You remember when I said the people near me might take everything away?

THE DAY HAS COME.

FUUUUUUUUUUU-

Do I have to say how retarded it is to take a PC and a phone away from a person who first off, loves tech, second of all, gets all her university assignments and information THROUGH an email, third, wants to be a game developer?

Seems like even telling them that I am trying to get as much informed about gaming industry as a whole isn't a valid fucking reason for why I use tech as often as I do... I want to be a game dev, you fucking morons.

So... This began by them AGAIN drilling me about the university progress. I cannot even remember my goddamn schedule, for fuck's sake! How do you expect me to remember every damn grade, every damn exam date and every damn subject name? They also expect me to study 100% of the time I'm using the PC. WHO does that?

They start drilling. I try not answering. It drives them mad. They start exploding. I try all I can to calm the goddamn situation. It's not enough for them. NO, they HAVE TO KNOW EVERYTHING! I try all I can to survive the situation without a conflict. Too late. At a certain point my amazingly clever father says I'm definitely autistic for trying to answer in as little words as I can. Because they totally don't give me a reason to never want to talk at all in their presence...

They got mad enough to take the phone, the PC and my headphones away.

And now here I am, writing this on a university PC in Chrome of all :|

Dear self proclaimed wordpress 'developers/programmers', kindly go fuck yourself.

I'm not talking about wordpress devs/designers who don't claim to have a better skillset than they have and are actually willing to learn, those are very much fine.

I'm talking about those wordpress people who claim that they're developers, programmers or whatever kind of bullshit which they're obviously not.

"A client's site crashed, you have to fix it!!!!!" sorry, come again? It's YOUR client's site. It's hosted on our hosting platform meaning that WE are responsible for KEEPING THE SERVERS UP AND FUNCTIONING.
You call yourself a wordpress 'developer' with 'programming experience' for 10 years but the second one of your shitty sites crashes, you come to us because 'it's your responsibility!!!'.
No, it's not. Next to that fact, the fact that you have to ask US why the site is crashing while you could easily login to your control panel, go to the fucking error logs and see that one of your facebook plugins crashes with a quite English error message, shows me that you definitely don't have 10 years of programming experience. And if you can't find that fucking article which tells you exactly where the motherfucking error logs are, don't come crying to us asking to fix your own fucking bullshit.

"My clients site got hacked, you have to clean it up and get it online again ASAP!!!!" - Nah, sorry, not my responsibility. The fact that you explicitly put your wordpress installation on 'no automatic updates' also doesn't help with my urge to fucking end you right now.
Add to that that we have some quite clear articles on wordpress security which you appearantly found too difficult (really? basic shit like 'set a strong fucking password' is too difficult for you?), you're on your own.

"I'm getting an error, please explain what's going wrong as soon as you can! this is a prio 1!!!!" - Nope. You were a wordpress dev/programmer right? Please act like one.

I'm not your personal wordpress agent.

I'm not your personal hacked wordpress site cleanup guy.

I'm not even a fucking wordpress professional. No, I'd rather jump off a bridge than develop wordpress bullshit for a living.

That you chose to do this, not a problem. Just don't rely on me for fixing your shit.

I'm sick of cleaning up your bullshit.

I'm done with answering your high prio tickets about bullshit which any dev could find out with just a few minutes of searching.

Oh your wordpress site isn't showing up so high in google? Yeah sure, shoot a ticket at us blaming us for your own SEO mess. I'm a fucking sysadmin, not a SEO expert.

I'm fucking done with you.

Go die in a fucking corner.

Long rant ahead, but it's worth it.

I used to work with a professor (let's call him Dr. X) and developed a backend + acted as sysadmin for our team's research project. Two semesters ago, they wanted to revamp the front end + do some data visualization, so a girl (let's call her W) joined the team and did all that. We wanted to merge the two sites and host on azure, but due to issues and impeding conferences that require our data to be online, we kept postponing. I graduate this semester and haven't worked with the team for a while, so they have a new guy in charge of the azure server (let's call him H), and yesterday my professor sends me (let's call me M), H and W an email telling us to coordinate to have the merge up on azure in 2-3 days, max. The following convo was what I had with H:

M: Hi, if you just give me access to azure I'll be able to set everything up myself, also I'll need a db set up, and just send me the connection string.
H: Hi, we won't have dbs because that is extra costs involved since we don't have dynamic content. Also I can't give you access, instead push everything on git and set up the site on a test azure server and I will take it from there.
M: There is proprietary data on the site...
H: Oh really? I don't know what's on it.
<and yet he knows we have no dynamic data>
M: Fine, I'll load the data some other way, but I have access to all the data anyway, just talk to Dr. X and you'll see you can give me access. Delete my access after if you want.
H: No, just do what I said: git then upload to test azure account.

Fine, he's a complete tool, but I like Dr. X, so I message W and tell her we have to merge, she tells me that it's not that easy to set it up on github as she's using wordpress. She sends me instructions on what to do, and, lo and behold, there's a db in her solution. Ok, I go back to talking to H:

M: W is using a db. Talk to her so we can figure out whether we need a database or not.
H: We can't use a database because we want to decrease costs.
M: Yes I know that, so talk to her because that probably means she has to re-do some stuff, which might take some time. Also there might be dynamic content in what she's doing.
H: This is your project, you talk to her.
<I'm starting to get mad right now>
M: I don't know what they had her do apart from how it interfaces with what I've done.
H: We still can't have databases.
M: Listen, I don't do wordpress, and I'm not gonna mess with it, you talk to her
H: I won't do any development
<So you won't do any dev, but you won't give me access to do it either?>
M: Man, the bottleneck isn't the merging right now, it's the fact that W needs a db
H: I know, so talk to her
M: THE RESTRICTION TO NOT HAVE DATABASES IS NOT MINE, IT'S YOURS, YOU TALK TO HER. I can't evaluate whether it's a reasonable enough reason or not since I don't know the requirements or what they're willing to spend.
H: It's your project.
M: Then give me fucking access to azure and I'll handle it, you know you'll have to set up wordpress again regardless whether we set it up the first time.
H: Man just do your job.

At this point I lost it. WHAT A FUCKING TOOL. He doesn't wanna do dev work, wants me to go through the trouble of setting up on a test subscription first, and doesn't want to give me access to azure. What's more, he did shit all and doesn't want to anything else. Well fuck you. I googled him, to see if he's anyone important, if he's done anything notable which is why he's being so God damn condescending. MY INTERNSHIP ALONE ECLIPSES HIS ENTIRE CV. Then what the fuck?

There's also this that happened sometime during our talk:

M: You'll have to take to Dr. Y so he'll change the DNS to point to the azure subscription instead of my server.
H: Yea don't worry, too early for that.
M: DNS propagation takes 24 hours...
H: Yea don't worry.

DNS propagation allows the entire web to know that your website is hosted on a different server so it can change where it's pointing to. We have to do this in 2-3 days. Why do work in parallel? Nah let's wait.

I went over his head and talked to the professor directly, and despite wanting to tell him that he was both drunk and high the day he hired that guy, I kept it professional. He hasn't replied yet, but this fucker's pompous attitude is just too much for me alone, so I had to share.

PS: I named his contact as Annoying Prick 4 minutes into our chat. Gonna rename him cz that seems tooooooo soft a name right now.

[Client]
We've noticed we gave you the wrong product prices for our new online shop.

[Dev]
Yeah, just login to the backend and fix them.

[Client]
But we don't want to use your fancy backend, we'll be using anyway soon - we want EXCEL!
Could you send us an EXCEL, so we can fix that?
How much will this cost?

[Dev]
Sure... here you are.
Not that much, takes about an hour.

[Client]
Great, you'll hear from us in a few days.

(a few months later...)

[Client]
We've finally managed to update the EXCEL. And btw, we've also added a bunch of columns with product pictures and new properties, highlighted products to delete red, inserted some comments with manual instructions and basically destroyed the entire data structure of this table.

Before I forget... also make sure to get this finished today, we have to go live ASAP. Our marketing campaign is already live.

[Dev]
Well, I'm sorry to say this, but this is not possible.
I'm currently working on another project and it will take me hours to clean up the data you sent me, before even starting to build an import tool for the new data you provided. Better stop the campaign and I'll do my best to get this done by the end of the week. Also it may be a bit costly.

(angry client calls immediately...)

(dev transfers to manager...)

(client transfers to client's boss...)

[Manager]
Ok Dev, I think I was able to explain it to them. However, it would be great if you spend day and night to get this thing out ASAP.

[Dev]
No problem...
I'll just do it by hand to get this out immediately.

(few days later; nearly done, exhausted)

[Client]
Hey Dev, here's another EXCEL.
We've just noticed there were a bunch of errors in the previous one. Please use this instead...

** Non Dev Rant **

I just need to rant about this because I'm furious.

Last night I had a house warming party. It was mostly, if not all, of my girlfriend's friends. I'm a cranky old developer so I don't have friends.

Everyone was nice and dressed nice and brought us gifts.. all of the gifts were pretty much specifically for my girlfriend.

So this one girl came... she's younger.. around 25. She came with no gift (I wasn't expecting gifts I just need to mention it for the plot), and was dressed in sweat pants. Alright, no problem.. I really don't care at least she's here.

So as more guests arrive I finally get a gift. Someone brought me a case of beer and a couple of yummy cookies. I had to put it down on the kitchen counter for a bit because I needed to grab more chairs.

The basement door where the chairs are is 10 feet away from where I left my present..

I come back from upstairs.. not even 5 minutes later and I see sweat pant girl stuffing one cookie in her fucking mouth and the other in her pants...

Are you fucking kidding me!? I bought desserts and snacks and all the alcohol you can think of and you steal MY fucking present. Not just one of them... but BOTH.

She saw the other guests give me it.. say "here buddy this is for you"... followed me in the kitchen and STOLE my fucking cookies.

I was going to eat them this morning with my coffee and I realized I couldn't because this fucking ass hole took my fucking cookies!!!!

I hosted this party for my girlfriend's SJW ass hole fucked up friends... put a smile on my face... pretended to like people... and for once didn't yell at someone... and the fucking thanks I get is 2 stolen fucking cookies.

Fuck her.

Sorry, !dev-related.

Today I wake up tired. Mother barges into my room and tells me I should be already ready, takes time to fucking argue, then does some cleaning(As if I never do it or something), and this evening she starts arguing about that again and just disconnects the plug from my PC, telling me I shouldn't have gotten a person who takes preparing way longer than me and who also got out of the car when I was ready to take off late AND that I should apologise to her for speaking „in a rude manner“, when just a few seconds ago from that she hit me. That hit wasn't painful. It still was a hit, though. Do I have to say how angry I got? As if I needed that. I'm already having trouble with not wanting to kill myself for a whole week nonstop. And she tells me I have to apologise or I don't get my PC back. Oh, I haven't gotten to the best part: My birthday's coming really soon. A week and a day later. Beats me how I will have to force myself to smile like an idiot again just because the actual idiots cannot understand the shit they've done to my mind. So much so I may not be functioning at all if I stay with them much longer.

This combined with all my family telling me how insane I supposedly am etc.

I might try a photography school. My friend(who could be my twin), has been nagging me about trying it...

I need a job.

I need a fucking place away from these blood-sucking leeches.

I need to understand how my horrible self-esteem has potentially fucked my whole life up and how much nerves I wasted on my goddamn nuclear family.

I also need to learn to forgive myself.

Many more, but I will end this here.

So at work today my coworker overlooked my laptop running Linux with i3.

Coworker: How do you live with this?

Me: What do you mean? This is customized to work with Git and my IDE efficiently while I do dev ops with my server.

Coworker: Your mouse barely works and you operate this thing totally on keyboard shortcuts. Linux will never be a serious platform.

Me: I'm not saying you or anyone at work has to use this, I built an environment to suite my needs. Same as anyone. I thought you liked consumer choice?

Needless to say we didn't get much further beyond him thinking I was nuts for configuring my server in the cli. I swear I don't understand why I try to explain anymore. 😡

Friend(non dev): Hey. Do you know how much it costs to maintain an app?

Me : Well that depends. What are you planning to do?

Friend: Something like Trivago. But small.

Me: That still doesn't tell me anything

Friend: Come on. Just give a number. How hard can it be?

Me: 42. *facepalm*

Friend: See wasn't that hard. Was it?

Me: *thinking* Don't correct him. Just let him be.

May your holidays be filled with the happiest of memories 🎅🎄🎁

Person at work, staring at my keyboard: How much was it?
Me: The keyboard? Oh it's a cheap one for around $30.
Person: Huh... I'll never get you rich boys and your fads.

Well, I don't fucking judge you for your $600 phone, or your $80 shoes or shirts, you cuntwaffle. Fuckin' asshole has the face of a horse's left testicle, is always on his phone, which is arguably fine since he's not a dev but still fuck him, and has the gall to call me bringing my mechanical keyboard to work a 'rich fad'. Oh, that's rich coming from you. Ever seen your ugly mug in your undeserved branded clothing, you unloved, shit-gobbling piece of shit?

"You type so loud." And you breathe too loud but I don't tell you to stop but maybe I ought to.

Go suck on your daddy-uncle's chode for a couple more bucks and stop hanging around me, you judgemental cum-snorting piece of shit.

P.s. it's a cheap keyboard with blue switches but the office is normally noisy and busy enough that no one gives a shit about it. Planning on buying an Anne Pro sometime next month.

My brother just called me asking for help in some MS server thing and I'm like "I don't know that!" (I really don't), and he replied "Yeah, you know, mom told me to call you to ask for help.". Jesus Christ. Just because I'm in CS it doesn't mean I know everything informatics-related.
I now know your pain, devRanters. I usually don't mind being the IT support (so much that my parents call me to help them when their computers decide to randomly die or do something weird because of something they've done, but I live like 300km away because of uni so I can't just go there and help them. Sometimes I say "Ask your son" (he's taking a tech course in high school), but my brother cuts out of it like "I don't know how to fix it" without even looking at it sometimes. Well duh, me neither at times, but google is your friend damn it. Sometimes I search for the answers. Other times I just poke around in the program until I find what's wrong. Either way, when I say I don't know and/or I can't really do much about it they give me the usual "We're paying your uni fees for what?" (in a joking tone but. I'M NOT STUDYING FOR THAT, I WANNA BE A GAME DEV DAMN IT)), but goddamn it I don't know everything just because I am a CS student. I wanna help but sometimes I can't. Deal with that >:V

Root interviews for a job

So I've been interviewing for fun lately (and for practice), and it's been going mostly well. This one company in particular looks interesting, and they seem to really like me. This morning was interview #4 with them; tomorrow morning is #5.

The previous interviews were pretty enjoyable, especially the last one where I interviewed with one of the senior devs who gave me his "grumpy old man rails quiz." He actually asked some questions I wasn't able to answer! (Mostly dealing with Rails' internals.) Also when showing me the codebase, there were a few things I hadn't seen before, so it's exciting that I'll actually be able to learn something if I sign on. We ended up talking for almost an hour past our allotted time, and we got along famously. He said he was very surprised I did so well on his quiz because most people don't. Everyone else I interviewed with so far has liked me and gave positive reviews, too.

I don't know if I want the job, but that's beyond the scope of this rant anyway. The real reason for this comes next.

My interview today was with the VP of engineering. It was more of a monologue, as he wanted to give me perspective to see if I actually wanted to work there, but it was still very much a monologue. He's an old white guy who seems to loves to drone, and he never seemed very happy when I responded, so I let him drone and drone. Good information though.

But he's very set in his ways in some regards, and two of them were pretty insulting. We never really talked about technicals, and he just assumed that since I wasn't old and graying that I was a junior dev. He said, and I'll quote: "We run a lean but senior team, so we typically only hire senior devs here. But the dev team is all old white men. There's no diversity in talent, age, sex, race, religion, etc, and I'm looking to change that." He made several more allusions to my more junior level, too. He made a lot of assumptions (like how I'm not comfortable with structure because I've been the only dev so often) and got annoyed when I countered them.

I realize he has no idea of my skill level -- even though he should if he was listening to his team -- but to just assume that I'm not talented because I'm young, and bloody hire me just because I'm female? I don't want to be your diversity hire, old man. 🤬

So I'm feeling angry.
I might still take the job because the it offers considerable benefits over where I'm working (despite being quite happy here), but it will absolutely be despite him.

Please don't make junior developers feel they're a burden.
Have you ever googled "how to mentor junior developers"? It's quite mind-blowing how many articles, talks and panels are on this topic. And yet still junior developers are not feeling welcomed in their companies.
Yup, you guessed it, we also have something to add (based on our own experience):

1. Asking for help is not easy. Please don't blow juniors off by telling them to read docs when they ask a question. Always assume they've read it and did a sprint to solve the problem. They ask you, because they see you as a mentor and really need your help. If you can, spend more time with them and guide through the entire problem solving process.

2. Please don't think "I learnt it this way so you should too". If you're in charge of teaching a junior developer, don't expect them to be a carbon copy of yourself. Because even though in your opinion your approach is more "pro", they might not be there yet to use it properly. And last, but not least:

3. Of course, juniors will compare themselves with seniors on their team. And there'll be moments they feel so guilty and so afraid that they cost the company too much, that they need training, and supervision, or are between projects and are not bringing in any money, and they'll fear that their company regrets hiring them. Make sure they don't feel like a burden. As juniors, we often
have this misconception what is expected from us.

Dear tech companies, please set very clear expectations and tell your juniors you're happy. Don't get us wrong here. We don't expect unicorns, roses and pats on the back from companies. We do understand- this is business, and at the end of the day we all are here to make money. To do so, companies need to make smart investments. Junior dev with a great assistance, planned support, and a clear training program will become a great asset. It really is as simple as that.

I am bloody sick of being on my own.

I was the sole dev at the last few jobs I've held, with the exception of API Guy -- who didn't really help much, and who got fired / quit six months after I started. Every other job I've either been the only dev, or the only web dev. (Exception:My boss at my previous job was a Rails dev, but he has zero time to code, and was significantly less experiened so he could only rarely help anyway.)

But now I'm in a company with a bunch of other devs, and they're all ostensibly senior devs, so you'd think I should be able to ask questions, right? And get answers? that actually help? like "Hey, you built this; how does it work?" No bloody way.

So far every time I've asked someone for help, they've been incompetent. I asked about what a few flags did, and got an answer that basically said "you just gotta know. oh, and the labels aren't up to date, so don't trust what they say." I asked the head of the "product team" about a ticket that he wrote, and he changed what it meant four times within two days. I asked about another, and he said "oh, that isn't reproduceable." Thanks. I asked about mailers, and got two very different, very incompete walkthroughs from the more senior devs (9+ years on this codebase) that didn't help. I asked two people about how users and roles work, and still have no idea what kind of user (there are like twelve?) is what, what roles even exist, or how to check for permissions. `@current_user` is a thing, but idfk what it holds since that can change considerably, and there's an impersonation feature that changes how it works, too. I ask the product guy again about where to link something, and he has no idea. I ask said product guy about what this feature needs to do, and he doesn't know. I ask what the legal team needs, and i get nothing. I ask the designer where the goddamn CSS lives, and he doesn't know; he apparently just puts it wherever he feels like, even if it's a completely unrelated stylesheet. As long as it works, right?

I ask very simple and straighforward questions, and it takes them forever to get back to me saying what amounts to "idk, ask someone else."

This feels like the same crap all over again, except now there are a bunch of devs I can ask that give me basically the same answers as the sales people always did. Always "idk" or a confusing mess of an 'answer' that skips most/all of the important bits. At least these people don't [usually] contradict themselves.

So, @Root is all alone, again.
And currounded by incompetence.
Again.

For fuck's sake.
Can't I catch a break?

Our most senior and most competent backend developer got fired, he got told he "wasn't committed enough". This dude did the most complex tasks really quickly (and competently), could configure the most boring stuff off the top of his mind, and brought great culture to the company from his previous 20+ years of experience. He was about to implement some cool automation stuff, and improved our processes a great deal.

Now he's being let go. I was fearing *I* would get fired because I'm much slower and less knowledgeable than this guy.

When I talked to him, he figured the so-called "lack of commitment" was because he had missed a few standups the last few days, and got late to today's standup.

Now the boss (who is a less experienced than this dev who was let go, but co-founder of the company) was changing the database credentials (which we somehow have access to) and had the product down for like half an hour because of it.

I don't think firing this developer was a wise decision at all, and that's putting it generously. What a shame. Now I'm also a bit scared because the responsibilities of this developer might likely fall upon me. But generally I think we're worse off without this guy, and getting someone as good as him will take time.

So we where given a project with a deadline already set behind our backs and we have to give our deadline despite not knowing wtf we have to do exactly ...

They asked us to don't ask too much time because the budget can't afford too much time...

I'm here thinking: WTF?!
THEY PASSED A FUCKING DEADLINE AND PRICES TO THE FUCKING CLIENT WITHOUT ASKING ANY! ANY MOTHERFUCKING DEV ABOUT IT!!!

We asked them so many fucking questions on the first meeting that they were fucking baffled about everything but kept playing cool like "well, this project is already set and we are gonna have to deal with it"

Bunch of motherfucking stupid cock suckers , go die agonizing on your own vomit and if ask my help I'm gonna answer "well, you gonna have to deal with it because you are already fucked"

This company!
Ugh.

Two days ago we had an hour and a half meeting on which projects to focus on, with the result being all seven are top priority. Because of course.

Last night I told my boss why an api he has me hitting always returns 401s; even gave him the line# responsible for the response (in his code). After an hour and sixteen minutes of him debugging, he finally admitted I might be right. zzz. This morning, he tells me it's on my end, and to ask someone else for their project's API code. The problem is that the server is not accepting the new application's key, since that key is not in the allowed list. That other project works just fine. Guess why? Their key has been whitelisted for months. But it's totally my code. Yeah. Bloody brilliant. 🔅

Anyway, today we're discussing "Winning with Accountability," a 100 page book that boils down to "do what you say you'll do, by when you said you'd do it, and take responsibility if you don't." But a huge part that the boss is stressing is: provide the exact date, time, and timezone of when things will be completed by. I mean That's fine for sales calls and reports and such trivial busywork. But dev projects? Not so much.

And that's been my past three days!
Friggin joy.

I've had many, but this is one of my favorite "OK, I'm getting fired for this" moments.

A new team in charge of source control and development standards came up with a 20 page work-instruction document for the new TFS source control structure.
The source control kingpin came from semi-large military contract company where taking a piss was probably outlined somewhere.

Maybe twice, I merged down from a release branch when I should have merged down from a dev branch, which "messed up" the flow of code that one team was working on.
Each time I was 'coached' and reminded on page 13, paragraph 5, sub-section C ... "When merging down from release, you must verify no other teams are working
on branches...blah blah blah..and if they have pending changes, use a shelfset and document the changes using Document A234-B..."

A fellow dev overheard the kingpin and the department manager in the breakroom saying if I messed up TFS one more time, I was gone.

Wasn't two days later I needed to merge up some new files to Main, and 'something' happened in TFS and a couple of files didn't get merged up. No errors, nothing.
Another team was waiting on me, so I simply added the files directly into Main. Unknown to me, the kingpin had a specific alert in TFS to notify him when someone added
files directly into Main, and I get a visit.

KP: "Did you add a couple of files directly into Main?"
Me:"Yes, I don't what happened, but the files never made it from my branch, to dev, to the review shelfset, and then to Main. I never got an error, but since
they were new files and adding a new feature, they never broke a build. Adding the files directly allowed the Web team to finish their project and deploy the
site this morning."
KP: "That is in direct violation of the standard. Didn't you read the documentation?"
Me: "Uh...well...um..yes, but that is an oddly specific case. I didn't think I hurt any.."
KP: "Ha ha...hurt? That's why we have standards. The document clearly states on page 18, paragraph 9, no files may ever be created in Main."
Me: "Really? I don't remember reading that."
<I navigate to the document, page 18, paragraph 9>
Me: "Um...no, it doesn't say that. The document only talks about merging process from a lower branch to Main."
KP: "Exactly. It is forbidden to create files directly in Main."
Me: "No, doesn't say that anywhere."
KP: "That is the spirit of the document. You violated the spirit of what we're trying to accomplish here."
Me: "You gotta be fracking kidding me."

KP grumbles something, goes back to his desk. Maybe a minute later he leaves the IS office, and the department manager leaves his office.

It was after 5:00PM, they never came back, so I headed home worried if I had a job in the morning.

I decided to come in a little early to snoop around, I knew where HR kept their terminated employee documents, and my badge wouldn't let me in the building.

Oh crap.

It was a shift change, so was able to walk in with the warehouse workers in another part of the building (many knew me, so nothing seemed that odd), and to my desk.

I tried to log into my computer...account locked. Oh crap..this was it. I'm done. I fill my computer backpack with as much personal items as I could, and started down the hallway when I meet one of our FS accountants.

L: "Hey, did your card let you in the building this morning? Mine didn't work. I had to walk around to the warehouse entrance and my computer account is locked. None of us can get into the system."

*whew!* is an understatement. Found out later the user account server crashed, which locked out everybody.

Never found out what kingpin and the dev manager left to talk about, but I at least still had a job.

Senior devs out there, please be supportive to juniors. Don't treat them bad just because they don't know as much as you do. Guide them and help them learn and grow as devs. That'll make your company (and/or the community) a better place to work at, because everyone will be a better dev, and you might learn and grow in the process as well.

> 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.

!dev

If you comment shit like "mUsIc ToDaY iS gArBaGe" and "iM fRoM tHe WrOnG gEnErAtIoN" on YouTube, you deserve to have whatever rights you're given stripped from you.

We live in the most technically advanced time the world has ever seen. We have music available 24/7 from literally all over the world. So shut the fuck up and listen to your preference. Nobody holds a gun to your head and makes you listen to today's music. Don't like it? Don't listen.

It's not brain surgery and this doesn't make you unique or quirky as much as you want it to, nor is it a personality trait.

Bad dev habit to unlearn:

Impostor syndrome before starting a project.

Don't think a lot before diving into a tough project. Just jump in. If you second guess yourself about being ready, you'll never do it. Either you're already good enough or you'll figure out what you need.

I wasted way too much time before starting to write an AI chess engine but it turned out a lot simpler than I expected.

Starting to wish I never got involved in this industry.

I am working for the most ridiculous, god awful place I have ever had the misfortune of working and I am having a HELL of a time getting out of it because everything wants 5 years fucking exp in some fucking specific framework that is basically the same as every other fucking framework.

Our previous cto was a closeminded totalitarian bully and when she finally left she was replaced by a lecherous fucking dinosaur who has no idea how to code in our code base. He also has barely been showing up to work for the last few months.

For some reason our fucking ceo allows this all to continue and only interjects whenever he can make himself the biggest nuisance (ie design handoffs etc where he has little to no knowledge)

I was already woefully underpaid but was recently 'promoted' to team lead and when I brought up my ridiculous salary (yes I was essentially just funneled into this role) they gave me a neglible raise and ceo told the fucking dinosaur to tell me he 'doesn't like when people ask for raises'

The only reason I am in this position is because we have such ridiculously poor employee retention and I am one of the people after only 2.5 years there that has the ability to provide any kind of knowledge transfer. Most of our dev team consists of people fresh out of school and our code base is just an absolute mess of junior dev spaghetti debauchery.

I have expressed concerns over this and was told that I'm negative and go looking for problems and that 'everywhere is like this'

The ceo has a few people he keeps close because in his words 'they're the only ones who don't disagree with me'

He also refused to hire anyone with experience because they cost too much and he doesn't like people who have opinions.

To make matters worse all the fucking dinosaur does is wander around and talk to the junior devs about video games.

His previous favorite past time was staring at my tits, ranting about his wife and telling me 'he'd offer to give me a back rub but you can't do that now a days'

I caught his fucking wife creeping me on LinkedIn a few months ago for some fucking reason.

Oh and as icing on the cake I had a fucking interview today for an intermediate angular position and a few minutes after I received an email saying that ACCTUALLY they had been informed they were now looking for a senior react dev.

Like seriously what the fuck.

Dear designers/project managers,

I am a developer. That means you don't have to explain simple programming concepts to me that you half know and think you fully understand as if I have never seen code before.

Save your breath and stop being so condescending. You don't know half as much as you think.

Thanks, from one annoyed dev.

tl;dr: thanks! :)

I just love this community.
The idea of devRant is great. The emotions, the shared knowledge in each post. Never seen such densely packed quality content in a social media! :D
I enjoy spending my time here, though I do not post that much. Reading just about the life of @linuxxx, @gitpush @alexDeLarge (to name a few) share with us is just wonderful, it makes me happy! :)

I think this post is meant as a thank you, I guess? Just felt like it... hope you guys don't mind having read a non-dev related post.^^'

btw:
@dfox and @trogus, you guys are awesome as fuck!

Last Friday company-wide call consisted of the sales CEO bossman, the remote contractor dev, and myself. The only topic of discussion was CTO-bashing (bossman's favorite). Neither person had much of anything to say about their week, and they didn't want to hear my rather-lengthy summary either (I did a lot). All they wanted to do was bash the CTO (API Guy).

The CEO asked how many hours I had worked, and seemed annoyed when I said less than 40. Well screw you. Monday was Christmas, and Sunday was Encroaching Estranged Asshole Day. (Earlier rant)

I've been spending most of my time trying to learn the steaming mountain of rancid hippo shit that API Guy squeezed out, since he's leaving forever in 10 days. Sure, CEO bossman says he'll still be around to answer questions, but even with him right next to me in the office he's less than useful. After he's gone and finally feeling free of this farce? It'll be worth fuck-all.

So bossman is mad at me for both not working enough over Christmas, and not pumping out features at a frantic pace despite multiple explanations of why this is a bad idea. And he didn't care about what work I actually did do.

My every interaction with him makes me angry. Whenever I -- or anyone else -- does something he doesn't approve of, seemingly no matter the reasoning, he makes it out to be a failure on their part, and like he can't trust them as much now.

Well I'm sorry we're trying to make sure our websocket works perfectly before putting it in the hands of our customers who rely on it for cash processing.

I'm sorry I'm trying to recall printers that aren't configured properly, which also prevent customers from using our goddamn service they're paying for.

I'm sorry I'm trying to learn how everything works while I still have someone to talk to and ask questions of.

I'm sorry I'm preparing for the day I have to take over and have you breathing down my neck. Once API Guy's gone I'll be responsible for everything, and you'll be yelling at me and having a @Root bashing session instead if I don't know how to fix everything right away.

But no. All you care about is that I talk to you about what's going in so you can micromanage development despite having zero fucking understanding of goddamn anything. All you ever fucking want is the next shiny feature you can push to make more sales / keep your current contacts happy. Doesn't fking matter if it makes development awful later; that's tomorrow's problem. And yet you have the gall to bash API Guy over and over and over again for the codebase being a mess? Sure he's a terrible programmer, but been putting up with this exact same shit for five years. No wonder it's a mountain of rancid hippo shit. That's as much your fault as his, asshole.

I'm so sorry you "have serious concerns" about me. I don't want to put up with your shit either.

Fuck off and die.

Welp, time to ditch devRant

I don't mind green dots posting the same things over and over (and let's be honest, everyone had some of those complaints when we started coding), but what's been happening lately with spam and bots is just too much.

Thanks for the ride @dfox, it's been good while it lasted. Too bad I never got a dev duck tho, they were always out of stock :(

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.

Alright, so my company wanted to redesign its old website, so we (the dev team) got tasked with making it happen.

Talking with the people making the marketing decisions for the site (think clients but in-house) :

CLIENT : We don't want any colors, black and white only, it's trendy.

US : Okay, but you actually do need colors for call to actions, to achieve the effect of levels of importance and such.

CLIENT : No colors.

Why would they listen to us, not that we are the experts are anything... Oh and they scrapped pretty much all of our CTA, why would you need those anyways, right?

Sometimes later, while coding the Dealer Locator :

CLIENT : The more important dealers will be shown on the map in black, the ones a little less important in white, and the ones we would rather not send people to will be in blue.

US : In blue? Blue, the only color in a sea of black and white? You do realize that the only thing the user is going to see are the blue ones, achieving the exact opposite of what you want?

CLIENT : We have decided.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Some 'wk306' highlights from different people:

Walk around the office in his underwear, because he forgot he left his trousers in the bathroom

Run a red light outside the office due to not wearing his required glasses. When questioned by co-workers, replied "I don't follow those facist rules"

Asking if we work less will we get paid more, because the project will take longer to do (while in a startup with no funding trying to secure some)

Tell a senior dev to stop testing in his spare time, as we won't be able to release on time if he keeps finding critical security bugs

Telling me "your timezone is not my concern", when asking for help with new tooling so we don't have to be online at the same time

Blaming my team for requesting too much help, leading to his team missing deadlines, in a meeting with very senior managers. When the reason we were requesting help was the handover doc we were given was filled with lies about features being finished and "ready to ship" and lacking any unit tests

Being accused of bullying and harassment to the CEO, because someone asked "did you follow up with X about the partnership they emailed us about". The person who was responsible, forgot 4 times, and saw it as an "attack" to mention it in team meetings

Telling an entire office/building mid November they've secured funding for at least the next year, then announcing in January after the Christmas break that its cheaper to move to India, so they are closing the office in 30 days

Don't you just love cracking dev jokes and have that one special flower start with their:

"well, technically..."

followed by an explanation showing how much expertise in the field they've gathered over the years to be able to point out your joke is not 100% accurate.

Imagine them at a party.

- Knock knock
- Well, technically you wouldn't ASK who's there, statistically people would look first, but nice try

So they discovered a small tiny bug in a thing anyone last touched about 3 months ago. It has been there for at least 6 months, and JUST NOW someone noticed it. But OF COURSE that bug is important enough to have me drop FUCKING EVERYTHING that I'm doing, despite us being very short on time already!

Fucking hell, if nobody noticed that shitty little crap bug the past 6 months how can it possibly be so important. Good thing I don't have a large wooden mallet nearby.

So thanks so much for having me fix this RIGHT NOW, or rather IN THREE FUCKING HOURS or however it'll take to set up this project's dev environment... absolute horseshit.

Fellow Dev: the clients are requesting a gallery on their website with functioning modals.

Me: okay cool

So for the record, I'm new to front-end and I've got quite a lot to learn in JavaScript.

*I googled as much as I could and I made a proper functioning gallery in 2 full days of coding*

Him: okay, so this is great but they aren't really digging it.

Me: *sigh* yes, so what do they want?

Him: have you seen how an image opens in Google images? Like you click on one, the image opens while the rest of the content shifts down?

Me: um... Yeah?

Him: yeah, so they want that.

Me: ... *Scoops the web trying to figure out how Google does it*. Dude, I can't find anything close to it and I've still got a lot to learn. Idk how to do it.

Him: well, you're being paid for that. So, you better do it.

Me: 1000Rs ( approx. 14.58$ ) isn't called "being paid". Gimme a break here.

Him: You're a novice rn.

Me: why don't you do it?

Him: I'm your boss.

*Sigh* (he indeed is my boss)

Him: deal with it.

Me: FU........C.....*suddenly I realized how it's done* OH OH OH OH I just got it, I just got it!

(I actually make something like that)

*Lol yay*

That's just my best story of a fight. Lol.

I did a 3 years study in computer science.

I got an intern that is on her last year of a 5 years study in computer science too.

So we have the same age, just that I have more practical experiences than her and she have more theoretical baggage than me.

We are discussing on the design of what she will do over her internship and while I'm talking about some JSON modelling she interrupt me to say something like "so this tuple is meaning..." talking about a JSON object. I didn't get what she was talking about (I never did python and didn't learn much about mathematical theorems during my study) so I asked her: "What is a tuple?".. She looked at me with dead eyes saying "what!? you don't know this ?!!" Like I was the dumbest man on earth. Fortunately our PM which is also a coding guy was sitting next to us and explained to me that by saying "tuple" she meant a "JSON object" and to her that it IS normal if I do not know what a tuple is, first because of my studies, 2nd because my job is to be an Android Dev and that I do not need to know this to do my job. He added that by the way I'm doing well my job and that if I wasn't there to help her on her code she would never succeed her internship.

I'm glad my PM intervene but fuck those who always think they know everything better than others without questioning themselves before !

Not just another Windows rant:

*Disclaimer* : I'm a full time Linux user for dev work having switched from Windows a couple of years ago. Only open Windows for Photoshop (or games) or when I fuck up my Linux install (Arch user) because I get too adventurous (don't we all)

I have hated Windows 10 from day 1 for being a rebel. Automatic updates and generally so many bugs (specially the 100% disk usage on boot for idk how long) really sucked.

It's got ads now and it's generally much slower than probably a Windows 8 install..

The pathetic memory management and the overall slower interface really ticks me off. I'm trying to work and get access to web services and all I get is hangups.

Chrome is my go-to browser for everything and the experience is sub par. We all know it gobbles up RAM but even more on Windows.

My Linux install on the same computer flies with a heavy project open in Android Studio, 25+ tabs in Chrome and a 1080p video playing in the background.

Up until the creators update, UI bugs were a common sight. Things would just stop working if you clicked them multiple times.

But you know what I'm tired of more?

The ignorant pricks who bash it for being Windows. This OS isn't bad. Sure it's not Linux or MacOS but it stands strong.

You are just bashing it because it's not developer friendly and it's not. It never advertises itself like that.

It's a full fledged OS for everyone. It's not dev friendly but you can make it as much as possible but you're lazy.

People do use Windows to code. If you don't know that, you're ignorant. They also make a living by using Windows all day. How bout tha?

But it tries to make you feel comfortable with the recent bash integration and the plethora of tools that Microsoft builds.

IIS may not be Apache or Nginx but it gets the job done.

Azure uses Windows and it's one of best web services out there. It's freaking amazing with dead simple docs to get up and running with a web app in 10 minutes.

I saw many rants against VS but you know it's one of the best IDEs out there and it runs the best on Windows (for me, at least).

I'm pissed at you - you blind hater you.

Research and appreciate the things good qualities in something instead of trying to be the cool but ignorant dev who codes with Linux/Mac but doesn't know shit about the advantages they offer.

I'm gonna have a serious talk with my bosses the day after tomorrow. We have so much to do, we are basically at 150% workload. Problem is: they don't pay us for overtime.

This has been going on for 18 years in the company. It will not be easy. But they either start paying our overtime or I am out (and probably taking the whole dev team with me.)

Wish me luck!

Me passing time on the weekend

Random call from unknown number

Turns out it's the manager

M: hey , how is your weekend going ...

Me: nothing much ... Whatsup ?

M : yeah well , we wanted to push some minor adhoc fixes as some clients wanted it urgently

The Devops folks need developer support . Can you pitch in and monitor

Me : I'm not aware of what changes are going , i don't think i can provide support

M : don't worry it's minor changes , it's already tested in pre prod , you just need to be on call for 30 mins

Me : ugh okay .. guess 1 hr won't hurt

M: thanks 👍🏽

Me: *logs in

*Notices the last merged PR
+ 400 lines , implemented by junior dev and merged by manager

*Wait , how is this a *minor* release...

*Release got triggered already and the CI CD pipeline is in progress

*5 mins later

*Pipeline fails , devops sends email - test coverage below 50%

Manager immediately pitches in ...

M: hey , i see test coverage is down , can you increase it ?

Me: and how do u suppose I do that ?

M : well it's simple just write UTC for the missing lines ... Will it take time ?

Me : * ah shit here we go again

Yeah it will take time , there are around 400 lines , I am not aware of this component all together

Can you ask junior dev to pitch in and write the UTC for this

*Actually junior dev is out on a vacation with his girlfriend

M : well he's out for the weekend , but
as a senior dev , i expect you to have holistic understanding of the codebase and not give excuses ,
this is a priority fix which client are demanding we need this released ASAP

Me : * wait wat ?

---

I ended up being online for next 3 hours figuring out the code change and bumping up the UTC 🤦🏾

A few months back, me and my friends built our own Web Dev firm. I'm the one who talk to clients, customers, etc. and these have been the most ridiculous messages I received from them:

1. I don't like it, but I don't know why?

2. I have an idea! Can we change the design?

3. We want something with more of a `wow` factor.

4. Can't you just copy their logo?

5. But we are also a startup. You must understand that we can't pay the full price.

6. So do you have the file open and ready to edit/

7. Can't you just copy and paste it in?

8. We don't have much of a budget but there are plenty of projects coming your way.

These are just a few of the huckleberryfuck our clients sent. I'm not sure if I can handle them anymore.

So I have been working at the same company for five years, doing pretty much all the IT stuff. Sys admin, help desk, you name it. I've also developed a fair amount of in-house software for the company.

Today, I learned from a trusted source that they are actively interviewing people to replace me. I probably have a week, maybe two until I'm fired. To my knowledge I've done nothing to warrant this.

I've been looking around lately for a new job anyway, but without any sense of urgency. I have put in several applications with very few responses though.

I have 5 years experience doing this professionally and 15 total years of dev experience, but only a GED.

I'm not sure why I'm not getting any responses from my applications, but I'm pretty scared right now. I have a 5 month old baby, a wife and a teenager that all depend on me.

I don't know what to do...

An un-rant on Universities. (UC Irvine)

A lot of my friends and I are about to graduate 👨‍🎓 from UCI, with Computer Science degrees.

Most of them are complaining that they don't know any current frameworks, and all that we learned is outdated.
And that pretty much any bootcamper knows more tools that any of us do.

I totally disagree. I don't think it's the university's job to teach you tools (node, tencerflow, ...), rather, I think they made us into programming Swiss Army knifes. I can pick up any framework (I wanna be a web dev) real easy, and when shit breaks down, I can easily figure out the issue.

I think that's the major difference between Computer Scientists and Bootcampers/Programmers. We know "why", while they know "how".

What do you think? Is the current price of a CS degree worth it?

Life as a homeless developer.

I'm a lil brainsick but homelessness makes you that way.
I started writing software as a hedge against an old injury i had from my teen years. I have a unique condition leaving me with limited use of my hand as such any jobs like cashier call center and they like are of limits to me, i can't hold change because my hands don't bend flat, and to much typing is excruciating. Therefore being adev should get the most bang for the buck that I have left. Ive been doing this for 12 years. Well it's all bullshit and unicorns. I can't get a job to save my life. All i get is calls from recruiters wanting a full stack retard. I'm an erlang developer for about 5 years, c# php no i can't do Photoshop or frontend gay as colors because it's a different skillet. Oh but trumpy says we're at the lowest unemployment ever, ya because we're all homeless and companies are still looking for unicorns, they don't exist just like the fake jobs which is the real fake news. In reality if a company wants you its because their dev left and you are to fix their broken shit, which never worked in the first place thus cannot be fixed besides I'm not a plumber. In my opinion many companies nowadays are run by liberal sjw children who don't value your time but want the product now, spoilt. Recruiters are the worst, gimme money because i touched your resume. I'd rather just kill myself than try to appease some fucking retarded children. Its so awesome to live in a tunnel while my skills entropy while i have 160 self published github repos, know many programming languages and be told your have no value. its those same children that dont understand the flow of money or value loyalty, claim we have all these jobs but no skillid employees, so they can bring in more visa overstayers, underpay them and claim record profits, the more you pay forieners my countries money the less there is to go around in the society leading to disenfranchised people like me, and you wonder why there's so many shootings in il. How long can i endure homelessness before i start becoming a criminal? Soon i will have no other option. You employers had a choice but I'm going out with a bang.

I'll use this topic to segue into a related (lonely) story befitting my mood these past weeks.

This is entire story going to sound egotistical, especially this next part, but it's really not. (At least I don't think so?)

As I'm almost entirely self-taught, having another dev giving me good advice would have been nice. I've only known / worked with a few people who were better devs than I, and rarely ever received good advice from them.

One of those better devs was my first computer science teacher. Looking back, he was pretty average, but he held us to high standards and gave good advice. The two that really stuck with me were: 1) "save every time you've done something you don't want to redo," and 2) "printf is your best debugging friend; add it everywhere there's something you want to watch." Probably the best and most helpful advice I've ever received 😊

I've seen other people here posting advice like "never hardcode" or "modularity keeps your code clean" -- I had to discover these pretty simple concepts entirely on my own. School (and later college) were filled with terrible teachers and worse students, and so were almost entirely useless for learning anything new.

The only decent dev I knew had brilliant ideas (genetic algorithms, sandboxing, ...) before they were widely used, but could rarely implement them well because he was generally an idiot. (Idiot sevant, I think? Definitely the idiot part.) I couldn't stand him. Completely bypassing a ridiculously long story, I helped him on a project to build his own OS from scratch; we made very impressive progress, even to this day. Custom bootloader, hardware interfacing, memory management, (semi) sandboxed processes, gui, example programs ...; we were in highschool. I'm still surprised and impressed with what we accomplished.

But besides him, almost every other dev I met was mediocre. Even outside of school, I went so many years without having another competent dev to work with. I went through various jobs helping other dev(s) on their projects (or rewriting them), learning new languages/frameworks almost every time: php, pascal, perl, zend, js, vb, rails, node, .... I learned new concepts occasionally (which was wonderful) but overall it was just tedious and never paid well because I was too young to be taken seriously (and female, further exacerbating it). On the bright side, it didn't dwindle my love for coding, and I usually spent my evenings playing with projects of my own.

The second dev (and one one of the best I've ever met) went by Novo. His approach to a game engine reminded me of General Relativity: Everything was modular, had a rich inheritance tree, and could receive user input at any point along said tree. A user could attach their view/control to any object. (Computer control methods could be attached in this way as well.) UI would obviously change depending on how the user could interact and the number of objects; admins could view/monitor any of these. Almost every object / class of object could talk to almost everything else. It was beautiful. I learned so much from his designs. (Honestly, I don't remember the code at all, and that saddens me.) There were other things, too, but that one amazed me the most.

I havent met anyone like him ever again.

Anyway, I don't know if I can really answer this week's question. I definitely received some good advice while initially learning, but past that it's all been through discovering things on my own.

It's been lonely. ☹

The amount of much political correctness in the dev community just pisses me off sometimes.

I've watched "Use the right tool / language for the job" has become *THE* excuse for shitty tools and languages. 

Case in point -- JavaScript. If you want to make a website that interacts with the end user, the right tool is JavaScript. But that's because IT'S THE ONLY TOOL. Does that make it a *good* tool?

HELL NO.

/midranttimeout

Brendan Eich, I forgive you. You had 10 days and a corporation on your case.

That's not saying JavaScript doesn't have some good things in it. It does. But "Javascript the good parts" is a fucking thin book.

Sure, some amazing things have been written in JavaScript. Great communities have coalesced around this cancer.

BUT THATS IN SPITE OF JAVASCRIPT, NOT BECAUSE OF IT. AS A LANGAUGE IT'S STILL A STEAMING PILE OF DOGSHIT.

A master can draw great art with a shitty piece of charcoal. That doesn't make charcoal THE BEST DRAWING TOOL EVARRR. It's just a testament to the master's craft.

If you started your programming journey with JavaScript, do expand your horizons.

Break free from Stockholm's syndrome.

Discard your cognitive dissonance.

See JavaScript for what it is -- a shitty language everyone was forced to use. 

PS: Don't even get me started on Java ...

LONELINESS IS REAL
I am a freshman in a university ( about to complete my first year ) with a girl to boy ratio of around 1:10. During my first semester I was spending a lot of time with friends, chatting up with people and making connections. Due to this my productivity as a dev, if I am even capable of being called that decreased ( I was not a developer before joining , but I had an aim of being one , esp at least the best in my batch ) after 1st year. In retrospect I did nothing productive till 3 months out of 4 in my first sem and the guilt hit me hard . During the last month I had to catch up with my much neglected studies and all I had done was a little bit of html and css, and barely scratched the surface of js( please don't judge me for this :) , I had to start somewhere < although I learned a little bit of C++ > ). BUT I WAS A HAPPY CUNT, and had no sign of lonelines. Now during this sem , I had made progress ( learn js with es6 syntax and still learning, did c++ and extended my knowledge ) . Currently I am working on my Vue full stack app ( along with express and some websocket library , TBD ) < yeh I learnt some backend too > , and increasing my knowledge of dsa using clrs. Although my productivity has increased manifolds but I know feel the need of closure. I am kinda happy with the fact that I know a lot of people around here ( thanks to my extroverted 1st semester ) but sometimes it hits me hard at night when I don't have a monitor to drown my eyes and thoughts in. I have increased my academic performance too but I need someone to share and express my feelings with. I could have made a girlfriend earlier but now most of them are taken and I have lost touch. But believe me, all I want is a companion to spend these lonely days and night ( not talking about as a friend ). Staying away from home isnt easy you know...m :(

KUDOS TO DEVRANT FOR DEVELOPING A COMMUNITY WHERE PEOPLE LIKE ME CAN FEEL SAFE IN OUR NATURAL HABITAT. I COULDN'T HAVE EXPRESSED MY FEELINGS ANYWHERE ELSE EXCEPT IN A PERSONAL BLOG ( where no one would have read it )

PS1: I apologise if I sounded arrogant about any of my skill, I didn't mean that way. I ain't even that good, just kinda proud of myself a little for achieving something I couldn't have thought.

PS2: Any type of suggestions and help is much appreciated ( considering I am a college student who went into some serious development 4 months ago , I am pretty impressionable ;) )

PS3: Please don't confuse this with depression. I am HAPPY BUT LONELY

PS4: Is there a way so that I can change my username?

TM: Hey, do you have a moment?

Me: not really, I'm already overtime and have enough work for the whole year.

TM: Yeah, we know. Just a quick meeting to discuss something awkward.

Me: Hmkay.

...

Later that day:

TM: Yeah. To make it quick - we're confused and bit dissatisfied with how project X turned out. The staging server is blazing fast, but the devs machines seem to be extremely slow... Some devs complained.

Me: No wonder. I said from the beginning that the devs shouldn't do X and Y, and that the dev machines need to be redone after staging is done - as we need to gather hands on experience first, cause no one could explain to me what resources the project actually needed.

TM: Oh. I wasn't aware of that.

Me: I guessed so. You were on vacation at the beginning and I didn't had the time to lead another team...

TM: Yeah... So the dev machines get replaced?

Me: They _could_ be replaced, but the devs would need to reset up their environment, as I and won't transfer the environment of the dev user.

TM: Ah... So they would have to retransfer their personal modifications, if they made any?

Me: Yes. As always, the basic setup just provides the necessary services, settings etc. - stuff like remote IDE settings on the machine, configuration etc is left out and we don't transfer it as it is usually too much of a hassle and risky, as every dev does have his / her own preferences, and we don't want to support every possible configuration out there.

TM: Just out of curiosity... Staging was ready like... Last year?

Me: Beginning of December, yes.

TM: Sigh.

Me: The jolly of having a kinder garten full of toys that no kid wants to clean up...

TM: No comment. The kinder garten Kids might make me a Pinata otherwise.

Me: If only they'd fill us with chocolate first instead of just beating us.

...

Tales of lazy devs, to be continued...

Client : We need this feature

Team lead : Sure, we will deliver this to you in 3 days.

Meanwhile Teamlead forgets to work on it or assign it to anyone in the team while he was surrounded by many other tasks.

Client on 2nd day morning : What's the progress on that feature?

Teamlead to Client: It's going fine, we will deliver it to you on time.

Meanwhile, Teamlead to a junior developer in the team (on 2nd day afternoon): We have this priority feature where we need to finish it in one day and deliver it tomorrow!

Junior Dev to Teamlead : This is too much of work to complete it in 1 day, it atleast needs 3 days!

Teamlead to Junior dev : I don't care, can't talk, busy, just complete the work and deal with the client, bye.

And the Junior dev continues to struggle where he is unknown of the fact that the task actually was of 3 days but just because the Teamlead forgot to do the task and also to assign the task early, he is in trouble!

As a junior developer, your primary goal should be to learn and absorb as much as you can, not to try to make a name for yourself. It's all too common that I see devs fresh out of college with this amazing gung ho attitude that quickly devolves into needing to feel like the smartest person in the room.
This leads to an unnaturally inflated ego, a feeling of self importance, and blocks you from truly understanding what is going on in the stack in front of you.
That's not to say you can't try to take on difficult tasks, just be humble and ask for help when you need it, and don't make assumptions that might lead to rework later.
I would much rather you ask me a question then put up a PR that has wildly different assumptions because you didn't fully understand the acceptance criteria of a particular task.

tl;dr - sit down, shut up, do your job, learn what you can as fast as you can.

Sincerely,
A very fed up Senior Dev

I'm investigating PRs for a super legacy codebase. Someone else already approved the PRs -- somebody who has never even run the code or had the project set up before.

The codebase hasn't been touched in two years, and it hasn't been updated in four. It's using CoffeeScript, Node v0, Electron v0.30, and Angular 1.x. I obviously don't have a dev environment anymore, either, and my previous dev env was on Windows, so I'll have to translate my custom build utilities from batch to bash (or much more likely: node).

To make matters worse: the PRs break both the initial project setup and the project itself (NPM can no longer find some installed packages, among other problems). And. someone already merged them into master. So: fuck.

I'm going to yell at the author and tell him to fix his shit. Why? Because when I check out my last commit prior to his PRs, everything works perfectly. Surprise!

I was so done with this project two and a half years ago. I'm still so done with it. I just don't want to maintain this anymore, or honestly even look at it. I would happily rebuild the project from scratch, but updating it from the days of IE8? No way.

Some of y'all talk way too much shit about web development tools/libs without being web devs yourselves......

I don't know enough about OS development to talk shit, you see me doing it? no

fk me I am getting so fucking fed up with this community, it used to be cool rants about the shit that we go through, now is just pop wannabe dev ranting meme bullshit

I heard scary thing.
A tester found an issue yesterday. He came to the dev and reported about it. Apparently the only feedback message was "something went wrong". They spend almost an hour hunting down the cause for that. It turned out the error message was from one of the try-catch. I do not know much details apart from that. At the end, the dev lead said this (which he had said before).

"That's why I don't like to catch exception."

I was at a company for almost 5 years (my first job too). Got fired a few months ago by my mentor/the lead dev who was there for about 3 - 3 1/2 years of my time there. He left for better opportunities, he knew the company was pretty shitty to work for. He comes back (why???) and fires me about 1-2 months after his return.
Reason why, I'm unhealthy for the company and the company is unhealthy for me (not because I'm a bad dev, cool I guess). I don't disagree (a lot happened while he was gone, but he doesn't really know what happened) but this happens after I have a "discussion" with him about how I don't know how to prioritize my work anymore with new policies regarding billables and pms and management pushing me in multiple directions in regards to what I should be working on. (There's more to this but I'm trying to finish this rant eventually.)
I'm not surprised but I'm pissed at the company for never really improving and I'm pissed at him for drinking the kool-aid so to speak.
I want this company to fail. I'm surprised it hasn't. The place was a shit show when it came to the Dev department and my old mentors return didn't help much either.
I should get over it and move on but this place was like a toxic relationship I couldn't bring myself to leave (as much as I wanted to leave and knew I should). And there's so much to unpack with this place.
I'm hoping dev rant can be a good place to unpack the shit I dealt with there over the years so I don't burden my friends and family with my thoughts.
So yeah, hey ya'll and welcome to my rant(s).

I don't want to come off as a linux-elitist but it's simply amazing how much easier my job is on linux. A good example recently was setting up some libraries for a C++ program I was writing to show to my class. Most of them were using Windows and visual studio, took about 15 minutes to download all the headers and libs, and show them how to configure a VS solution to link them. Not too big a deal but on linux, it only took about 30 seconds to pacman and gcc -l the lib. Little things like that keep me interested in linux as a dev tool.

I love it when a fellow "dev" asks about some interesting security topic (full disk encryption) and I'm like "yeah I use LUKS pretty much everywhere".. and then takes an entire arm when given a hand.

Performance in LUKS? Yeah sure you can benchmark it within cryptsetup. Here's how to do it and choose a good cipher for your CPU.

D: Oh also how do I check my battery life?
M (thinking): you lazy fucking piece of shit.
M: FUCKING GOOGLE IT
D: Obviously that means that you don't know it.
M (thinking): so not only lazy but also disgustingly ungrateful, fucking twat.
M: acpi. Next time fucking Google it.
D: You know what? Never mind.

As if I'm the one that's fucking wrong now!! But you know what, never mind indeed. Because you've successfully wasted my fucking time instead of fucking googling "check battery life Linux" like a sensible dev would.

Fellow "dev", if you're on devRant I hope you read this. You can seriously go fuck yourself.

My first dev job my boss, understood me so well. i think he must of been like me as a kid. Much like when people go to uni people say they change so much. He knew i was just in my shell, shy, but capable.

I turned 18 and he straight away wanted to get me to nightclubs! i don't remember much from the night, except, i got into a bit of a fight (we won) stole a huge pitcher of some kind of drink (to drunk to taste it) and danced on the tallest part of the stage most of the night, kind of like the spotlight of the entire place. It was epic, and it certainly made me come out of me shell.

I wonder if flappy bird dev is in this community. Anyway, I want to ask you guys - What would have you done if you were in his situation?

I hear he removed the game after he saw people are wasting too much time on it.

People waste too much time on porn, Facebook, YouTube and what not. I don't understand his reasoning behind removing the game.

Anyway, what would have you done?

Manager: "Hi Almond, how is X going?"

Almond: "...I don't know, Bob is in charge of that."

Manager: "Ok. Do you know the status of Y at all?"

Almond: "Not sure, isn't that Bob's responsibility too?"

Manager: "Well, yeah, but I never seem to be able to get a good answer out of him. Find out on both fronts and let me know ASAP please"

...sure, I know how this goes. I'll stop all the dev work I'm doing, do your job for you, talk to the lazy bonehead that never bothers doing anything, report back that he's done sod all (or still "in a requirements gathering phase" as he puts it), be asked "why is he taking so long", have a bit more back and forth, then decide we'll just leave him be as actually trying to get him to do any work is going to be too much like hassle 😒

Me : *trying to download latest version of android studio*
Google: "Your client does not have permission to get URL /studio/index.html from this server. That’s all we know."
Me: FUCK YOU GOOGLE
Me: *googles: دانلود اندروید استودیو* (which means download android studio)
*and downloads it from a random website*

It happens every goddamn time, why the fuck i can't download this shit !? Because these countries are fighting each other all the time! What did i do wrong in my life? I just want to download your fucking app to write another shitty app to continue my fucking life. I don't know shit about this wars happening, I'm just a dev like others all over the world.
Downloading an app, is that too much to ask? Well fuck you then.

Interviewed at a pseudo-startup (not quite a startup, but later realized run and organized like one) where the VP of dev ops seemed eager to have me in. I sent him my code sample and he said he'd schedule an onsite. Weeks went by without a peep.

Being persistent, I kept emailing, figuring the environment still might be worth the apparent lack of interest... Eventually the dude told me he'd been away on "travel" and he didn't check his mail. He said come on by if I was still interested...

I went in and met with a couple people on the team, interviewed (I think) well and he said he'd be in touch. Another two weeks -- nothing. I emailed again, he said they hadn't reached a decision. By this time, I'd pretty much written it off. I never heard anything back. No good, no bad.

Moral of the story, don't waste your time on anyone who doesn't respect it enough to give you theirs.

Usually I develop in python, mongo, cordova and node. Few days back I installed Windows on my laptop cause I needed to use the Visual Studio for a specific task. Then I thought that if I can setup the python, mongo, cordova and node stack on Windows then I don't need to switch between Linux and Windows frequently. And that was a horrible decision.

It took almost 8-10 hours to setup that shit, and still I couldn't make it work. There are so much complexities and those do not make any fucking sense! I mean why the hell I need to add the python path to the environment variables, and then again add the pip path separately. Then mongodb can not autostart. And finally I needed to make and build a package, and that waa the moment when I just scrapped it.

It takes me 2-3 hours to setup a fresh Linux box (which supports apt) including the OS installation. Same for the osX. I still wonder that why Microsoft does this! If Windows is for non-dev and non-tech people then why don't they release a Windows developer edition? Developing anything except ASP.NET and Java in Windows is a fucking nightmare for me!

Yknow what the best part about Unix is? (Not Linux. Like old school Unix. AIX, HPUX, or in this specific case: Solaris)

It never needs to be updated. like ever. Even when new features are added 5 years ago to add features that GNU has had for literally decades. Updates are for the weak. Because why should I be able to type "netstat -natup" when instead you can enjoy several hours of developing the nightmare one-liner that is:

Pfiles /proc/* | awk '/^[0-9]/ {p=$0} /port/ {printf "%.4s %-30s %-8s %s\n", $1,$3,$5,p}' 2>/dev/null

Isn't that just so much more fun?!
Thanks guys. I'm going back to GNU now if you don't mind.

20 minutes trying to convince my boss (lead dev) that dynamically create tables on DB based on file name to store uploaded json content isn't a good design approach and he is still convinced that 500 lines will really impact performance that much on one table and that this is the best design...

Based on this approach, he wants to create another table with the user who last modified and the "fk" (not sure if he even knows what this is cause none of the fks here point to anything...) would be the table name... now I know where those hideous tables we have here come from...

Don't know if I laugh or cry...

!dev (Please, don't take this very seriously, I'm kind of burnt out)

I'm not having a good time.

I can't even write a post to properly explain how I feel.

I feel disappointed by life and by myself in many levels. Life is disappointing. I am disappointing too.

I'm having issues to focus, can't even write a couple of lines of code.

Time to listen to some emo lofi and write about how much I hate myself.

I wished I didn't feel these feelings.
I wished I didn't regret so many things I did or didn't do.
I wished I could fucking understand everything I read, but I don't, everything I read is gibberish, every paragraph makes me feel like I'm drifting in a storm.

I wished I was happy with my career, with my job. I wished I had a true friend.
I wished I could finish one goddamn fucking project for once.

I wished there was something that made me unique, but I don't think there's any.
I just feel like an ant, and that I don't really matter.

I don't feel like I'm someone at all, I feel like I'm experiencing a dream, and a rather boring one.

Programming used to be challenging and fun for me, but it has become this dull and stressful ordeal.

The internet has shown me that I don't matter really. I remember being a little kid and believing that the internet would not discriminate you, that right from the comfort of your house you could connect to people and be cared for, and collaborate in something.

But every year that passes I see that I was wrong. I have tried to put in time into people, I have asked people how they're doing, I have cared for their projects. But there's no reciprocation.

The internet itself has become a thing where the big fish only matters. The top 1k users will get 99% of the attention.

Fuck nurture, rule competition.

What's the point of creating a github project that you think it's cool? No one will give two shits about it, it won't make a goddamn difference whether you push it or not.

You know what fucking matters? If you're an apple or google developer and have thousands of followers.

Bla, bla, bla, I'm depressed...

Worst things about being a dev? Boy, this will be a long one!
- Whatever I do, be it hard work or smart work, I feel I am always underpaid.

- Most people who don't know tech feel my job shouldn't take that long. "Oh, a website that should be easy." "Oh, REST services, that's cute!"

- Most people who know a little tech will be like, "Here is the code for this on Google, then why are you charging this much"

- Companies like Microsoft and Apple who are too cool to follow standards.

- Always underpaid!

- The friggin compilers and random environment vars. Sometimes you make no change and the code works on a restart. I mean wtf!

- Having to give/meet deadlines, when we know most of the times things get out of control.

- Having to work for jerks mostly who don't know squat, and can't tell the difference between a CPU and a Wooden box.

- Sometimes I wanna take a break from my laptop(traveling and stuff) , those are the times I get the maximum work load!

- Did I mention we are always underpaid?

- Because of the kind of work I do, finding a girl has been challenging. Where the heck are they!

- We have to stay always updated. Often we deploy something using a framework and the next day we see an update.

- Speaking of updates, I hate having to support for OSes like Microsoft.

- Speaking of OSes, I hate Apple!

- Speaking of Apple, I feel we are underpaid, de javu?
...
How much would you hate me if I wrote "just kidding" ?

First day back. I am a junior Dev a year and a half of work.
I get in after Christmas break and find people standing around my desk turns out all senior staff (except CEO and PM who are both non-technical ) are away and an email. Basically saying it's up to me for the next week to manage people.

FU&£&# what the heck I don't have a clue what I am doing and I can't mange if I could I would be a manager pays better. So I designate to people took me an hour to figure out what people can actually get on with. Then PM wants a break down of the plan. Then meeting with CEO over the importance of these projects and told 'politely' shortest deadline to date most work, get it done the company depends on these projects if you don't well it would be the end of you.

Get back to my desk people need work I should be getting on with to do theirs but I have been busy in silly meetings and litrually every 5 mins get nagged 'have I done it yet'. But as I am about done they discover what they should have been working on is doable without my work. I don't shake but at one point today I was shaking so much with nerves I couldn't type. Had a very short lunch and stayed on late sorting people problems out. (Thankfully the even more junior people are nice and 1 did help me at one point today I'm so great full for the help)

I'm a junior no training in the technologies I work with not even before starting the job. £3 million+ worth of projects and possible future client resting on my shoulders... (Thankfully the real project lead and senior members are back next week although won't be long left till deadline) Wtf ...
Anyone got a job going I want out!

After I spent 4 years in a startup company (it was literally just me and a guy who started it).

Being web dev in this company meant you did everything from A-Z. Mostly though it was shitty hacky "websites/webapps" on one of the 3 shitty CMSs.

At some point we had 2 other devs and 2 designers (thank god he hired some cause previously he tried designing them on his own and every site looked like a dead puppy soaked in ass juice).

My title changed from a peasant web dev to technical lead which meant shit. I was doing normal dev work + managing all projects. This basically meant that I had to show all junior devs (mostly interns) how to do their jobs. Client meetings, first point of contact for them, caring an "out of hours" support phone 24/7, new staff interviews, hiring, training and much more.

Unrealistic deadlines, stress and pulling hair were a norm as was taking the blame anytime something went wrong (which happened very often).

All of that would be fine with me if I was paid accordingly, treated with respect as a loyal part of the team but that of course wasn't the case.

But that wasn't the worst part about this job. The worst thing was the constant feeling that I'm falling behind, so far behind that I'll never be able to catch up. Being passionate about web development since I was a kid this was scaring the shit out of me. Said company of course didn't provide any training, time to learn or opportunities to progress.

After these 4 years I felt burnt out. Programming, once exciting became boring and stale. At this point I have started looking for a new job but looking at the requirements I was sure I ain't going anywhere. You see when I was busy hacking PHP CMSs, OOPHP became a thing and javascript exploded. In the little spare time I had I tried online courses but everyone knows it's not the same, doing a course and actually using certain technology in practice. Not going to mention that recruiters usually expect a number of years of experience using the technology/framework/language.

That was the moment I lost faith in my web dev future.

Happy to say though about a month later I did get a job in a great agency as a front end developer (it felt amazing to focus on one thing after all these years of "full-stack bullshit), got a decent salary (way more than I expected) and work with really amazing and creative people. I get almost too much time to learn new stuff and I got up to speed with the latest tech in a few weeks. I'm happy.

Advice? I don't really have any, but I guess never lose faith in yourself.

Did I ever say I love my PM? He's fucking awesome.

In the summer I got an internship at this company and the PM had plans to turn me into a permanent employee, junior position I assume. I told him I'd need a month after school started to see how things went with school and the job at the same time. In the end I decided I couldn't work full-time because I don't have time for it. Also, I want to explore a bit the CS field and see if there's anything else I like (quantum computing and low level programming are at the top of my list), so I decided I won't be renewing my contract as an intern either.

Last week I went into a call with my PM to tell him about all of this and I did not expect the response I got. He actually thinks I'm doing right and supported me in my decision to learn other things. I didn't expect this kind of response at all and it made me feel much, much better (I was pretty nervous to tell him). He also told me that if I want to work on something else in order to learn I just have to ask (I currently do web dev).

But that's not all. He gives us, developers, space to work and doesn't micromanage us. He has technical understanding, doesn't force deadlines on us and understands that sometimes things take longer than expected. He is just great and I'm kind of sad I'll be leaving this job because he's awesome and (from what I read here on devrant) that seems to be pretty rare.

Anyways, that's it, no anger or anything today, I just wanted to say I like my PM very much.

On negotiation and signing contract
================================
manager: yes you will work 8 hours a day from Tatta hours to Tat tat ta hours.
dev: okay great, i accept it. So no overtime and everythings right?
manager: that we will consider.
dev: hmm okay
=========================

Start working for about 1 month
=========================
manager: John, you not showing up at the office today? What happened?
dev: Sir, I have to stay up all night finished the last task as required and just sleep around 6am in the morning.
manager: John, i need to tell you. your performance is very great. Our clients are happy.
You deliver all the task. We love you, John.
dev: Yes thank you so much. I am happy too, but i need to sleep now i been over time for the last 3 weeks.
Manager: don't worry john, you will get reward later.
===================================
Weeks later:
dev: i need to request for leave, i am over work and now i am sick, my eye got red and cannot look at the screen.
manager: what is happening this month, you been late to work and you not deliver the task, you are sick and this and that, and depressed and whatever... tata taata,
dev: sir, when i first started you said i could only have to work 8 hours a day, now I work more than 12 hours day. What's change?
================================
life as devs in tough companies, high expectation and shit.

Me: Asking a lot of junior questions
Dev: Stop! Before you ask another question - think for 10 minutes, google another 15 minutes and if you don't find anything - ask me.

^ This was the best thing he said, after that I can google pretty much anything, and hell, I even go to 5-th page of the google from time to time!

Those weeks when you get calls from recruiters offering you up to four times your current salary.

I enjoy my job, love the atmosphere, team spirit, freedom (although sometimes there's a bit too much of this!), but I have a family and am saving to extend our house.

I don't want to let my team down, I'm the only programmer dev in a team of 3 (others do front end web design but not much JS), but sometimes I wonder if I should pursue one of these better offers...

I might be fucked up, but I have a tendency to gravitate towards the shit that everyone else dislikes for the sake of knowing if their bias against is actually because shit is truly fucked up or if shit is legit plain WRONG.

From all technologies that I have worked with professionally I can count:

Java(currently in the form of old JSP services for an "enterprise level application")

Java for Android development - i was the lead engineer for a mobile project

Swift with IOS dev, same gig as the above.

C++ for Android development in the form of OpenCV with Java as well.

Javascript in all possible forms, basic input validation, ajax services, jquery datatables, jquery animations and builders.

Css/sass heavily

Clojure for an ldap active directory application

Python for glue scripts

Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript

VB Net forms

C# For ASP.NET MVC

Bootstrap for multiple intranet frontends

Node+Express for a logistics warehouse management tool

Ruby on Rails freelancing small gigs

Php in all ways possible from complete standalone php apps to Laravel and just php+composer apps aaaaall the way to wordpress

Django consulting

I have found that the one that I dislike the most is wordpress. And the one that I like working with the most is Node. Don't know why, i just do really fucking like messing around with Javascript, the language has changed a fuckload throughout the years and continues to increase and change. It was my first scripting language following a stint in me trying to learn cpp way when i was starting and royally FAILING

Never really got the hate for it, even when I used JScript with classic ASP i just enjoy working with Javascript a lil too much. And from all the above mentioned stacks safe from Php is the one, or one of the ones in which i don't royally suck :V

I'm a junior dev working with some very proprietary applications. The point is, I can't Google for code solutions at all.

The seniors are all very put upon and too busy to offer much actual help unless it's urgent.

I beg for assistance until I'm blue in the face and eventually stumble my way to something resembling the solution.

I get one of them to review my code, and while they do I point out all the places I STILL need help.

They don't answer any of those questions but damned if they don't have opinions on how my comments should be formatted.

Aaauuuuggghhhh

So... I've got a confession to make.
I'm no longer a Dev. After the disaster that was my last commercial gig, I went and got a sec Ops role... And I love it. It's just technical problem solving and explaining all the way.
Don't get me wrong, I still love to code. But that's exactly the thing. As a commercial developer employed by corporations, I spent close to 80 % of my time not coding, but in useless meetings, or trying to figure out just what my colleagues thought was "common sense", reverse engineering their work and documenting how to get it running, etc. Basically, fixing shit for braindead academics with next to no real world experience.
Now, when I code, I get to do it on my own terms, with my own stack and as much comments and docs as I want to have. I own my time, and the only ones that are allowed to interrupt me is the local fire department.
I can do what I'm fucking passionate about and leave the rest for the useless people.

Why dont people trust you?

I was hired to be an SQL developer, I don't actually get to do much development, normally doing something involving copying and pasting in Excel.

Some of our databases were running slow and we noticed some (a few hundred) indexes were in shit state.

I knocked up a couple of scripts, one to reorganise indexes that were up to a certain amount of fragmentation and one to rebuild the indexes

My boss wants them tested (they were several times in dev) we've had these for over 3 weeks, but she doesn't want to run them.

Instead of fixing hundred of indexes she decided I should contrate on fixing some historic data issues that are preventing 10 indexes from being rebuilt.

Now there are serious issues and the CTO is asking why the indexes haven't been fixed.

I could have done this nearly a month ago, but now it's turned into a huge fucki g deal, and no doubt they'll try and push it back on me

VoIP meeting today lasted 7 minutes.
I have kept the board down to ~5 ticket average for the last 3 months.

Co-worker(jokingly): I guess we don't need you anymore.
CEO: Quite the contrary. @chenb0x may need a promotion.
Me: *smirks*

This is why I like working for this company. Love the culture....no matter how much I may bitch about the clients.

'How did I get here?' a young dev may ask.

1. Delegate where proper
2. Script whatever can be scripted
3. When the board is low in tickets, it becomes a recursive responsibility to keep it low.

Back story
-----------------
When I was hired, the VoIP board was sitting at a ~30-40 ticket average.

Java dev here. I rewrote an app and replaced a system call to ssh with a modern jaxrs post for uploading a file and (new) some additional data.
I even used a stream.

1 hour in production, first client doesn't get his file. Log says OutOfMemoryError: heap.

Me: wtf? I already use streams.
Looking at the Jersey library. Docs say nothing. An issue from 2013 says: oh if you silly don't use the Apache httpclient addon, we disable chunking and buffer the whole body, because our tests fail with the jdk included http client otherwise.

Me: meh.

No warning in the logs. Thank you soooooo much! Who could have known?

I was not having much respect for out front-end developer, as the UI is not so good., yea. I know it UI depends on the designer.

Now the new design changed and our UI looks awesome.,

and I must say that my respect increased a lot when my pm asked him to fix the layout in UC Browser.

Fucking shit., in UC it is showing two lanes as one lane. I don't know why., he was working hard to fix that.

Massive Respect to him. I really happy by being backend dev.

10 year anniversary 'celebration' for a couple of employees (one dev, one a DBA) and the VP of the department was saying kind words about them, talking about the 'good old days'.

VP to the DBA: "I apologize, when you started, you walked into my database architecture. I didn't know that much back then and never thought about the architecture much beyond a few years. Its amazing my design has lasted over 20 years and triple digit business growth..blah blah blah"

Inner voice: "Mother F-er!...My database was designed IN SPITE of your meddling and demanding to create 1,500 field tables. Shut the F up you egotistical bastard!"

I can't even count how many times I had to stop him from, for example, adding a 'ProductID' field to a Customer table.

Me: "Why did you add a product id field?"
VP: "How else will we know what product the customer wants to buy?"
Me: "You mean like a wish list? What if the customer wants more than one product?"
VP: "Oh, that’s easy, we'll create more fields when that happens. ProductID2. Microsoft made it really easy to add fields."
Me: "We already have a wish list table schema. Customer can have as many wish lists and as many products as they want."
VP: "I don't understand. All I want is a field for me to store the product I'm buying. I don't know why you make this so hard, its just one more field."

Now the VP is bragging all the success was due to his expertise?! Gaaaaahhhh!

I quelled my rage with ample quantities of donuts, juice, and chocolate milk.

Management Double standards...
At a previous employer, the manager had me doing some QA testing for a updated version of some customer facing UIs. I spent 3 days constantly testing, except for my lunch break.
Every bug that I found I sent to a Sr dev.
Now this Sr dev was a coding savant. I mean awesome coder, but he had the personality of a rat and snake combined. If he wasn't coding he was brown-nosing the manager, talking about how he was doing all the work, or trying to rat on us other devs.
Anyway this dev has spent the 3 days of bug fixing alternating between watching videos and fixing bugs. Don't know what the videos were, don't realy care. I do know that he did not like to be disturbed while watching them...
On the third day, on my lunch break, I decided to watch two fifiteen minute videos on VSTS feeds and linking node packages.
As soon as I started Sr dev came over and asked me if I was focused on the teams priorities. I told him that it was my lunch break and since this was related to an upcoming sprint I thought it was worth it.
This S.O.B. goes full out hissy fit. He was flat out throwing a tantrum like my small daughter would. He made such a noise that my manager walked over and asked what was going on.
This shitbag Sr dev smirked at me and asked to speak to the manager in his office. When the manager called me over I knew what was up. I was lectured on not focusing on the teams priorities. I tried to explain that the videos were relevant to an upcoming sprint but was shot down. When I brought up the fact that the Sr dev was watching videos, the manager told me flat out that he didn't care. I was mad and told the manager that this was bullshit. All the manager cared about was keeping the Sr dev happy. I was told to "treat <shithead sr dev> with respect or else".
It was at that time I decided to look for another job. Less than a month later I left, for a much better paying job with awesome benefits. Sr dev acted like he was hurt I was leaving. Manager couldn't have cared less.
When some others on the team heard what he did, they started looking for work elsewhere too.
A month after I left another Sr dev on the same project left. At the same time a BA and QA tester demanded to be put on another team or else they would leave.
Manager started out with a team of 6 was left with only two people.
When the last one left, manager had the nerve to ask me why I didn't let him know anyone was unhappy. I told him if he cared so little for me, why would I think he care about them.
Ultimately, leaving was one of the best things I could have done.

Me, the only iOS dev at work one day, and colleague (who we'll call AndroidBoy), the only Android dev at work that same day (he's been working with us for less than two months). There was a change in one of the jsons we received from the server: instead of receiving a list, we now received a dictionary with strings as keys and lists as values. My iOS colleague had already made this modification on our parse function the day before.

AndroidBoy: "Hey what happened with the json?"
Me: "Oh, well instead of parsing a list, we'll parse a dictionary and get the list from each key. You basically have to do the same thing, only this time the lists are organized into categories."
AndroidBoy: "Oh, ok. But I don't know how to parse a dictionary while using Retrofit." (Context: Retrofit is a framework for request handling - correct me if I am mistaken, that's just what I've been told)
Me: "Sucks, dude, can't help ya. I've never worked with that and don't have that much exp. with Android."

I go out for a cigarette break. When I return, AndroidBoy is nowhere to be seen and suddenly I can't seem to get that data in my app. AndroidBoy comes in from the room where the backend colleagues work.

AndroidBoy: "Solved it!"
Me: "Solved what?"
AndroidBoy: "I told them to change back to a list and just put the key inside the objects of the list."

... he used the precious time of the backend colleagues to change the thing back hust because he was too lazy to search how to parse a dictionary. I was so amazed by his answer, that I didn't know whether to laugh, scream at him or punch him in the face. Not to mention the fact that now I had to revert just so he could avoid that extra work.

"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.

Pretty much right now. I'm seething, just thinking about going to work in a few short hours.

I work for a company that doesn't respect me. A fucking simpleton designer who can do no wrong has changed everything about a project that I'm responsible for, hundreds of times. She gets out a ruler (yes, really), measures stuff against her little mockups (that are also prone to changing without notice), and screams when things don't precisely match her "designs" on every single device she can get her goddamned hands on. She's changed everything except the deadline. I have gotten none of the recognition and all of the blame, and I'm completely over it. This is nothing new. In addition to being a dev team of one, I also found out that I'm the third such person in my company's employ in the last two years, and I've worked here for one.

The final straw was when I was given a schedule for the next project, which I had not been consulted on. It was a printout of an email. Copied in the email was the designer, my boss, and an intern. A FUCKING GOD DAMNED HOURLY INTERN.

Fast forward one week.

I'm in third stage interviews with half a dozen companies right now, second stage interviews with at least that many. When I do get another job, I was originally going to give notice, but I think now I'll just give my boss a printout of an email to the interns and walk out.

Shove the internet up your ass, you fucking fucks

!dev

I need to rant about something that has been on my mind lately.

Someone, actually. Friend/romantic interest of mine, from a few years back.

NGL, I liked him. A lot more than I should have. The man had his own issues, but I refused to tolerate his poisonous behavior. Truth be told, didn't want to hate him, even though he was trying his best to get me there. And so, one day I ended up blocking him after a fight. A few months back, I tried to reconnect. Same behavior. But this time around he did say that he was done with me. So instead of sitting through the torture of his "reasons why you suck" presentation, I blocked him again.

Now, I hope he's doing well. Never wanted anything but happiness for him. And as much as I miss him, I think it's better for him to stay away from me too. I mean, if I trigger him that badly, maybe I shouldn't be around him anyways.

Nowadays, I'm staying away from someone else again. Similar scenario. Reason being that I was actually being mistreated, and again I refuse to be tortured to the point of hating the object of my affection.

I wonder if I get attracted to the torture. I'm okay with dying alone tbh, what I'm not okay with is falling for those who don't want my love and much rather kill it.

... Actually, at this point in life I don't even want to fall for anyone anymore. (That is not the same thing as dating someone I like tho. That, I would do) The darker side of me says those who I fall for are all the same type of disappointment, but the brighter side says that I am enough, complete as is, and not everyone needs someone else. idk maybe I'm being a tad narcissistic, or hyper-independant, or flakey and afraid of attachment. But that first friend occasionally pops up in my thoughts, and reminds me that not everyone appreciates when you don't let someone make you hate them.

Oh well. *sigh*

A bit of backstory...

I have been the sole dev at my organization for awhile now (other two left for other jobs), so I have been maintaing and writing new code to support the business.

Our company was recently acquired by a larger entity and it has been very strange so far.

1. It has taken 5 weeks to acquire local admin rights on my own machine (I work remote) as well as a visual studio license.

2. We have known for a few weeks now we are getting a jr dev who will need the SAME procedures done on his machine/account and it has been two weeks now and nothing has been done. (Tickets have been put it - the issues have been escalated etc etc)

3. All of our code from our old company is in Azure Devops (which is connected to Azure AD) for some reason I haven't been able to add an external account (for my new account and org) to move the code elsewhere. I don't have the authority (I don't think) to place all of our code in a new location (GitHub,GitLab, self hosted solutions, etc)

4. All of our production VMs are billed through our old org located in Azure, so eventually that bill will stop being paid since we transitioned - I've brought this up to my manager (more non technical) who wasn't terribly worried about it.

5. I'm feeling slightly unfulfilled in this position. Earlier in my time here it was new and exciting, but there isn't much direction, not many goals, or interesting problems to solve.

Just wanted to express some issues that had been going on. Feel free to add ant feedback of suggestions 😄

!dev

I have a couple of thoughts about social justice controversies from these last years.

I think it's hard to have a good opinion about these events for several reasons.

One reason is that finding good information in 2019 is very hard.

Revenue based sites (thus unneutral) dominate the search results. You search about something and you find thousands of sites basically saying the same thing (because they copy each other).

That's why the existence of a free and open search engine is so important, so it's easier to find neutral hence good information on which to base your opinions, but they are prohibitively big for small groups to build.

Another reason is that controversies generate shock and shock curtails rational thinking. Maybe that's how the primitive brain works?

I'm not much of a scholar to feel confident to say that, but it's so recurrent that it's not too much of a wild guess.

When a controversy happens, a natural reaction is to pick a side. This means that:
a) we assume that there are only 2 sides, and
b) we must pick one of them

So, maybe the human is a bad politician by nature?

Also, because of the shock controversies generate, peaceful dialogue is very rare.

I have yet to see peaceful dialogue online about what patriarchy means to feminists and a lot of other terms they use.

I don't care much about feminists that vandalize or interrupt talks (yelling over someone else is abuse in my opinion).

But for the rest of them, I think discussing their ideas would be good.

I say this because most feminist discourse I see online is not open. Or maybe there are such instances but the web is so big that it's hard to find such instances.

I think some part of the modern feminist doctrine is bullshit, and some part is true.

I for one hate when some men I know in life expect their wives to be their cooks+cleaners (unless they want to do that, willingly). Personally, I'd encourage my wife to get a job (rightfully so, not just to meet some minority quota in some company).

I don't mind either calling a trans person the pronoun she wants.

But other ideas are awful, like the idea that meritocracy is patriarchy, so you need to force minorities to meet a proportionate quota. That's terrible reasoning.

Or the excessive self appreciation culture, like saying to yourself "you are pretty, you are beautiful, you are perfect". I think that grows arrogance and black-or-white thinking.

And some other ideas as well.

I guess the same you can say about any doctrine with different degrees. Some part is bullshit, some part isn't.

Some right wing people hate everyone who isn't white by default, but some want to have more immigration control.

I sure don't like the experiment of separating children from families like the current us govt did, but I wouldn't be happy either to know that by '99 50% of gangs members in the us were hispanic.

With this, I'm not going to say "embrace everyone's ideas" like an idiot. I hate when people do that. It's a stupid and weak reaction to radicalism.

In fact I think the way you fight radicalism and bad doctrines is that you listen to them and maintain good dialogue and counterargue in a respectful but insightful manner.

Making snide remarks, insulting or trolling won't change anyone's mind. That is just throwing fire to the fire.

In fact, when someone gets harassed because of something they believe in, usually it results in even more adherence to their beliefs, because of the usual assumption that success or goodness is full of strife.

So by telling a "sjw" or kkk member that they are idiots over twitter, you are in fact making them stronger believers in their doctrine.

Think of Daryl Davis, a black guy that made 200 members leave the kkk. How? He didn't tell them they were assholes, he somehow made friends with them.

I feel bad now because I've been trolling new devrant users a lot because of how they worsen the quality of the site, but maybe I should tell them that they are ruining the site somehow in a nice way and maybe they'll listen? I dunno...

Fuck. I'm fucking alive. The past month or so has been hectic. I've mainly been working, sleeping, or at school (not like I've showed up much lately anyways, maybe 12 days or so since the middle of February).

!dev

I'm fucking tired.

Bought an FX 8350 with the Wraith cooler for my desktop, got it for $70 when normally it's about $140 or so. Gonna replace the PSU and case when I get paid on Saturday, cause I don't have to pay anything with this check, so it's all to myself. Cut myself putting a heatsink back on my motherboard, still hurts 3 days later.

My "best friend" is still not talking to me. But she's been talking ABOUT me. Oh well. Nothing I can do about it now. I'm done with the whole situation with her. It's just her crying over every little thing.

My rants tend to be about my personal life, and this one is no exception. I just have a lot of shit going on and I need to get it out sometimes.

Making my own game console.

I work with FPGAs and have access to a bunch of pretty nice dev boards, so building a workable CPU and GPU is definitely possible. I even have architectures for both in mind, and have planned ways to get compiler support (i.e. just use RISC-V as the ISA as much as possible so that I can reuse an existing RISC-V compiler with minimal changes) so that I don't need to write assembly.

But, lack of time. Sigh.

Tech Lead: We need to exclude logged in user from our all users API as we don't want to show user's self card on the frontend with other users.

Me (Backend dev): This should be handled by the frontend and they should exclude it by a condition in their loop:

If (user.id != loggedUser.id)
{
// Add card
}

We also need self user at several other places.

Tech Lead: Create a query param filter for that.

Me: We should keep our APIs as generic as possible.

(Real thing starts)

Tech Lead: Which has more processing power frontend or backend?

Me (confused): Backend

Tech Lead: This will add a break to our loop and Do you know how much processing power it will take because of this condition?

Me (dead): WHAAAA....?

Hey guys it's not a rant, but i feel this place might help...
I am a 20 yr old, second year guy ...have got some experience in core Java and after that, i have been doing android for 8months... Yeah , i coded some basic apps got my hands dirty on firebase, sql libraries and some connectivity...
Even got landed in an internship.

Today i feel myself to be an intermediate android dev , nd i know their are many things that can be learnt in android that i don't know..
But what after that?development as a carrier interests me, but i fear for a job security ... I could learn more of Android,maybe learn ios after that but their are always articles coming out that react is future, webapps will replace android and stuff like that...
I Have also heard stuff like companies today want to squeeze more out of their techs, so they want less and complete developers having experience in both web and mobile app designing and other stuff like that
Are you freakin kidding me? Android and ios alone are like drinking Pacific and indian ocean and to add web developing, its like drinking out every drop of ocean in the world.
I guess their are guys which exist with knowledge of all three, maybe I can cover them all too(someday) but that would take my whole clg life of 4 years..(I guess)
And no ,I don't have problems with that too.. I actually like developing but again i hear big words like cloud computing, AR,VR AI, data sciences, automation, graphics designing, game dev, and many more...

Basically i hear too much and i fear too much 😅 and i don't think closing my ears would be a good choice...
So, which ocean of carrier should i aim to go for?nd are my fears real? Do companies really prefer some web guy designing Amazon like apps over android-only guys like me?is automation nd templates really gonna take all we, developers jobs?should i look into ai/data sciences?

Well , i am a simple guy, who got his first pc at 17 so naturally, i am fascinated even by the working of a calculator app and anything relates to tech so am open to pursue my interests in any fields

Things I wish people had said at my first job (in light of lots of the people I see starting their first dev gig on here). Please add yours.

Congrats!
Take a breath, you will be fine.
If you get frustrated, take a moment to collect your thoughts.
Don't be afraid to say you don't know, you are not expected to know everything.
Your workday needs to end at a decent time. Don't overdo it or you will be useless for more of your hours.
Always take whatever length of time you think something will take and double it. If you think it will take 15 minutes, it'll probably take your 4 hours.
Concentrate on networking and personal relationships.
Pick the smartest people who have moved the most vertically and pay attention to what they say, they might know a lot.
When management makes an "unwise" or "crazy" decision, ask them why or what the context or motive is that made then arrive at that course of action. Some of them might surprise you in their bigger picture motives or dumbassedness.
Six sigma may be in your future, learn what it is.
Automate as much of your own job as possible.

Um, that's all I've got for now. Hopefully that's helpful to people just starting out. Feel free to add yours.

Me: We have a new research project for you. We need you to test these 2 new services, see how they will fit into the new application, look at alternatives if necessary etc. At the end we need you to write a report with your findings, showing how you would integrate them to achieve X, Y and Z, and how much it would cost each month.

Dev: sounds good, I'll come back to you when I have it.

*2 and a half weeks later*

Document paragraph 1: The new language translation service doesn't support the languages we need.

Document paragraph 2: Here's my proposal for integrating the new language translation service.

*review*

Me: So I had a look at the doc and it says it doesn't support the languages.

Dev: yeah unfortunately not.

Me: Ok, so when you discovered that, why didn't you look for an alternative? Or come back to me and say it's not going to work.

Dev: I dunno, I thought you'd want to see the rest of the research first.

Me: ... not if we know for 100% undeniable fact that it will never function.

Dev: Ah ok, I didn't think of that. I'll do that next time, don't worry.

... aw how sweet, he thinks there will be a next time. Poor guy.

!rant !notrant !confession_maybe? Bit of a read.

Last year, around September (around 8 months into my first job in the industry), I started loosing motivation to be a developer. By then I had consistently dropped out of 3 or 4 courses for my degree (no penalties as it was pretty much within the starting weeks of the each course). I was think that I do not want to do this. It got so bad that I was looking for other jobs and even trade apprenticeships (I am old-ish so chances of that are so bloody low).
I had my mind set. Including not wanting to finish the degree I had started, which only had 1 year as full time to complete.

My missus supported me in my decision making, but she insisted that I finish the degree as the years I spent on it would have been a waste if I don't. So I agreed, with the idea that I will do this part time when I find another job.

Fast forward to New Years and a very spontaneous decisions was made. I resigned from my dev job and we ended up moving away to another city, two weeks later. By this point on I was so certain that I did not want to be in the IT industry. I had not done any dev work (personal projects or learning new technology etc) outside of the job for months. It had been months since I've visited devrant (to be honest it was not even installed on my phone, mainly because I broke my phone and after having it replaced I had not reinstalled a large portion of the apps I used). I had sold my custom built pc thinking that we do not need two PC's (we kind of don't, she's fine with her laptop) which meant no more dev stuff as none of this stuff was set up on my missus pc. I was looking for all kinds of jobs outside of the IT industry, anything really.

But then something happened. And this is that something. I mean this, deverant. I was flicking through the apps list on google play store, and I saw devrant, and I choose to reinstall it. I began reading rants and comments and I am certain that this made me realise why I want to be a developer. Within about 2 weeks of redownloading deverant I was enrolled full time as a uni student fully motivated to earn my degree.

There are bits and pieces left out of the story. I don't regret leaving my first ever dev job and moving away, it does seem drastic but it changed me for the better I believe. I have the experience from that role and I new fresh start so to speak. I think my missus new this was just a phase, although it felt so certain about it.

I am more of a lurker than a ranter or a commenter on this social platform but I felt that I need to share this. Thanks for reading this. Not really sure what to tag this. Has anyone else experienced this before?

So this one day I'm at work and the manager peaks into my office and just says "can you check that platform X is building, pretty much done just a basic bug check" (this bloke had negative 1 technical experience)

I'm not sure what he means, the whole thing is built in Java and I know nothing about that...

I log in the platform on dev server, sure enough it seems to work, charts are drawn, no errors, then I try to log out; this button does nothing...

I don't bother telling the manager, I just go to the dev who's a friend of mine and tell him about it.

A week later, manager jumps in the room all excited "we're launching this product tomorrow, mind checking again?"

Sure, I log in, ... There's no log out button, it's gone... I ask the dev.

"Yeah I fixed it, it's gone now!"

them: welcome new project members, this is our CI/CD pipeline which is completely different from the rest of the company, there won't be any great knowledge transfer, we just expect you to be able to know and use everything. but also, we expect you to work on your tasks and don't waste any time.
me: okay, so my tasks aren't going as fast as expected, because I need to invest some learning so i can set up my project correctly.
later: some help would be nice, i'm stuck right now
coworker: *helps me to fix my problems, which were partly due to misconfigured build servers* i know it's a lot, and unfortunately, for this topic sources on the web aren't so good. i can really recommend this book, this will give a deeper understanding of the topic.
me: okay, yeah i mean, tbh, i'll read the book if the project invests some time for me so i can learn everything that's required, but this won't happen. also, some initial workshop on the topic or anything would have been nice.
coworker: well, i mean, i am a software developer. for me, it is normal that i learn all that stuff in my free time. and i think that's what the PM expects from us.
me: okay, that's fine for you, i mean, if i'm interested in a topic, i will invest my private time. but in this case, PM would just expect me to do unpaid labor, to gain knowledge and skills that i can use in this specific project. i'm not willing to do that.
coworker: ...
me: ...

it's not that i don't want to learn. the thing is that there isn't any energy left by the end of the day. i'm actually trying to find some work life balance, because i don't feel balanced right now, haven't felt since i started this job.
also, this is only one of several projects i'm working on. it's like they expect me this project has top priority in my life. if it wasn't so annoying on different levels, maybe i'd have a more positive attitude towards it.

also, at the moment i find it fucking annoying that i have to invest so much time in this dev ops bullshit and this keeps me from doing my actual work.

if they are unhappy with my skills, either they can invest in my learning or kick me out. at this point, either is fine for me..

Absolutely not dev-related.

Blah, blah, weird conversation and shit. I'm too tired and lazy to write this crap again, but let's do it.

The guy is a dev I randomly found on some chatting service, he was interesting to talk with until this conversation. I'll write this out of memory, so yeah.

Him: So by the way I wrote an app that you give your penis size to to get measurements and stuff about it.
Me, thinking it was dev humor: That's hilarious. Tell me more, I'm interested.
Him: So the idea behind all of this was to gather some big data style info about people's penis size and habits and all that stuff.
Me: Man that's awesome. Can I see the source?
Him: No, it's proprietary. You can buy a license though.
Me: You went that far for a joke?
Him: What joke?
Me: The whole software you just told me about.
Him: That's not a joke, I'm being very serious about it.
Me: Oh well. What did you get from the stats?
Him: I got some tips from people's habits! I never thought that shaving it could make it look bigger, but that's awesome!
Me: Do you really care about it that much?
Him: Studies have proven that size correlated with confidence. Since I started doing it, I've been more confident than ever!
Me: Great.
Him: I'm a bit disappointed to see that I'm in the lower percentiles though.
Me: Well of course you are.
Him: Why would you say that?
Me: Well since people with a big dick tend to go more willingly into the subject and might even buy a fucking app for it, of course you'd have the higher average in your stats.
Him: You're only saying that because you have a small cock.
Me: Why the fuck would you say that? You're the one that's concerned about it, not me.
Him: Go on, what's your size?
Me, because I don't care about discussing that stuff: *Tells him*
Him: [stats, comparisons and stuff]
Me: Well I never gave a fuck and your stats won't make me change my mind.
[ ... Some other shit about my size compared to his ... ]
Him: Would you want to work with me for the database maintenance?
Me: You must be joking?
Him: I'm serious.
Me: *Deletes account*

Seriously, fuck that guy. I rewrote that quickly so you only had the best, but it was a whole fucking conversation.

Like any frontend dev working in an organisation, all of what I do are "designed" by an UX/UI designer. Now he fucking has a problem with me and has been going around saying he's gonna resign because of me. (Apparently he said that while walking away from where I was with the intention of it falling in my ears but I was oblivious to it).

On enquiring (to another colleague)why he has a problem with me he said I don't respect him. Perplexed(more curious), I asked what is it that I do to disrespect him and what I found out was out of the world.

I DISRESPECT HIM BY ASKING HIM QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WORK HE DOES.

Awesome, right? Not only does he consider that disrespect but he also takes it personally. WTH?! I'm not supposed to ask why you do a certain things?

Some of my questions -
1. Why are there font sizes of 13px, 14px, 15px right next to each other?
2. Why is there a gap between the sidebar and the content?
3. Why aren't even sizes being used?
Etc.

So much for maturity. He's completely ignoring me, be it on the floor or during meetings. I couldn't care less. It wouldn't take me much to tell him where he's fucking up. The only reason I asked him questions was to understand things better; maybe I don't understand what I find wrong.
But now ~(˘▾˘)~

So, some years ago, my old firm was bought by a much larger company.

A couple years later, my CTO resigned, as he needed a week deserved break. I acted as interim CTO for half a year, with the full support of the CEO.

But then higher management removed my CEO for a politician 🤡. His first move is to ask my ex-CEO who to consider for CTO.

He adamantly vouches for me, but in the end, I'm not "political" enough. (Sure I admit I'm not the most organized person, and do not sweeten arguments to suits, but I had won the full trust of my previous superiors *and* fellow devs, and had people to cover for organizational stuff, and have successfully navigated situations with the world's biggest tech orgs).

So I'm again a dev, and they hire this new CTO at twice my salary. But as you can probably guess, who ends up still doing all the CTO work on top of his dev work? Yeah.

That drove me to quit, not because of the demotion, but for a denied minor raise when I was doing the work of someone with twice my paycheck.

As could be expected, once I quit, the CTO barely lasted 6 months.

Fun part is, I've been freelancing (successfully) from them on, and I've been contacted by this CTO, trying to hire me to do some work in his new company...

I'm torn whether to tell him to bite me, charge him a shitton of money or any other funny ideas.

Mind you, I don't dislike the guy, and he's not particularly annoying to work with, so I guess this doubles as a rant against corporate clowns, and a bit of advice seeking.

Everybody is criticizing Microsoft for leaving too much legacy code in Windows, etc., but let me tell you that I prefer 100% that and have lifetime backward compatibility than having to deal with Google bullshit.

Google sucks ass.
It's one of the most dev unfriendly company on this planet (along with Facebook).

You can't fucking change BASIC stuff in Android SDK every fucking version.
You just can't!

You can't use a system of "PERMISSIONS" each developer has to set in its application and each user has to accept during the installation, that a few versions later become USELESS... because "Hmmm… no, It's not enough, let's make a new privileged permission that makes the old one fucking worthless".

YOU FUCKING, TOXIC, BASTARDS.

It's my app, my code, my device, my fucking conditions. If I want to install viruses on my device, I should be able to do it.
I shouldn't have to call fucking Sundar fucking Pichai fucking CEO of fucking GOOGLE.

USERS != BABIES.
DEVS != CRIMINALS

We are the reason you have a fucking job, fucking food on your fucking table.

I want a fucking GOD_MODE permission in the next SDK, assholes!

You can't REMOVE fucking "Android.OS.getSerial()" making it only for system apps.
It's not sensible data… and if It's in your opinion, you've already created a "android.permission.READ_PHONE_STATE", so what else do you want, fucking asshole?
Right, you want to introduce "android.permission.READ_PRIVILIGED_PHONE_STATE" to make obsolete the other one, son of a bitch!

I don't fucking use you're garbage Google Play Store, no worries! I won't upload my app on your servers, bitch!

They've created a monopoly in the industrial space (PDAs) and they keep making fucking wrong decisions every single year.

My job is already stressful, why you can't just stop making it worse? fml

A lot of things dev say are true, but this one I don't believe as much:
Many devs say that it's important for everybody to learn a bit of a basic programming language, to learn about computers and how programs are made. I disagree, I think that instead people should learn *how* things work. Ex, in my school people always use a VPN to get around the proxy. I don't care if they know basic statements, I think it's more important to learn how a VPN works. Most of them don't even know what VPN stands for. Am I the only one?

(first post/rant on here)
So I recently started at a new company. I was kinda aware that the project I'm working on would be rather old school (to put it in a nice way :-)).

Part of my job is to 'industrialize' and update/clean up the existing code so there is less time spent on fixing bugs due to bad design.

One of the first things I had to do was to write a new interface to integrate with external software.

I already noticed some rather nasty habits, like prefixing every variable with m (don't know why), private fields for every property (all simple properties) and a whole lot of other stuff that either is obsolete or just bad practice.

Started writing clean code (simple classes with properties only, no m prefixing, making sure everything is single responsibility, unit tests, ...).

So I check in the code, don't hear much from it again besides the original dev/architect that started the project using my code to further work on that integration.

Now recently I started converting everything from TFVC to Git (which is the company standard but wasn't used by our team yet). And I quickly skimmed through my code to check if everything was there before pushing it to the remote repo.

To my surprise, all the code I had written was replaced by m prefixed private variables used in simple properties. BL classes were thrown in together, creating giant monstrosities that did everything. And last but not least, all unit tests were commented out.

Not sure what I got myself into ... but the facepalming has commenced.

Had a job interview today as a Junior Python dev. The hardest part: they asked things, that I used to learn in some time in the past, but got rusty in my memory because I don't use em much. Like "to write func that sorts array". Last time I was writing sorting without standard library at least half a year ago. Same with the regular expressions (need em the most once in several months) or sql expressions (last time - 7 month ago). How to remember these things?

I am thinking about leaving this platform. To be honest I don't get anything out of it anymore and the only thing keeping me here is the less-rant'ish content like @devNews or the stories.

I am actually a bit disappointed, the quality of devrant really did degrade alot in the last few months. Don't get me wrong but I feel like people have become "normies" over here. I don't mean that in an edgy or degrading way but let me explain. When I started here I had a very high opinion of the people here. Everyone seemed like a passionate / knowledgeable individual from whom you could hear interesting stories or learn. Maybe I just saw it like that because I was still a very inexperienced dev and was looking for a dev community. But nonetheless I think devRant transformed into a place of mediocrity.

Dont get me wrong I wouldn't think of myself as aspiring or generally "better" than anyone else on here, but the content over here got a little stale.

I am not the kind of person who would "rant", in the first place, so I may have a different mindset and to be honest "ranting" has always been a thing I looked down upon. It just does not support my style of thinking. I totally get that people sometimes need to "vent" their feelings but there is nothing productive to gain from ranting, like you ain't not improving your situation by doing it. The more passionate raters over here call people things, I would never even dream about saying to people. Don't worry I'm no sjw or something like it, I don't care if you do it. If it helps you sure, why not. But there is a point where you corner yourself so much that you stop respecting your colleagues because they wrote that shitty code, instead of helping.

Some tech sure is bad, but it is not getting any better by insulting it.

Another thing I use to notice are people, thinking so highly of them selfes / being so close-minded - that they only accept their own views as true. These are the people that I always try to avoid, but that is getting harder and harder as time goes on.

Collectivism and group thinking are very strong on devRant making it really hard to defend a unpopular opinion - I get that devRant is not the kind of platform that would support actual proper arguments/discussions - but I still feels like some people shove opinions down another people's throat with no reasoning behind it.

Arguments on devRant are always won by the person coming up with the most witty response. Having another opinion is always seen as offensive. That's not exactly the definiton of open-mindedness.

Another rather annoying thing are what I call the "non dev, dev's". See: As a developer you should aspire to understand what your doing - I won't get into this too much but one sentencd: How are things like serious "Semicolon memes" a thing? I am as much into memes as the next guy, but debugging 3 hours, just to find out its a typo. I mean come on...

I sure get that devRant is not the kind of place where you would find the people I am looking for, and that's why I am leaving.

My whole post may seem super negative of the platform - and it is to an extend - but I sure also had a good time back in the day - devRant as in "the platform" surely is not at fault, but a forum is only as good as the people on it. Maybe I changed, maybe devRant did. All I know is that it is not for me anymore.

I won't delete my account and I probably will not leave completely, but all I will do is the "once a week" checkout.

(1st week Monday)
Went to a game programmer job interview, job description says most of unity related stuffs; create games in Unity, code in c#, work within Unity to build robust game systems etc.

Interviewer asked for my experience and portfolios, showed him. Then he asked me some questions about making interactable objects in a VR scene, then asked if I'm able to do a demo (on oculus rift) to prove him I can do it.
I don't have oculus rift, I'm allowed to go their office and use their rift for testing though.
Dateline = 2nd week Friday.

(2nd week Monday)
Showed him a demo scene in GearVR, he seems pretty satisfied.
He: I will get back to you next Monday. I'll wait for client's reply first.
Me: (smile and jokingly said) so...... If the client doesn't get back to you or doesn't want the project anymore, means I don't get the job?
He instantly replied: no (with a serious face)
Then said: You shouldn't reply with that "attitude", you should instead think of "is there any reason to hire you if client doesn't get back to me"
*backfired, but wtf?*
*insert meme here*
(Please comment, am I too rude? Or *unprofessional*, but it's just a joke ffs)

He also asked if I'm able to do it on rift since I made it on GearVR already.
I said yes, depends on the controller used.
(Any dev with common logic should understand it'll work too, with given SDK, even without, some hacks should do it, just a matter of time)
(He even told me he's a dev himself)
(Should I insert the meme here again?)

But he doesn't accept the answer. He wants me to give him a text (through WhatsApp), telling him *in a professional way* that I can do it.
*wtf*
*insert meme here*

(Last day of third week)
Needless to say, he didn't get back to me. Thought he promised he would.

Things to note:
Job description doesn't say anything about VR.
Spend a week of my time to do his demo without obligations.
Didn't get to ask much about his role and job scope either.

My internship is about to end in two months. I was under the impression that I'll start looking for a job towards mid August and then decide what to do. I didn't expect my company to offer me a position so early before my internship ended.

Initially I had liked the place. The work was pretty relaxed and I had quite a bit of freedom. Soon enough, I proved my worth and my team started respecting my opinions and suggestions. They even consulted me on multiple occasions.

The first thing I noticed on the downside was the company, despite being resourceful enough and having a decent turnover and important clients, was quite stingy in terms of employee welfare. There was no coffee. There was machine but you had to buy the capsule for yourself. And that sucks. I know I don't need to say more but the other problems were there was no enterprise subscription (or any subscription) to PhpStorm even though our team handled so many PHP projects. I know IDEs are personal preferences but not having any professional IDEs is not something to let slide. The lead dev uses NetBeans (and not because he loved it or anything). Even though I worked on WebDev and front end, I had no option to ask for a second screen. I had one display apart from my laptop. Usually most companies in Paris provides food tickets for internships and this company did not even give me that. And worst of all, there wasn't really anyone I looked up to. As much as I enjoy responsibilities and all, I don't think I should be in an environment where I have nothing much to learn from my seniors. For some fucked sense of security and certainty, I was willing to overlook all this when they offered me a position. But I recently had my interview and the regional manager, a fuck face who still makes me wonder how he reached his position, made a proposal for some quite a small amount of salary. What infuriated more than his justifications was his attitude itself. There was absolutely no respect whatsoever. It was more like "We'll give you this, I think this is more than enough for you. Take it or do whatever you want". I asked for more and he didn't even bother negotiating. I declined the offer.

Now this would have solved all the issues. But my manager and my lead dev like me a lot. Both of them are pretty nice people. They both were bothered with the fact that I had turned down the offer. My manager even agreed that the offer was too low and had already given me tips to help me negotiate. But after I turned down the offer, she went and discussed the issue with the regional manager and he offered me a new proposal. This time it was decent but still under my expectations. I'm pretty sure I can do better elsewhere. I said I need time to think about it. I get multiple advises from people to take it atleast so that I get my visa converted to a work permit. For some reason, I want to take the risk and say no. And find something else. But today my lead dev called me aside and asked me if was going to say no. He really tried to influence me by telling me a lot of good things about me and telling me about the number of different projects we're going to start next month and all that. Even though I'm fully convinced that I don't want to work here, just the sheer act of saying no to these two people I respect is sooo fucking difficult for me that I can already imagine me working here for the next one year. The worst part is I can clearly classify their words and sentences into stuff they say to canvass me, stuff they're bullshitting about and flattery just to make me stay. Despite knowing I'm being taken advantage of, some fucked up module in my head wouldn't stop guilt tripping me. I don't know what to do. If I only I could find a really better job.

Pardon the grammatical errors if any. I'm just venting out and my thoughts branch in 500 different ways simultaneously.

Not particularly dev related but I do need to rant.

Parents are here to visit, it's lovely to see them. Unfortunately I have a small ass 1 bed flat because rent and house prices are stupid high where I work. I'm sleeping in the living room on an air bed, the fridge/freezer is noisy and about 3 foot from my head so I've been turning it off over night. It didn't get plugged in this morning so shit's getting thrown out. I sleep maybe 5 hours, wake up at 1 too hot, 4 too cold then mother comes in at 6 with the dogs. 3rd night of this. I've taken holiday even though I don't have much to spare because there's no way in fuck I can work feeling like this, I'm a dev and need to be able to think and do intelligent things ffs.

It's nice to see family but it's nice to have my own space too.

!dev

I will never understand the need for weeding bs. I am ok with marriage, and doing whatever religious festivity you want to whatever deity you follow. I respect that stuff enough to not go all anti-religious or what not. But I just cannot fathom making a party that benefits the attendee (food whatnot) more than the people starting a life together. Gifts? a popularity contest? I don't get it. My weeding was simple, did not invite a bunch of people, shit burned bridges, but our families were there and that to me was more than enough. Anyone else that got offended, well, they can get offended whenever they pay one of my fucking bills.

But I just cannot get the need to have such a ceremony, AND then to have the audacity to get upset or call out people that cannot make it. Make it for fucking what? the bridge and groom are going to be so fucking distracted with everyone that at most your presence gets an "ah glad you came!"

AND some people even do it in different cities, fucking why? it is a burden as an adult to make time for such minute events, even more to take the time, and the fucking money to go to your fucking party on another city. Bonus points if I need to buy a fucking airplane ticket, no fucking thanks.

I am currently doing something big in my life that only my wife can help me with, because of my situation, my family can't help me, so i am all by myself and wife, and some people told me to put it on hold.....to go to a fucking party. WHY? Why in the sweet holy Mexican baby Ritchie would I go ahead and fucking do that? you are not going to help me afterwards when I get back, shit, you will be out on fucking vacation after the party, for 2 fucking weeks (talk about privilege) and you still want me to put my shit on hold to go...to a fucking party?

Fuck, sometimes I feel that I am toooo fucking egotistical to put my time before others, but man, you really get shit out of this. 2 weedings happening this month, one requires a ticket, the other is a drive away (4 fucking hours) but still, I really don't feel that I should waste my VL that I would much rather spend with my wife and child on some fucking obnoxious ego-inflated party.

So a few weeks back guy I used to work with contacts me for some dev work on a UK project he is working on, it's the Thursday and they need the thing the coming Monday. I tell him it's totally impossible, and it was so he asks what can done and how much, as well as how much for the entire project.

I stipulate exactly what can be done, with exclusions and say 7.5k and them mail over a detailed quote for 30k for everything.

I get told it's all fine, I must go ahead. I get through a bit more than expected by the Monday, but they still needed something to demo and I set I can get enough for demo in place by Thursday.

They demo to business and money and all that and everyone is happy and tell me to finish up along with some changes, and I don't even adjust the price as it was more work they wanted outside of the original spec.

Get to probably 80% done and they say we need to pause they need to look over other feedback.

Next thing, the PM come back, no they were never actually happy with the quote and they found some other guy willing to do the entire thing for 7.5k and they willing to only give me that for the code I have written so far. Cunts.

Anyway, he tries to take some blame for it, even though I know it's BS and says he will pay in another 7.5k from his share if I am willing and we call it quits.

This people, is why I don't freelance.

I feel sorry for this new kid, he clearly under quoted, and yes I am expensive, but with decades experience having worked on international projects for one of the largest digital asset management firms, my countries leading fintech dev house and now the lead developer for my countries largest insurance software dev house, you damn fucking strait my free time comes at a premium, as you are getting top fucking quality, 100% tested, high performing code.

They can go fuck an entire flock of ducks when they come back after this half ling fucks up the diamond I coded up for them.

Even funnier, they a UK based company, so for them this was a 1.5k project. Cheap cunts.

MS Access and VBA.

This combo is the worst dev tech I had to use it by now. Why? Because even if you try it, you can't make a single line of clean code. The syntax is horrible, it still use GOTO...

Maybe the reason why I hated working with it is linked to the context too: I was (and still) developing a system using NoSQL database and this system should be mostly fully configurable through metadata within JSON documents and it was. But we were still writing every JSON by hands so we decided we needed to develop a web based utility for us and clients who would need to configure the system but one of the head decision making people said that we don't need to use fancy technologies (because NoSQL is already "fancy") and that the configuration tool will be develop with Access because he used it a lot when he was younger and when he was coding during its free time. He said that using Access would be much easier and much time saving than our "fancy web based solution" and that he could help if we had questions...

Developing a MS Access software is already a pain in the ass but when you need to output JSON with it...

First and foremost introduce concepts like version control from the beginning. As for the rest, the motivated students will teach themselves the relevant things and the others will fail/drop out. That seems to take place now.

My biggest complaint with the education system is more general and not CS specific. Remove all of the gen ed requirements. REMOVE ALL THE GEN ED REQUIREMENTS. They don't make you "more well-rounded" they just set you back 2 extra years and throw you into twice as much debt as necessary. We spend 13 years learning the foundational things just to spend 2 years in college paying out the nose to go through it again.

Fix that and add a few relevant ideas into CS degrees and I think the education system is decent. There will always be bad teachers, but software developers need to be able to pick things up themselves so it's just preparation for when they get a job and have a useless senior dev to work for.

I don't get much spam, but when I do, I rant about how badly those mails are crafted.

I mean, yeah, for non-devs or typical old people, those badly made Google fake mails (that use the old Google logo, the logo in Times New Roman or something) or ISP / phone company mails with malicious attachments may look good enough.

But, seriously, if I were a dev paid to create spam mails, they would look like the real deal, if I may say so myself, as I would actually put some effort in them.

What do you think? Wouldn't spam made by real developers like us be "better"?

Maybe send some examples from inside your junk box 🤔

all of them. countless wasted hours.

as fate decided to turn me from $random-dev-geek into "the guy that calls the shots in tech", one of my earliest decisions was to automate formatting.

everywhere, automated at CI.

gofmt was an inspiration for the industry.
js?/ts? use prettier
C++? use ClangFormat
etc.

always default settings.
enforced by pre-commit hooks and CI.

never a single argument about bracket style, I don't care if someone likes single or double quotes better.

"fucks given" counter is fixed at 0.
everybody prefers it (ok, sometimes after a while sometimes)

of course there is still some more conventions to do for us humans.
IMHO the most critical ones.

like naming or even casing (camel, snake, kebab, - which one works where), but taking out most of the "so what" decisions takes discussions to a much more resonable level.

!Dev

Sitting in a bus on 19 hour ride with my class to England a few things to rant about came to my mind:

Why the fuck do you have to blast shitty german rap music out of your fucking JBL boxes and why do you have to turn up the volume so much that I can still hear it although I am wearing headphones, listening to music and sitting 5 fucking rows in front of you.

Also why the fuck do clocks in buses never display the right time? How hard can it be to make the clock display the right fucking time?

Another thing: why does this bus which is especially made for long rides not have a fucking trash can?! Seriously wtf?

Rants aside I am really looking forward to staying in England for a week although I won't have a computer for the next week :(

Another thing: why the fuck is the coffee you get at pull-ins so fucking disgusting ?
Like srsly, it is made by a machine and still tastes like thrown-up.

And why the fuck does everyone look weirdly at you when you buy a can of red bull but everything is fine when someone my age drinks 3+ liters of beer and then throws up? What the fuck? People look at me weirdly when I tell them that I don't drink any alcohol, heck I am actually not even allowed to do so because I am 15 and not 16 (beer is allowed in Germany if you are 16+ but nobody really cares about that). Heck where I am from they even encourage you to drink beer? What the fuck??!!

Anyway looking forward to England and also sorry about the long non-dev related rant. Just had to rant about some people and society.

P.S. do you know any (preferably free) Android apps / games where you have to code or just solve problems with logic?

had to create a rather large CLI based application in Java as a graduate level assignment.

Doing shit like this makes me appreciate Node/Python/literally fucking anything else much more for this shit in which storing and retrieving JSON does not have to be that much of a fucking hassle WITHOUT using external libraries(they want it all made by hand)

I love Java, don't get me wrong, but I would rather use it for only a couple of things. I stopped working as a Mobile dev precisely because of Android being shit for Java. No, Kotlin does not fix it, its not the language that is my problem, its the fucking general architecture of the Android API that pisses me off.
And no, I do not care if you like it, like 1 fucking bit. I am not saying that the architecture is shit, I am saying that I did not like it.

Sigh.......oh well. Almost done with the assignment, but still.

Hey this is the first time i post here.

I just started working part-time for this company last week. What i have to do is to change some windows from Win32 to WPF. As i was reading the legacy code i just had to sigh man. They have like 100 projects in a single solution, from C++ to C#, everything acctached to each other, with almost NO comments or docs. Wtf man? I don't know how it actually works in the industry (this is my first dev job) but when you write fucking 20 classes with each one contains bunch of attributes, methods, properties, you can't just leave all the code's semantics in their names. And by the way the app is so fucking ugly i bet they have appointed part-time developers as UX engineers... Even i have little knowledge about UX/UI, i just can't bear with this kind of ugly and confusing and unintuitive production with a cost of a good photo editting software.

Ok there may be much more to rant in the future but let me try through this and tell you more. Have a good day. :)

Hey peeps,
I got a question that is bothering me for a while now. I am from Germany and I quit my CS studies a few months ago in favor of a "Berufsausbildung". I don't know if other countries have a comparable equal to our Berufsausbildung, so I gonna give you a quick overview:

In the Berufsausbildung you stay 30% of your time in school where you have to learn the basics and theory parts of your chosen profession. 70% of your time you are in the company ("Ausbildungsbetrieb") that is training you to learn the practical parts your profession and gain work experience. At the end of the Berufsausbildung, you have to work on a project and present it in front of a committee and write some exams.

So the Berufsausbildung is more about learning by doing instead of learning all the little things in the field of your profession.

Now to my actual question. One of my biggest dreams is to work in Japan as a freelance for a few years or more. Working on projects for companies in my home country while traveling through Japan. I know that it is hard to be allowed into the country for a longer time and even working there without a good education. I always have the feeling that I am inferior to people who have a college degree and I am afraid that my "inferior education" might be a huge disadvantage in the future for me. I already gained 3 years of work experience as a dev and in February 2020 I will have finished my Berufsausbildung. What is your experience with working as a dev without any college degree? Are you treated differently than other people that got a degree? And has anyone experience with working abroad with or without a degree?

Thank you very much!

story which happened yesterday and ended in mixed emotions

big changes in our company were announced, non tech employees changed positions, new business plan, people changing teams, shattering my plans of relocation back to my home country on the end of this year... told my manager I'm not happy, scheduled a call with manager on the highest position I'm in contact with

the call BB - big boss
BB: things are changing, it was decided like this, must be like this, can't do anything with it, other manager bla bla
ME: yes, but you knew I wanted to relocate, now my only option of relocating is to leave the company
BB: well, yes, thats unfortunate, but we would like you to stay, manager bla bla about growth, good work environment
ME: yes, but you're leaving me in this team as a only developer with people who not just don't have any tech background, they don't have a clue about dev stuff, like... at all * me = very not happy *
BB: but you know all our systems and work processes which will stay in place and you can teach new people, we need you * stopped, because probably realised what he said *
ME: * arrogant little laugh * well, i mean, I think i can live with it, but really wanted to talk about this, so you guys know I don't agree with what is happening here
BB: * sigh * ok, well.. yes, I mean, we were counting on this, we can give you a raise, but not much, maybe x%
ME: x% sounds good, I guess I can learn to live with this situation for a while

* everybody laughs *

4 months into the journey at an ambitious streaming startup we, a team of 10 engineers (primarily full stack), sets up a tiny and performant express.js api setup.
We document plans for improving the maintainability, including outlining specific practices (not very different from general node best practices) that need to be followed for all new development.

Enter a new engineering manager (dedicated backend manager), henceforth referred to as S, with a rat face and brain that belongs in a rat hole.

Week 1:
S: let's push this new feature out asap
Dev: it'll need a couple of weeks to get done right
S: let's push out a functional version tomorrow, and revamp in the next iteration
Dev: ... (long pause) there's documented practices specifically directing against this
S: can you not do it by tomorrow
Dev: not if it needs to be done right
S: all you need to do is.. (simplifies changes spanning 5 modules into a 3 line summary)
Dev: yes, (outlines how each changes chains into the others, and how to keep the development maintainable for atleast a few months)
S: (interrupts every sentence saying "yes dev, I understand, yes yes")
Dev: could you please tell me how you expect me to connect (outlines two modules that would fail unless developed as standalone services)
S: Yes dev, I understand, yes yes. I don't have much experience with Node.js, so I can't tell you that.

Dev:
<_<
>_>
O_<

Our.. entire.. backend.. stack.. is.. Node. (Months of motivation, cultivated through hard work over late nights, dies inside)

I need a J and some sleep.

Story && rant && dev && linux

I was using linux mint for a while... more like 5 months for work, there's this Touchpad/mouse issue in it that was driving me crazy, so basically the mouse stops responding out of nowhere in the middle of my coding and I have to restart the fucking laptop to get it back. Yeah, I tried all the solutions I could find on the Internet and nothing works.

This issue likes to fucking mess with me so much, it seems to only happen when I absolutely mustn't restart the laptop or I'm working on a task and have a tight deadline and I don't have time to waste restarting my pc.

A couple of days ago, I had this major feature I needed to release to production and the time I estimated for it and shared with my team turned out to be insufficient, so I had to work extra hours from home to finish it ... while I was working, the mouse issue returned and I had to restart my pc like 20 times that day. It was fucking frustrating and It was already midnight and all you can hear are keyboard sounds and fucks flying.

I made a promise to myself that once i finish this task, I'm gonna fucking migrate to another distro, I'm fed up with linux mint's BS. I've been putting up with it for so long it's time to move on.

Yesterday I installed Manjaro and I'm happily working on it today xD.

I don't have anything to say about getting a dev job in some company. But I can give some tips on attracting clients for your freelance work.

* Have a few projects of your own hosted on Github to show off your quality code.

* Contribute to others' open source projects if possible.

* Get yourself a nice website and showcase all your work.

* Ask your current clients to write testimonials on your work and post it in your website.

* Be nice to your clients. Chances are they'll refer you to their friends and family.

That's pretty much all I've done and I get more freelance dev requests than I could take.

!dev

Another tinder story from last night.

Matched with a girl, I thought she was cute and all. She texted me first, and we started talking. We kinda just clicked, had similar interests and everything. Conversation turned to musicals, she said she wanted me to come listen to one with her at some point when we were both free. I mentioned the whole story from Sunday night to her (see previous rant), and told her how the girl said I was a "rebound", but nothing actually happened. Then she changed the conversation by saying something like "rebounds normally involve sex, maybe I can make up for it".

After that the conversation got sexual. Dirty talk, nudes, everything. Talking about how hard she wanted me to fuck her and everything. That carried on until about 6 in the morning. We both decided we should go to sleep.

I woke up around 11, we talked for a few minutes, then she said she had to get ready for a doctor appointment, and I didn't think anything of it. Went to work at 2, had to go get a car from a dealership like 20 minutes away. Me and my coworker got back, I decided to check my phone and see if she messaged me or anything.

Come to find out, she basically just fucking ghosted me. Blocked me, unmatched me on tinder, the whole nine yards. No warning, nothing. 8 hours earlier she was saying how much she wanted me inside her (not paraphrasing), and now she just decided "nah fuck him altogether".

I don't fucking know what it is. It's been about 10 hours since I found out, and I just..I don't know. She could have just said "nah I don't wanna fuck" and I would have been 100% fine with that. But nope. No warning, just blocked me.

I'm not mad that she just backed out of it, I'm mad that she didn't say fucking anything about it. Like, even apart from all the sexting and stuff, I genuinely liked this girl. She was nice, cute, funny, just everything I could have asked for. And now, I'm honestly kinda sad about it. Everything seemed like it was going well (maybe all the sexting would have been better for another time in the future ya know, but I can honestly say I didn't initiate it), and now I have nothing again.

So I am interning at this company, and I am Coding in Go.
Now I don't have much exp with go so I'm learning it, and all of my team is cool cause they also had to learn Go. Anyways I am just petty intern-dev so everyone and everything is cool.

Migrating from python to go is quite hard.

Unlearn, You must.

What I have imagined Go, to be is:
While python has this top down approach to inheritance and polymorphism, Go has bottom up approach.
In Python child classes are derived from parent class but In Go child classes create a parent class. (this might be totally wrong, but that's how I've imagined golang)

Go is static wrt dynamic python.

I have coded in C for 1.5 years then I switched to python, so I feel that am familiar with static typing. The path that lies ahead of me shouldn't be too hard.

I would like to take a step further and say that Golang is C, but with modern syntax/semantics. It derives many of its features from newer langs like js, Python, etc while being a compiled language which translated directly to machine code.

That's all 😊

My team members are really great and supportive, I am about 10 years younger than them but we still connect and sync.

Everything is Great, Life is Good ❤️

Not a dev!rant,/but certainly a rant. Long post ahead.

First of all I MISSED YOU ALL

Had my fair issues of shit these months. And for that, FUCK EVERYTHING. End of rant for now. I am still managing somehow to do - slowly as fuck, but who cares at this point - like finally going to uni, finding a psychologist and not a psycho, unraveling a fuckton of previous trauma (hi abuse) and ~drums~ buying my new desktop! Not exactly a nasa server but a middish level workstation/gaming place. I am shopping right now. The previous days have been shaky with all the flashback business and emotional rollercoaster of death, but I feel like going the right way somehow. Is it true? Who knows! But after enduring several issues of suicide planning and luckily only one serious-bugged attempt epically hilariously failed, the slightest hope is a victory. I like p2p, so feel free to torrent and seed this little joy. If it is mine it can be yours. Take it!

Also, you know how much autistic I am, but I'd really like to make some friends. I make attempts but honestly I am awkward errrr.... I don't know how many dude/ttes I can count on. For friend I mean simply someone that honestly likes me somehow, is loyal, and has interest in sharing they like to do or think! (And if they want to give me tips on security/sysadmin/dev stuff, even better, but not required obviously).

Also, I may have some projects in mind. Will publish in the projects section when the roughest idea is finished.

Maybe I deserve an updoot. In real life.
(Which is also here....)

🎶🎶🎶🎶

Back when I was still in school for comp sci we had an advanced software engineering and design class with c++. At this time, everyone was expected to be proficient enough with cpp to go ahead and properly work with whatever the instructor would throw at us. And pretty much everyone was since past classes included a lot of c++ development. Of course, efficient at least related to academic studies rather than actual real world development.

Our teacher would mix in a lot pf phyisics and mathematics into what we were doing, something that I greatly enjoyed, while at the same time putting real world value concerning cpp best practices to avoid common pitfalls in the development of said language. Since most bugs seemed to be memory based he would be particularly strict about that.

One classmate, good friend and an actual proper developer now a days would ALWAYS forget to free his resources...ALWAYS for whatever fucking reason he would just ignore that shit, regardless of how much the instructor would make a point on it.

At one point during class on a virtual lecture the dude literally addressed a couple of students but when he got to my boy in particular he said: "you are the reason why people are praying to Mozilla and Hoare to release Rust as fast as possible into a suitable alternative to high performant code in C++, WHY won't you pay attention to how you deal with memory management?"

And it stuck with me. I merely a recreational cpp dev, most of my profesional work is done on web development, so I cannot attest to all the additional unsafe code that people encounter in the wild when dealing with cpp on a professional level.

But in terms of them common criticisms of C and C++ for which memory is so important to work with, wouldn't you guys say that it comes more from the side of people just not knowing what they are doing rather than a fault on the language itself?

I see the merits and beauty of Rust, I truly do, it is a fantastic language, with a standardized build system and a lot of good design put into it. But I can't really fathom it being the cpp killer, if anything, the real cpp killers are bad devs that just don't know what they are doing or miss shit.

What do y'all ninjas think?

Meanwhile I was sitting in my Python class.
Suddenly she starts teaching about CGI Scripts and how widely they are used in these days' web interfaces.
:3
Being a web dev myself, this felt so sad.
Considering the advent of so many web frameworks that make it so much easier for the developer to ship a website, who'd use CGI scripts until it's a total nessecary.

Now , what's much worse is she wants us to write a CGI Script for making a resume generator?
I don't know what to do with her..!

It feels weird now. I don't really have much to rant about. That's partially cause I haven't been doing much dev work lately (but the bit I have done, everything's been fine). My personal life is going fucking great for once, so nothing to worry about there (the girl I'm talking to is so fucking sweet, and just amazing overall)

Life is fucking good guys. I hope everyone that might have had a bad day or a bad week or whatever feels better soon.

!rant but kinda.
!dev but also dev

Hello, my name is ***** and I already had a few Old Fashions🥃

I've been chasing a big career and success since i was about 12.. the first 8 years of my career I did the same.
for the last two years i decided to slow down, I'm still keeping up with stuff and do a good job but I took a break from wanting to being the next Wozniak.

Im much happier and more relaxes now but I'm at a point where i really wanna do, be and achieve more..

My #1 goal in life is to build a family, having a wife and a few kids. (first gotta be able to talk to women though:/)

i have a very strong desire to have an impact on the world and society to build a life in which at least my (non existing) family could be happy and without worries. but i've no fucking clue how to achieve that. how to have an impact. i don't see a way as a software engineer anymore..

i feel lonely and lost without any fucking perspectives..

i feel like i was better off when i was chasing the big money..

i know dev rant is not the place to do this but i can't talk to my family and i wanted to share my emotions. been alone for 3 months now and it's also about my dev career, that's how i justify to post this to our community here😅

I'm not going to lie, the surge of bootcamps really irks me. Not because I'm afraid of competition, or that I'm an elitest. Mainly because a lot of people who attend these bootcamps have no real interest in software engineering. I sometimes attend a meetup, and it's a beginner meetup. I try to help out. And a lot of people clearly have no patience for learning software engineering. I try to be encouraging, but sometimes I just want to be dick and tell them "Why the hell do you want to be a dev, if you're not interested in how computers work".

I'm an 100% myself taught developer. Granted I'm 38 and taught myself programming at 14. But it came out of an earnest desire and love for technology in general. So I never shyed away from learning? C and assembler? Bring it on. Theoretical computer science? I can get with that. For me I loved computer so much, that I was willing to learn about anything in the realm of computing.

This is what annoys me with the adult bootcamp crowd. I feel they're only willing to learn as long as it's easy. If something gets complicated or complex, then they check out. And I a lot of their questions is "tell me how to do this/that". But they don't know why they would do it.

To me it feels like they're trying to fast track themselves to a dev job. Yet you would think if they're trying to do this all professionally, they would be open to learning as much as possible, and not closing themselves off.

My semi-friend who runs the meetup is trying to start a bootcamp himself. So I try I severely hold my tongue when I attend those meetups. And I want to be supportive. I certainly don't want to be the reason why people are turned off by programming. But at the same time, I hate how people are abusing this profession because they think it's fast money and an easy way to earn 6 figure salaries.

One thing I truly fucking dislike about the development life is knowing about server administration. I think that the mental hurdle that is to develop a huge application, make a stable dev environment, learn all the tools, tricks, techniques, modern standards, processes whatever, detailing software engineering are way tf too much to also handle server admin shit.

We don't have anyone at work that deals with that, and as such my devs need to know how to do entire series of maintenance shit that just takes time and effort plus hours of notetaking and study. I mean I get it, they should know their way around a linux environment enough to troubleshoot issues that are related to the os when working with some tools, but fuuuuuuuck me man, setting up a server, even for the holy grail of easy (standard lamp stack) takes way tf too much.

Wish we could have a dedicated server admin in the team.

I know where my faults are, setting up servers is something that I know but just can't be assed with in terms of keeping up, I wish we had a devops dedicated server admin deployment guru cuz I really cannot stand losing hours doing this shit.

It also diminishes good s admins in value, "weLl ThE deVs caN do It" YEAH BITCH but wouldn't it be nice to have an expert concentrating on JUST THAT?

FUCK man

You know, I've really been thinking about renouncing my love for Microsoft's products. I got into the tech world through them, so their stuff was all I really knew. It's like a non-dev growing up using Mac and iPhone. You don't really know what other hardware and software can do (especially since Microsoft is now acting a LOT like Apple nowadays). Ever since they killed Windows Phone, I started seeing past the rose-colored glasses. They've annoyed me with one slip-up after the next. The only things that have kept me tied to them are my Windows Insider membership, and their developer platform. Now that I've seen things like Fuchsia and Linux, I realize that the way Microsoft is going about technology is painful to developers and consumers alike, and this is now beginning to hurt their bottom line. I'm sick of it.

The issue is that if I leave the Microsoft platform, I will have no time to waste. I spent the last 2 yeas cozying up to them, and now I will need to find other platforms, languages, and utilities to build a portfolio from. This also means that I will despise pretty much every major tech company for different reasons (Apple for locked-down hardware, Microsoft for locked-down software, Google for it's monopolistic actions and its unfair policies and terms, Amazon for its invasiveness, etc). If things get worse, I'll probably end up going to Linux and joining the open-source community. The only worry I have is what I'll do for a career. I'm almost halfway to getting an Associates in Computer Science, but where do I go from there? Can't make a living open-source (unless I get patrons, which is unlikely), will probably abandon my dream of joining Microsoft or Google, and I don't currently specialize in any particular area of development yet. I want to spend my life dealing with tech and software. But right now, I've got next to no plans. I've got a lot of thinking to do...

!dev

For a long time, I thought that the most annoying people on the ski slope are kids overestimating their abilities on a difficult piste or speeding down the slope ignoring others. Boy was I wrong; those kids are nothing compared to all the fucking morons who think that buying the most expensive gear at a local sports store makes them better at skiing.

For the love of god, if you ever consider skiing, just buy some reasonably cheap all-mountain gear, and if you think you need something better, do proper research or find a fucking expert. I'm not talking about those "experts" they have at your local sports store, I'm talking someone who provides gear and support for actual ski clubs and teams, or at least someone working at a dedicated outdoors store who actually owns some of the gear they're selling.

"Oh, but I'm an advanced skier" - right, then why don't you tell me what turning radius, width profile, and flex would best fit you? Thought so.

Look, it's clear just by looking at your $1000 "racing" skis that they have a way shorter turning radius than any competition-level skis, and if you were really going as fast as you think you are, you'd probably spin out on every other turn with such a short radius. Your curved skiing poles aren't fooling anyone either; professionals only use those in super-g and downhill because you need to go insanely fast to notice any advantage over regular poles. And people who race that fast use way more protection than I can see on you.

Okay, it's your gear, it's your body; if you're going to buy overpriced stuff that doesn't make sense or neglect protection, that's up to you. Do you know what's not up to you? Being a fucking moron and ruining skiing for everyone else. Just because you got the most expensive "expert-level" gear, you can't just use it for powder, park, or moguls when you feel like it because you don't fucking know how to ride any of these, even if your gear claims to be good for all types of skiing. And let me tell you, that expensive gear you have is much less forgiving than some entry-level gear if you decide to try other styles of skiing.

I'm fucking tired of people like that. If I go to the resort with lots of powder, I want to ride the powder, not spend most of my time avoiding groups of morons who clearly don't have the right gear and skills for the powder. If I go to the resort with a huge park, I want to ride the park, and I can't do anything if the place is covered by dipshits speeding past the objects and braking in front of the jumps. And if I want to race down the piste, I want to race, I don't want to have a bunch of morons constantly switching side in front of me to avoid "rough" parts they can't ride on.

I have been a professional Dev for about a year for a cyber security startup. Unfortunately, startup died do to finance mismanagement. My lead Dev said that he wanted to start a co-op contract business and since we all work great together than we should stick around. So we tried to obtain contracts and it is going much slower than imagine. I am going on my second month of no work or contract work. I'm working on my own site to do some freelance work on the side for myself offering ever, marketing and ERP software services. That is the goal for side hustle. However, for the main hustle well I'm stressed now of being home and we'll meetings not turning into money. I actually want to call it quits and do my own thing and look for normal gig. It just feels rough as he has been my mentor and offered me my first software gig. I don't feel like I own anyone anything I'm regards money or time. However, I do feel bad of I take off it will hurt them from being able to handle larger contract if they do get one.

Note: I'm pulling from my savings

Thoughts??

Hi there fellow Devranters,
I am new here but my problem is pretty old. You see i stumbled into coding totally by accident. That was about 5 years ago. I have been learning ever since.
But the problem is that each day I just feel less and less of a programmer, more of a failure. I started with python, from sololearn to various ebooks.Then C++ and finally Ruby. But I still feeal weak.Despite the projects that I have worked on I still don't feel good enough. Most especially in Ruby.
I have a friend who is also into coding and coincidentally started about the same time as I did.The difference is that he learnt at university and I am self-taught.We used to talk a lot but we don't anymore,I feel too ashamed, an impostor even. I am scared he'll ask me something and I won't know anything about it.And I once taigjt him OOP. Right now I can't even code a hello world program without reading a whole ebook on python just to be confident.
We had dreams with my friend on a dozen or so projects that would have put us on the software dev map, but I keep avoiding him so much we have barely started any. I am afraid he'll find me too amateurish to work with.
I learn everyday to expand my knowledge,I have subscribed to a gazillion software related stuff on all social media platforms I happen to be in.But deep down I feel insufficient. I have been going through rants since the few hours I joined and it doesn't sound gibberish to me.Neither does other people's code when I go through it.But I am ashamed of mine I end up deleted after it runs successfully.
I just don't feel like a software developer, I don't even know what it takes to be one even. I learned 10 languages focused on 3, laughed at memes only devs get, used linux and loved it too but still I feel like an impostor. I used to be happy about all the things I taught myself, I onced dreamed of working at Google and later having my own startup back home.Now my friend and a couple of his friends have a small start-up and I feel ashamed of myself.
I don't feel like what I know is enough and learning only makes me feel worse, so bad I am scared of coding again now.Yet I just can't stop learning, I feel incomplete when I don't do anything dev related,but I don't even feel my speed is fast enough when I type on my keyboard.
😥😥

The best happened today.

These past 2 weeks have been shit. People wronged me big time, got thrown under the bus for shit that the people behind refused to own up to it. Took that shit because I just couldn't be bothered to fucking argue.

I'm the only dev on this project and we're so close to release so I bit my tongue and took it on the chin but it's been eating me alive since then.

The tipping point was yesterday. 5 people failed to communicate shit properly amongst themselves on all channels got me forced to be the last one finishing work yesterday 4 hours after everyone left. I had every right to refuse and leave on time but again, we're so close to release and I don't want to see this project fail.

But see, I got angry. So fucking angry that nothing else has been on my mind since yesterday.

I don't take out my anger at others, that's not who I am (moslty) so today I was at work and secluded myself from everyone else otherwise I would've exploded in someone's face.

I was also supposed to meet up with friends tonight but with all this shit going on I decided not to go because I would not have been fun to be around.

Left work on time today, fell asleep on the train because I am too exhausted.

When I was about to walk into my house I noticed this little super cute puppy following me. I had no idea where or how long he's been behind me as I was walking home but he seemed way too happy when I saw him. His tail wagging like he's excited to see me even though I have never seen him. I petted him, played a bit with him. He seemed to be the happiest dog ever 😁. He managed to put a smile on my face for the first time in the last few days.

He then ran away.. I guess he got bored 😅

I am feeling so much better now all because of this little puppy 🐶. I'm so glad I ran into him because I've been smiling since then.

I wish I had took a picture of him 😥

Doggo, you probably won't read this, but thanks mate you made my month in those few minutes 🤘

If you have a dog, go pet him and appreciate how much happiness they bring in your life. If you have a cat.. Uhh I don't know... Uhh pray it doesn't kill you in your sleep I guess?

Thanks for reading

so i am on notice period and suddenly my manager has realised that there are a lot of tasks that i have to pickup. well fuck this guy.

i was initially dumb enough to think that i leaving is a bad thing,and i should be doing everything to make the transition easier. the task was also interesting enough , as we were trying to add a new and complex feature and i was the main dev there.

so i started at full pace. i would work on my tasks for hours , even missing on my personal projects. but since last week he would keep adding new tickets in my jira boards every few days , followed by a quick huddle telling how this is a very small and high priority ticlet and i should look at that first.

and me being me, i would not only just finish those small tickets in time, but have a progress on my major feature, as well as answer doubts of other team mates and attend meetings.

--------

i always forget how hypnotising this work culture usually get. the above scenario that i explained? i have no problem with that in a general day. i love to work, solve problems and help others. but these are no normal days, this is my fuckin notice period.

And i am here coz of a reason. if they rely on me so much, why did they forced me to relocate when i just can't? why don't they gove me a lucrative salary + worthy relocation benefits ? fuck them. i even have to serve for a fucking 60 days coz they are not willing to reduce my notice period .

fake promises everytime.
"you don't worry about different office mentioned in your offer letter. we will always keep the environment remote" ~ lie

"even if we go wfo, our company will open an office in your city too, your city is the capital and we had an office there before" ~ lie

"your notice period will get reduced, dont worry about the 60 days" - another fucking lie

______

notice period experts, i need some devil advice to not get exploited by a lier corp. how to utilise my notice period and what should he the excuses to not attend any nloody meetings?

I've now worked on both monolithic solutions and microapps/microservices. I gotta say I'm not sold on the new approach. There's so much overhead! You don't have to know your way around one solution -- no, now you need to know your way around 100 solutions. Debugging? Yeah, good luck with that. You don't have to provision one environment for dev, test, staging, and prod. No, now you need 100 environments per... environment. Now, you need a dedicated fulltime devops person. Now devs can check in breaking changes because their code compiles fine in that one tiny microapp. The extra costs go on and on and on. I get the theoretical benefits but holy crap you pay for it dearly. Going back to monolithic is so satisfying. You just address the bug or new feature head on without the ceremony and complexity. You know you're not crapping on other people's day (compilation-wise) because the entire solution compiles.

...and yeah, I'm getting old. So get off the lawn! ;)

So we called out our project manager and tech leader, who sent out an email last Friday to our bosses and stakeholders a project schedule - which we never knew about until we saw it in our inboxes - that showed we had already completed development and would go on to UAT testing by next week.

Except if you look at our agile board we have 3 weeks of dev tasks left and a couple more for testing and QA. Then our dev environment is shit because the deployment steps in TeamCity were not properly done by Dev Ops. And we still don't have a UAT environment created, much less tested out. And the project manager is about to go on a one-month vacation. Great!

So we replied back with all the aforementioned information (less the swearing and name-calling) and sent it out to the same recipients, including our bosses and stakeholders.

That was such a fun Friday afternoon.

I made my passion my job, programming servers & web dev. Although it has been productive economically it has sucked the fun out of programming servers for me...so as a way to rediscover my passion I'm giving game dev a try. After a couple of weekends playing with a game engine this is what I've got, a monkey dev with a suit that jumps from project cabinet to project cabinet avoiding hazards, drinking coffee and trying to make some money (someone told me I should express myself and I took that personally).

I'm pretty much done but the hazard placeholders (a box and an arrow) don't convince me so I wanted to see if my fellow disenfranchised developers had some ideas of what my developer should be avoiding/being hit by, preferably something I could draw easily since as you can see I'm not much of an artist although I've also though of just words falling like "deadline" or something.

Anyway any feedback is welcome, take it ez I've never drawn anything more than a stickman and this is my first attempt at something playable. Small Rant plus question. Happy Monday.

!dev, depressing topic warning

-----PADDING START-------
Thanks for the update and for me to get a new one and it was the same as the one I have is a trial run to the store and get some rest and feel better soon and that is why I am asking for a friend to talk to you about your day and I don't know yet if I can get it to me by the end of the day I was in the shower and then I will be able to make it
--------
Do you ever feel there's like no real point to life, like you could die tomorrow, you wouldn't really care?

I feel life is ok, I've got it a lot better then others in my situation at least financially. But in terms of relationships probably not and I don't have much interest in developing any.

And looking at the future, I just don't see it going anywhere or getting any better? I could be easily replaced, forgotten, not doing anything meaningful.... And the only other people that would notice and remember are my parents.

I enjoy doing things but in the long run they make no difference. I can have short term goals like maybe for the next few weeks, months but if someone asks where do I what to be a year from now, what do I want to accomplish, there answer is "I don't know and I don't care"...

And I guess that's the point, each day sorta just feels like whatever...

I don't really know what I should be feeling right now.

So its been 2 years at my company and im still considered a junior dev. There's a pay freeze, meaning there's no chance for me to move up the ladder.

And yet, as of today, I am being asked to head up both the design AND development of a prototype file cloud sync engine that will replace our current sync application that's been worked on for 4+ years now (yeah, its legacy). And I'm 100% on my own, at least for a while, untill someone else comes around.

I still reside under the title 'junior dev' and am paid as such. I don't mind challenges, but this just feels like a bit much. Heck, I'm sure maybe I could even do it too, but I don't feel like im being compensated or given a higher title to reflect that sort of responsibility. I've tried to tell my manager I don't feel comfortable with this, but they've insisted I head this up.

I feel kind of locked up inside, I don't even really want to start working on it because I feel angry that I would be given such a huge project to do all on my own, while being called a junior, and without anyone to fall back on.

What should I do? Do I refuse the responsibility? Do I see it as a challenge that will help me grow? Or do I see it as an exploitation?

Here comes lots of random pieces of advice...

Ain't no shortcuts.

Be prepared, becoming a good programmer (there are lots of shitty programmers, not so many good ones) takes lots of pain, frustration, and failure. It's going to suck for awhile. There will be false starts. At some point you will question whether you are cut out for it or not. Embrace the struggle -- if you aren't failing, you aren't learning.

Remember that in 2021 being a programmer is just as much (maybe even moreso) about picking up new things on the fly as it is about your crystalized knowledge. I don't want someone who has all the core features of some language memorized, I want someone who can learn new things quickly. Everything is open book all the time. I have to look up pretty basic stuff all the time, it's just that it takes me like twelve seconds to look it up and digest it.

Build, build, build, build, build. At least while you are learning, you should always be working on a project. Don't worry about how big the project is, small is fine.

Remember that programming is a tool, not the end goal in and of itself. Nobody gives a shit how good a carpenter is at using some specialized saw, they care about what the carpenter can build with that specialized saw.

Plan your build. This is a VERY important part of the process that newer devs/programmers like to skip. You are always free to change the plan, but you should have a plan going on. Don't store your plan in your head. If you plan exists only in your head you are doing it wrong. Write that shit down! If you create a solid development process, the cognitive overhead for any project goes way down.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others, especially to the experts you are learning from. They are good because they have done the thing that you are struggling with at least a thousand times.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself today to yourself yesterday. This will make it seem like you haven't learned anything and aren't on the move. Compare yourself to yourself last week, last month, last year.

Have experienced programmers review your code. Don't be afraid to ask, most of us really really enjoy this (if it makes you feel any better about the "inconvenience", it will take a mid-level waaaaay less time to review your code that it took for you to write it, and a senior dev even less time than that). You will hate it, it will suck having someone seem like they are just ripping your code apart, but it will make you so much better so much faster than just relying on your own internal knowledge.

When you start to be able to put the pieces together, stay humble. I've seen countless devs with a year of experience start to get a big head and talk like they know shit. Don't keep your mouth closed, but as a newer dev if you are talking noise instead of asking questions there is no way I will think you are ready to have the Jr./Associate/Whatever removed from your title.

Don't ever. Ever. Ever. Criticize someone else's preferred tools. Tooling is so far down the list of what makes a good programmer. This is another thing newer devs have a tendency to do, thinking that their tool chain is the only way to do it. Definitely recommend to people alternatives to check out. A senior dev using Notepad++, a terminal window, and a compiler from 1977 is probably better than you are with the newest shiniest IDE.

Don't be a dick about terminology/vocabulary. Different words mean different things to different people in different organizations. If what you call GNU/Linux somebody else just calls Linux, let it go man! You understand what they mean, and if you don't it's your job to figure out what they mean, not tell them the right way to say it.

One analogy I like to make is that becoming a programmer is a lot like becoming a chef. You don't become a chef by following recipes (i.e. just following tutorials and walk-throughs). You become a chef by learning about different ingredients, learning about different cooking techniques, learning about different styles of cuisine, and (this is the important part), learning how to put together ingredients, techniques, and cuisines in ways that no one has ever showed you about before.

Set some dev goals..

TLDR: spend less time at work coding

No, really..for what I do at work, I am happy. Would like to learn more recent stuff (partially stuck with vb.net), but I don't even know where to start googling.. sooo... get more free time I guess to figure this out..which is a dev goal on it's own too, come to think of it, this translates as don't spend so much time at work coding.. and spend some of it learning new (dev related) things outside of work..new/different js frameworks, python (been fixing/adding some code here & there, but never learned it properly & to check it's full potential, I heard it is awesome btw), read up on algorithm time costs (learn how to fuckin spell this!!)...

And kinda dev related as I will have to spend less time at work is to get back in 'sort of' shape and climb (more)..and spend more quality time with my husband, who is too good, totally supports me & my work, so I never get to hear him nag I was working late, which leads to 'stop working so long' goal I rly need to get in order or I'll burn out again, and I'm bitchy and horrible whe BO..and we don't wanna see that again..

Sum up: work less, learn new things, climb more, be happy/content.