Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

pour another glass

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sip

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

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

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

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

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

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

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

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

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

#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?

A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.

As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.

A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.

About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."

Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.

R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."

As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.

!dev
!!rant
!!rooting while drunk

I got drunk last night and painted my nails. I bought a really pretty shade of purple that should match one of my favorite shirts, and it's my last day at the office today (EVER; lease is up), so dressing up is a great idea, right? I'll feel better and more confident and it'll make everyone miss me.

Except. I was drunk.
And for some reason thought painting them in the dark was a great idea.

Oh, they look horrible!
and apparently I don't own any nail polish remover, so.

Today's going to be the best day ever!
😄😅😢☹

Yesterday, the whole dev team went out to lunch and we ate a lot and we drank a lot until we all got drunk! Since we are paid for the number of hours we work, we all decided to go back to the office and work.

WE WERE DRUNK WORKING! Drunk coding ftw

Result: The server is down right now because someone fucked it up and I think i ruined my code yesterday because I wasn't really myself. The whole team was crazy as fuck. One of us just came back from Poland so we were drunk and high from all the polish chocolate we ate.

I hope they fix the server so I can check what kind of bullshit the drunken me did yesterday o.O

!dev
!!misery

I'm drunk, so it's time for some faux-emotional, blunt oversharing. and lots of profanity. It won't be pretty.

------

I'm miserable. I can't sleep at night. When I finally manage to, I sleep like crap. In the morning, early, I get woken up by my children screaming or pulling my hair or jumping on either the bed or me, or talking ad furore, or any number of other miserably unpleasant things that completely prevent sleep. So I'm tired every single day, which totally surprisingly makes focusing on work fucking difficult. Doubly so because the work is fucking uninteresting and the code is awful to read and difficult to understand because it's complicated and often poorly written. And extending it takes enormous mental effort I simply do not have to give. Oh! Guess what my job is?

To make matters worse, time to myself basically does not exist, ever. I wake up, I attend standup, I cook and eat breakfast, I work while fighting against endless distractions and interruptions, I cook and eat dinner, I work some more, and finally: I can go to bed and try to sleep. The next morning, I wake up and repeat this misery, ad nauseam.

Et ad nauseam? Nauseam est nunc.
It's not proper latin, but fuck you. it's good enough. and nobody speaks it anyway.

Ego sum miseriae. Is that good enough for you?

I can't find it in myself to care about anything. I've been doing whatever I can to feel a little more normal, but mostly I just feel numb. If I drink, it helps a little because I notice my misery a little less. That's a great solution right there: drink until I don't care anymore, and keep doing the same shit without even trying to make things better. Why? Because I fucking can't. I hate this house, I hate the lack of quiet, I hate this city, I hate the dust and the clutter, I hate this state, I hate this codebase, I don't like my coworkers, I hate that I can't get a fucking thing done without spending 6x longer than it should, I hate that I can't fucking think of a single thing I want to do, I hate that I can't ever enjoy anything, I hate that I'm beginning to hate myself, and I fucking hate everything else, too.

In short:
I'm not happy. I'm fucking miserable.

And no, I'm not posting this here for you to psychoanalyze me or suggest solutions. It's for me to vent. Fuck your opinions and fuck your advice and fuck you.

!dev

I live next to a nightclub and went outside for a fag.

It’s wet, 2:30am and kinda cold.

A girl and her boyfriend come out of the club..
Her feet hurt because of her high heels so she takes them off, walking on the wet, cold road barefoot now.
Her boyfriend sees it and tells her to put them back on.
She denies.

He takes off his shoes and gives them to her (good boyfriend...) she puts them on, almost falling over cause she’s hammered as fuck, takes them off again and says they don’t fit and look stupid on her..

WTF, I understand taking the shoes off When she’s drunk but I don’t understand how the fuck she could care if it looks good at half 2 in the morning in an empty town..

I’ve seen it all now..

#onlyInIreland

Drunk Dev 1: These wifi signals are really take toll of brain tissues and may probably cause brain cancer. 🙁

Drunk Dev 2: Let’s power off our wifi router. We don’t need wifi while drinking. 😏

Drunk Dev 1: Good, but what about other wifi signals in proximity. Your neighbours ?? 🤨

Drunk Dev 2: Oh poor, they wont get into our brains as our brains don’t have password for their wifi thus, we can’t connect to their access point 😎

Drunk Dev 1: 😳

Worst client request.
Craziest client.
Worst accident.
Accident you thought were impossible in the dev world.
Story time, that one time where you f*cked up really bad.
Best boss.
Nicest client.
Most satisfying hobby project.
Best dev food.
Most helpful accident.
Your favorite project you had to trash, explain why.
Weirdest thing someone asked you to fix because you worked with computers.
Most memorable thing from devRant.
Best thing to happen to you because of devRant.

Its 6am and i feel productive, its not even my app got dammit.

Project you took too far.
Best/worst drunk coding experience.
Weirdest thing you ever ended up fixing because you know stuff about computers.
Worst setup you have seen someone have.
Worst treated hardware you have ever seen.
Best skill to have picked up because of your interest for development, but isnt completely dev related.
Best/worst choice in your carreer, what happened.
Sketchiest email a coworker, friend, boss or client sent.
That one accident that prevented you from using your computer or the internet.
Moment when you thought your dev environment would get a huge boost, but ended with a plot twist.
Worst disturbance while working.

If i come up with more ill either post again, or comment here. This was all i could get off the top of my head, believe it or not.

Edit, gotta add this one: Cable porn

I love stackoverflow!

1. Developer who knows SO, and loves it : Yeah, my friend!

2. Developer who knows SO, but hates it : Go home, you're drunk.

3. Normal people who doesn't know the dev world : Why would you like a stack to overflow?

4. Normal people who is a tech savvy : Ah, the place where people share their questions and answers to make a better software and to be together? I never used it, but I heard it is awesome!

5. Idiots : What is that?

6. Grammarly : Recommended word is "stack overflow"

7. Dishwasher : Fatal error!

Fuck yeah I love Thursdays! Deployments went well in the office, freelance clients are satisfied as well and I am drunk with my wife... what more can a dev(ranter) ask for?!

I was nights out drinking yesterday. Today I discovered that I've booked a flight and a hotel for Lisbon. I don't remember doing that. 😆

Well... it's non refundable, so vacation it is.

!rant (maybe somewhat drunk)
I'm a moderate gamer, and I like online gaming (battlefront, rocket league, that kind of stuff). And I can say that from all online communities i've seen, devRant is by far the less toxic one, being actually extremely nice.
Most dev communities i've been part of are extremely competitive, but devRant is all about sharing and caring.
A big bravo to you all, and thanks!

How many lightbulbs does it take to screw a dev?...

Forget it, I'm drunk.

!dev
!!vodka!
!batch files. because they're stupid.

Preface: I may be drunk. If not, I'll keep trying ~

Update: no, i'm already kinda wasted.

I told @AlexDeLarge that I would try Reyka today and let him know how it is. So, let's have at it!

At the recommendation of a friend, I tried Deep Eddy (vodka) a few weeks ago. It's extremely smooth and very good. Totally recommend. I can drink it straight, or with a tiny bit of water.

The same friend also recommended Reyka, which I bought earlier today (among quite a few other things, because alcohol). Here's what I discovered:

With Reyka, I was expecting something extremely smooth and almost tasteless, but tasteless it is not. Reyka tastes halfway between vodka and a good gin, like Bombay Sapphire. It actually has a *lot* of flavor, but the vodka itself is actually pretty high quality. I haven't found anything to mix with it yet, and I don't really like it straight. I might try lemon or lemonade next.

If I was to recommend vodkas, it would be either Tito's, or Deep Eddy. (Reyka is kind of strange, so I don't know if I can recommend it yet.)

Tito's is smooth and tasty -- absolutely not a gross vodka flavor, but ... nice. All alcohols have different effects and make me feel different. Grey Goose makes me tired, Tito's makes me happy.

Deep Eddy is incredibly smooth, and has almost no taste at all. It's wonderful.

UPdte: I took awhilfe to wrte this and... I'm getting a little tooo drunkt o conitinue so i thnkg oin going to nd this rannt here. ssorry! ^^

Having to review an offshore C++ codebase made in Romania that the company I worked for they bought to control a wifi module on a complex RF mobile tech device that I can't legally give more details on.

If I could legally post this masterpiece, or should I say masterpiece-of-shit, all of you C++ dev would instantly get AIDS and all the existing types of cancer upon browsing it for 2 minutes.

It's laughably bad and unmaintainable. One of my colleague called it "the perfect example of human obfuscation" and it fits perfectly.

Think of a 100k LoC main function with nested loops and ifs with random sleep values, 1000 values of hardcoded 32 bits arrays declared globally in the first 10k lines for unknown reasons. Comments in Romanian mixed with english. Somehow, this shit works by some miracle.

The worst intern you can think of, while being piss drunk, could do better and it's no joke.

1. Set your podcast player to 0.5x speed
2. Listen to your favorite dev podcast
3. Imagine they're all drunk
4. Profit

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.

My first job was actually nontechnical - I was 18 years old and sold premium office furniture for a small store in Munich.
I did code in my free time though (PHP/JS mostly, had a litte browsergame back then - those were the days), so when my boss approached me and asked me whether I liked to take over a coding project, I agreed to the idea.

Little did I know at the time: I was supposed to work with a web agency the boss had contracted to build their online shop. Only that he had no plan or anything, he basically told them "build me an online shop like abc(a major competitor of ours at the time)"

He employed another sales lady who was supposed to manage the shop (that didn't exist yet). In the end, I think 80% of her job was to keep me from killing my boss.

As you can imagine, with this huuuuge amout of planning and these exact visions of what was supposed to be, things went south fast and far. So far that I could visit my fellow flightless birds down in the Penguin's republic of Antarctica and still need to go further.

Well... When my boss started suing the web agency, I was... ahem, asked to take over. Dumb as I was, I did - I was a PHP kid and thought that Magento, being written in PHP, would be easy to master. If you know Magento, you know that was maybe the wrongest thing I ever said.

Fast forward 3 very exhausting months, the thing was online. Not all of it worked yet, but it was online and fairly secure.

I did next to everything myself, administrating the CentOS box the shop was running on, its (own) e-mail server, the web server, all the coding required for the shop (can you spell 12 hour day for 8 hour pay?)

3 further months later, my life basically was a wreck, I dragged myself to work, the only thing I looked forward being the motorcycle ride home. The system worked though.

Mind you, I was still, at the time, working with three major customers, doing deskside support and some admin (Win Server 2008R2 at the time) - because, to quote my boss, "We could not afford a full time developer and we don't need one".

I think i stopped coding in my free time, the one hobby I used to love more than anything on the world, somewhere Decemerish 2012. I dropped out of the open source projects I was in, quit working on my browser game and let everything slide.

I didn't even care to renew the domains and servers for it, I just let it die without notice.

The little free time I had, I spent playing video games and getting drunk/high.

December 2013, 1.5 years on the job, I reached my breaking point and just left, called in sick at least a week per month because I just could not see this fucking place anymore.

I looked for another job outside of ALL of what I did before. No more Magento, no more sales, no more PHP. I didn't have to look for long, despite what I thought of my skills.

In February 2014, I told my boss that I quit. It was still seven months until my new job started, but I wanted him to know early so we could migrate and find a replacement.

The search for said replacement started in June 2014. I had considerably less work in the months before, looks like he got the hint.

In August 2014, my replacement arrived and I got him started.

I found a job, which I am still in, and still happy about after almost half a decade, at a local, medium sized ISP as a software dev and IT security guy. Got a proper training with a certificate and everything now.

My replacement lasted two months, he was external and never really did his job - the site, which until I had quit, had a total of 3 days downtime for 3 YEARS (they were the hoster's fault, not mine), was down for an entire month and he could not even tell why.

HIS followup was kicked after taking two weeks to familiarize himself with the project. Well, I think that two weeks is not even barely enough to familiarize yourself with nearly three years of work, but my boss gave him two days.

In 2016, the shop was replaced with another one. Different shop system, different OS, different CI. I don't know why and I can't say I give a damn.

Almost all the people that worked at the company back with me have left for greener pastures, taking their customers (and revenue) with them.

As for my boss' comments, instructions and lines: THAT might not be safe for work. Or kids. Or humans in general. And there wouldn't be much left if you put it through a language filter...

Moral of the story: No, it's not a bad thing to leave a place if you're mistreated there. Don't mistake loyalty with stupidity!

And, to quote one of my favourite Bands: "Nothing matters when the pain is all but gone" (Tragedy + Time by Rise Against).

I hope all the liquor in my system will be null in next 2,3 hours. Amen.

I am a people people pleaser.

Especially when it comes to deadlines. I struggle heavily with them. For example:

My boss: 'Will the app be done by Friday?'

Me: 'well some features won't be ready but overall yes.'

The truth: "No even if I work on it 24/7 there are just so many things in the background that are too technical to explain to my boss that it will be impossible for me to hit that deadline. It will most likely take over a month to be ready for beta testing...."

I just don't know how to deal with those kinds of questions. I don't want to say 'most likely over a month' because it makes me look like a bad dev but at the same time I know that that is way more realistic than 'it will be done by Friday'

The truth is: even if it just looks like 3 buttons to you, in reality I need to change thousands of lines of code to accomplish the expected goals...

P.S:

I wanted to write this rant for a long time. Now I am drunk. There will be a sober more ordered version of this rant.

!dev (when do I ever post a dev related story? I only post about my personal life really)

For about 2 years I had a very good friend, and I had a huge crush on her for most of those 2 years. All of my junior year of high school, she dated my best friend, then they broke up the summer after because he'd cheated on her around the time they got together and she had found out. I was there for both of them during the breakup (it was fucking exhausting). The thing is, I was there for the girl more because I had a crush on her, and I started to consider her my best friend rather than her ex.

She knew I had a crush on her for a long time. But she still spent about a year going to parties every weekend, getting fucking hammered, and hooking up with random guys, then proceeded to tell me about it after. I can't count how many times she had to cancel plans because she got hammered the night before.

But I had a huge crush on her, so I essentially put her up on a pedestal, thinking she could do no wrong. Then we hit a point where we didn't talk for a couple months because I hit a low point and she was uncomfortable with me because of it. Around April we started talking again, immediately back to being best friends but my feelings for her came and went for a while. She had a huge crush on our other friend that had a girlfriend at the time. Life went on, she actually ended up being my first kiss while she was drunk one night (I was sober cause I was driving), but I started talking to a different girl a few days before then, so I was very conflicted about everything there.

Then a few weeks ago came. A different friend got a Radeon 5700 XT and I went over to his house to check it out and everything. We ended up talking for a while, and the conversation turned to my whole friend group that I hung out with all the time (the girl being the center of the group). That friend was never very fond of her, and he always made that very clear. Basically he made me realize that she's not perfect, and that I'd been seeing her through rose-colored glasses.

I spent a week or so rethinking our whole friendship, and I realized that she is nowhere near fucking perfect. For example, she ALWAYS has to be the center of attention. If our friend group is focusing on someone else for whatever reason, she essentially throws a fit then gets really quiet to get attention. Also she can't take criticism at all, she always acts like a victim if you try to criticize her in any way. I also feel like every time I tried to better myself in some way, she ended up bringing me down and making me feel like my problems aren't important. She uses her kindness as a weapon, such as "How could you say that about me? I've been nothing but kind to you!" And the list just goes on.

So, about a week ago, I told her that I feel like she's a toxic person, and she does nothing but bring people down over time, because that's truly how I feel. And of course, she couldn't take the criticism, and said "I don't even know why you feel that, I've been nothing but nice to you".

I haven't talked to anyone in that friend group in one week now. And I feel a lot better mentally. Being friends with her felt like a chore. Only one person in that friend group has tried to talk to me, and that was today. Nobody else has texted me or anything since last Monday. And I honestly couldn't care less. I feel like a huge chapter of my life is over, like the depressing chapter in a book.

I don't know how to end this. I'm doing fairly well now, been hanging out with coworkers a bunch lately. Life's actually kinda good for once.

Manager: (𝑤𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑒𝑠 𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑘𝑒𝑡)

Title: Something something related to the dynamic display of a button on one of our screens in our UI

Description: Something something completely different related to how entities are filtered on a different screen

Dev: f*&$ing hell, do i have to give yet ANOTHER schooling in JIRA this week?!

I swear they're drunk every time they write tickets.

You weally aer a true developr if u get drunk adn go on dev rant

remember when our whole dev team was drunk but we went back to work anyway? turns out, someone rm -rf a whole folder of js scripts!! it took us some time before we could find the back up files which were in the old server (that crashed) because recently we changed servers (so we were transferring files) and we are now using amazon.

our boss got so pissed this morning but oh well, it was his idea to drink and feast in the first place!

Worked for a team where Scrum was thrust on it to fix/cover up bad management decisions.

Manager is really enthusiastic (to impress his new boss) and gets a bunch of colored post-it sticky notes for stories and shit. Team spends a bunch of time carefully writing stories & etc and arranging said notes on a white board. Come in the next day and 90% of them fell off due to condensation, or such such.

Left the group, with the rest of the senior dev staff, after the "15 minute" standup expanded a minimum of 1 hour each day... and the SM carefully writing down everything everyone said.

A co-dev gave me some career advice - "when the pilots are drunk, it's time to get off the plane."

Well, some guy at one of weddings I've attended, when he found out I was a dev, he started his pitch about shopping mall maps. Even tho I was quite drunk, I easily explained him this idea sucks and told him it's a freaking Google maps feature..

!dev

What a fucking son of a bitch day...

I’m hungover as fuck so i don’t wanna drive, so I want to pay parking for a few hours.
I didn’t find my fucking key, when I pulled up the couch to look under it, my XPS fell of it and smashes the screen. At that moment my landlord knocks on the door to take a look at the kitchen ceiling and t he kitchen is a fucking MESS! You know when you’re drunk and get a late night cooking attack? Yea, that sort of mess.

Completely fucked in my head I got the reserve key for the car, unlocked it and the bloody alarm went of because the keys battery is empty. So managed to turn it off, went back into my apartment and found the key BEHIND the motherfucking couch.. BEHIND THE COUCH, HOW WOULD IT EVEN GET THERE? Ffs...

I’ll just continue drinking now and hope tomorrow is gonna be a better day.. and order a new screen for my laptop, it’s not at all like I’m short on money this month anyway..

I've just got in from bar* work, a little drunk*!

My last dev employer actually offered me my old job back, but as HR are so awful I said the situation was past that and demanded compensation. A nice payout agreed for me, for not taking it to tribunal 👍

Now for the new job! I thought working the night scene would be fun, but it's not well paid and the freelance I have is but it's hard to juggle the two.

I might have a break or a month or so doing this, then look for another job.

Anyone recommend good companies LGBT friendly in London?

I love it when asshats, that wear testicles for sunglasses, like to ask me a question about my past experience with a given technology. Let's call it "X". After I've said my piece about the desired effect "X" was supposed to achieve, and describe the environment/scope where "X" was used, and describe the pain points I've encountered with it or the headaches "X" has caused in those environments, these camel spunk garglers then try to immediately rebut me by saying that every one of the times they've set "X" technology up it's worked just fine.

So, I kindly remind them that my past experience was in large enterprises where "X" technology just doesn't scale well so I've seen some issues with it.

Spunk Gargler: "Hmmm, must've just not been setup correctly."

I lose my shit (internally of course because I can't afford to be without a job right now.) and say, "I'm not so sure that it wasn't setup correctly, I just don't think that 'X' works properly at the scale of 500+ employee environments well. You've only ever set it up in small offices of like - what, 20 users?"

Shitlord McHerp-a-Derp who's Drunk on Spunk: "Maybe, but it just sounds like a bad configuration was causing those issues to me."

He shuffled back into his office shortly after I basically told him he's a fucking chump playing small team tactics and I've seen shit at scale so I've seen first hand what does and does not work well.

I'm writing this because this is the same fucking imbecile that has only ever encountered a /23 network once before from a client they inherited from a previous MSP team and they didn't know how to "safely change it" to a /24 so they just left it in place.

(BTW, just for the non-networking guys/gals out there, I'm sure you've already guessed it, but a /23 network is NOT a fucking problem!)

These puffy cancerous taint boils that call themselves IT engineers are the fucking problem!

I'm not a dev by trade or training, but trying to learn DevOps, and I can totally see why Dev teams can/sometimes get pissed with infrastructure teams... infrastructure/helpdesk side of IT is full of these fucking meat heads.

I am drunk right now. Just wanted to let you guys know that I love you and that I am really proud to be part of such a nice community. I know that we Devs sometimes have a hard time due to our profession, but I am happy that we are still able to stay strong together.
And now good night. Have to work in 6 hours.

Went to PC Gamer's website. Got blocked by an anti-adblocker. Opened the DevTools to remove the fuck out of it. Found class names that may have been made by the drunkest vodka-fed polish dude the Earth ever carried.

who's so stressed out right now? me.

why? i need to change the access token in my code because it was changed

why is that stressful? because there is no variable for it, it was hardcoded

who coded that? me.

when? when the whole dev team was drunk asf

fml

Me: ok so let's be producing tonight, work on some new systems and maybe some of my book..

Brain: *no you won't, you'll get drunk, get annoyed and shelf another project like the millions you have and will forget about your book...*

Me: ...

Brain: *exactly what I thought, now sit down and be a good little Dev*

Even my own brain hates me haha

I drank so much whisky tonight I can't see straight

no proud of it, but at least i don't lie like all the social media fucks

at least i have that

It's 6pm here, running out of scotch. Writing a backend for telegram bot. Seems like I need to step out to get some scotch

!dev
I was so tired of work last week and weather was so good I ended up in a bar.
People were so nice there so I got there second day in a row.
I met new nice people and cute female bartender who laughed from my jokes.
Was to drunk and tried so much to make her laugh that l forgot to get her number.
Got there next day asked bartender for her shifts, turned out it was last day of her work, she moved out from city for at least a year. So I got drunk again, and so on 5 days in a row.
Well that’s my life. Lucky me... again.
Karma is so funny I can’t laugh for some time anymore.

I am so close to crying it is just not funny, every time i close my eyes I picture Superman's Scream after snapping Zod's neck in man of steel i.e. filled with pain, anguish and not being able to accept what you have become... I am not a dev but I have been glued to a computer screen since 7 years old.

I work for a company as the I.T. Administrator that does quite a bit of specialized work in the regulatory industry and has there own in-house software. This was built by one developer after another, hired straight out of university/college and you cannot believe how big of a monster this became being built with direction from someone who cant code and a bunch of "drunk children" who do not know good principles (swear to god thousands of lines with no comments and no OOP)

Now I am validating and testing a system, i keep being asked if we will be ready by the end of the week and due to my lack of qualifications after dropping out of school I keep thinking yes, but every time i test something I find another problem, I may not be able to code but understanding quickly is my strength and I know this shit is not simple.

I am under constant pressure to deliver something quickly.

Any concerns I raise are almost brushed off because I am an idiot with no qualifications who should be greatful for the work I am doing and the low as balls salary

The problems I solve are commended by the 10+ years of experience senior developer writing the application for us, yet I get shit for taking an hour to find the problem that existed in our network setup because it is the devs job (OMFG HE WOULD NEVER HAVE REALIZED WITHOUT COMING HERE AND LOOKING AT OUR INFRASTRUCTURE... WE WOULD HAVE BEEN STUCK FOR A FUCKING MONTH!!!!)

I see only 2 courses ahead for my life. The easy way and the hard way.

Easy way, buy a gun and end it all.

Suffer for 3 more years in the place that is causing constant breathing difficulty and the occasional pain in my left arm, finish my matric, continue learning to code and leave.

But right now I just want cry scream like Superman!!!

My web dev teacher was drunk almost every lesson, and my C++ teachers don't care about visiting our high school)) All we know is learnt by ourselves
Other teacher hates when we type
void smth(){
}
Instead of
void smth()
{
}
And wants to overwrite the code to fix these style errors))

!dev

It took a one fucking year to get over her and all it took was couple of birthday pictures of her with her "best friend", I wanna get drunk...

At least pretend to have a reason for using checkboxes where the behaviour is obviously a single choice. I know I'm sometimes full of crap. I know I can waste so much time arguing for something I'm wrong about. At least I have arguments to support my approach, and I don't dismiss my mistakes. I don't need you to spend the next 5 minutes changing checkboxes for radio buttons in the mockup, it took dev 5 seconds to replace "checkbox" with "radio" and move on. However, I do need you to know what you're doing, even if it turns to be wrong.

I know this world celebrates people who can do things perfectly: models with perfect bodies, singers with perfect voices, sportsmen with perfect scores, students with perfect grades. I understand that's why you wish to try again so you can do it perfectly.

That's not what the world needs. The world needs people who know why they did what they did. It's drunk drivers who break down in the court, not serial killers. Serial killers know what they did, they know why they did it, and they believe it was the right thing to do; drunk drivers on the other hand had no idea what they did or why they did it, and they try to dismiss their wrongdoings by blaming them on alcohol, not getting a taxi, parking fees, the car, or some other circumstances.

So confront your bullshit for once. Stop searching for excuses to dismiss challenging ideas and prove you can defend your position. Otherwise, don't get angry when your "impeccable" ideas lose to someone who at least tries to defend their nonsense.

A beautiful Friday night on an island with plenty of drinks and katsu!

Life is great sometimes! Don't code too hard guys. Have a drink!

!dev (never been less dev related)

I’m off for a few days from tomorrow on.
Have to travel to get some administrative shit ordered..

But I’ll depart the day after tomorrow.
Now I’m half way drunk asking myself why I didn’t take off from Monday on..

Today (Thursday) is my Friday, because tomorrow is off, which is the day I get hammered but it’s not Friday, it’s fucking Thursday..

Somehow bothers me because the days are shifted.
Sometimes I feel a bit like Sheldon cooper..

You get me or am I just talking nonsense?

Is there any terminal who informs when you write code while drunk.

Non "dev"-rant, more of a social/relationship/life rant..

Just,, fuck,, my,, life..

Backstory; I have some issues, I'm not normal, socialy, so I finally gave up on life, do just enough to continue providing for my daughter (cause her mother is more fucked up than me), that means letting go of any chance of happiness, dating, the few friends I had and so forth.

The latter simply means that I stop trying to keep em around, because that's how it's always been, and they're all gone, all except one. THE one, the one I work with, the one I fell totally in love with a year ago, the one that is the first and last thing of the day on my mind, the one I had to tell my feelings for, the one that I really need some distance from.. But no. She's the one that won't let me go..

I'm on my way to a concert right now, a concert I tried inviting her to a few months ago, she wasn't interested,, For some reason I opened Instagram right now,, bam, right in my face. Her,, in full makeup, which she never wares, posting a selfie, which she never does..

Whish I could say why life is so fucked, but take my word for it, it just is.. And guess what, After the Christmas holiday, one day in, she probably noticed that something was "off".. and she immediately suggest that we take one of our "dinner dates" next week, and I'd bet that the first question is "you're beeing wierd, what's up?", and all I can say, again, is "can't talk about it".. cause I really can't, anything I say is that much to much..

Fuck!

Yes, this rant is mostly focused on "her", but to get a hold of my state of mind, I've given up, and just accepted that I should never have any kind of social life, cause that's simply best for everyone.

And if you wonder why I'm posting this here, I don't have time for a therapist, and "she" is my PM at work, where I'm THE senior developer.. Every issue that anyone else haven't been able to solve, ends up in my lap. She calls me magic on a daily basis..

Yes, I'm drunk as fuck right now..