Did a very tiny migration for a client which would normally be done against our hourly rate but decided to do it for free as it would take me like 5 minutes and it was a very important thing for him and he actually offered to pay.

Fuck it, he'll be very happy, it doesn't take me much time and I know my boss would approve.

Did the migration, messaged the client and he thanked me.

Next day a cake arrives at work with my name on it and "thanks for helping us with the migration!"

Now that's how you make my fucking day!

I told my girlfriend about Devrant. Now she's hooked onto it and doesn't pay attention to me. And now I'm ranting about it on Devrant. Oh the irony! T_T

"Oh, he is asking that much money for this website? I will create that for only $250 with WordPress. He is just trying to use you"

You fucking wanker. What you don't understand is that you are pushing the companies to a fucking black hole that they won't be able to recover from.

He shows an example of a website which takes 30 sec to load. It's full of hundreds of dreadful plugins. He chose the shittiest stock pictures to make it look "pretty".

When I point out his fucking shite website takes this long to load, he says if the company wants to make the website fast, they will need buy the premium plan of CloudFlare. WHAT THE FUCK are you even talking about?

Not only that, the example website, doesn't even have any SSL. He is saying that the other company didn't want to pay for the SSL. Ever heard of fucking StartSSL or LetsEncrypt?

It's people like you who is responsible for making half of the web an insecure, slow, low-performance space which is prone to hacking.

WordPress was made for blogging. KEEP IT THAT WAY. Stop trying to make your high-performance CMS or eCommerce website with this shite.

I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

An open letter to the guy that commented on my website:

«Function X does not work. This program is shit. I am going to uninstall it and tell everyone.»

I'm sorry that my completely open source project didn't work for you. The fact that I lost countless days and months and years working on it in my free time, without ever asking for a cent, just trying to do something good for the community, doesn't give me the right to release a feature that may be buggy.

You could have opened a bug report. But that takes time. A whole 2 minutes. I understand the urge to post such a harsh public critic on my website. That's why I was so calm and understanding when I replied to you there.

However, it's a long time I wasn't browsing devRant and I confess I felt the urge to tell you to go fuck yourself. And this is the best place to do it! I'd pay to know you. I'd love to see your face. Oooh you must be so confident of yourself. I'm sure you have accomplished a lot in your life. So here's my message:

Go Fuck Yourself Asshole

Confessions of a Programmer

#1
If a client is an unbearable asshole during the initial communication, I look for every excuse to pad on the hours for the estimate to get paid more. If a client goes above and beyond in their douchbaggery, I tack on an additional $40/hour.

#2
Sometimes I will present an elaborate solution to a client, but really I'm just reading off the features of a plugin or library I'm going to download or buy after the call. Not because I can't build it myself, but because I'd rather spend more time on other/my own projects.

#3
Clients assume because I know one language, I know them all. Rather than turning down the work, I take a crash course to work in that language, or outsource the work and clean it up afterwards, whichever is more practical at the time.

#4
I use cPanel on a dedicated to manage our client websites. I'm not paid enough to bother with setting up everything manually.

#5
Certain projects I build have a 3-day backdoor built into it. If the client doesn't pay upon completion, a unique hash triggered as a GET variable deletes a core file in my work, rendering the work useless. If it wasn't triggered by the 4th day, the file allowing me to trigger this backdoor is removed. This is only used for clients where the project must be launched on their servers, or if there has been a previous issue collecting payment.

#6
I slip in the initial contract that all preceeding phone calls will be monitored and recorded, and that they acknowledge the recordings are admissable in court. This has saved me from losing money twice now.

#7
I have never used an IDE. (I know, I know, it's really inefficient and dumb, but I'm just more comfortable with Sublime. Plus I often find myself mobile and without my computer, so I have to program from my phone.)

#8
Each day resembles a betting spectacle of which work will be late, which will be rushed out and which will never see the light of day.

#9
I have used "sick" and "family emergency" as an excuse to just sleep in far more than I can count.

#10
When a client from hell crosses over the line in their conduct (such as getting very nasty and personal, or sending threats), I anonymously report them to the BBB and on RipOffReport.

So... This company was in trouble. They hire me to help fix things and build this nice new stack to get rid of their old legacy monster application.

I'm there for three weeks when one of their top investors storms in. Apparently they are turning less profit than they told me during my interview. (Yeah, it is one of the things I always ask, even thought I don't always get an answer).

So this investor/shareholder guy starts on this motivation speech which is basically a veiled threat that "we" need to do better.

Obviously he doesn't know anyone in the room other than the boss. And it was apparent, at least to me, he also has 0% knowledge of anything related to software development. The boss doesn't look to happy about having to let this happen.

Then the guy turns to me. He points his finger at me and demands to know how failing so badly makes me feel...

So I answered truthfully... "I've only been here for three weeks, so I don't think I've been failing too much, yet. Now, how long did you say you've been throwing money at this failure without getting the return you wanted?" Emphasizing the "you" by pointing right back at him.

That doesn't shut the guy up, but he does bring his "motivational" speech to a rapid close.

He doesn't bother saying goodbye when he stormed out again, not even to the boss, who looks a lot happier at this point.

Apparently the guy pulled this stunt every couple of months (or weeks, if he was bored enough). After this encounter, he apparently had enough of trying to "motivate" us developers. We I didn't see him again in the 2 years I worked with the company after that.

I got a pay raise the month after. Apparently that was totally unrelated to this incident... 😙🎵

Non-dev coworker (ndc) sees me using google chrome: I don't understand why chrome is so popular. I hate it and don't know why anyone would use it.
Me: what browser do you use?
NDC: internet explorer.
Me: why do you like ie better than chrome?
NDC: it does everything chrome can do and it's free.
Me: ie can NOT do everything chrome can do and chrome is free. You just have to download it from google.
NDC: no I read that chrome is proprietary software and why would I pay to use it when ie is free.
Me: ie is also proprietary software. Proprietary doesn't necessarily mean it costs money it's just not open source. Plus ie is not free. You paid for it when you bought the windows license that came with your computer.
NDC: no ie was already on the computer when I bought it so I didn't have to pay for it.
Me: it was included in the price of the computer but you still paid for it.
NDC: whatever I'm going to keep using ie because it's free for me.

ARE YOU RETARDED???

Client: Can you provide some kind of guaranteed timeline that you're going to be able to move our website to our new servers with the optimizations implemented? I know you said it should take a week, but we have 3 weeks to get this moved over and we cannot afford to be double billed. I'm waiting to fire up the new server until you can confirm.

Me: As I said, it SHOULD take about a week, but that's factoring in ONLY the modifications being made for optimization and a QA call to review the website. This does not account for your hosting provider needing to spin up a new server.

We also never offered to move your website over to said new server. I sent detailed instructions for your provider to move a copy of the entire website over and have it configured and ready to point your domain over to, in order to save time and money since your provider won't give us the access necessary to perform a server-to-server transfer. If you are implying that I need to move the website over myself, you will be billed for that migration, however long it takes.

Client: So you're telling me that we paid $950 for 10 hours of work and that DOESN'T include making the changes live?

Me: Why would you think that the 10 hours that we're logged for the process of optimizing your website include additional time that has not been measured? When you build out a custom product for a customer, do you eat the shipping charges to deliver it? That is a rhetorical question of course, because I know you charge for shipping as well. My point is that we charge for delivery just as you do, because it requires our time and manpower.

All of this could have been avoided, but you are the one that enforced the strict requirement that we cannot take the website down for even 1 hour during off-peak times to incorporate the changes we made on our testbed, so we're having to go through this circus in order to deliver the work we performed.

I'm not going to give you a guarantee of any kind because there are too many factors that are not within our control, and we're not going to trap ourselves so you have a scapegoat to throw under the bus if your boss looks to you for accountability. I will reiterate that we estimate it would take about a week to implement, test and run through a full QA together, as we have other clients within our queue and our time must be appropriately blocked out each day. However, the longer you take to pull the trigger on this new server, the longer it will take on my end to get the work scheduled within the queue.

Client: If we get double billed, we're taking that out of what we have remaining to pay you.

Me: On the subject of paying us, you signed a contract acknowledging that you would pay us the remaining 50% after you approved the changes, which you did last week, in order for us to deliver the project. Thank you for the reminder that your remaining balance has not yet been paid. I'll have our CFO resend the invoice for you to remit payment before we proceed any further.

---

I love it when clients give me shit. I just give it right back.

I was 15 years old and the first year of high school. Everything was new to me and I was such a newbie. At that time I had 2-3 year of programming behind me at an institution where they taught competitive programming. And I knew something about computers. Not much but more than most of my school mates. At that time I wanted to become "super cool hacker".

So we had this very very thought teacher for history which was also our form master. She really knows how to explained everything about history and in an interesting way. But while she was teaching we also had to write down notes from her powerpoints that were on a projector. And occasionally she would wait for us to copy everything and then move on with her lecture. But sometimes she didn't. This was frustrating as hell. The whole class would complain about this because you couldn't take notes down normal, you had to do it at double speed.

But she got one weak spot. She was not very good with computers. Our school computers were locked in some kinda closet so that students didn't have physical access to a computer and were also password protected. So I came up with the plan to plant wireless mouse in her computer so that I could control her mouse. At that time it seemed like SUPER HACKER MASTER PLAN.

So I got an opportunity one time when she left the classroom and let closet where the computer was open. I quickly sneaked the USB of the wireless mouse in the computer and then go back to the seat.

So THE FUN began.

Firstly I would only go back in powerpoint so that all my schoolmates could write down notes including me. And it was hilarious to watch when she didn't know what is happening. So then I would move her mouse when she tried to close some window. I would just move it slightly so she wouldn't notice that somebody else is controlling mouse. And by missing X button just by slight she would click other things and other things would pop up and now she had to close this thing so it became a nightmare for her. And she would become angry at the mouse and start complaining how the computer doesn't work and that mouse doesn't obey her.

One time when she didn't pay attention to her computer and projector I went to paint program and drew a heart and wrote we love you (In Slovenian Imamo vas radi -> See the picture below) and one of my school mates has the picture of it. We were all giggling and she didn't know what is was for. And I managed to close everything before she even noticed.

So it got to the point where she couldn't hand it more so she called our school IT guy so that he would check her computer (2 or 3 weeks passed before she called IT guy). And he didn't find anything. He was really crappy IT guy in general. So one week passed by and I still had messed with her mouse. So she got a replacement computer. Who would guessed all the problems went away (because I didn't have another mouse like that). I guess when our IT guy took the computer to his room and really thoroughly check it he found my USB.

So he told her what was the problem she was so pissed off really I didn't see her pissed off so much in all my 4 years in high school. She demanded the apology from whom did it. And at that moment my mind went through all possible scenarios... And the most likely one was that I was going to be expelled... And I didn't have the balls to say that I did it and I was too afraid... Thanks to God nobody from my school mates didn't tell that it was me.

While she waited that somebody would come forward there was one moment when our looks met and at that moment both of us knew that I was the one that did it.

Next day the whole class wrote the apology letter and she accepted it. But for the rest of 4 years whenever was there a problem with the computer I had to fixed it and she didn't trust anybody not even our IT guy at school. It was our unwritten contract that I would repair her computer to pay off my sin that I did. And she once even trusted me with her personal laptop.

So to end this story I have really high respect for her because she is a great teacher and great persons that guide me through my teen years. And we stayed in contact.

My experience with Adobe...
(I recently moved to Canada)

Me: I want to give you money. (Tries to pay with Canadian card)

Adobe: Sorry, you have a US account, you must use a US card.

Me: Okay, what are my options to pay with my Canadian card?

Adobe: We have to delete your US account and create a Canadian one.

Me: Okay... Why can't you just switch the country from US to Canada on my account?

Adobe: *bullcrap response*

Me: Okay, delete it and transfer everything.

*Kicks me out of the chat.
*I log back in. Try to reconnect to customer service chat.

Adobe: AdobeID unable to participate in chat.

*I'm 30 minutes into this ordeal

Me: (to myself) I could literally torrent this program in 5 minutes 🤔

Lesson: if a company wants people to not torrent their software make it easier for a willing fucking customer to buy your software!

Since the chat doesn't work anymore, I called customer service and am still on hold.... 😤😤😤

Why does the internet have borders?

Shutting down my company 😔,

Can't do it anymore,trying to do the best work for shit pay.

Clients haven't paid... Now I doubt I can even find 10 quid literally don't have 10 quid to my name right now 😔.

Burnt myself out ... I can't even concentrate on my work cause I'm stressing on everything...never ending spiral.... 😢

Going to just get a normal job ... Just lucky I have parents to go back to.

Running a dev company... Really amazing when things go well, it's unexplainable in fact but... Devastating when it doesn't 😞

You know when you break up with a girl you've been with for ages... Like how horrific ... That can be... This is literally worse .. I didn't think it was even possible...

A Geologist and an engineer are sitting next to each other on a long flight from LA to NY. The Geologist leans over to the Engineer and asks if he would like to play a fun game. The Engineer just wants to take a nap, so he politely declines and rolls over to the window to catch a few winks. The Geologist persists and explains that the game is real easy and a lotta fun. He explains, "I ask you a question, and if you don't know the answer, you pay me $5. Then you ask me a question, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $5." Again, the Engineer politely declines and tries to get to sleep. The Geologist now somewhat agitated, says, "OK, if you don't know the answer you pay me $5, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $50!"

This catches the Engineer's attention, and he sees no end to this torment unless he plays, so he agrees to the game. The Geologist asks the first question. "What's the distance from the Earth to the moon?"

The Engineer doesn't say a word, but reaches into his wallet, pulls out a five dollar bill and hands it to the Geologist.

Now, it's the Engineer's turn. He asks the Geologist, "What goes up a hill with three legs, and comes down on four?" The Geologist looks up at him with a puzzled look. He takes out his laptop computer and searches all of his references. He taps into the Airphone with his modem and searches the net and the Library of Congress. Frustrated, he sends e-mail to his co-workers -- all to no avail.

After about an hour, he wakes the Engineer and hands him $50. The Engineer politely takes the $50 and turns away to try to get back to sleep.

The Geologist is more than a little miffed, shakes the Engineer and asks, "Well, so what's the answer?"

Without a word, the Engineer reaches into his wallet, hands the Geologist $5, and turns away to get back to sleep.

A lot of the people are complaining about working in inhumane conditions. I want to debunk some bullshit that I think is causing this.

Devs are hard to find. That makes you valuable. A good dev that actually works for 30-40 hours per week is extremely hard to find.
The relationship with your employer / client should be simple: you work, they pay. What you do NOT:
1. Do not take responsibility for other people's decisions
2. Do not internalize other people's problems (you've got your own, better stick to them)
3. Do not let ANYONE guilt trip you into anything that you're not indeed guilty of.
4. Do NOT work for an effective rate that's significantly lower than you know you can get elsewhere.

There are indeed some utterly evil assholes out there that will try to manipulate you, into thinking that you're "part of the project", or that "you're all a team". Yeah, you are, but when it comes to making money, you'll only get the salary, regardless of how successful your work will be. THEY have a motivation to stay up late, to work extra hours, etc. You DO NOT. If you do that, and don't get paid extra, you're working for free, which means that you're not a professional.

Are you a professional? Then have respect for yourself, and bill for every fucking second of your time. Don't let the assholes think they own you.

As a professional, you MUST do EXACTLY what you're paid to do. No more, no less. Well, if you're feeling good about it, then you can do slightly more. And anyone that's demanding more, basically has no respect for you, and doesn't consider you a professional. That is the plain truth. See it as it is, and handle those scumbags accordingly.

I turned 40 yesterday. Here are some lessons I've learned, without fluff or BS.

1) Stop waiting for exceptional things to just happen. They rarely do, and they can't be counted on. Greatness is cultivated; it's a gradual process and it won't come without effort.

2) Jealousy is a monster that destroys everything in it's path. It's absolutely useless, except to remind us there's a better way. We can't always control how we feel, but we can choose how we react to those feelings.

When I was younger, jealousy in relationships always led to shit turning out worse than it probably would have otherwise. Even when it was justified, even when a relationship was over, jealousy led me to burn bridges that I wished I hadn't.

3) College isn't for everyone, but you'll rarely be put square in the middle of so much potential experience. You'll meet people you probably wouldn't have otherwise, and as you eventually pursue your major, you'll get to know people who share your passions and dreams. Despite all the bullshit ways in which college sucks, it's still a pretty unique path on the way to adulthood. But on that note...

4) Learn to manage your money. It's way too easy to get into unsustainable debt. It only gets worse, and it makes everything harder. We don't always see the consequence of credit cards and loans when we're young, because the future seems so distant and undecided. But that debt isn't going anywhere... Try not to borrow money that you can't imagine yourself paying back now.

5) Floss every day, not just a couple times per week when you remember, or when you've got something stuck in your teeth. It matters, even if you're in your 20s and you've never had a cavity.

6) You'll always hear about living in the moment, seizing the day... It's tough to actually do. But there's something to be said for looking inward, and trying to recognize when too much of our attention is focused elsewhere. Constantly serving the future won't always pay off, at least not in the ways we think it will when we're young.

This sentiment doesn't have much value when it's put in abstract, existential terms, like it usually is. The best you can do is try to be aware of your own willingness and ability to be open to experiences. Think about ways in which you might be rejecting the here and now, even if it's as seemingly-benign as not going out with some friends because you just saw them, or you already went to that place they're going to. We won't recognize the good old days for what they were until they're already gone. The trick is having as many good days as possible.

7) Don't start smoking; you'll never quit as soon as you'll think you can. If you do start, make yourself quit after a couple years, no matter what. Keep your vices in check; drugs and alcohol in moderation. Use condoms, use birth control.

8) Don't make love wait. Tell your friends and family you love them often, and show them when you can. You're going to lose people, so it's important. Statistically, some of you will die young, yourselves.

When it comes to relationships, don't settle if you can't tell yourself you're in love, and totally believe it. Don't let complacency and familiarity get in the way of pursuing love. Don't be afraid to end relationships because they're comfortable, or because you've already invested so much into them.

Being young is a gift, and it won't last forever. You need to use that gift to experience all the love that you can, at least as a means to finding the person you really want to grow old with, if that's what you want. Regardless, you don't want to miss out on loving someone, and being loved, because of fear. Don't be reckless; just be honest with yourself.

9) Take care of your body. Neglecting it makes everything tougher. That doesn't mean you have to work out every day and eat like a nutritionist, but if you're overweight or you have health issues, do what you can to fix it. Losing weight isn't easy, but it's not as hard as people make it out to be. And it's one of the most important things you can do to invest in a healthy adulthood.

Don't put off nagging health issues because you think you'll be fine, or you don't think you'll be able to afford it, or you're scared of the outcome. There will always be options, until there aren't. Most people never get to the no-options part. Or, they get there because all the other options expired.

10) Few things will haunt you like regret. Making the wrong choice, for example, usually won't hurt as much. I guess you can regret making the wrong choice, but my deepest regrets come from inaction, complacency and indifference.

So how can we avoid regret? I don't know, lol. I don't think it's as simple as just commiting to choices... Choosing to do nothing is still a choice, after all. I think it's more about listening to your gut, as cliche as that sounds.

To thine own self be true, I guess. It's worth a shot, even if you fail. Almost anything is better than regret.

My boss's name is Skayo.
He's the best and the worst boss at the same time!

He does let me play video games during work hours, but he doesn't pay me :(
Also when I'm really unproductive, he doesn't even try to motivate me to do some actual work... It may not sound like it, but it sucks.
On the other side, I can just choose which project I'll be working on, which gives me a bit of freedom!
No coworkers tho...

I have to let it out. It's been brewing for years now.

Why does MySQL still exist?

Really, WHY?!
It was lousy as hell 8 years ago, and since then it hasn't changed one bit. Why do people use it?

First off, it doesn't conform to standards, allowing you to aggregate without explicitly grouping, in which case you get god knows what type of shit in there, and then everybody asks why the numbers are so weird.

Second... it's $(CURRENT_YEAR) for fucks sake! This is the time of large data sets and complex requirements from those data sets. Just an hour through SO will show you dozens of poor people trying to do with MySQL what MySQL just can't do because it's stupid.

Recursion? 4 lines in any other large RDBMS, and tough luck in MySQL. So what next? Are you supposed to use Lemograph alongside MySQL just because you don't know that PostgreSQL is free and super fast?

Window functions to mix rows and do neat stuff? Naaah, who the hell needs that, right? Who needs to find the products ordered by the customer with the biggest order anyway? Oh you need that actually? Well you should write 3-4 queries, nest them in an incredibly fucked up way, summon a demon and feed it the first menstrual blood of your virgin daughter.

There used to be some excuses in the past "but but but, shared hosting only has MySQL". Which was wrong by the way. This was true only for big hosting names, and for people who didn't bother searching for alternatives. And now it's even better, since VPS and PaaS solutions are now available at prices lower than shared hosting, which give you better speed, performance and stability than shared hosting ever did.

"But but but Wordpress uses MySQL" - well then kill it! There are other platforms out there, that aren't just outrageously horrible on the inside and outside. Wordpress is crap, and work on it pays crap. Learn Laravel, Symfony, Zend, or even Drupal. You'll be able to create much more value than those shitty Wordpress sites that nobody ever visits or pay money on.

"But but but my client wants some static pages presented beside their online shop" - so why use Wordpress then? Static pages are static pages. Whip up a basic MVC set-up in literally any framework out there, avoid MySQL, include a basic ACL package for that framework, create a controller where you add a CKEditor to edit page content, and stick a nice template from themeforest for that page and be done with that shit! Save the mock-up for later use if you do that stuff often. Or if you're lazy to even do that, then take up Drupal.

But sure, this is going a bit over the scope. I actually don't care where you insert content for your few pages. It can be a JSON file for all I care. But if I catch you doing an e-commerce solution, or anything else than just text storage, on MySQL, I'll literally start re-assessing your ability to think rationally.

HE:"Hey I improved my code"

ME:
*opens the file*
*Sees random static allocations*
*Code is as verbose as before*
*Down to 2600 lines from 2800ish*
*Still doesn't do shit properly*

"Uuuh what exactly did you do?"

*Starts noticing the lack of namespaces*

HE: "I used this using namespace std to write a bit less"

ME: "Can I pay you yoga lessons so you can taste your own cock and show your parents how good you are at it?"

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

It's always fun to get contacted by someone who doesn't code and they want you to code an entire startup for them...

The fun part... Is they will pay you later when it generates money

1. Move to new house
2. Setup electricity account to auto-pay every month
3. Wait
4. Receive "disconnect" notice from electric provder
5. WTF
6. Call. Oh, yeah, our website doesn't tell you that you have to pay your first month's bill before you can setup auto-pay. It's in the fine print.

Okay people, here's my rant - if you manage a website that supports auto-pay and you're not PREVENTING your customers from signing up for auto-pay until there is a $0 balance in the account, then you're doing something wrong. Don't let your customers think they're about to loose their electric service because of a frontend guardrails issue.

Someone please shoot me right now.Or better a blackhole could just collide with earth right now and annihilate everyone and everything!
We are supposed to launch the app this coming Friday and as of Monday this week everything was OK.
Just yesterday this client came up with dozens of changes that demand a major rewrite of the backend.

The thing with this client is that she doesn't realize I deal with the mobile apps and not the APIs.Right now am headed to the management office to explain why the app is not updated after she sent this email today morning.
This is not the first time she has demanded changes a week to the launch and i feel like i should stand up to her but you know, i have bills to pay.

At one of my former jobs, I had a four-day-week. I remember once being called on my free Friday by an agitated colleague of mine arguing that I crashed the entire application on the staging environment and I shall fix it that very day.

I refused. It was my free day after all and I had made plans. Yet I told him: OK, I take a look at it in Sunday and see what all the fuzz is all about. Because I honestly could fathom what big issue I could have caused.

On that Sunday, I realized that the feature I implemented worked as expected. And it took me two minutes to realize the problem: It was a minor thing, as it so often is: If the user was not logged in, instead of a user object, null got passed somewhere and boom -- 500 error screen. Some older feature broke due to some of my changes and I never noticed it as while I was developing I was always in a logged in state and I never bothered to test that feature as I assumed it working. Only my boss was not logged in when testing on the stage environment, and so he ran into it.

So what really pushed my buttons was:

It was not a bug. It was a regression.

Why is that distinction important?

My boss tried to guilt me into admitting that I did not deliver quality software. Yet he was the one explicitly forbidding me to write tests for that software. Well, this is what you get then! You pay in the long run by strange bugs, hotfixes, and annoyed developers. I salute you! :/

Yet I did not fix the bug right away. I could have. It would have just taken me just another two minutes again. Yet for once, instead of doing it quickly, I did it right: I, albeit unfamiliar with writing tests, searched for a way to write a test for that case. It came not easy for me as I was not accustomed to writing tests, and the solution I came up with a functional test not that ideal, as it required certain content to be in the database. But in the end, it worked good enough: I had a failing test. And then I made it pass again. That made the whole ordeal worthwhile to me. (Also the realization that that very Sunday, alone in that office, was one of the most productive since a long while really made me reflect my job choice.)

At the following Monday I just entered the office for the stand-up to declare that I fixed the regression and that I won't take responsibility for that crash on the staging environment. If you don't let me write test, don't expect me to test the entire application again and again. I don't want to ensure that the existing software doesn't break. That's what tests are for. Don't try to blame me for not having tests on critical infrastructure. And that's all I did on Monday. I have a policy to not do long hours, and when I do due to an "emergency", I will get my free time back another day. And so I went home that Monday right after the stand-up.

Do I even need to spell it out that I made a requirement for my next job to have a culture that requires testing? I did, and never looked back and I grew a lot as a developer.

I have familiarized myself with both the wonderful world of unit and acceptance testing. And deploying suddenly becomes cheap and easy. Sure, there sometimes are problems. But almost always they are related to infrastructure and not the underlying code base. (And yeah, sometimes you have randomly failing tests, but that's for another rant.)

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.

You know what? Fuck this shit. We spend most of our life locked down in a school, we are being told facts, tested and stressed for many years with the only hope to get out as soon as possible.
Failing is something that keeps you there indefinitely.
Parents keep pushing on kids to achieve the best and get good grades to have a job.
Then something happens.
You get out of school and what happens?
You start working.
A.k.a modern slavery...
Employers thinks that since you are young they are doing YOU a favor if they decided to hire you.
So you find yourself having to do the same tasks everyone is doing, perhaps you are even fully capable of managing them and get the shit done but guess what!!
You are paid the minimum.
You barely make enough to pay off your rent which keeps you locked away from Holidays abroad, from that huge cake you desperately want.
And guess what! Try to raise your voice and you'll get fired in a Matter of seconds, replaced with someone else which accepts any condition.
You dream of a house, a family and a car but you can't even eat healthy with that salary.
So you are forced to buy cheap and low quality food from the same store again and again till you had enough and spend some days with that horrible feeling...
Calling you to get a job interview feels like they are doing you a favor, they always try to give the minimum possible and expect you to work in a serious manner and respect their deadlines.
Colleagues earn a lot more even though they aren't doing anything different from you.
For the first year you won't have any holiday, let alone traveling or anything different from just staying home for 3 days straight.

Banks won't give you a loan because your job doesn't pay off
The day that your car is broken you struggle to eat the whole month.

On top of that, taxes. Because they aren't taking away enough.

I don't want to live this life, I don't want to become a modern slave and work 8-17 everyday for the rest of my life and retire with a shitty retirement pension that won't probably grant me anything again.

I had enough of this shit.
I don't want to go back to work and pretend to do what I am supposed to do with a smile on my face knowing that I am just a number and that no matter how skilled I am I can always get replaced with N number of people for a lower salary of mine.

I am tired
I dream of a life that I won't ever reach this way.

Today I looked up houses prices and felt like shit.
I will never in my entire life be able to afford something so expensive, let alone buying furnitures and what is needed or what I like.

I dream of having my place, my dog and my family but apparently I am asking too much.

How is this even fair in 2018/2019?

I... I am... Speechless.
I wonder how many people out there are in the same situation or even worse and I can't even wrap my mind around that.

This is just modern slavery.

My boss makes a shit load of money from young people that can't complain because they are threatened and will eventually be replaced...

This is my rant.

Ok, so, to every pieces of shit out there that got a "revolutionary idea that will change the way we look at things" and who asks you to code it :

Fuck you, you sons of a cunt

No, i won't make your app on 3 different platforms for free, i'll make you pay for every platform you wanker, i'm a freelancer, i need money.

No, making database is not something that a little business cunt like you can handle, you don't even know what sql means

And fuck no, I won't make that shit in 2 weeks just because your peabrain thinks that it'll make mad dosh and that "It MusT bE eAsy to Do!!111", "a dating app but with a twist" won't work you gobeshit

If you want me to work on this shit, you give me money, specs and shit, you handle the rest, if it doesn't make money, it'll be your problem. I'm not your employee you wanker

Fuck y'all

Remote manager: Hey, that contractor you are working with that sits with me. We are thinking of sending him over to you guys, get him a visa, pay relocation and all that stuff and have him sit with you guys as a full time employee. What do you think?

Me: .... eh ... look I have to be honest, that guy is awful. He doesn't listen to me, constantly working on other things, and the architecture he forced onto the rest of the team is some of the worst i've ever seen.

RM: hhhmmmm, ok but what if we have him report to you, can you whip him into shape?

Me: Honestly I think theres too much effort involved. We are very short staffed. I'd prefer to hire someone else here who has more experience. Its a firm no from us on this guy.

RM: Ok, understood, thanks.

*2 weeks later*

Contractor: Hey guys, was chatting to my manager last week and he said the company is finally looking to convert me to a full time employee, and best of all he wants to move me over to sit with you guys. Isn't that great?

..... not really no

Co-worker put in her two weeks notice, then found out the company doesn't pay out remaining PTO.

.. so she took a two week paid vacation with her remaining 14 days. XD

You know side projects? Well I took on one. An old customer asked to come and take over his latest startups companys tech. Why not, I tought. Idea is sound. Customer base is ripe and ready to pay.

I start digging and the Hardware part is awesome. The guys doing the soldering and imbedded are geniuses. I was impressed AF.

I commit and meet up with CEO. A guy with a vision and sales orientation/contacts. Nice! This shit is gonna sell. Production lines are also set.

Website? WTF is this shit. Owner made it. Gotta give him the credit. Dude doesn't do computers and still managed to online something. He is still better at sales so we agree that he's gonna stick with those and I'll handle the tech.

I bootstrap a new one in my own simplistic style and online it. I like it. The owner likes it. He made me to stick to a tacky logo. I love CSS and bootstrap. You can make shit look good quick.

But I still don't have access to the soul of the product. DBs millions rows of data and source for the app I still behind the guy that has been doing this for over a year.

He has been working on a new version for quite some time. He granted access to the new versions source, but back end and DB is still out of reach. Now for over month has passed and it's still no new version or access to data.

Source has no documentation and made in a flavor of JS frame I'm not familiar with. Weekend later of crazy cramming I get up to speed and it's clear I can't get further without the friggin data.

The V2 is a scramble of bleeding edge of Alpha tech that isn't ready for production and is clearly just a paid training period for the dev. And clearly it isn't going so well because release is a month late. I try to contact, but no reaction. The owner is clueless.

Disheartening. A good idea is going to waste because of some "dev" dropping a ball and stonewalling the backup.

I fucking give him till the end of the next week until I make the hardware team a new api to push the data and refactor the whole thing in proper technologies and cut him off.

Please. If you are a dev and don't have the time to concentrate on the solution don't take it on and kill off the idea. You guys are the key to making things happening and working. Demand your cut but also deserve it by delivering or at least have the balls to tell you are not up for it.

It seems like every other day I run into some post/tweet/article about people whining about having the imposter syndrome. It seems like no other profession (except maybe acting) is filled with people like this.

Well lemme answer that question for you lot.

YES YOU ARE A BLOODY IMPOSTER.

There. I said it. BUT.

Know that you're already a step up from those clowns that talk a lot but say nothing of substance.

You're better than the rockstar dev that "understands" the entire codebase because s/he is the freaking moron that created that convoluted nonsensical pile of shit in the first place.

You're better than that person who thinks knowing nothing is fine. It's just a job and a pay cheque.

The main question is, what the flying fuck are you going to do about being an imposter? Whine about it on twtr/fb/medium? HOW ABOUT YOU GO LEARN SOMETHING BEYOND FRAMEWORKS OR MAKING DUMB CRUD WEBSITES WITH COLOR CHANGING BUTTONS.

Computers are hard. Did you expect to spend 1 year studying random things and waltz into the field as a fucking expert? FUCK YOU. How about you let a "doctor" who taught himself medicine for 1 year do your open heart surgery?

Learn how a godamn computer actually works. Do you expect your doctors and surgeons to be ignorant of how the body works? If you aspire to be a professional WHY THE FUCK DO YOU STAY AT THE SURFACE.

Go learn about Compilers, complete projects with low level languages like C / Rust (protip: stay away from C++, Java doesn't count), read up on CPU architecture, to name a few topics.

Then, after learning how your computers work, you can start learning functional programming and appreciate the tradeoffs it makes. Or go learn AI/ML/DS. But preferably not before.

Basically, it's fine if you were never formally taught. Get yourself schooled, quit bitching, and be patient. It's ok to be stupid, but it's not ok to stay stupid forever.

/rant

Ordered a new 34" Dell Monitor which should have been delivered today. The lazy ass mailman tried to scam my neighbor by telling him to pay 1000€ for the packet... (Amazon doesn't use cash on delivery)
FUCK OFF IDIOT, I HOPE YOU LOSE YOUR JOB BECAUSE NOW I HAVE TO DO YOUR GOD DAMN WORK AND COLLECT THE PACKET ON MY OWN.

!!privacy
!!political

I had a discussion with a coworker earlier.

I owed him for lunch the other day, and he suggested I pay him back either with cash (which I didn't have), Venmo, or just by him lunch the next time (which I ended up doing).

I asked about Venmo, and he said it was like paypal, but always free. that sounded a bit off -- because how are they in business if it's always free? -- so I looked it up, and paid special attention to their privacy policy.

The short of it: they make money by selling your information. That's worth far more than charging users a small fee when sending $5 every few weeks. Sort of what I expected when I heard "always free," but what surprised me is just how much they collect. (In retrospect, I really shouldn't have been surprised at all...)

Here's an incomplete list:
* full name, physical address, email, DoB, SSN (or other government IDs, depending on country)
* Complete contact list (phone numbers, names, photos)
* Browser/device fingerprint
* (optional) Your entire Facebook feed and history
* (optional) all of your Facebook friends' contact info
* Your Twitter feed
* Your FourSquare activity
(The above four ostensibly for "fraud prevention")
* GPS data
* Usage info about the actual service
* Other users' usage info (e.g. mentioning you)
* Financial info (the only thing not shared with third parties)

Like, scary?

And, of course, they share all of this with their parent company, PayPal. (The privacy policy does not specify what PayPal does with it, nor does it provide any links that might describe it, e.g. PayPal's "info-shared-by-third-parties" privacy policy)

So I won't be using Venmo. ever.

I mentioned all of this to my coworker, and he just doesn't understand. at all. He even asks "So what are they going do with that, send me ads? like they already do?"

I told him why I think it's scary. Everything from them freely selling all of your info, to someone being able to look through your entire online life's history, to being able to masquerade around as you, to even reproducing your voice (e.g. voice clips collected by google assistant), to grouping people by political affiliations.

He didn't have much to say about any of them, and actually thought the voice thing was really cool. (All I could think of was would happen if the "news" had that ability....) All of his other responses were "that doesn't bother me at all" and/or "using all of these services is so convenient."

but what really got me was his reaction to the last one.

I said, "If you're part of the NRA, for example, you'd be grouped with Republicans. If they sell all of this information, which they do, and they don't really care who buys it or what they do with it... someone could look through the data and very very easily target those political groups."

His response? "I don't have to worry about that. I'm a Democrat, and have always voted Democrat. I'll tell anyone that."

Like.
That's basically saying every non-democrat is someone you should be wary of and keep an eye on. That's saying Democrats are the norm and everyone else is deviant and/or wrong.

and I couldn't say anything after this because... no matter what I said, it would start a political conflict, and would likely end with me being fired (since the owner is also a democrat, and they're very buddy-buddy). "What if they target democrats?" -> "They already do!" or "What if democrats use it against others?" -> "They deserve it for being violent and racist, but we never would" (except, you know, that IRS/tea-party incident for example...)

But like, this is coming from someone who firmly believes conservatives are responsible for all of the violence and looting and rioting and mass shootings in the country. ... even when every single instance has been by committed by democrats. every. single. one.

Just...
jfl;askjfasflkj.

He doesn't understand the need for privacy, and his world view is just... he actually thinks everyone with different beliefs is wrong and dangerous.

I don't even know how to deal with people like this. and with how prevalent this mindset is... coupled with the aforementioned privacy concerns... it's honestly *terrifying.*

> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

Hesitated for a while before posting this, as I don't like to whine in public but this should be therapeutical

Beware, it's a #longread

Years ago, I thought about how cool it'd be to have conversation-based interactive fiction on my phone. I remember showing early prototypes to my ex in 2012. It took me over 2 years to build up the courage to make it my priority and to take time off. FictionBurgers.com was born.

A few weeks in, a friend of mine forwarded me a link to Lifeline. I was devastated. I literally spent 2 days cursing my past self for not making a move sooner.

I soldiered on, worked 7 months straight on it. Now the tech is 90-95% finished, content is maybe 60% finished and I just... gave up. Every other week now, similar projects are popping up. I'm under-staffed and under-financed compared to them. Beyond the entertainment space, "conversation-based" is hot stuff in 2016, and I still can't seem to know what to do with what I have.

I feel like I had this fantastic opportunity and squandered it, which makes me miserable.

Anyway, just so you get some cheese with my whine, here are a few lessons I learned the hard way:

Lesson #1 : Don't go it alone. I thought I could hack it, and for over 7 months, I did. But sooner or later, shit gets to you, it's just human. That's when you need someone; just so that their highs compensate your lows and vice versa. Most of the actual writing was done by a freelancer (and he did AMAZING WORK, especially considering that I couldn't pay him much) but it's not the same as a partner, who's invested same as you.

Lesson #1.5 : Complementary skills. Just like my fiction project failed because I was missing a writer partner, my fallback plan of getting into conversational tech hit the skids for lack of a bizdev partner. It's great to stick among devs when ranting, but you need to mingle with a variety of people. Some of them are actually ok, y'know :)

Lesson #2 : Lean Startup, MVP. Google those terms if you're not familiar with them. My mistake here (after MVPing the shit out of the tech) was to let my content goal run amok : what made my app superior to the competition (or so I reasoned) was that it would allow for conversations with multiple characters! So I started plotting a story... with 9 characters. Not 2 or 3. NINE FREAKING CHARACTERS! Branching conversations with 9 characters is the stuff of nightmare -- and is the main reason I gave up.

Lesson #3 : Know your reasons. I wasted some much time early on, zig-zaging between objectives:
"I'm just indulging myself"
"No, I really want it to be a project that pays off"
"Nah, it's just a learning opportunity"
"Damn, why is it bothering me so much that someone else is doing the same thing ?"
"Doesn't matter, I just mine finished"
"What a waste of time !!"
etc etc
And it's still a problem now that I'm trying to figure out what to do!

So anyway, that's my story, thanks for readin'
Check out chatty.im/player/sugar-wars if you want to test the most advance version.

Also, I've also tagged this #startupfail, if any of you fine people want to share the lessons you've dearly paid to learn!

QA: When I open the app I get this strange error message that includes "No data connection could be established" near the start of it.

Me: I'll clean up how thats displayed, but the error means your phone doesn't have internet connection.

QA: No that can't be it, I do.

Me: You screenshot shows no WiFi or 3g / 4g symbols.

QA: No those are never there, please investigate.

Me: I have investigated and found that every other one of your screenshots had a WiFi or a 3g symbol. Example: <link>. Please check your connection and try again, i'll clean up the error display.

PM: Oh i've had an issue something like this before. We really need to show users an error screen. We can't just leave them on this screen with no error message at all.

Me: ... we have an error, thats what QA is complaining about, its not loading the text and displaying the error object.

Anyone else want to not pay attention and complain about something else that doesn't make sense? ... no? ... ok good, back to work then

I got my first job!

A real, full-time job that doesn't pay me shit!

I haven't even graduated Uni yet!

FUCK YEAH! 🍻

A Geologist and a developer are sitting next to each other on a long flight from LA to NY. The Geologist leans over to the developer and asks if he would like to play a fun game. The Developer just wants to take a nap, so he politely declines and rolls over to the window to catch a few winks. The Geologist persists and explains that the game is real easy and a lotta fun. He explains, "I ask you a question, and if you don't know the answer, you pay me $5. Then you ask me a question, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $5." Again, the Developer politely declines and tries to get to sleep. The Geologist now somewhat agitated, says, "OK, if you don't know the answer you pay me $5, and if I don't know the answer, I'll pay you $50!"

This catches the Developer's attention, and he sees no end to this torment unless he plays, so he agrees to the game. The Geologist asks the first question. "What's the distance from the Earth to the moon?"

The Developer doesn't say a word, but reaches into his wallet, pulls out a five dollar bill and hands it to the Geologist.

Now, it's the developer's turn. He asks the Geologist, "What goes up a hill with three legs, and comes down on four?" The Geologist looks up at him with a puzzled look. He takes out his laptop computer and searches all of his references. He taps into the Airphone with his modem and searches the net and the Library of Congress. Frustrated, he sends e-mail to his co-workers -- all to no avail.

After about an hour, he wakes the Engineer and hands him $50. The developer politely takes the $50 and turns away to try to get back to sleep.

The Geologist is more than a little miffed, shakes the developer and asks, "Well, so what's the answer?"

Without a word, the developer reaches into his wallet, hands the Geologist $5, and turns away to get back to sleep.

WWDC was not about developers this year. It was a conference call with shareholders and investors. No bold moves, just several consecutive "this product will no longer suck" and "look at what you can do now, big companies" announcements.

watchOS will work now (it's too slow ATM). tvOS will just be less cumbersome. macOS still lagging behind (I mean, I already have great third party apps that clean my hard drive, but thank you for solving a problem I didn't need fixing). iOS 10 is simply about messages (it's not going to make me ditch Telegram, because it doesn't have an Android client, regardless of how large you make emoticons appear on screen). Apple Music will still suck, especially if you have more than one Apple ID. And Apple Maps will continue to be useless outside of the US.

Where did the bold moves go? Where's the "we're breaking up iTunes into several distinct apps that serve their purposes really well"? (Guess iTunes is too valuable a trademark...) Where is the "we will end the WKView vs UIView vs NSView nonsense"? (You know, OOP is about creating classes, which are abstractions and whose instances deal with the particularities of their environment; a View is a View, regardless of where they live; an instance of a View should care about being on a watch or on a phone, not the developer.) Where is the "we love indie developers and will help you"? They showed off a lot of integration with well established apps, that don't really need to stand out any more. They showed that video of "normal people" who have developed apps, but no one knows about them! And then they changed the AppStore so you can pay to advertise your app, but who has the means to do that? Indie devs are surely on a tight budget, so who's that helping again?

For me, this WWDC was sugar coated with a "we love you developers" BS, but was a business statement to large companies ("see what you can do now Uber, Lyft, WeChat, WhatsApp, Doordash, all the P2P payment apps, ESPN, WSJ and so on?"). It's already a known fact that the bulk of the AppStore revenue goes to the top 1% apps. And what's the point of having tvOS be open to developers if it is very unlikely I'll ever develop anything for it unless I work at CBS?

It's great that they want to make it easier for kids to learn Swift. But there's very little point in that, if those kids' apps aren't going to be used and are simply going to make the "we have 2 million apps on the AppStore" announcement look shinier for shareholders. Without a strong indie community, the Swift Playgrounds app for the iPad is just manufacturing workers for large corporations.

And without a strong indie community, things get tougher for indie clients as well. Who will have the money (and therefore the time) to implement all those integrations in order to even dream about competing with heavily funded apps?

Yeah... So thanks, Apple, but no thanks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

!!office drama

I haven't been around much in recent weeks. Due to family illness, christmas shopping, dealing with estranged parents, and brooding over the foregoing, I haven't had a lot of time or energy left to myself.

tl;dr: The CTO ("API Guy") is ostensibly getting fired, and I might be taking over his job. I don't know if I should accept, try to stave this off, or simply flee.

------

Anyone who has been following my recent rants knows that API Guy is my boss, and he often writes terrible code. It's solid and unbreakable, but reading it is a *nightmare.* One of our applications is half the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, and it's difficult to tell what code is live and what amounts to ancient, still-active landmines. This is one application; we have several, most of which I've never even looked at.

Ostensibly the code is so terrible because the company grew extremely quickly, and API Guy needed to cram in lots of unexpected / planned-against features. From what I can see, that seems about right, but I haven't checked timeframes [because that's a lot of work!].

Here's a brief rundown of the situation.
- API Guy co-founded the company with the CEO.
- CEO and API Guy have been friends for a long time.
- CEO belives the company will fail with API Guy as head of tech.
- They could just be testing me; I have zero way of knowing. API Guy seems totally oblivious, and CEO seems sincere, so this feels pretty doubtful.
- CEO likes pushing people around. CEO believes he can push me around. API Guy doesn't budge. (I probably won't, either, except to change task priorities.)
- API Guy's code is huge and awful, but functional.
- API Guy is trying to clean up the mess; CEO doesn't understand (maybe doesn't care).
- Literally nobody else knows how the code works.
- Apart from API Guy and myself, the entire company is extroverted sales people.
- None of these sales people particularly like me.
- Sales people sell and sell and sell without asking development if they can pull enough magic features out of their hat to meet the arbitrary saleslines. (because the answer is usually no)
- If I accept, I would be the sole developer (at first) and responsible for someone else's mountain of nightmarish code, and still responsible for layering on new features at the same pace as he. Pay raise likely, but not guaranteed.
- My getting the position is contingent upon the CEO and the investors, meaning it's by no means guaranteed.
- If I don't accept, likely API Guy will be replaced with someone else of unknown ability, who doesn't know the code, and whom I must answer to regardless. Potentially OK, potentially a monumental disaster.

Honestly, it feels like I'm going to be screwed no matter what course I choose.

Perhaps accepting is slightly better?

The best would be to assume the position of CTO and keep API Guy around -- but that would feel like an insult to him. I doubt he'd be okay with it. But maybe. Who knows? I doubt the CEO would seriously consider that anyway.

I feel like a lamb between a dim, angry rhino, and an oblivious one.

The world makes no fucking sense.

In 2013 I had a manager approve a couple days' leave coz my son was having medical issues.

He was super nice about it and told me I could take as much time as I needed. I said, a couple days is enough. I took Thursday and Friday off. I took two days.

On Monday, an emergency meeting was held with the CTO (it was a small company, it went me -> manager -> C suite). I was told that a production deployment happened on Friday that fucked up a few clients' systems and that it had cost said clients hundreds of thousands dollars and are now suing the company.

Turns out on Friday, lead developer was also given the day off for whatever reason and I was being scolded because as the next senior developer, it was my responsibility to review code and make sure shit like this doesn't happen.

I agreed (and still agree) but also explained I had already filed leave weeks prior and I wasn't informed about dev lead's absence. Sure I could've checked my messages but my kid was in the hospital and I was busy. Still I couldn't help but feel a little guilty.

Manager holds a separate meeting with me and talks me into just writing an apology note in the email chain and he'll do the rest of the talking for me and make sure I get minimal punishment. I trusted him, he was the one who found me and brought me into the company (I know, I was naive).

So I wrote the email. It was a small note. I apologized for not checking messages and explained my situation again and mentioned I would've definitely checked if I was informed that the lead dev would be away.

Another meeting was held the next day and after pleasantries the Manager started with this, "Ok so we've all seen the email and understand that this was all Angry's fault right?".

Now, we're not native English speakers and Manager doesn't really do well with grammar. I was alarmed by what he said but wasn't angry because I was pretty sure that's not what he meant. I'm sure he meant to say that "Angry feel's guilty but his actions were understandable given the circumstance" or that he forgot a "not" in there and really meant "not Angry's fault". Surely this is what he meant to say. Right?

But then the rest of the meeting went on and I was unceremoniously let go. Immediately for "failing to accomplish my tasks and costing the client 100Ks of dollars". I wasn't even given a chance to say anything else.

The meeting ended and since we were both in the office, Manager approached me with exit papers and a check (~1200 USD)--it was my month's pay. I was asked to leave that day and was told I didn't need to come back. No handovers, no knowledge transfers, not a even a documentation of open projects I was handling.

I realized I just was made the scapegoat by a management screwup that costed our clients a lot of money.

Of course, I wrote the CEO multiple emails the next couple days. I also cc'd the CTO. No response.

A couple of weeks pass, I get another job at a cool company and i promptly move on.

I write this story now because I just found out today that in 2016, Manager was let go by the company for **sexual harassment**. Apparently, he actually did it too according to friends I still had within the company.

Here's where it gets fucked up. He turns and sues the company for unlawful termination and I guess to avoid a long legal battle? the company settled. They fucking settled and handed this man 2 Million PHP (at the time about 40k USD).

2 fucking million. Life changing money around here. And he got it by being a slimy piece of shit.

The world makes no fucking sense.

Is it normal my boss want me to pay for the coffee I drink at work? 🤔
He asks me €1 for 2 coffee capsules for his coffee machine, while each costs only 22 cents… fucking bastard.
And it doesn't even taste good…

ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.

I'll summarize the few I remember.

First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.

Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'

and gems like:

def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end

^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.

Next up are a few of my personal favorites:

Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am

LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?

And for design decisions...

The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'

I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.

Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.

But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.

Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.

Yep, it's garbage all the way down.

Fuck ever working for a company that doesn't know shit about the worth of a developer ever again.
> be me
> just got my first class masters in Soft Eng that I worked hard as fuck to get
> get a job for a pretty well known medical company here
> offered a bit less than what I was expecting but fuck it, it's a job straight out of uni doing what I want to do
> fuckitwhynot.mp4
> stay for a year with no bonus programme, no pay review, no objectives, no perks, literally fuck all
> see literally every other position in the company be promoted and actually supported from IT & the developers
> feelsBoomerMan.jpg
> get the hail mary recruiter "you'd be great for this role" linked in DM
> follow it through and go to the interview
> nailed it
> comes to negotiating a starting salary and they actually laugh at my current rate and immediately raise it by about 30% with bonuses, reviews and all that shit occurring regularly
> later virgins

Man I really hate it when people think that coding doesn't take any concentration and can just interrupt you while you're thinking about how to solve problems

So the other day I was working on how to solve a problem with filtering data with JS, and I had to urgently update one of our pages on our website. I had to update that page according to the content of a Word file, which I didn't check how long it was.

About 15 minutes later everything was ready and published, so I set myself back to my problem.

I get an email from her, "you mixed up things" and she showed up in my office. "There are four pages in this word doc and you copied wrong parts", I was like "ok, I'll fix it". Fixed it two minutes later, went back to code.

Received another email, with another subject, again with another problem. Start getting pissed off for being interrupted for nonsense. Fixed it instantly and put my manager in the email loop so she is aware my other colleague pisses me off.

And again, another direct email "can you fix this?!". I started ignoring her requests because I need some work to be done, and I already lost 2 hours. Got again interrupted by her personal visit to point me which things are wrong, repeating everything twice as I am stupid to her. Man I can't code in peace. I fixed her shit, exactly as she wants and decided to pay my manager a visit to tell her I'm really pissed about being interrupted all the time.

Five minutes before the end of the day, she comes panicking in the office about ANOTHER WORTHLESS issue. Told her it's nothing and went away.

Day is over, thought it was over - a whole afternoon spent correcting her fucking page that gets 10 visits a year.

On the next morning, "there is something wrong with your form, can you check it?!!?" with an attached screenshot. FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU STOP ANNOYING ME WITH YOUR FUCKING SHIT CANT WORK ANYMORE. PUT YOUR FUCKING PAGE RIGHT UP YOUR ASS AND FIX IT YOURSELF.

She doesn't have any access to the back end.

Guess I'll have to fix it then...

A person just bought a 3000€ workstation and asked me to install cracked versions of Office, AutoCAD, full Adobe suite and Rhino with plugins. And he's going to use them at work to make money.

So, since I have to, I installed 2-3 years old versions of each, in English (he only knows Italian) and blocked all the connections so he can't receive any update/fix or use web related functionalities. I also disabled all autostarting components and contextual menu / OS integrations (although this can be seen as a plus).

When he's calling me asking to "fix" things, I will simply say "sorry, it's the only way for the crack to work, if you want everything you'd better pay for a license or else go open source".

Why can't people understand the value of the complex software they use? Just because it's not a material thing doesn't mean it's not a steal

College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.

I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.

This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.

Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.

Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.

The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.

Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.

Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.

And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.

And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!

But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.

My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.

If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.

Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.

Fuck NDA, if client doesn't pay me then I'm going to make their open in Github.

Worst hack/attack I had to deal with?

Worst, or funniest. A partnership with a Canadian company got turned upside down and our company decided to 'part ways' by simply not returning his phone calls/emails, etc. A big 'jerk move' IMO, but all I was responsible for was a web portal into our system (submitting orders, inventory, etc).

After the separation, I removed the login permissions, but the ex-partner system was set up to 'ping' our site for various updates and we were logging the failed login attempts, maybe 5 a day or so. Our network admin got tired of seeing that error in his logs and reached out to the VP (responsible for the 'break up') and requested he tell the partner their system is still trying to login and stop it. Couple of days later, we were getting random 300, 500, 1000 failed login attempts (causing automated emails to notify that there was a problem). The partner knew that we were likely getting alerted, and kept up the barage. When alerts get high enough, they are sent to the IT-VP, which gets a whole bunch of people involved.
VP-Marketing: "Why are you allowing them into our system?! Cut them off, NOW!"
Me: "I'm not letting them in, I'm stopping them, hence the login error."
VP-Marketing: "That jackass said he will keep trying to get into our system unless we pay him $10,000. Just turn those machines off!"
VP-IT : "We can't. They serve our other international partners."
<slams hand on table>
VP-Marketing: "I don't fucking believe this! How the fuck did you let this happen!?"
VP-IT: "Yes, you shouldn't have allowed the partner into our system to begin with. What are you going to do to fix this situation?"
Me: "Um, we've been testing for months already went live some time ago. I didn't know you defaulted on the contract until last week. 'Jake' is likely running a script. He'll get bored of doing that and in a couple of weeks, he'll stop. I say lets ignore him. This really a network problem, not a coding problem."
IT-MGR: "Now..now...lets not make excuses and point fingers. It's time to fix your code."
IT-VP: "I agree. We're not going to let anyone blackmail us. Make it happen."

So I figure out the partner's IP address, and hard-code the value in my service so it doesn't log the login failure (if IP = '10.50.etc and so on' major hack job). That worked for a couple of days, then (I suspect) the ISP re-assigned a new IP and the errors started up again.

After a few angry emails from the 'powers-that-be', our network admin stops by my desk.
D: "Dude, I'm sorry, I've been so busy. I just heard and I wished they had told me what was going on. I'm going to block his entire domain and send a request to the ISP to shut him down. This was my problem to fix, you should have never been involved."

After 'D' worked his mojo, the errors stopped.

Month later, 'D' gave me an update. He was still logging the traffic from the partner's system (the ISP wanted extensive logs to prove the customer was abusing their service) and like magic one day, it all stopped. ~2 weeks after the 'break up'.

I was getting a freelancer job to do some backend work for a company in India that is working for a huge company in Saudi Arabia.

The customer in india was my primary contact, I wasn't allowed to talk to the guys in Saudi Arabia. My contact, we'll call him Aman, asks if i can do frontend too. I decline. Now what follows were 4 weeks of backend work during which Aman called me 10-15 times per day via skype to ask me how I was progressing, and if "insert spec here" was already done. He even called me in the middle of the night, well aware of the different time zones.

But in the end all the work is done, Aman is happy. I request payment.

Aman: We can't pay you yet, you didn't do the frontend!
Me: I'm not doing frontend.
Aman: It's just a few simple changes and then we're done.
Me: Gnnn, fuck it, what do you need?
Aman: Our customer would like the frontend to look better.
Me: Ok, so what exactly should look better?
Aman: All of it.
Me: Do you have any specs?
Aman: No just make it look more modern.
Me: So you want me to rework the whole frontend? That's not just a few simple changes...
Aman: How long would you need?
Me: I actually don't do that kind of work.
Aman: We pay you double your hourly rate if you do this and finish it fast.

(This is were I should have just said no... but the greed...)

Me: Ok, but it will take me about 3 weeks to do that.
Aman: OK.
Me: Do you have any preferences as to how it should look?
Aman: No, just surprise us.

(After this sentence I really should have gotten the hell out of Dodge)

After working 3 weeks changing over 20.000 lines of CSS and most of the HTML I present Aman with the changes.

Aman: No our customer doesn't like the changes. Can you make a different version?
Me: What doesn't he like, any specifics, coloring, styling of lists or the buttons?
Aman: He doesn't like the whole thing. Please make us another version.
Me: Ok, you are the customer, but it would really help if you give me some pointers as to how it should look like.
Aman: Just do your best.
Me: ..., ok, that's helpful.

2 weeks later...

Aman: No our customer liked the version before better. But could you make it look more modern.
Me: *Bangs head against wall repeatedly*
Me: What do you mean by modern?
Aman: It should look more modern, as a whole.
Me: Ok, I get that, but could you give me an example?
Aman: Sends me a screenshot of the overview screen with all the elements encircled and modern written beside them.

1 week later...

Aman: The customer has decided, he likes the original version best. Can you undo all the changes?
Me: Sure but that'll take like 1 hour.
Aman: Oh by the way we were asked by accounting why the price for this project was so high?
Me: *hugh* *gnn* what?
Aman: Well at the beginning, you estimated the backend and frontend work to be done in 4 weeks.
Me: The frontend was never part of the original estimate.
Aman: Can you do anything concerning your hourly rate, so that we can get back to the original pricing.
Me: *make a mental note to never work with an intermediary company in india again and cancels the job requesting the due payment*

Luckily I got paid the full amount but not before having another 10 Skype call with Aman...

Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.

From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.

Fast forward to today...

Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.

If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.

Alright so listen to this. I was working on a project, it was a fork of another github repo. So the project is mainly based in PHP, simple enough right?

Anyways I have my version working and I put it up as a website and am doing fairly well with it. I was trying to advertise it a bit on reddit ( pay attention to the trying ) then someone comes along and asks how I made it and all that.

Just trying to be kind I tell them what I used and all that to make it. Then they come back a few hours later explaining that they are trying to make their own version for "fun". Then they proceed to explain that they are having some issues with it, it obviously is something in the back-end (they must've fucked up something).

So I politely ask them to show me the code so I can help them fix it.

He refuses.

So we exchanged a bit. What his excuse for not showing me his code ( Keep in mind he is also taking this from an open-source software same as me he has simply broken something and can't fix it himself ) is he doesn't want me stealing his ideas...

I nearly snapped when he did that, I had already seen the site he made, from that end it wasn't anymore spectacular than mine and no serious changes seemed to have occurred. The best part is that it was broken. He asked for my help and refused to let me see the code so I told him that I simply couldn't help him fix it then. He goes and is just going alright.

Next he then asks me how I solved this issue and that issue and he wanted the code that I used to fix each of these little issues. Pretty much to the point that it would've been a clone of my site. So I just didn't give him anything.

Didn't hear from him for a few hours, next thing I know he messages me asking if he can fix my site so it is mobile friendly...First off my site is mobile friendly and works pretty well. I have been spending a lot more quality time to work on this than him.

Moral of the story is, some people are retards.

*Got a request for installing and configuring an online shop for a client*

Me: Do you have a web space already?
Client: No, I don't want to pay for it. (FYI: They only cost about 20€ a year)
Me: Okay, but free hosters are often slow and unprofessional. I really do not recommend using free hosting services.
Client: Doesn't matter, do it.
Me: *Working on the shop for several weeks, finally goes online*
One week later, client contacts me saying shop is offline. I realize the free hoster he used shut down their services (bankruptcy), resulting in the loss of about 90% of the work that I had done (no proper backups due to complexity)
Client: How can that even happen? You'll redo the shop, right?

♪~ ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ

Worst of 2020?

Well, I've learnt never to do free / voluntary work.

Been spending many weekends helping out a former friend, mostlyby creating APIs, sites, managing servers & scripting.

Now that I have a girlfriend, my weekends are spent mostly with her.

He got really mad, said he doesn't want to waste time.

Then went to *pay* someone else to continue what I've been doing...

Here's a genuine rant for you. Probably the only one I've ever made and ever will..

It's a bit depressing and covers a few topics so just read it, it's important.

*deep inhale*
So, with the help of my friend and my Nana, I was getting VR set up. (Oh, what joy.)

Now, I love everything about VR. But the thing is, I've had this damned headset since may (Dell MMR) and I haven't been able to use it. The reason for that is, something always came up that I needed to buy and this became a huge deal.

But let's start from the beginning.. I'm curentally fighting depression. I have been for months. My only income is what my Nana gives me ($150/mo) and what my friend ocasinally gives me.

Anyways, the first issue was that I couldn't afford the headset. This was find, as my friend would get it for me, and I would pay them back the following month. But, then, once I got the headset that's when the real problems started. First it was that I needed bluetooth, so I bought an adapter. Then I realized my entire CPU was incompatable, so I had to get a new tower and I went ahead and got a new GPU as well. I also got a charging kit for my headset (This ended up making me owe my Nana money). Then after all of that was settled, I learned that the evauation software lied, and my computer doesn't have USB 3, so I need that too but low and behold; both of my graphics cards cover my second pcie slot. So my options are to either try and rig up something, or to buy a cpu and psu for my third AMD PC which I had forgotten about during this whole ordeal..

This was soposed to help me with my depression and stress. Now I don't even want to get out of bed.

With all that said, I might be getting on SSI soon (I'm sure some of you are familar with that, and no I don't want to talk about it) and when that happens I might just leave behind tech (well, my PC and games) and all the stress and pain it's caused me over my life so this was all for nothing.

Honestly.. I'm just done with everything. To all the new faces around here; Hello! How are ya? To everyone else; You know me. I've been around for a while, though I'm not popular because I lurked and commented with Alice. You all probably noticed that I left a while back, and it was because I was trying to get out of tech. My reason for tech was that I was searching for something. I was always looking for the next game to sate me, or fill this gap in my life. I became a programmer because it gave me control were I lacked it otherwise. I made friends online because my anxiety prevented me from doing so in the real world.

But to what end? What have I acomplished? My twenty second birthday is next month. I've no job, I move from family member to famly member because I'm so fixated on becoming someone else to make something of myself.

I have my own ideals, but it seems that I push them aside to try (and fail to) impress others.

It's time for change. Of course, I can't do anything without money, so I'll have to wait for my SSI which I will get news on in August.

I hope this message came through how I meant it to. There is so much I want to say, but I've no words to say them. And btw, the VR thing is just one of manny issue that i've delt with (but certanly the most expensive)

Alice, Zennoe (Alexis, whom is not on devrant); I'm not giving up tech entirely. don't expect to suddenly not hear from me. I'm mostly just giving up my computer and games. More casually so for now, and them more seriously once I get on SSI. I'll still message you every/other day like I have been. <3

This is something that happened 2 years ago.

1st year at uni, comp sci.

Already got project to make some app for the univ that runs in android, along with the server

I thought, omg, this is awesome! First year and already got something to offer for the university 😅
(it's a new university, at the time I was the 2nd batch)

Team of 12, we know our stuffs, from the programming POV, at least, but we know nothing about dealing with client.

We got a decent pay, we got our computers upgraded for free, and we even got phones of different screen sizes to test out our apps on.

No user requirement, just 2-3 meetings. We were very naive back then.

2 weeks into development, Project manager issues requirement changes

we have a meeting again, discussing the important detail regarding the business model. Apparently even the univ side hadn't figure it out.

1 month in the development, the project manager left to middle east to pursue doctoral degree

we were left with "just do what you want, as long as it works"

Our projects are due to be done in 3 months. We had issues with the payment, we don't get paid until after everything's done. Yet the worse thing is, we complied.

Month 3, turns out we need to present our app to some other guy in the management who apparently owns all the money. He's pleased, but yet, issued some more changes. We didn't even know that we needed to make dashboard at that time.

The project was extended by one month. We did all the things required, but only got the payment for 3 months.

Couldn't really ask for the payment of the fourth month since apparently now the univ is having some 'financial issues'.

And above all: Our program weren't even tested, let alone being used, since they haven't even 'upgraded' the university such that people would need to use our program as previously planned.

Well, there's nothing to be done right now, but at least I've learned some REALLY valuable lesson:

1. User Requirement is a MUST! Have them sign it afterwards, and never do any work until then. This way, change of requirements could be rejected, or at least postponed

2. Code convention is a MUST! We have our code, in the end, written in English and Indonesian, which causes confusion. Furthermore, some settle to underscore when naming things, while other chooses camel case.

3. Don't give everyone write access to repository. Have them pull their own, and make PR later on. At least this way, they are forced to fix their changes when it doesn't meet the code convention.

4. Yell at EVERYONE who use cryptic git commit message. Some of my team uses JUST EMOTICONS for the commit message. At this point, even "fixes stuffs" sound better.

Well, that's for my rant. Thanks for reading through it. I wish some of you could actually benefit from it, especially if you're about to take on your first project.

Hey guys and ladys. I've got another little rant about my teacher.
As some of you may know, i finished my final exams last week, so basically every relevant grade is done. Every teacher except of my special snowflake programming teacher spends the lessons casually talking with us (some even say we dont need to show up anymore).
Little backstory: Grades need to be done on 18th, June and i get my certificate on 22nd.

Back to my rant. Special Snowflake is different. He wants ANOTHER project. This is totally his idea and is nowhere mentioned in our curriculum. It has to be done until next friday, it has to be C# and we need a detailed documentation. This wouldn't be a problem normally - if I wouldn't be moving at the moment. Special Snowflake knows this but doesn't care.
Except from the criteria above he wants it to be:
- fancy
- loved by everyone. Literally we need to make something EVERYBODY wants in their daily life
- good looking
- everyone should want to pay money for this

How am I supposed to come up with an idea and program the shit out of it in less than 2 weeks, which i need to paint my new office and pack some more stuff.

My company got another contract to support a research institute. My current contract has shitty leadership that won't back us against our boss (different company, same contract) without proof. The fact that 3 of the 4 of us dread going to work isn't enough?

Anyways. Talking to the other site about transferring. Need to gtfo to a less toxic environment where I won't be made to work fucked up hours with a boss who doesn't like women in tech, and thinks he's something special because he's vegan (but had real leather jackets and bike seats, but that's an entirely different story) and does yoga and plays the guitar.

Meanwhile, he resents his kids and seems to regret getting married. All because he used his military education benefits to pay for their school.

>got 2TB storage upgrade for Xbox One S
>plugs in
>format went well
>queue up ganes to download to external storage
>all is fine
>whoops a game crashed and hanged the console
>force-reboot xbox
>OH MY GOD ALL THE GAMES ARE GONE ALL OUR SAVES ARE GONE EVERYTHING'S GONE
>well at least the saves are all cloud saves
>wait why are they not resyncing
>Turns out you can sync saves upward but not downward if you don't pay for Gold for ALL ACCOUNTS ON THE XBOX, and gold family share doesn't count
>mfw Microsoft is ransoming save backups now

I'm still at my first job, got the job by word of mouth from a friend.

This company wants me to develop both their iOS and Android apps, and being the solo developer it's a long process. I forgot to mention I had to learn objective-c on the job, and being from a java background Android was easy to pick up but it wasn't exactly 100% easy either.

8 months down the line I finished the iOS app and working on the Android app, which is more so copying the features I did with the Android prototype I worked on at the start.

I get paid minimum wage with from the looks of it no sight of a pay raise.

This company doesn't seem to know about how difficult it is to be the only developer for two apps in two different languages.

Anyway aside from this I was wondering if I could get some advice, I want to apply for jobs while I finish up the Android app, but is it a good idea to put the company I work for on my CV? I don't want to risk getting found out for looking for a job, without my boss knowing.

Would it be ideal to just have some sort of more information on request type thing if the jobs I apply for respond?

I guess I could stay until I'm here for one year (student advisor said this) but in saying that I don't think he understands that software development is done in projects rather than time, and after these apps I'll have to start on a new app from scratch, which I'm not looking forward to.

Anyways for any advice you guys give me thanks in advance I really appreciate any input, just wanna get out of this job, the 10 hours of commute I spend a week is killing me :/ along with it being expensive.

Bit of an essay. TLDR: come Monday I'm either getting fired or promoted. And the CTO is a dickhead. If you think you work with me or know who I am, no you don't, shut the hell up.

Was having a discussion with my team, went on for a bit, at one point my manager mentioned that the CTO wanted me to go into the office occasionally, same thing I've had since I joined when they literally wanted me to move hundreds of miles to be close to the office mid covid when the office was closed. I give a nondescript answer. He's a bit more persistent, I snap a little but the conversation moves on. Discussion of company and team dynamics, at one point he makes a comment about people at another company being told if they don't go into the office they won't be eligible for promotion.

I ask everyone else on the call to leave.

I point out that 2 years ago me and him were interviewing candidates. He on a few occasions introduces me to candidates as a _senior_ engineer. My job title does not contain the word senior. I let it slide the first time, not worth it for a slip of the toung. Happens a couple more times, I take him aside and privately point out my job title does not contain the word senior. He says he didn't realise and thought I was.

My take away then: I'm expected to do the work of a senior without being paid for it and without being given the acknowledgement of the appropriate job title. I remind him of this. My job title hasn't changed. Fuck, I took a low ball offer when I joined and have had a minimal pay rise in like, 3 years. My tone is "not happy".

His response? He discussed promoting me with CTO however budged constraints. I somewhat understand, however.

We have promoted several people in the last few years. We have grown by hiring new people in the last few years (5 in a company of 30). There are ways to compensate someone in ways that do not impact day to day budget (shares, TC, total compensation, is normal terminology in the tech field for this). I ask why the hell should I travel a few hundred miles to the office to get get to know people, put effort in to a company that demonstrably doesn't value me? Particularly as all levels of management have completely failed at developing a social atmosphere during covid? My first month, I had 3 5 minute meetings with my manager a week. That was all of the communication I had with people. I literally complained and laid out what they should do instead, they adopted most of it.

I also ask him if he genuinely thinks being here is in my professional interest? My tone has well passed pissed off.

I will say, I actually quite like my manager, we have a good working relationship and I've learned a lot from him.

He makes some mediocre points, tries to give advice about value of shares. To me, the value of shares is zero until they are money. The value to the company, however, is that it's a sizeable chunk on their balance sheet and shares sheet that they have to be willing to justify. If I wanted money, I'd go work at a high frequency trading bank and make 5x what I'm on now. No joke, that's what they pay, I could get a job, came close in the past but went to amazon. He understands.

He says will discuss with CTO. They were on a call for like an hour. His tone has changed to "you will be promoted ASAP, comp may be structured as discussed". Point made.

I'm in this job because it's convenient, is easy for me. Was originally lower challenge than previous, has a range of chances to learn and _that's_ the value to me. He's suitably nervous.

Point made I think.

So given I swore a few times, at least once about the CTO. Interesting to see how it goes.

Message from him to the effect that he spoke to CTO, has been told to write a proposal for promotion (kinda standard), will discuss with HR on Monday as they're on holiday.

So, maybe not getting fired today?

Blood pressure still very high.

This one's for all the SysAdmins out there.

About 4 years ago I was asked to take over a dental offices systems administration (~20 machines) after their previous guy had allowed their servers RAID 1 to fail and hadn't done any updates or general maintenance. (please take note this office is my parents dental office).

I since have been recovering from his poor configuration and setup by instating an active directory environment and installing up to date software as well as updating machines on the domain to Windows 10 since windows 7 is no longer supported. I have also been properly licensing everything.

My bosses (my parents) are annoyed with this because "it's more expensive" and "it's too complicated we don't know how to manage it" and I don't know how to explain to them that they aren't fucking systems admins. They asked why they could do it before and I tried to explain that now it's secure and things need to be rolled out on the network level. They had every user running full local admin on every workstation plus the server.

Some people don't fucking understand that just because it's simple doesn't make it a good fucking idea. And because it's cheap doesn't mean it will always be (just wait till Microsoft audits you).

Oh and they also don't understand fucking CAL licensing and refuse to pay for gsuite for all their staff who use it. Instead they just have two gsuite accounts and give everyone the fucking password.

I'm going to have an aneurysm

I recently received a 1 star review in the App Store. I have answered him twice to ask about which issues he had and what features were missing to him.
He responded really aggressively by posting this:
I purchased this app for my Sonos and found it very simple for an app I had to pay for. I gave it a 1 star and wrote why. Since then the designer has contacted me twice complaining about my review. Sorry, but I am entitled to my opinion and I want you to stop harrassing me because I think your app is basic and doesn't always work right.

DO NOT WRITE ME AGAIN. Suck it up and let me have my own opinion for what I paid for. If you don't like it, make the app free in exchange for 5 ego stars.

Clients are SUCH FUCKFACES!
So me and 3 friends developed a website and logo for an hr company, run by this woman and she loved it
She was our client for GOMC. Now, since it was a "project" she assumed she didn't had to pay for the whole thing....fine I agreed to just getting maintenance, to maintain goodwill and getting some more clients maybe

One day she wakes up and wants half of the shit altered....NOW, after almost over a month..Fucking bitch
She now wants a fucking RAINBOW colored logo...And she added "it must look professional OK?"...The fuck? Now we have to change the cards, letterheads, UI (entirely). Basically everything and doesn't wanna pay for shit
FML

Watch out for these fucking bug bounty idiots.

Some time back I got an email from one shortly after making a website live. Didn't find anything major and just ran a simple tool that can suggest security improvements simply loading the landing page for the site.

Might be useful for some people but not so much for me.

It's the same kind of security tool you can search for, run it and it mostly just checks things like HTTP headers. A harmless surface test. Was nice, polite and didn't demand anything but linked to their profile where you can give them some rep on a system that gamifies security bug hunting.

It's rendering services without being asked like when someone washes your windscreen while stopped at traffic but no demands and no real harm done. Spammed.

I had another one recently though that was a total disgrace.

"I'm a web security Analyst. My Job is to do penetration testing in websites to make them secure."
"While testing your site I found some critical vulnerabilities (bugs) in your site which need to be mitigated."
"If you have a bug bounty program, kindly let me know where I should report those issues."
"Waiting for response."

It immediately stands out that this person is asking for pay before disclosing vulnerabilities but this ends up being stupid on so many other levels.

The second thing that stands out is that he says he's doing a penetration test. This is illegal in most major countries. Even attempting to penetrate a system without consent is illegal.

In many cases if it's trivial or safe no harm no foul but in this case I take a look at what he's sending and he's really trying to hack the site. Sending all kinds of junk data and sending things to try to inject that if they did get through could cause damage or provide sensitive data such as trying SQL injects to get user data.

It doesn't matter the intent it's breaking criminal law and when there's the potential for damages that's serious.

It cannot be understated how unprofessional this is. Irrespective of intent, being a self proclaimed "whitehat" or "ethical hacker" if they test this on a site and some of the commands they sent my way had worked then that would have been a data breach.

These weren't commands to see if something was possible, they were commands to extract data. If some random person from Pakistan extracts sensitive data then that's a breach that has to be reported and disclosed to users with the potential for fines and other consequences.

The sad thing is looking at the logs he's doing it all manually. Copying and pasting extremely specific snippets into all the input boxes of hacked with nothing to do with the stack in use. He can't get that many hits that way.

An adult cam website I worked on as freelancer had/has this code everywhere:
$user = $_POST['usr'];
$pass = $_POST['pwd'];
$row = $db->query ("SELECT * FROM users where username='".$user."' AND password='".$pass."' COUNT 1);

I was hired to add new features and was touch any other parts of the code. When my job was done, I tried to fix those as a good samaritan but the client thought I was messing with the system or should be thing of new features to add. So I got fired.

5 years later, I check out of curiosity and they are still there. I ask him again if I can work on them for a little less pay(I'm broke) and he doesn't reply. What a douche. I hope his site receives a shot of SQLi from a customer.

Take the know-it-all guy you grew up with, that ruins every relationship he's ever had with friends and family, because he gets angry when folks don't deem him as the authority, even for shit he doesn't have a single clue about doing correctly.

Now make him the manager of a fast-food restaurant - so he can command anyone he pleases, making them do anything he wants them to, because he feels it's fun to experiment with co-workers emotions.

Give him an assistant manager that realizes that the only way they can keep their job is to kiss his ass, blowing him every once in a while for a ten cent raise, while the rest of the employees do nothing but smile, say "yes, sir", and go about their business - eventually shit talking about him at the parties he's not invited to.

Watch him jump on every fashion trend, no matter how much it costs, until he eventually decides that the job he's had for the last decade and his fellow employees are beneath him, without saving any money to pay for the things he needs to survive, or taking the proper time to learn all the things that would have made him successful in the long run.

Even though he was an uptight twat and a half, some folks feel that he never got the chance he deserved, as death comes knocking at an earlier age than many would have expected; creating an empty, irrational, and partial dependency in their lives, caused by problems he never cared to correct for their love and admiration, while others are happy as fuck that he's breathed his last breath.

This is the state of our current industry.

*Drops the mic*

That awkward moment you go from being the developer of an online store, to being the customer of said online store, and pray the ordering system behind the scenes doesn't fall over due to a bug you haven't fixed yet 😅

Here's something I never thought I would do, I just returned this weeks pay check back to the company!

When the client asks you to build him a website "like" booking.com but his budget doesn't even pay a weekend on a cheap hotel...

A month or so ago this manufacturer of soldering equipment contacted me with the request to make a video about a review unit (a soldering handle) that they'd send to me for free in exchange. Initially I was really pumped about it - company would send me free stuff!! - but fast-forward to today and I realized how terrible a choice I've made by accepting that offer.

See, that handle is worth only €40 and I've spent so much time on the bloody video material already that it'd make my "pay" expected to be close to €1/h if not less. I feel like I've been exploited, especially since I don't even like the handle's design and am not using it. It's just collecting dust, making my work essentially free labor.

I could return the item but that's gonna cost me a fuckload of money, I could pay for the handle and cut my losses that way.. or I could do the review anyway and end up feeling very bad about that company. Or I could tell them to fuck off and lose a supply chain for my soldering equipment.

I have no idea what to do about this..

Oh and the fact that the correspondent in that company has the worst Chinglish skills imaginable, the communication skills of a toddler and is also super indecisive (they asked me to make a YouTube video first which led me to assume a video format for YouTube, but instead they want to put it on their fucking AliExpress product page, rendering my existing video footage useless!) doesn't help either.. I hate that shit company. Fucking leeches!

Anyway, what would you do when you're in a position like that?

Recently started at a new job. Things were going fine, getting along with everyone, everything seems good and running smoothly, a few odd things here and there but for the most part fine.

Then I decided to take a look at our (public facing) website... What's this? Outdated plugins from 2013? Okay, that's an easy fix I guess? All of these are free and the way we're using them wouldn't require a lot of refactoring...

Apparently not. Apparently, we can't even update them ourselves, we have to request that an external company does it (which we pay, by the way, SHITELOADS of money to). A week goes past, and we finally get a response.

No, we won't update it, you'll have to pay for it. Doesn't matter that there's a CVE list a bloody mile long and straight up no input validation in several areas, doesn't matter that tens of thousands of users are at risk, pay us or it stays broken. Boggles the fuckin' mind.

I dug into it a bit more than I probably should have (didn't break no laws though I'm not a complete dumbass, I just work for em) and it turns out it's not just us getting fucked over, it's literally EVERYONE using their service which is the vast majority of people within the industry in my country. It also turns out that the entirety of our region is running off a single bloody IP which if you do a quick search on shodan for, you guessed it, also has a CVE list pop up a fuckin' mile long. Don't get me started on password security (there is none). I hate this, there's fucking nothing I can do and everyone else is just fine sitting on their hands because "nobody would target us because we're not a bank!!", as if it bloody matters and as if peoples names, addresses, phone numbers and assuming someone got into our actual database, which wouldn't be a fuckin' stretch of the imagination let me tell you, far more personal details, that these aren't enticing to anyone.

What would you do in my situation?
What can I even do?
I don't want to piss anyone senior off but honestly, I'm thinkin' they might deserve it. I mean yeah there's nothing we can do but at least make a fuss 'cause they ain't gunna listen to my green ass.

We made a simple SMS application - when there is alert in a building, SMS is sent to specific range of numbers, based on the alert type. After a month we received invoice of approx. 10K € from the client, my colleague was supposed to pay
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After checking the logs and running tests on module, we found out it was not our fault, client then told us he played with SIM-card while module was sending SMS and somehow he managed to fu*k up. I still don't get it, partially.. Mobile service provider doesn't give a sh!t about sending tons of SMS/hour? No warning, nothing..

Ahh.. Clients, right?

First rant (hello everyone), just wanted to share my experience of my recent job search.
I had worked about 2 years for one of the bigger companies in my country when I decided I had enough with their bs (I have some decent rants from that company if someone's interested) and I wanted to move back to my hometown. I applied for a few jobs in smaller companies , one which I personally knew the lead programmer of, and he really wanted me to work there. One other company responded quickly and after a couple of interviews I got an offer from them. By that time I haven't heard anything from the first company, so I called them. The CEO was in a meeting but would call me when he was done about am hour later. Didn't hear from him. So I called them again, this time he answered. He seemed really interested and said they were just working some things out, so I said that I needed an offer soon since I already got an offer from another company. His response (without me telling anything about the other company):
"We're not going to be able to match the salary so if you only care about money you should take that. We want you to work for us because you want to, not because of the money"
Well that doesn't pay the bills, so I simply stated:
"I appreciate your honesty and good luck finding anyone"
I hadn't really understood just how bad that was until I told my wife and she pointed it out. The thing is, the company that gave the offer first was really for a junior role, but they increased the proposed salary when they saw my CV. The shitty company was looking for a senior dev. Yeah, good luck finding a senior dev wanting to work without getting properly paid.
Anyway, took the first offer and haven't been happier!

NO FUCKING WAY YOU ARE GONNA PAY SOMEONE THE EQUIVALENT OF TWO MONTHS WHAT I MAKE TO DO SOMETHING I CAN DO IN A FUCKING WEEKEND BECAUSE "I HAVE SO MUCH TO DO ALREADY AND COMPANY STUPID POLICY DOESN'T ALLOW EMPLOYEES TO BE CONTRACTED AS FREELANCER ON THEIR SPARE TIME!!
HOW DARE YOU SAY THAT TO MY FACE YOU STUPID COCK SUCKER! I BET YOU CANT EVEN SUCK A FUCKING DICK PROPERLY STUPID FUCK!!!!!!!

Parked the car in a parking lot 15 mins before job interview. Plenty of time to spare.

Go to pay for parking.

Ticket machine doesn't accept cards. Fine, I have notes.

Ticket machine doesn't accept notes. Shit, I need to go get change quick.

FUCKING FUCKER DOESN'T ACCEPT £1 COINS WELL WHAT THE FUCK TO YOU ACCEPT THEN YOU FUCKING FUCK I'M GOING TO BE LATE FOR MY JOB INTERVIEW OR GET A £80 FUCKING PARKING FINE

So one rant reminded me of a situation I whent through like 10 years ago...
I'm not a dev but I do small programs from time to time...
One time I was hired to pass a phone book list from paper to a ms Access 97 database...
On my old laptop I could only add 3 to 5 records cause MS access doesn't clean after itself and would crash...

So I made an app (in vb6) , to easily make records, was fast, light and well tabbed.
But now I needed a form to edit the last record when I made a mistake...
Then I wanted a form to check all the records I made.
Well that gave me an idea and presented the software to the client... A cheesy price was agreed for my first freelance sell...
After a month making it perfect and knowing the problems the client would had I made a admin form to merge all the databases and check for each record if it would exist.... I knew the client would have problems to merge hundreds of databases....
When it was done... The client told me he didn't need the software anymore.... So I gave it to a friend to use as an client dabatase software... It was perfect for him.
One month later the client called me because he couldn't merge the databases...
I told him I was already working in a company. That my software was ready to solve his problem, but I got mad and deleted everything...
He had to pay almost 20 times more for a software company to make the same software but worst... Mine would merge and check all the databases in a folder... Their's had to pick one by one and didn't check for duplicates... So he had to pay even more for another program to delete duplicates...

That's why I didn't follow programming as a freelance... Lots of regrets today...
Could be working at home, instead had a burn out this week cause of overwork...

Sorry for the long rant.

my dad bought me my first computer at 8, when I was 12 he thought I was always playing video games. at 19 he wouldn't pay for me to go get a bachelor's degree in computer science even though I was dual majoring with computer science and business. but he wonders how I always have money, he's 79 years old so not really unexpected.

my mom never understood what I was doing on computers but knew I was making money when I needed it, she's 61 years old and getting in bad shape so she's living with me and my wife. but she can tell when I'm thinking hard on a project and leaves me alone.

my wife doesn't know what I do and thinks I found a fucking magic money tree and she'll bug me after I spent 30 minutes planing a function out and I have to start over.

Always back up your data.

I came to my computer earlier today to find it on my Linux login screen. This could only mean one thing: something went horribly wrong.

Let me explain.

I have my BIOS set up to boot into Windows automatically. The exception is a reboot or something horrible happens and the computer crashes. Then, it boots me into Linux. Due to a hardware issue I never looked into, I have to be present to push F1 to allow the computer to start. The fact that it rebooted successfully, without me present, into *Linux*, could only mean one thing:

My primary hard drive died and was no longer bootable.

The warning was the BIOS telling me the drive was likely to fail ("Device Error" doesn't really tell me anything to be fair).

The massive wave of panic hit me.

I rebooted in hopes of reviving the drive. No dice.

I rebooted again. The drive appeared.

Let's see how much data I can recover from it before I can no longer mount it. Hopefully, I can come out of this relatively unscathed.

The drive in question is a 10 year old 1.5 TB Seagate drive that came with the computer. It served me well.

Press F to pay respects I guess.

On the bright side, I'll be getting an SSD as a replacement (probably a Samsung EVO).

TL;DR you suck, I suck and everybody sucks, deal with it....

------------------------------------

Let me let off some steam, since I've had enough of people hating on languages "just because"

Every language has it's drawbacks and quirks, BUT they have their strengths also. Saying "I hate {language}" is just you being and ignorant prick and probably your head is so far up your ass that you look like an ass hat. With that being said, every language is either good or bad depending on the developer writing in it. Let's give you an example:

If I ware to give you a brick and ask you to put a nail in a plank, can you do it? Yes, it will be easier if you do it with a hammer, but you have a brick, so hammer is out of the question. If you hit your thumb while doing it... well... sorry, but it is not the bricks fault - it is YOU!

JavaScript, yes it has a whole lot of problems, but it works, you can do a ton of stuff and does a good job at that, it is evolving through node and typescript (and others, just a personal pref), BUT if you used js when you ware debugging that jquery (1.0) plugin written in the free time of a 13 yo, who copy pasted a bunch from SO, well, it is not js' problem - deal with it. Same goes for PHP, i've been there where you had a single `index.php` with bazillion lines of code, did a bunch of eval and it was called MVC, but it also is evolving.. thing is all languages allow you to do some dumb stuff so YOU have to be responsible to not fuck it up (which you always DO btw, we all do). Difference is PHP/JS roll with it because the assumption is that you know what you are doing, which again - newsflash - you don't.

More or less I would blame that shit on businesses which decided to go with undergrads to save money instead of investing in their product, hell, I am in a major company that does not invest that doesn't care a whole lot about dev /tech stuff and now everybody's mother is an engineer - they care about money, because investors care about money (ROI) and because clean code does not pay the bills, but money does.

If we get all of the good practices and apply them to each language every one of them has it's place, that is why there is no "The Language", even if there was, we STILL ware going to fuck it up and probably it was going to be even worse than where we are now.

Study, improve, rinse and repeat... There are SENIORS and LEADS out there that are about 25-30 and have no fucking clue about the language, because they have stuck up their heads up the ass of frameworks and refuse to take a breath of clean air and consider something different than their dogmatic framework "way" of doing things.. That is the result you are seeing. Let me give you a fresh example to illustrate where I am at atm:

Le me works with ZendFramework 2.3-2.5 (why not, which is PHP5+ running on PHP7 [fancy, eh]), and little me writes a module for said project, and tries to contain it in its own space, i.e not touching anything outside of the folder of the module so it is SELF-CONTAINED (see, practices), during 2-3-4 iterations of code review, I've had to modify 4 different modules with `if (somthing === self::SOMETHING_TYPE)` as requested by my TL, which resulted in me not covering 3 use-cases after the changes and not adding a new event (the fw is event-driven, cuz.. reasons) so I have to use a bunch of ifs in the code, to check a config value and do shit. That is the way of I am asked to do things I hate what I've done and the fact that because of CR I have lost case-coverage, a week of work and the same TL will be on my ass on monday that things are now "perfect".

The biggest things is "we care about convention and code style"... right.... That is not because of the language, not because of me, not because of the framework - it is some dude's opinion that you hate, not the language.

New stuff are better, reinventing the wheel is also good, if it wasn't you would've had a few stone circular things on your car and things ware going to be like that - we need to try and try, that is the only way we actually learn shit.

Until things change in the trade, we will be on the same boat, complaining about the same shit over and over, you and me won't be alive probably but things will not change a bit.

We live in a place where state is considered good, god objects necessary (can you believe it, I've got kudos for using the term 'God Object'... yep, let that sink in). If you really hate something, please, oh god I beg you, show me how you will do it better and I will shake your hand and buy you a beer, but until then, please keep your ass-hurt fanboy opinion to your self, no one gives a shit about what you think, we will die and the world will not notice...

First post.
So, I've been teaching myself front-end for about 7 months now, and I'm really enjoying it, especially the actual programming aspect of JS. I also just started a new job, nothing to do with development, that I expected to be extremely boring and unfulfilling, as it doesn't fulfill any of my interests, but it'll pay my rent and it has decent benefits. I'll be mostly working with excel.
Now, like I mentioned, I'm really new to the dev world, just a little infant really. I know enough to know that I don't know shit. So, I was surprised to learn today that you can program in excel with VBA. I know the language gets a good bit of hate on here, I did a search before posting, and while I haven't started to learn it just yet (I'm starting tonight) I'm excited about. Firstly, because I'll get to do coding for my job, something I'm interested in, and secondly, because if I can figure out how to automate part of what I do well enough that it's implemented with the rest of the team, then maybe I'll be rewarded, and I'd be able to put professional coding experience on a resume for when I try to find a better job.
I've really enjoyed reading all the rants. They've been entertaining and also educational sometimes.
tl;dr Discovered VBA and was actually excited about it

1) Glassdoor

2) Only work on open source projects so you can see what you're getting yourself into.

3) Avoid job postings that use the words "polygot" and "passion" in the same sentence.

4) Work for yourself. Build a product or service to make you money, and if it doesn't pay for itself sell it.

I asked my friend to design a flyer for an organization's annual dinner, asking her to send me an invoice so I could pay her (I can't design worth shit, she's doing me a huge favor).

She said she'll do it, declined payment, and doesn't even want me to get approval for her to put it in her portfolio...

How the hell do I pay her back for her work? If we lived in the same town, I'd at least take her to coffee and lunch, but she moved states and I moved countries :(

I spent the last three weeks+ (literally THREE full weeks, weekends too) building something I thought was really cool, powerful, and useful. Made a blog post, posted a giant thread on the company Twitter.

Literally one person gave it a like.

I don't know why I give shit anymore, cuz nowadays if it isn't about getting rich quick, cHaTgPt, or some other made up hype, no one cares. Apparently I shouldn't either...

Meanwhile my 16 GIGABYTE RAM MAC, yes 16 GIGABYTE RAM can't even hold power while plugged in, and I'm still clowning around with an ancient iPhone 6 (actually one of my mom's old iphones) that barely stays above 20% battery for more than an hour...

And FINALLY, my FUCKING ISP is for sure screwing me, since I've been doing some hard core data streaming and broadcasting, even though I pay $60+ month for that shit it, keeps dropping out, shit doesn't load.... I mean wtf this isn't 1990 dialup AOL anymore

When I step back I just feel like the worlds biggest loser, maybe the world's biggest 🤡

As a developer, I'm fed up with companies that expect us to work miracles in impossible timelines. We're not wizards, we're not magicians, we're not even superheroes. We're human beings who need time to develop quality software.

It's frustrating to be given a project with a deadline that's completely unrealistic. It's even more frustrating when the same company that gave us the deadline is unwilling to give us the resources we need to meet it.

And let's not forget about the endless meetings, emails, and phone calls that eat up our valuable time. We need to code, not attend endless meetings that never seem to accomplish anything.

And don't get me started on the non-technical people who think they know more about coding than we do. Just because you know how to use Microsoft Excel doesn't make you an expert on software development.

It's time for companies to start treating developers with the respect we deserve. We're not just code monkeys, we're skilled professionals who can create amazing things when given the right tools and resources. So stop treating us like we're disposable and start investing in us. Trust me, it will pay off in the long run.

And now the bloody client that can't pay me is asking me to remove the search feature I spent days implementing as she'd asked me to not a week ago. She doesn't seem to realise I develop for money, I don't develop for good will and positive vibes.

An asshole ex-client who owes me in excess of $1000, and doesn't intend to pay, has left me on their Twilio administration (unknowingly clearly) panel. I have the option of requesting around 30+ Cayman Islands numbers to auto charge his card enough to offset the debt.

Hmmmm.

After a few weeks of being insanely busy, I decided to log onto Steam and maybe relax with a few people and play some games. I enjoy playing a few sandbox games and do freelance development for those games (Anywhere from a simple script to a full on server setup) on the side. It just so happened that I had an 'urgent' request from one of my old staff member from an old community I use to own. This staff member decided to run his own community after I sold mine off since I didn't have the passion anymore to deal with the community on a daily basis.

O: Owner (Former staff member/friend)
D: Other Dev

O: Hey, I need urgent help man! Got a few things developed for my server, and now the server won't stay stable and crashes randomly. I really need help, my developer can't figure it out.
Me: Uhm, sure. Just remember, if it's small I'll do it for free since you're an old friend, but if it's a bigger issue or needs a full recode or whatever, you're gonna have to pay. Another option is, I tell you what's wrong and you can have your developer fix it.
O: Sounds good, I'll give you owner access to everything so you can check it out.
Me: Sounds good

*An hour passes by*

O: Sorry it took so long, had to deal with some crap. *Insert credentials, etc*
Me: Ok, give me a few minutes to do some basic tests. What was that new feature or whatever you added?
O: *Explains long feature, and where it's located*
Me: *Begins to review the files* *Internal rage wondering what fucking developer could code such trash* *Tests a few methods, and watches CPU/RAM and an internal graph for usage*
Me: Who coded this module?
O: My developer.
Me: *Calm tone, with a mix of some anger* So, you know what, I'm just gonna do some simple math for ya. You're running 33 ticks a second for the server, with an average of about 40ish players. 33x60 = 1980 cycles a minute, now lets times that by the 40 players on average, you have 79,200 cycles per minute or nearly 4.8 fucking cycles an hour (If you maxed the server at 64 players, it's going to run an amazing fucking 7.6 million cycles an hour, like holy fuck). You're also running a MySQLite query every cycle while transferring useless data to the server, you're clusterfucking the server and overloading it for no fucking reason and that's why you're crashing it. Another question, who the fuck wrote the security of this? I can literally send commands to the server with this insecure method and delete all of your files... If you actually want your fucking server stable and secure, I'm gonna have to recode this entire module to reduce your developer's clusterfuck of 4.8 million cycles to about 400 every hour... it's gonna be $50.
D: *Angered* You're wrong, this is the best way to do it, I did stress testing! *Insert other defensive comments* You're just a shitty developer (This one got me)
Me: *Calm* You're calling me a shitty developer? You're the person that doesn't understand a timer, I get that you're new to this world, but reading the wiki or even using the game's forums would've ripped this code to shreds and you to shreds. You're not even a developer, cause most of this is so disorganized it looks like you copy and pasted it. *Get's angered here and starts some light screaming* You're wasting CPU usage, the game can't use more than 1 physical core, and after a quick test, you're stupid 'amazing' module is using about 40% of the CPU. You need to fucking realize the 40ish average players, use less than this... THEY SHOULD BE MORE INTENSIVE THAN YOUR CODE, NOT THE OPPOSITE.
O: Hey don't be rude to Venom, he's an amazing coder. You're still new, you don't know as much as him. Ok, I'll pay you the money to get it recoded.
Me: Sounds good. *Angered tone* Also you developer boy, learn to listen to feedback and maybe learn to improve your shitty code. Cause you'll never go anywhere if you don't even understand who bad this garbage is, and that you can't even use the fucking wiki for this game. The only fucking way you're gonna improve is to use some of my suggestions.
D: *Leaves call without saying anything*

TL;DR: Shitty developer ran some shitty XP system code for a game nearly 4.8 million times an hour (average) or just above 7.6 million times an hour (if maxed), plus running MySQLite when it could've been done within about like 400 an hour at max. Tried calling me a shitty developer, and got sorta yelled at while I was trying to keep calm.

Still pissed he tried calling me a shitty developer...

I have arrived at a conclusion that most, if not all, people in management (managers, sr managers, directors, VPs, etc) are assholes.

And every single person who is hands on with their skill is gold of a human being.

I think, to be a manager, the basic criteria is to be an asshole. Fuckers ignore you, discourage you, belittle you in front of everyone, never help you, and make your life difficult as much as they can.

That totally ruins the productivity and moral of a person.

Welcome to Capitalism, Floyd.

And person who is hands on, knows and has fuck ton of more knowledge and wisdom needed to achieve something. They are very helpful and nice.

Just bagging a heavy pay check and making crappy decisions doesn't make you a good boss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

it also seems kinda slow for responses,

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

Y'know, I'm an audiophile. I want perfect sound, and that's why I want high quality headphones and audio files. I dislike speakers because the sound changes from room to room quite a lot, while it doesn't with headphones, and that would also be distracting when I'm coding. Anyway, that's not what I'm complaining about.

I really don't get it when I download music that has been given out to download for free by the author or recording label, it sometimes comes as a WAV or FLAC. I have enough space on my phone/SD card anyway so gimme lol. Sometimes, I like a song so much, I buy it but often, I never get a WAV or FLAC or anything similar to that. Only MP3 320kbps, WHICH SIMPLY ISN'T ENOUGH FOR MY AUDIOPHILE NEEDS SINCE I CAN CLEARLY HEAR THE FUCKING FREQUENCY CUTOFFS. AAC 320kbps would sound way better (WITH LESS FUCKING FILESIZE, MIND YOU) and its compatibility is also good enough to distribute it as such, but that's something that, again, only fucking free downloads sometimes use. IT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE! GIVE US PROPER FILES IF WE PAY FOR YOUR GODDAMN MUSIC!

I don't get people..

He is a good person and and realy tries..

Tries what?! To annoy coworkers that have to fix every single thing he does?!

Some people will justify anything with 'he is a nice person and tries hard'. WTF?!

So if someone is a nice person, likes to talk a lot, has 'good' social skills but writes crappy code he doesn't test at all.. or tests and see that it's glitchy and still doesn't fix it.. so he is a good worker for that?! Dafaq?!

So if he is a 'lovable' person, he deserves to be here, doing more damage than helps.. he deserves to have a job, with same pay (or even more) than me?! WTF?! How?!

Why is this ok?! If we were heart surgeons and he killed a person or two due to lack of skills or negligence, what would happen?!
He'd get fired on spot!! Why can't it be the same with devs?!

Why on fucking earth do we need to put up with people who try their best and fail?! Especially if their best is lowest of all, lower than the 'I don't give a fuck, just doing sth so the boss stops nagging'?!

Fuuuuuuuu!!!!

But ok, some people are not cut out for some work, I get it.. but why the fuck do other people justify that with 'he tries'?! Dafaq?!

Maybe next time 'I'll try' to perfom brain surgery on you..and you'll end up a fuckin plant.. is that ok with you?! I'll be trying (not really) and do my best (well I will try not to use a chainsaw when cutting open your head).. will that be ok with you?!

Fuck!!

Yesterday I was hanging with the guys from our Records dpt in the staff lounge. Their manager is a pretty nice talkative guy. Everything was going well until this happened..

Him: Hey you, I have an idea for an app. You can"definitely" help me, right? Or someone you know who also does the code thing..

Me: It depends. Just before you tell me about this idea, know that you'll be paying me or whoever will be doing this job unt..i..l *he interrupts

Him: Paying? I thought it was a one time or few hundreds of dollars. Why do I have to keep paying when you haven't finished the app?

Me: Did you finish your entire work this week?...but you're still getting paid next week, right?

Him: Oh crap, makes sense. Ok, how about I pay you the amount you charge then, that's it?

Me: See, you don't get it. I know once the app is done, you'll come back to me to fix and update things. When that time comes, you'll have to pay me again. And with the initial payment, don't just think you pay me and that's all... you'll...

Him: Crap, I have think more and come up with a plan for this.. nevermind, I'll keep you updated.

I think I made him sad knowing that, this sort of things doesn't happen easily.

"CTO" here.
Two week ago the CEO informs me that the "investor" want to put me in contact urgently with an external software house to help me with my "bottlenecks".
The investor goes immediately on holiday, so it's not available for explanations. The CEO doesn't know much.

Today I meet the software house CTO and CEO.
They tell me that I should do a transfer of knowledge with them. That they will respect my requirements, my schedule and that they want to help me.

During the meeting the business consultant explains "his" vision. Some new development nobody understand. Not even the CEO. The other cofounder is probably in disagreement but stay silent.

I agree to cooperate with them in due time and with due scope and planning.

It appears they already signed a contract with the investor. The investor is offering to us 40 days of a senior developer, for "free".
The CEO doesn't even know the economical details of the contract and he is surprised that has been signed.He also didn't know that a person will come over for 40 (?) days and that we will have to pay the transfer expenses.

I try to be friendly. I explain to them the issues I need to solve. I say specifically that I need help on certain tasks and that my wish is that nothing "new" will start until we fix some obvious problems.

After leaving, in the evening I receive an email from the software house guy, telling me that next week I MUST allocate a slot for technical transfer and the 2 weeks after for on site training. Like that. He also mention we "agreed" on that which is false. We agreed on me deciding the timing.

We are only 2 developers, at the moment and the other one will be on holiday next week, so I'm trying to get from him a lot of things I don't know because I don't know everything.

I'm not even sure I'll be able to explain how to prepare all the environment.
Worst thing is that I don't know what will be the scope of the project.

I really don't know how to behave.
I wrote back setting my conditions. I have holiday too. I have to prepare "documentation", explanation, etc.

I don't want the "senior dev" coming when I'm not present.
Maybe I was too weak answering and I should have started a fight immediately. Because he actually AGREED to let me decide and after that he set conditions on me immediately.

I don't know.
My stomach is burning, I had a very bad digestion with fever and headache, feel like puking, plus I spent several evening hours fixing the fucking Linux kernel bug.

I want to survive. I don't want to let them oust me in this stupid way. I want to fight.
I know that if I will explode, scream or whatever I will be at fault and I'll accelerate my demise.
When I try to be "diplomatic" actually I end up being weak.
When I try to be assertive I'm in fact rude and hysterical.
I can't think anything else.

This is what burnout looks like.

> Startup: ok listen up, we got this super cool thing we want to do with Twilio. Doesn't get any easier: some calls to book a restaurant, you ask for booking data and save that on some db.
> iHateForALiving: I'm on it. We got a couple weeks of development, never worked with Twilio, but should be easy enough
> Startup: Hold it big guy, we can't just write code like this. There's this OTHER developer with a super cool framework he wrote himself, it supports OAuth2 and multitenancy, written in Huskell, microservices to authenticate several apps all working concurrently in our environment, some orchestrator, cloud computing on AWS, you're going to love it. There's this Postman project with 200-something calls (the ones I need for my project, one and only consumer for those APIs, are 5 including the login)
> iHateForALiving: You are aware you'll have approximately six clients and they'll pay some 30 bucks each per month, aren't you?
> Startup: You don't understand, this infrastructure is CRITICAL for the future of our company
> ffwd 6 months
> iHateForALiving: guys we had this 2 weeks project and it's taking months, I'm ready, what is going on there?
> Startup: someone killed our DB, the OTHER developer pushed on git the access credentials :(

THE FULL MOON IS DRAWING NEAR AND THE FUCKING WERECODERS STRIKE AGAIN!

Shaving with an old-style safety razor just rocks - that metal thing consisting of three pieces where a slotted, double edged razor blade fits in. With the good Russian Astra Platinum blades at 10 cent per piece where a hundred piece pack lasts for years. The whole thing can be fully dismantled and cleaned.

I can't understand why people use this modern overpriced Gillette shit at 2 EUR per piece that you can't even clean, with debris stuck in-between that starts to rot if you use the blade block more than once. Must be brainwashing by ads. Even worse for women who pay 50% extra for the pink version of that unhygienic shit.

Oh, and real shaving soap with a real shaving brush and not the canned aerosol garbage that doesn't really work anyway.

TL;DR: Why does that online shop NOT support paypal?

I'm a LITTLE pissed.

I wanted to buy some stuff online (since my gf birthday comes closer and I have no city, no car nearby to go shopping) - and this website doesn't support paypal. You know why? Because they had to high fees.

Why on earth don't they do it like any other online shop?! - the user can pay with paypal for a little more % or €.

I don't have an actual credit card but the thing you can get <18yo. Paypal works with it but I can't use any other payment option.

Currently working as student part timer on a company that I really like.
When I'll finish my bachelor's degree, I will have been there for about 2-3 Years, additional to my 5 years working prior to that as a developer.

Today I learned, that our company doesn't usually pay the market price for devs (not a huge company, 150 employees, so it's understandable).
So now I don't know what to shoot for when discussing a raise after my degree. Should I still aim for market price? Should I argue with that and hope for the best?
I'm really unsure about that stuff...

Last year I changed jobs from a large multi-national to a small local agency (which happens to be run by friends of mine).

One of the reasons for doing this was that my work involved more office politics than *actual* software development, and had just plain stopped being fun.

Now, I am having fun again! An example?

For one of our clients we have to connect to (a lot) of third-party APIs. Often even SOAP APIs!

Now I hear you protest "But that is no fun at all! SOAP APIS SUCK!" Which is true, more often than not. 😔

BUT! My friend started an internal API-SNAFU Trello board. Every time you get bitten in the ass by some ill conceived fuck-up of an API, you get to add your complaint to the board.

Beside giving as something to reciprocally rant about, the board also serves a serious function: depending on the amount of fuck-ups an API has been known to make, the price for working with that API will go up.

Who said it doesn't pay to complain? 😀

I really hate the childish corporate culture at some tech companies. Today I received my Christmas "gift" from my employer. It was a branded chocolate bar and a sticker pack. The stickers were designed by our UX designers, and the stickers look like they are made for little toddlers at kindergarten. The stickers said things like "Make Friends!" and "To The Moon!". Jesus Christ, are we little kids? The average age of an employee at my company is around 30 years old, and those are the stickers you give us? Stickers are childish anyways, but it seems like 50% of my autistic colleagues seem to like putting those ugly things on their laptops to lick the boots of upper management.

The office itself literally looks like a kindergarten. There's LEGO artwork on the walls and the "Make Friends!" and "To The Moon!" nonsense and similar motivational bullshit is plastered on all the walls. Seriously, who ever thought it's a good idea to tell 30 year old adults to "make friends!". I already have my friends, I don't need to be friends with anyone at work, and I definitely don't need to be told to do so!

Even funnier than that is the fact that the whole "To The Moon!" bullshit is a phrase introduced by upper management to symbolize their effort and wish to make our company bigger and stronger by having a bigger market share. Basically it's the rich peeps from upper management telling us to work harder and make them more successful. Today I had a meeting in which they told me they wouldn't increase my salary because they have a tight budget this year because of the economic problems we're currently facing. But that doesn't stop them from childishly motivating us with bullshit like "To The Moon!" so they can become richer themselves, while the little people at the bottom of the pyramid need to work harder without extra pay.

The most annoying part of this is that many employees lick the boots of upper management and go along with all this bullshit. God I hate cringy childish corporate culture so much.

Guys what I want to know is how do you secure your code so that they pay you after you deliver the code to them?
So recently I was in this internship that I secured with an over-the-phone interview and the guy who was contacting me was the CEO of the company (I'm going to refer to him as "the fucking cunt" from now on). He asked me to do some OCR and translations and I managed to write a few scripts that automate the entire process. The fucking cunt made me login remotely to his desktop which was connected to the server (who the fuck does that) and I had to operate on the server from his system. I helped him with the installation and taught him how to use the scripts by altering the parameters and stuff, and you know what the fucking cunt did from the next day onward? Dropped contact. Like completely. I kept bombing emails upon emails and tried calling him day after day, the fucking cunt either picked up and cut the call immediately on recognising its me or didn't pick up at all. And the reason he wasn't able to pay me was, and I quote, "I am in US right now, will pay you when I get back to India." I was like "The fuck was PayPal invented for?" Being the naive fool that I was, I believed him (it was my first time) and waited patiently till the date he mentioned and then lodged a complain in the portal itself where he had posted the job initially. They raised a concern with the employer and you know what the fucking cunt replied? "He has not been able to achieve enough accuracy on the translations". Doesn't even know good translation systems don't exist till date ( BTW I used a client for the google translate API). It has been weeks now and still the bitch has not yet resolved the issue.And the worst part of it was I got a signed contract and gave him a copy of my ID for verification purposes.
I'm thinking of making a mail bomb and nagging him every single day for the rest of his life. What do you guys think?

My arguments about Apple:
- "iPhone 12 camera can be better than anything else because it's more advanced, it has LiDAR and 10-bit codecs"
- "I can copy on my iPhone and paste on my MacBook and vice versa out of the box"
- "My Beats can seamlessly switch from playing from my MacBook to my iPhone to my Apple Watch. I can be exercising with only my Apple Watch and my Beats, no need for iPhone"
- "2K screen with nice colors in a 900g laptop is rare if you consider the price. Apple one is the cheapest one with that characteristics"
- "Apple Pay is convenient"
- "Fingerprint scanners fail with wet fingers no matter if it's ultrasonic or optical, LiDAR Face ID is objectively more secure than any camera-based unlock mechanism"
- "Stainless steel frame feels better than aluminum one"

I'm not saying Apple is the best. I'm not saying that Google Pay doesn't exist or that Apple Pay is better. I'm not saying that Apple has no downsides.

However, these are responses I get:
"But Apple IS crapple, immutably"
"Why are you even looking at apple crap if you want something good"

If you want to bash Apple, bash it for something real like that butterfly keyboard fails, unconventional AirPods shape that makes most people's ears hurt, screen coating fails on MacBooks, App Store commissions.

Ugh, I hate when customers refuse to pay for staging systems but then randomly complain about stuff that's WIP and not working as expected yet ...

"Yes, sir, this house doesn't have a roof right now because the basement isn't done yet."

So my boss doesn't want to pay devs to stay late and work overtime.

However, he does expect the last one in the office to stay and fix the issue.

Good thing I gave notice a couple of weeks ago.

Client writes a bug report: This and that doesn't work.
Me: This functionality never was implemented. Please open a feature request.
Client: But this is a bug. Without this feature, the service won't work as we expect.
Me: But this wasn't in the requirements for release. So you have to contact the PM for a feature request.
Client: THIS IS A BUG! FIX IT!
Me: GO FUCK YOURSELF! THIS IS A NEW FEATURE AND YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR IT!
Unfortunately, I never sent the mail. But I kept it in the drafts. Maybe someday...

1. take a web application working in somebody computer since 4 years with tons of features.
2. Believe that the application is the future and solve brilliantly a general market need.
3. multiply income of current only customer by 10: you are going to be rich.
3. start to install 2, 3 customers.
4. discover the application is shit. Doesn't solve well the problem. Functionalities are different for each customer
5. discover that customers are willing to pay 1/10th of the original customer
6. quickly reingeneer the application to a multitenant cloud application, because with 3 customers and different versions you are already in deep shit
7. keep giving away the application for free to flagship customers. With a lot of customisation developed for free.
8. reach 200 customers in 5 years and still no break even, but lot of debts
9. resort to financial tricks to keep the company going

Luckily money are not mine. They could be recovered.
Unluckily the time spent was mine. It couldn't be recovered
Hope that the application will finally crash so that I can move on to the next thing: retirement in a mental asylum

The site I work on is a market where you can buy magnets for dolors, insomniaque, bla bla bla (I don't believe a sec in this).
Just saying that to settle that 80% of our customers are +45 years old. They weren't born with a computer in their hands, and they sometimes manage to make a lot of mess in the site.
We are based in France, and we sell the most in France (no shit) and Switzerland. And this is the third time that a Swiss pass a command, puts all her address in Switzerland EXCEPT for the country (still on France) so she doesn't have to pay the shipping fee. I should do something about that, like a regex when verifying the zip code, but I have more urgent work to do, and the best has to come.
This smartass doesn't know she is the joke, because by saying she is in France, she has to pay the VAT that she wouldn't have if she said she was in Switzerland. She buys in general for around 350 €, so she has ~ 70€ (20%) in VAT, and she would only pay 14€ in shipping fee.
Maybe one day she'll see how dumb she is (my boss already mailed her so she pays attention to it, no change). But I think I would have set the regex by then.

Elon musk has shown himself to be a terrible person, a worse manager and someone who hasn't a clue of what a code review is. A summarily fires so many people that he can't find someone to open the doors for his big in person meeting or the vet the badges. He offers 3 months termination pay or you can work 12 hours a day 7 days a week hardcore. But none of the payroll people are around anymore either. Critical subsystems have not a single engineer left to work on them. He's paranoid that employees will sabotage the software. But I think he's doing such a good job it would be impossible to tell that anyone else was helping him.
An engineer wrote a prescient seven page report listing problems ahead including user verification. So Elon twit-fired him.
Also entirely predictable is the stress that the world cup will put on the system beginning today, I believe. He doesn't "like" microservices.
I work for the psychiatrist once who barely needed to sleep. Maybe Elon can function with 12-hour days week in week out. But it's cool to think you're going to squeeze substantially more work out of people by doubling their hours. More likely you will more than double their errors and what will that do to you budget? 50 years ago IBM determined that the best way to improve programmer productivity was to give each one their own office.
I can't believe he's whining over spending 13 million dollars a year on food. That is so far from being a strategic item. Soapbox out.

dev, ~boring

This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.

I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:

1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by

I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.

At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:

"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"

As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.

In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.

Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).

I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:

1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth

Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:

- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it

Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:

- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy

/rant

Can you rant about yourself?

I was reading about the AWS outage, with little to no interest. I didn't know what it was and thus figured it wouldn't affect me.
Some time goes by and I come up with this 300++ vote post. I'm witty, I'm smart, but when I want to upload a photo it doesn't work.
Must be the app right? I restart, nope nothing. Whatever..

Sometime later I have a dashing new photo for tinder. Surely to give me all the matches. Nope, can't upload it.
Must be my phone or Internet then.
Restart everything, nothing is working. Complete madness, no devRant upvotes and I'm still single.
I surrender, give up. Which is one of the worst things to do for me as a dev.

Today. Which is the cherry on the cake. I finally see my connection to the incident. I feel stupid and annoyed by myself.
God dammit Julian, pay attention.

</rant>

Can someone help me understand?

I subscribed to a nifty IT-releated magazine, and on its back, there's an ad for "Dedicated root server hosting", nothing unusual at a first glance, but after I read the issue, I decided to humor them and see what it is that they offered, and... It just... Doesn't make sense to me!

An ad for "Dedicated Root Server" - What is a dedicated root server first of all? Root servers of any infrastructure sound pretty important.

But, the ad also boasts "High speed performance with the new Intel Core i9-9900K octa-core processor", that's the first weird thing.

Why would anyone responsible enough want to put an i9 into a highly-reliable root server, when the thing doesn't even support ECC? Also, come on, octa-core isn't much, I deal with servers that have anywhere between 2 and 24 cores. 8 isn't exactly a win, even if it has a higher per-core clock.

Oh, also, further down the ad has a list of, seeming, advantages/specs of the servers, they proclaim that the CPU "incl. Hyper-Threading-Technology"... Isn't that... Standard when it comes to servers? I have never seen a server without hyperthreading so far at my job.

"64 GBs of DDR4 RAM" - Fair enough, 64 gigs is a good amount, but... Again, its not ECC, something I would never put into a server.

"2 x 8 TB SATA Enterprise Hard Drive 7200 rpm" - Heh, "enterprise hard drive", another cheap marketing word, would impress me more if they mentioned an actual brand/model, but I'll bite, and say that at least the 7200 rpm is better than I expected.

"100 GBs of Backup Space" - That's... Really, really little. I've dealt with clients who's single database backup is larger than that. Especially with 2x8 TB HDD (Even accounting for software raids on top)

This one cracks me up - "Traffic unlimited"
Whaaaat?! You are not gonna give me a limit to the total transferred traffic to the internet for my server in your data center? Oh, how generous of you, only, the other case would make the server just an expensive paperweight! I thought this ad was for semi-professionals at least, so why mention traffic, and not bandwidth, the thing that matters much more when it comes to servers? How big of a bandwidth do I get? Don't tell me you use dialup for your "Dedicated Root Server"s!

"Location Germany or Finland" - Fair enough, geolocation can matter when it comes to latency.

"No minimum contract" - Oooh, how kiiiind of you, again, you are not gonna charge me extra for using the server only as long as I pay? How nice!

"Setup Fee £60" - I guess, fair enough, the server is not gonna set itself up, only...

The whole ad is for "monthly from £55.50", that's quite the large fee for setup.

Oh, and a cherry on top, the tiny print on the bottom mentions: "All prices exclude VAT and are a subject to..." blah blah blah.
Really? I thought that this sort of almost customer deceipt is present only in the common people's sphere!

I must say, there's being unimpressed, and then... There's this. Why, just... Why? Anyone understands this? Because I don't...

you know what i !love?

-project managers that can't manage something as simple as pivotal tracker

-project managers that schedule repeated stakeholder demo sessions when none of my stakeholers show up (ever)

-project managers that hold repeated grooming sessions that no one gives a fuck about because they can't manage what the fuck is going on the current iteration and therfore cannot forecast a proper next iteration

-project managers that complain about what doesn't get done in a current iteration because they don't don't pay attention to high priority stories that are added by developers in the current iteration even though they have (OWN) pivotal tracker

-project managers who have no clue about the business but want to turn grooming sessions into some sort of requirements gathering meeting only so they can appear halfway competent in the stupid little pivotal tracker notes

-cats that can't decide whether they want to go outside or stay inside

i'll take cats. at least their cuddly. sometimes. fuckers.

! rant

Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.

I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.

Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.

His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.

It got worse. Much, much worse.

I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.

Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.

AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.

So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.

Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.

And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.

Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.

Spend the last year helping to rescue a company from the brink of collapse. Literally live and breathe the company for no extra pay or reward, supporting and improving all aspects from IT and development, HR, Legal, Procurement, business day to day running and Accounts.

Create a business plan and forecast for 2019 with the General Manager over the weekend (unpaid) to grow the business and start to make lots of profit, hand it over to the director and he makes me redundant the next day.

Furious doesn't even cover what I'm feeling at the moment.

I'm so fucking frustrated with my ex company CEO, this motherfucker made everyone move to Bangalore costing is employees a good chunk of their salary and this delusional ASSHOLE knew that only half of the expected funding was coming in January 2023 itself and they'd be out of funds by July/August, they let go few folks from the team, fired the entire marketing team and expected to make the product profitable. The only reason I had stayed at that time was because the product was interesting to build and the scale I was working with was crazy like 100k request per minute peaks and avg of 10k rpm. I left the company in August...

This MOTHERFUCKER hasn't paid out final settlement after leaving for most employees and he openly says to the folks who are still working there that paying us is not his priority.

I hope your Atlas cluster gets fucking deleted, accesses revoked and entire AWS setup goes down forever, bitch.

We can't goto courts because the company law tribunal needs atleast 1 crore (1.2 million usd) of unpaid dues to declare it insolvent in a years time..

This asshole deducted taxes from our salaried but didn't pay them to the income tax department for an entire fucking financial year.

What a cheating, delusional, sick bastard. And he's still not willing to sell off the company to pay off the debts and call it a day.

Aarrghhhh on top of losing 2-3k USD I might have to pay my taxes approx 5-6k USD to the govt to keep my records well maintained.

What a grade A delusional asshole 😡
If he won't clear the dues till December, I'm gonna launch a mass of social media posts and destroy his reputation so that he doesn't get one penny of VC funds in the future I'm gonna make sure of that...

#justdevthings
That moment when you're so engrossed in your project that you lose track of time. You begin to SEE code irl, not just on screens. Things like hunger, environment and a sense of time fade away. That feeling when the code just works, but better when it doesn't and you figure out a smart fix. Oh gosh ill pay to feel like that all day.

I wrote a shitty layout for an android side project. It haunted me. I could still SEE the shitty xml long after the pc was shut down. I had a nightmare about it and woke up sweating, and all I could see was xml. Fkin xml man. I redid the layout at 3am and boy was i so satisfied.
I think that was just the tetrix effect taking its toll on me.

I always got screwed by parents for being on that machine all day, back in school. But none of that matters now. I can now feel the code running in my veins and flowing into the machine. I can now feel my heart throbbing at the sight of such beauty. They ask how i manage my social life. I say everything goes well until i start a side project, that's when social life gets fucked hard. I think I'm gonna die one day after performing the final commit.

Client contacts our company that his site is down, we do some investigating and the only way we can access the site is on a mobile phone. From the office computers the site never loads and times out. Since we don't host the site and I've never logged into it before I don't have a lot of details so I suggest they contact whoever hosts their site. This is where things get weird.

Client tells me that the site is hosted on someone's home server. I tell him that this is quite strange in 2018 and rather unlikely and ask if he was ever given access to the site to log in or if he has access to his domain registration, GoDaddy.

He says he doesn't understand any of this and would rather I just contact his current developer and figure it out with him. We agree that he needs to get access to his site so we are going to migrate it once I get access to it.

I email his current developer letting him know the client has put me in contact with him to troubleshoot the issues with the site. I ask him some standard questions like: where is the site hosted? Can you access it from a computer? Do you have some security measures in place to block certain IP ranges? Can you give me from access to get the files? Will you send me a backup of the site for me to load up on my server?

*2days pass*

Other dev: Tell me the account number and I'll transfer the domain.

Me: I'll have to get back to you on that once I talk to the client and set up his GoDaddy account since we believe the business owner should own their domain, not their developers. In the meantime you didn't answer any of the questions I asked. Transferring the domain won't get the site on my server so I still need the files.

*3 days pass*

OD: You are trying the wrong domain. The correct domain is [redacted].com I'll have my daughter send you the files when she gets in town. We will transfer the domain to you, the client will forget to pay and the site will go down and it'll be your fault.

Me: I appreciate your advice, but the client will own their domain. I'm trying to get the site online and you have no answered any of my questions. It's been a week now and you have not transferred the domain, you have not provided a copy of the site, you have not told me where the site is hosted. The client and I are both getting impatient at this point when will we receive a backup of the site and the transfer of the domain?

OD: Go fuck yourself, tell the client they can sue me.

If the client is that terrible, wouldn't you want to hand them off to anyone willing to take them? I have never understood why developers and agencies try to hold clients hostage by keeping their domain or website and refusing access. From what I can tell this is a freelance developer without a real company so a legal battle likely isn't going to go well since the domain is worthless to him as the copyright to the name is owned by the client. This isn't the first time we've had to help clients through this sort of thing.

Why is chromecast so stupid?

So I'm on vacation, in another country, in a hotel. I took my chromecast and downloaded offline music to be able to use the TV for at least some entertainment.

Wifi is with login, chromecast doesn't support that. And it has isolation so I was prepared that it won't work through the hotel wifi. So I used another phone to create a Hotspot, but with no internet because roaming here is crazy expensive.

I thought that would work, but chromecast simply refuses to work if there is no internet access.

Why does it need internet if I'm streaming locally anyway?

So I temporarily activate data roaming, and hooray it works, so I quickly disconnect because I have no idea what this shit of a device will start sending to Google and how much I'm gonna pay for it. It works for 10 minutes then it crashes and needs internet again.

Most useless piece of crap I ever bought.

Should have brought my RPi instead but it's busy keeping my home alive and well while I'm gone. Should have ordered in bulk.

I would like to rant one more time about my internship.

I began in July, the first. That's my sister who helped me to find this internship and I was a little scared about how bad it could be.
I came at the office, my boss told me that I would work in an "Innovation lab", an apartment where people works on projects that are less corporate than the enterprise's ones.

To me, it was amazing. So I came in this apartment, it was like a dream. I didn't know that I would have such luck to be in this environment : kitchen, sofas, beds, many decorations for all political ideologies, ideas. There was some decorations that were about weed and many cool things for the young guy I am.

The lab's leader told me that it was a very free environment and all the awesome stuff I could use.
Then they showed me where I would work.

We were two interns employed as web developers. We had a complete room for us.
Then we began to work there, and I was presented to my internship tutor.
He gave me some instructions but told me that I had a week before the project begin.

Here began the troubles.

We waited a complete week without having any instructions. Then we began to build something in PHP with our knowledge and the informations someone from the lab gave us.
When finally we had news from the project, two weeks later, we learned that the project would be built with ASP. NET.
Here we go, I learn ASP. NET alone. I have many problems and nobody helps (even if the problem comes from enterprise's API/Framework). I finally make something usable with no help, after I discovered that my mate wasn't developer at all and just took an option for her classes which forced her to get an internship.

She had 3 month left, I had 6.
Then when the project really began, nobody came to verify what I was doing and on a meeting, they said that I was doing nothing.

The boss even became mad on us because he couldn't see what we were doing (we're back end developers).
I asked for help to the developers of the enterprise and someone came, sad to have to help an internship, and learned some tricks but nothing else.

To have a concrete explanation of what DDD was, I had to ask 4 times for help.

Finally I had something that could receive data from the connected hives we are working on and store them into a database in the architecture of the enterprise.

Then, they wanted me to try an API for them. I tried, and it wasn't working at all. So they make me still wait to change my whole architecture when the API will be released.

Recently, I was told that I would never do the front-end of the project (which was an horror because of the fantasm of the lab leader). Then they realized that my late wasn't a programmer. So they asked me to make a prototype for the front-end. I did for a presentation.

Then they didn't tell me the device they would use for the presentation and it was an iPhone 7. Idk why, safari couldn't display what IE can.

They blamed me for having done a bad work. It wasn't my job. I did it to help because they can't find a fucking front-end developer with a little more experience than me.

Actually, I am an alone developer since my mate is gone and the lab leader don't want me to show up because she considers me as a shame.
I asked to be moved back in the office of the enterprise, they agreed and said it was a 2-weeks delay. It's the Thursday of the second week and I have no news. I send mails to my tutor, even SMS, he doesn't answer me. They didn't call me to give me my pay with a week late. And the person who is responsible doesn't answer me neither. I came to see her, but she wasn't available. I'm now alone in a desk, waiting the time to pass.

Fucking this shit.

I'm in France.

EDIT : I forgot to say that I can't use the sofas or bed because I'm allergic to cats and there were 3 cats. Now there is still one and this beast vomits and poos everywhere in the house...

!Rant

The Eve V is a Community Developed Windows Tablet which will be released in Ocotober this year.

The best specs you can get is i7 6th Gen, 16 GB Ram and 500 GB SSD for around 1400$.

He wants 32 GB RAM in such a slim and small Tablet. Also wants a 7th Gen Intel CPU and 1 TB SSD in it. He's ready to pay 1000 $ more for his special edition.

The Eve V is already finished with tooling and they are wating for the screens to arrive. They already have all the other parts.

Dude you're crazy and that specs just for VM's? What are you running? 10x WinShitBox?

He's insulting everyone on the forum with a different opinion and says, retooling will be such easy.

That guy is a real douchebag and doesn't know shit. If you would build in different parts like this, you would need to remodel the whole tablet. You can stick your 1000$ in your ass, retooling would cost more than 10'000$

If it's so easy you shithead, then do it yourself and dont say it's possible and say to other people they should do! 😂😂

I have been keeping this inside for long time and I need to rant it somewhere and hear your opinion.

So I'm working as a Team Lead Developer at a small company remotely based in Netherlands, I've been working there for about 8 years now and I am the only developer left, so the company basically consists of me and the owner of the company which is also the project manager.

As my role title says I am responsible for many things, I maintain multiple environments:
- Maintain Web Version of the App
- Maintain A Cordova app for Android, iOS and Windows
- Working with pure JavaScript (ES5..) and CSS
- Development and maintenance of Cordova Plugins for the project in Java/Swift
- Trying to keep things stable while trying very hard to transit ancient code to new standards
- Testing, Testing, Testing
- Keeping App Stable without a single Testing Unit (sadly yes..)
- Just pure JavaScript no framework apart from JQuery and Bootstrap for which I strongly insist to be removed and its being slowly done.

On the backend side I maintain:
- A Symfony project
- MySQL
- RabbitMQ
- AWS
- FCM
- Stripe/In-App Purchases
- Other things I can't disclose

I can't disclose the nature of the app but the app is quite rich in features and complex its limited to certain regions only but so far we have around 100K monthly users on all platforms, it involves too much work especially because I am the only developer there so when I am implementing some feature on one side I also have to think about the other side so I need to constantly switch between different languages and environments when working, not to mention I have to maintain a very old code and the Project Owner doesn't want to transit to some more modern technologies as that would be expensive.

The last raise I had was 3 years ago, and so far he hasn't invested in anything to improve my development process, as an example we have an iOS version of the app in Cordova which of course involves building , testing, working on both frontend and native side and etc., and I am working in a somewhat slow virtual machine of Monterey with just 16 GB of RAM which consumed days of my free time just to get it working and when I'm running it I need to close other apps, keep in mind I am working there for about 8 years.

The last time I needed to reconfigure my work computer and setup the virtual machine it costed me 4 days of small unpaid holiday I had taken for Christmas, just because he doesn't have the enough money to provide me with a decent MacBook laptop. I do get that its not a large company, but still I am the only developer there its not like he needs to keep paying 10 Developers.

Also:
- I don't get paid vacation
- I don't have paid holiday
- I don't have paid sick days
- My Monthly salary is 2000 euro GROSS (before taxes) which hourly translates to 12 Euro per hour
- I have to pay taxes by myself
- Working remotely has its own expenses: food, heating, electricity, internet and etc.
- There are few other technical stuff I am responsible of which I can't disclose in this post.

I don't know if I'm overacting and asking a lot, but summarizing everything the only expense he has regarding me is the 2000 euro he sends me on which of course he doesn't need to pay taxes as I'm doing that in my country.

Apart from that just in case I spend my free time in keeping myself updated with other tech which I would say I fairly experienced with like: Flutter/Dart, ES6, NodeJS, Express, GraphQL, MongoDB, WebSockets, ReactJS, React Native just to name few, some I know better than the other and still I feel like I don't get what I deserve.

What do you think, do I ask a lot or should I start searching for other job?

Yesterday I almost ended my programming Carrier

Long story - I am enrolled in EC course which I cannot face for a single moment. Web development is something that had always excited me, and i wanted to make a room for myself here since childhood.

I cannot study what doesn't interest me. But that does not mean I hate learning. I have strong interest in learning things. Hence, I skipped two end-sem exam in the last semester. And utilized thar time to work on my project. I've been working on it since last 6 months. I learned more things in last one year than what I did in last 3 years at college.

My brother came to know I failed two exams in the last sem, yesterday. There were clouds flying over home for hours. What my family thinks is, I should get my degree. Whether I learn anything or not, but I should I get it. I must do graduation and what ever stuff I am working on can be done later. They don't understand the value of time and how fast things are changing.

I even got a client, who is willing to pay large amount for my platform. What my family thinks, is I am running for money, which is merely true.

What world we are living in. Parents and families don't want their children to get educated or well equipped with knowledge and values but want a printed degree in hand, which they think is enough to get a job.
The colony where I live, more than 80% graduates, that graduated in last 5 years with good numbers are unemployed.

!dev
EA can suck my inches. Fucking deprecated and greedy business practices. Now I'm fucking told me to play the game later, because "too many computers have accessed this accounts version of a shitty game that crashed my pc 3 times. Please try again later."

Stupid cunts, have you ever heard of a vpn? Or maybe listened to the people complaining about this issue since 2017. On top of that you apparently rendered geforce now useless with this error.

Good fucking lord, I haven't even mentioned origin, the big pile of shit, yet. The download functionality you praise like God's cum doesn't even hold out half an hour before it freezes, together while the whole UI. You cannot like your games with a steam account, so you'd have to pay for a game you already own.

...And a whole lot of other issues I probably haven't encountered yet.

It's more lucrative to sell this shitty account and then buy the fucking game I want to play on steam. I have a feeling that would be about the best option I have.

I'm tired of this shit, I just wanna play some games with friends. I did not play to be spit on my face by some corporate wankers

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 :)

I work 3 PM to 1 AM as a daily office job. Then go home and try to learn programming. Wake up next day at 8:30 AM for kind of another work until 1PM. Doesn't pay as much but I have to try. Then if I get free time do some freelance on UPWORK with whatever little graphic designing I know to help pay the bills.

And the fact that even my laptop is dying is a huge blow. Don't know when it might give up. Has 1st gen core i5 dual core, takes ages to load Adobe softwares. I have wanted to hulksmash this shit, but can't.

If I'm lucky, I get a stress free 6 hours of sleep a few days a month. And my depression doesn't help. More sleep should ease me a little, but I can't afford to waste any time. But this is life, isn't it.

Ok, first rant, about my struggles getting reliable internet over the past 6 years. It's not too interesting of a topic, but here we go:

I'm living in a more rural part of Germany and internet here is shit. I pay more than 50 bucks a month for 700kb/s downstream (let's just not talk about upstream...), which is meh by itself but it gets worse. Before this I had roughly 230kb/s downstream using DSL. My provider came out with a new oh-so-fucking-fancy solution for giving people faster internet without upgrading their lame ass fucking backbone and POS infrastructure from 70 years ago: they sell you hybrid internet which combines your shit DSL and an LTE connection using TCP Multicast. Not only do I get only 6 of my promised (and payed for) 50 Mbit, no, It's also a fucking piece of nonworking shit!!!

Let me illustrate:
You constantly have problems with web content (or any remote content) not loading because the host server does not support TCP Multicast. It either refuses connection altogether or it takes about 30-50 seconds to establish a connection. Think about your live when it takes two or three fucking minutes to load 5 YouTube thumbnails or load new tweets at the bottom of the Twitter page! Also, you never know if you a) have an error in your implementation of a new API or if b) the remote host doesn't support TCPMC (there's never an error for that! Fuck you!), your SSH sessions ALWAYS drop in the most inopportune fucking moments because the LTE thing lost connection, you always have to turn on a VPN if you want to visit specific websites (for example your school's website) and so on....

Oh and also, my provider started throttling specific services again these days with Netflix and YouTube struggling to display 240p, fucking 240p video without buffering when I get 600kbit down on steam (ofc the steam download is paused when watching videos). When using a VPN, YouTube 720p and Netflix HD work like a charm again. Fucking Telekom bastards

Then there is the problem with VPNs. The good thing about them is that they solve all the TCP Multicast problems. Yay. Now for the bad things:
First of all, as soon as I use a VPN, access times to remote go up by like fucking 500%. A fucking DNS lookup takes 8-15 seconds!!! The bandwidth is there but it takes forever.. because reasons I guess. Then the speed drops to DSL speeds after a while because the router turns off my LTE connection when it is unused and it does not detect VPN traffic as traffic (again because... Reasons?) And also, the VPN just dies after an hour and you have to manually reconnect (with every VPN provider so far)

And as if that wasn't enough, now the lan is dying on me, too, with the router (the fucking expensive hybrid piece of shit, 230 bucks..) not providing DHCP service anymore or completely refusing all wifi connections or randomly dropping 5Ghz devices, or.....

You get the point.

The worst thing is, they recently layed down 400mbit fiber in my neighborhood. Guess where the FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT CABLE ENDS??? YEAH, RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY NEIGHBORS HOUSE. STREET NUMBER 19 IS SERVED WITH 400MBIT AND MY HOME, THE 20, IS NOT IN THEIR FUCKING SERVICE REGION. Even though there is a fucking cable with the cable companies name on it on my property, even leading up to my house! They still refuse to acknowledge it! FUCK YOU!!!!

Well anyways thanks for reading. Any of you got the same problems? :/

This is long rant/story:

My manager conducts sync-up meetings regularly. The idea is to sync up all developers on current state of work. He does’t conduct stand-ups. He doesn't have time for it. He rather discusses on individual basis if we are blocked. The rule of the sync-up meeting is NOT to discuss any blockers or problems but simply explain each other what we are doing and how we plan next.

Sometime ago, the manager brought up and explained a new way of working in the sync-up meeting. At this point, a new developer in the team was absent due to sickness.

Today, there was a sync-up meeting and the manager started to question the new member about the newly introduced way of working. He was unaware of it and the manager never communicated this important information via email or any mode of communication available.

So, the conversation goes on as follows:

"Manager": — "Why didn’t you complete your task as per the new way of working?"
"Employee": — "Well, I've no idea. Am I supposed to do? I’ve been working as usual like any other"

"Manager": — "We have a new process and you have failed to follow it, so we’re late in delivering your work"
"Employee": — "I’ve already finished my work on time. I've raised a pull-request this morning"

"Manager": — "It doesn’t matter, it is not merged to main branch and so we can’t include your work in the release"
"Employee": — "I’ve no idea about the new process"

"Manager": — "Haven’t you asked around about what happened from previous meeting"
"Employee": — "Yes, I have. I was told which tasks were handled, but nothing about a new process"

"Manager": — "Aren’t you interested to learn it?"
"Employee": — "Why won’t I be interested? I was on a sick leave and I have no clue what happened here"

"Manager": — "What’s happened is past now, let’s not focus on it"
"Employee": — <Dumbfounded>
The Employee felt ashamed in front of everyone. He did his job but it didn’t pay off.

…. After an hour … the Employee had a talk with the Manager

"Employee": — "You shouldn’t have pointed me out in front of everyone. It made me feel real bad. You should have emailed this information if its important for the team."
"Manager": — "I have no idea what you’re talking about. When did I say so? I think you’ve a bright future in the team. You should be focusing on doing better things."

Employee goes back to work. A minute later, the Manager sends a PowerPoint screenshot of the process in the group chat.

**The Process**
It's about delivering release packages based on priorities defined by client. Each release package is a set of work items or requirements. Individual developers are assigned to work items. They are expected to deliver on planned delivery timelines in order to consider a work item into a release package.

After a lot of work I figured out how to build the graph component of my LLM. Figured out the basic architecture, how to connect it in, and how to train it. The design and how-to is 100%.
Ironically generating the embeddings is slower than I expect the training itself to take.

A few extensions of the design will also allow bootstrapped and transfer learning, and as a reach, unsupervised learning but I still need to work out the fine details on that.

Right now because of the design of the embeddings (different from standard transformers in a key aspect), they're slow. Like 10 tokens per minute on an i5 (python, no multithreading, no optimization at all, no training on gpu). I've came up with a modification that takes the token embeddings and turns them into hash keys, which should be significantly faster for a variety of reasons. Essentially I generate a tree of all weights, where the parent nodes are the mean of their immediate child nodes, split the tree on lesser-than-greater-than values, and then convert the node values to keys in a hashmap to make lookup very fast.

Weight comparison can be done either directly through tree traversal, or using normalized hamming distance between parent/child weight keys and the lookup weight.

That last bit is designed already and just needs implemented but it is completely doable.

The design itself is 100% attention free incidentally.

I'm outlining the step by step, only the essentials to train a word boundary detector, noun detector, verb detector, as I already considered prior. But now I'm actually able to implement it.

The hard part was figuring out the *graph* part of the model, not the NN part (if you could even call it an NN, which it doesn't fit the definition of, but I don't know what else to call it). Determining what the design would look like, the necessary graph token types, what function they should have, *how* they use the context, how thats calculated, how loss is to be calculated, and how to train it.

I'm happy to report all that is now settled.

I'm hoping to get more work done on it on my day off, but thats seven days away, 9-10 hour shifts, working fucking BurgerKing and all I want to do is program.

And all because no one takes me seriously due to not having a degree.

Fucking aye. What is life.

If I had a laptop and insurance and taxes weren't a thing, I'd go live in my car and code in a fucking mcdonalds or a park all day and not have to give a shit about any of these other externalities like earning minimum wage to pay 25% of it in rent a month and 20% in taxes and other government bullshit.

The shitty trainticket-app doesn't sell me any tickets. Who the fuck coded this crap. I really tried hard to pay for a fucking ticket...

A long long time ago ( 2007 I think ) I worked for a company that made landing sites, so basically an email campaign would go out, users would be sent to a 1 page website with a form to capture their data, ready to be spammed even more. You know how it was back then.

So I worked with a guy who we had just hired, I didn't do the hiring but his CV checked out, so I gave him one of my tasks. Now most pages were made with js and html, with a PHP backend ( called with Ajax). Now this guy didn't know PHP so I was like all good, ASP works too at the end of the day we don't judge, we do like 2 or 3 of these a day and never look at them again. So he goes of and does is thing.

3 weeks later, the customer calls up to me they still haven't received their landing page. Ok so he probably forgot to email the customer np, I tell him to double check he has emailed the customer. Another week goes by end the customer calls back, same problem. At this point I'm getting worried, because we're days away from the deadline and it was originally my task.

So I go back to the guy and I tell him I want that landing page so I can send it myself, half thinking to myself that we had a freeloader, that guy that comes in to companies for 3 weeks, doesn't work, but still cashes his pay. But no, this was much worse.

So he tells me he has finished yet. I ask him why, what's the blocker ? You had 4 weeks to tell me you were blocked and couldn't progress. And his answer was simply, because I wasn't blocked I have been working on it this whole time. So I tell him to zip his project up and email it to me. We didn't do SVN or git back then, simply wasn't worth it. So he comes back to me and says the email server is telling him attachments can't be bigger then 50mb. At this point I'm thinking he didn't properly sized the art or something, so I give him a flash drive to put it on.

When I then open the flash drive, the archive is 300mb, thinking to myself, the images weren't even that big to begin with.
So I open it up, and I don't even find any images, just a single asp page. About 500mb. When I opened that up and it finally loaded, I saw the most horrendous things ever.

The first 500 lines was just initializing empty vars. Then there was some code that created an empty form with an onChange event that submits the form. After that.. it was just non stop nested if's. No loops, no while, for, foreach, NO elseif's, just nested if's, for every possible combination of the state the form could be in. Abou 5000 of them, in a single file. To make matters worse, all the form ( and page ) layout was hardcoded in the if's. Includes inline css, base64 encoded images, nothing but as dynamic, based on the length of the form he changes the layout, added more background etc. He cut the images up for every possible size of the page and included them in the code.

I showed it to my boss, he fired the guy on the spot. I redid the work from scratch, in under 4 hours. Send it to the client. they had no ammends to make, happy as Larry. Whish I kept the code somewhere.

Morale of the story, allways do a coding test on interviews, even if small things just to sanity check.

In the Netherlands they have a sort of "don't ask, don't tell" culture around wages, how is this in other countries?

You ask for what you think you're worth (and are happy to work for) and if the company agrees they pay you.

There's no guarantee you'll be paid the same as your colleagues working the same job because they might just have the confidence to ask for more money.

I have no idea how my wages compare with my colleagues but as I am happy with what I earn it doesn't matter. Seems to solve a lot of the dick waving issues that stem from everyone comparing salaries.

I worked a few times for free until the client decided he doesn't need anymore that product so he doesn't need to pay me.
From that moment i started to ask for advance payments, but a lot of times I calculated incorrectly the real price of my work miscalculating the number of hours it will take, ending working for less than 3€ per hour...

I love freelancing, but I'm really bad at evaluating my work.

FUCCCCKKKKKKKKKK!

I need to get off this frustration out of my system.

I have a autistic retarded sister who has less than a half brain cell.

Evolution from fish to humans was faster than completion of a task assigned to this faggot.

I fucking hate her. Why was I born in this family. Fucking why!!!!!

Autistic narcissistic cunt. Horrible human.

Doesn't have any friends, no family member cares for her, entitled bitch, earns less than $75 a year.

Whenever we meet, she makes sure to belittle me in front of our parents and gives advices and gyaan on how superior she is and how much waste of oxygen I am.

Constantly mentions that my career choices are stupid, whereas she is doing great (in reality she isn't even able to score a simple degree and no one is willing to hire her).

Acording to her, I have zero financial literacy and she is a genius (in reality I am managing the entire family finances and providing for everyone).

Even when I ask her about something, she says that I am asking stupid questions where as in reality she is an anti vaxxer. God damn fuck!! She was stopping my parents to get vaccinated. Fucking bitch.

There's a simple 20 minute task regarding some tax work and she took more than 2 weeks to even comprehend my request and now screams at me for raising the request on the last day. Bitch WTF! I told you well in advance and now you fuck me up entirely.

My parents are so fucking biased and will blindly side her because she is a girl and using this argument they have destroyed me emotionally over years.

Yes, I no longer care for any of these maniacs and want to leave this place asap.

For now, for the life of me, I am ready to pay more than $3500 extra in taxes than deal with this woman child.

Got this in Slack from the owner of the firm I work for...

I mean, you already pay me half of the average salary I should be making, but yeah, let me get right on that...

To be fair, I work with this guy because he is a really good guy to work for, is very hands-off (no micro-managing), doesn't expect me to work on the clock or any overtime and lets me make all the calls with our directions in development. Plus he pays me all he can afford, so it's not like he's trying to screw me (he shares the books with me to prove it).

But still, the dude has to realize you get what you pay for. You don't go to McDonalds if you want a gourmet burger...

rant="""
It's too many features for me to keep up with. And the client just bounces between this matrix of all the possible permutations of them, refusing to admit that he is asking for mutually exclusive behavior in more than one place. I have mentioned to him at least 12 times a year that there is too much going on, not organized, we need to simplify, prioritize, or we will have 100 half baked untested features.

Of course it is more or less made it out to be that this is all my fault, or at least it's hard not to feel that way when I say:

It will be a long time before X will be working, we need 25 other things first.;

Next day he asks:
Have you made any progress on X;

I reply: Now we need 24 things to be done at this rate it will be a month.;

He replies:
Ok but I need this yesterday. How about if you add a new feature Y that does everything X does without those 24 things?;

I reply: That will not work at all like X. Y is just X + 1 more feature.

He replies: Ok well I need Y so when you're done with X I need a way to do it like Y also. I just thought it'd be easier.

EASIER TO ADD MORE FUCKING FEATURES YEAH SURE THATS EASY AS FUCK YOU FUCK FUCK FUCK. He's a nice enough guy, pretty smart compared to my first few paying gigs, but wtf really? How do I come out and tell you I need 25 days and you ADD more work? This was one example.

IN TWO days he has added 12 features. And during the week has asked for 29 UI interfaces to be COMPLETELY different. This is becoming COMMONPLACE. Every week there is either a huge change, or a conversation like about that finds its way into the entire business flow inside an dout.

The worst thing is: I TOTALLY understand what he needs. I feel that HE doesn't. This weekend I spent literally HALF of his retainer on getting equipment into my hands to bring it back to find out it DOESNT WORK. Why aisn't HE doing this so I can finish the features from NOVEMBER that HE NEEDS in order to PROCESS SALES.

I've tried and tried but I just can't get through to this client what a tremendous waste of time his \"process\" is, for lack of a better word. Constant changes, contsant additions, lack of clarity, needless repetition and contradictions, constantly adding moonshot ideas to compete with every industry in the region, and not beta testing anything until something goes wrong.

Fuck this guy! His business is failing and I felt responsible for the longest time but it is clear to me that if I wanted to save his business I would have to ignore 95% of his feature requests. I ignore 50% now because of the stress in trying to determine which of the 3 different paradigms he is talking about changing. I will lose this client, and I feel like he will sue me to get all of his money back. He holds me to very little honestly - BUT WEEKLY reminds me that he won't be able to pay me next month if feature XY and Z arent ready!

If a developer is CLEARLY overwhelmed, it makes NO sense at all to continue to PILE ON feature after feature
"""
try:
while true:
rant+=", after feature"
except DevHeadExplodes as inevitable:
raise YourDevsRatesOrLookElsewhere(inevitable)

A user calls me an hour after I'm supposed to have logged off.
"Hey, ahh, like, something is not good with, like, some thing"
Oh, snap! What happened?
"There is, like, this report, and it's, like, not right?"
Oh, the report is showing wrong data? Let me try to get a fresh version and...
"No, like,the data is right, but, like, there is many reports and , like, should be only one?"
Oh, you mean the report consolidation feature? It should only happen if the reports are fully compatible, and since it's automatic if the reports are not already grouped it means that they cannot be grouped. Probably due to this shopping season, we've seen a high uptick in demand.
"But, like, it should be, like, one! If not I will have to type in each report, like, by hand! I usually talk to this guy XYZ and he, like, does something that I, like, have no idea what it is. Can you call him up?"
(The dude the user mentioned logged off hours ago, and is in a different timezone. It's now about 11PM for him.)
It might not be possible. The system should add observations to each report it cannot consolidate. What do those say?
(the user takes two seconds to respond. I don't think they checked anything)
"It doesn't say anything. Can you cal XYZ, please?"
...

Shit, why do people wait until the last few hours of the last day of the month to do something that should have been done days ago and then demand that everybody everywhere just adjust to their late-ass schedule?
And then to demand I wake up a hardworking dev because someone is to lazy to use the system as it was custom designed for them? Because it had no problems but just wasn't making all things easy?

That's why users have to pay - they don't pay us to code, they pay us to put up with their bullshit.

- A boss that's not 100% incompetent to computers and technology in general.
-Decent pay
-Coworkers who aren't jackasses
-Doesn't feel like a job
-Nice break room
-Option to leave early and work from home

No experience with paid work yet, but for sysadmin work I'd mostly look at the environment and how the previous admin left the premises, and why they left. I wouldn't want to work with a bird's nest for a server room, that's got everything jammed into one clusterfuck of a god-function sort of server or something crazy like that. Separation of services, security, wire management, all those things matter because that's the state that you'll be working in, and cleaning up someone else's mess.. it makes my blood boil.

Payment is important, and if the job doesn't pay well, don't take it. Or if they place a wee bit too much value in those expensive pieces of toilet paper called certificates, it denotes incompetence from the employer by being unable to gauge your skills on their own (and I get that there's time management involved, but come on.. how long can it take to have a conversation with someone to gauge what their skillset is). But the working environment in particular is of vital importance. If it's all going to be yours to build, great (and don't you dare to half-ass it -_-). But if it's already been partially done by someone else, they'd better done it well.

I need to rant about life decisions, and choosing a dev career probably too early. Not extremely development related, but it's the life of a developer.

TL;DR: I tried a new thing and that thing is now my thing. The new thing is way more work than my old thing but way more rewarding & exciting. Try new things.

I taught myself to program when I was a kid (11 or 12 years old), and since then I have always been absolutely sure that I wanted to be a games programmer. I took classes in high school and college with that aim, and chose a games programming degree. Everything was so simple, nail the degree, get a job programming something, and take the first games job that I could and go from there.

I have always had random side hobbies that I liked to teach myself, just like programming. And in uni I decided that I wanted to learn another language (natural, not programming) because growing up in England meant that I only learned English and was rarely exposed to anything else. The idea of knowing another fascinated me.

So I dabbled in a few different languages, tried to find a culture that seemed to fit my style and attitude to life and others, and eventually found myself learning Korean. That quickly became something I was doing every single day, and I decided I needed to go to Korea and see what life there could be like.

I found out that my university offered a free summer school program for a couple of weeks, all I had to pay for was the flights. So a few months later I was there and it was literally the best thing I'd done in my life to that point. I'd found two things that made me feel even better than the idea of becoming the games programmer I'd always wanted to be. Travelling and using my other language to communicate with people that I couldn't in English. At that point I was still just a beginner, but even the simple conversations with people who couldn't speak English felt awesome.

So when I returned home, I found that that trip had completely thrown a spanner into my life plan. All I could think about after that was improving my language skills and going back there for as long as possible. Who knows what to do.

I did exactly that. I studied harder than I'd ever studied for anything and left the next year to go and study in Korea, now with intermediate language skills, everyday conversations no longer being a problem at all.

Now I live here, I will be here for the next year and I have to return to England for one year to finish my degree. Then instead of having my simple plan of becoming a developer, I can think of nothing I want to do less than just stay in England doing the same job every day, nothing to do with language. I need to be at least travelling to Korea, and using my language skills in at least some way.

The current WIP plan is to take intensive language classes here (from next week, every single weekday), build awesome dev side projects and contribute to open source stuff. Then try to build a life of freelance translation/interpreting/language teaching and software development (maybe here, maybe Korea).

So the point of this rant is that before, I had a solid plan. Now I am sat in my bed in Korea writing this, thinking about how I have almost no idea how I'm going to build the life that I want. And yet somehow, the uncertainty makes this so much more exciting and fulfilling. There's a lot more worrying, planning and deciding to do. But I think the fact that I completely changed my life goals just through a small decision one day to satisfy a curiosity is a huge life lesson for me. And maybe reading this will help other people decide to just try doing something different for once, and see if your life plan holds up.

If it does, never stop trying new things. If it doesn't (like mine), then you now know that you've found something that you love as much as or even more that your plan before. Something that you might have lived your whole life never finding.

I don't expect many people to read this all, but writing it here has been very cathartic for me, and it's still a rant because now I have so much more work and planning to do. But it's the good kind of work.

Things aren't so simple now, but they're way more worth it.

Disclaimer: I hold no grudges or prejudices toward [CENSORED] company. I love the concept of the business model and the perks they pay their employees. Unfortunately, the company is very petty, and negligence is the core of the management. I got into an interview for the position, of Senior Software Engineer, and the interview wouldn't take place if wasn't for me to follow up with the person in charge countless times a day. The Vice President of Engineering was the most confused person ever encountered. Instead of asking challenging questions that plausibly could explain and portray how well I can manage a team, the methodology of working with various technology, and my problem-solving skills. They asked me questions that possibly indicated they don't even know what they need or questions that can easily get from a Google Search. I was given 40 hours to build a demo application whereby I had to send them a copy of the source code and the binary file. The person who contacted me don't even bother with what I told her that it is not a good practice to place the binary in cloud storage (Google Drive, OneDrive, etc) and I request extra time to complete the demo application. Since I got the requirement to hand them the repository of the codebase, it is common practice to place the binary in the release section in the Git Platform (Jire, Azure DevOps, Github, Gitlab, etc). Which he surprisingly doesn't know what that is. There's the API key I place locally in .env hidden from the codebase (it's not good practice to place credentials in the codebase), I got a request that not only subscript to an API is necessary but I have to place them in the codebase. I succeed to pass the source code on time with the quality of 40 hours, I told him that I could have done it better, clearer and cleaner if I was given more grace of time. (Because they are not the only company asking me to write a demo application prior to the assessment. Extra grace was I needed)

So long story short, I asked him how is it working in a [CENSORED] company during my turn to ask questions. I got told that the "environment is friendly, diverse". But with utmost curiosity, I contacted several former employees (Software Engineer) on LinkedIn, and I got told that the company has high turnover, despises diversity the nepotism is intense. Most of the favours are done based on how well you create an illusion of you working for them and being close to the upper management. I request shreds of evidence from those former employees to substantiate what they told me. Seeing the pieces of evidence of how they manage the projects, their method of communication, and how biased the upper management actually is led me to withdraw from continuing my application. Honestly, I wouldn't want to work for a company where the majority can't communicate.