Most embarrassing and lucky moment on the first week of job.

Me and my best friend were selected in the same company as developers. I was having some trouble with my system. So I mailed the description to our support department. Pop up was displayed from our chat client and person on the other end happened to be a lady. She wanted me to share a team viewer link with click access. So I did it and within 2 minutes of efforts she solved it. I thanked her, closed the chat conversation and started installing few packages. Meanwhile, I was curious to see her as she was really nice throughout the conversation. So I opened LinkedIn, searched for her name and found her profile. I zoomed in her photo and she was a pretty chick. I didn't stop and found her on FB too, and quickly saw all her DPs. I just copied her profile URL and sent it to my friend ( the one that got selected with me ) and told him about my conversation with her. Then I asked my friend
"She's hot. Should I send her a friend request or have to find some more troubles in my pc and talk to her few more times ? :P "
He replied "Dude what are you wanting for ? "
Out of no where, a pop up showed up. It was the girl we were talking about. The exact message was

"You can now close your team viewer session, and we can talk over FB :)"

Embarrassing AF!

A "support" guy my boss got in. I had told my boss numerous times, "Get rid of this guy, he's only wasting our time and money. And he's going to end up doing something where we will end up having to put out the fires."

Sure as a pair of nuts on a squirrel, this crazy bastard goes and DELETES a client's database. Yes folks, in fucking production. A live database. The heart of the business' transactions are... *poof*... GONE!!!

No backups for the day! No synchronisation beforehand! No nothing... just GONE!!! Fucking flat-lining!

Well, when I realised what he has done, I had to remove myself from the room before shit got outta hand!

I told the boss man that is the last straw and he needs to go...

The long and short of it...
- The client had luckily only lost about half a days data.
- I'm no longer at the company.
- This dumb fuck still is.

//Long rant

[Boss man]: Hey, we need you to build us a web app.

[Me]: Okay, what do you need it to do?

[Boss man]: We need staff to be able to login from anywhere, create new appointments, check room availability, display live times for the rooms, schedule future appointments, record all the data as stats and export the stats to (email address).

[Me]: Okay, sounds useful, anything else?

[Boss man]: we also need it to send all relevant data to a calendar where certain staff will be notified by email of events.

[Me]: Okay... I'll get right on starting this.

[Boss man]: So you can have it done by the end of the day? (4 hours from this time)

[Me]: *Internal screaming* *WHAT THE FUCK* Uhm, no, I don't think that is possible to complete in a four hour period by myself.

[Boss man]: Okay, well by tomorrow then, I'm leaving for the day though, have a good one.

[Me]....

//End long rant

"A picture is worth a thousand words"

No one knows the pain of that more than a front end dev trying to reduce load times of a web page.

This was at my first internship (ranted about this before but hey fuck it).

- discovered several high critical vulnerabilities in their product. Wrote them down and kindly gave them to my boss/manager (they were the same person). He looked at me like 'the fuck' but I just went home at the end of the day. Next day, I got called into his office. I was a fucker, cancer guy who knew nothing about security, who would never reach anything and I shouldn't criticize their product (I had no right to because I was an intern).

- Bossman went to a meeting with a coworker to present their product. They came back to the office and it very clearly had gone pretty wrong. (we had nothing to do with anything related to the project including the meeting) he called us all bad things he could think of and it was all our fault and so on.

- I do have a transpiration problem but I can partly contain that when it's not too hot and the stress levels are okay. I was only allowed to sit in front of the window. YES IT WAS A MOTHERFUCKING HUGE WINDOW, 35-40 DEGREES FEELING TEMPERATURE AND NO MOTHERFUCKING AIRCONDITIONING. (okay gotta admit that one of the installation guys fell off the roof during the installation BUT THEN AT LEAST GET FANS OR SOMETHING).
Got called into his office multiple times because I smelled and 'couldnt take care of my hygiene'. I was literally sweating my ass off full-time so what the fuck could I do in those temperatures?!?

- my only project there: Google translating their whole CRM. Took us five weeks and the bossman kept pressure on us at all times which didn't FUCKING help.

Was fired after 5 weeks for hygiene reasons and because I didn't do my work well appearantly (still fuck translating all day).

One of the worst things? He pretended everything to go well until the first review came with my mentor (mentor == awesome guy). Then he talked shit about me like it was no-one's business.

I literally cried when I walked home after being fired.

1. Find bug
2. Try 3 methods of fixing
3. All fail
4. Tell yourself you're trying for the LAST time then you'll go on to something else
5. End up trying 5 more times
6. Repeat step 4 20 times
7. Cry
8. Finally take a break
9. Return next day, try another method, it works instantly

FML!

I don't even know where to start with this rant!
I haven't paid rent for 3 months now.I haven't paid the WiFi and electricity bills too.Hell, I haven't even paid the fucking college fees and it's almost mid-semester.I have like 100+ other bills I haven't paid.I have exhausted loans from all of my banks and I am at the fucking end now!!!!

What's worse is that some motherfuckers owe me close to 4 million in local currency!!!The project was finished in April and until now they can't fucking pay me because their "CEO has not signed the cheque". Motherfuckers, we were all in the same room when we agreed on the pricing.That half-assed CEO was also there!
What the fuck is wrong with people?WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?????
How many fucking times do I have to come to your stinking shit office to follow up on payments.How many fucking times????How many fucking times do I have to see new V8s parked outside your office yet you claim you still collecting the funds.How many fucking times?!!?
Please fucking pay me!.I fucking need that money stupid.I don't survive on eating flies! FTW!

Act I

Me (Lead Developer), Boss (Head of IT), CEO

> enter stage left CEO

CEO > "Alright Boss, give it to me straight. Are we going to be able to release app x by this date?"

Boss > "Yup we'll have a beta release on that date"

> exit stage right CEO

Me > types long email to Boss outlining exactly why we won't be able to release app x anywhere near that date, beta or otherwise, because:
1. We have a development team of 2
2. I've never developed an iOS app before
3. Developer 2 is still trying to understand git, because
3a. Developer 2 isn't even a developer (but he's doing iOS front-end so w/e)
4. We don't have the required database systems in place
5. Or CRM
6. Or CPQ
7. We'll need to conduct a security audit

Boss > "yeah, but CEO is gonna need to hear that date a few more times before he can fully understand"

Me > *internally screaming BUT YOU HAVEN'T TOLD HIM THAT AT ALL*
"ok cool just glad we're on the same page on that one"

I have been a mobile developer working with Android for about 6 years now. In that time, I have endured countless annoyances in the Android development space. I will endure them no more.
My complaints are:

1. Ridiculous build times. In what universe is it acceptable for us to wait 30 seconds for a build to complete. Yes, I've done all the optimisations mentioned on this page and then some. Don't even mention hot reload as it doesn't work fast enough or just does not work at all. Also, buying better hardware should not be a requirement to build a simple Android app, Xcode builds in 2 seconds with a 8GB Macbook Air. A Macbook Air!

2. IDE. Android Studio is a memory hog even if you throw 32GB of RAM at it. The visual editors are janky as hell. If you use Eclipse, you may as well just chop off your fingers right now because you will have no use for them after you try and build an app from afresh. I mean, just look at some of the posts in this subreddit where the common response is to invalidate caches and restart. That should only be used as a last resort, but it's thrown about like as if it solves everything. Truth be told, it's Gradle's fault. Gradle is so annoying I've dedicated the next point to it.

3. Gradle. I am convinced that Gradle causes 50% of an Android developer's pain. From the build times to the integration into various IDEs to its insane package management system. Why do I need to manually exclude dependencies from other dependencies, the build tool should just handle it for me. C'mon it's 2019. Gradle is so bad that it requires approx 54GB of RAM to work out that I have removed a dependency from the list of dependencies. Also I cannot work out what properties I need to put in what block.
4. API. Android API is over-bloated and hellish. How do I schedule a recurring notification? Oh use an AlarmManager. Yes you heard right, an AlarmManager... Not a NotificationManager because that would be too easy. Also has anyone ever tried running a long running task? Or done an asynchronous task? Or dealt with closing/opening a keyboard? Or handling clicks from a RecyclerView? Yes, I know Android Jetpack aims to solve these issues but over the years I have become so jaded by things that have meant to solve other broken things, that there isn't much hope for Jetpack in my mind 😤

5. API 2. A non-insignificant number of Android users are still on Jelly Bean or KitKat! That means we, as developers, have to support some of your shitty API decisions (Fragments, Activities, ListView) from all the way back then!

6. Not reactive enough. Android has support for Databinding recently but this kind of stuff should have been introduced from the very start. Look at React or Flutter as to how easy it is to make shit happen without any effort.

7. Layouts. What the actual hell is going on here. MDPI, XHDPI, XXHDPI, mipmap, drawable. Fuck it, just chuck it all in the drawable folder. Seriously, Android should handle this for me. If I am designing for a larger screen then it should be responsive. I don't want to deal with 50 different layouts spread over 6 different folders.

8. Permission system. Why was this not included from the very start? Rogue apps have abused this and abused your user's privacy and security. Yet you ban us and not them from the Play Store. What's going on? We need answers.

9. In Android, building an app took me 3 months and I had a lot of work left to do but I got so sick of Android dev I dropped it in favour of Flutter. I built the same app in Flutter and it took me around a month and I completed it all.
10. XML.

If you're a new dev, for the love of all that is good in this world, do NOT get into Android development. Start with Flutter or even iOS. On Flutter and build times are insanely fast and the hot reload is under 500ms constantly. It's a breath of fresh air and will save you a lot of headaches AND it builds for iOS flawlessly.

To the people who build Android, advocate it and work on it, sorry to swear, but fuck you! You have created a mess that we have to work with on a day-to-day basis only for us to get banned from the app store! You have sold us a lie that Android development is amazing with all the sweet treat names and conferences that look bubbly and fun. You have allowed to get it so bad that we can't target an API higher than 18 because some Android users are still using devices that support that!

End this misery. End our pain. End our suffering. Throw this abomination away like you do with some of your other projects and migrate your efforts over to Flutter. Please!

#NoToGoogleIO #AndroidSummitBoycott #FlutterDev #ReactNative

THIS is why unit testing is important, I often see newbs scour at the idea of debugging or testing:
My high school cs project, i made a 2d game in c++. A generic top down tank game. Being my FIRST project and knowing nothing about debugging or testing and just straight up kept at it for 3 months. Used everything c++ and OOP had to offer, thinking "It works now, sure will work later"

Fast forward evaluation day i had over 5k lines of code here, and not a day of testing; ALL the bugs thought to themselves- "YOU KNOW WHAT LETS GUT THIS KID "
Now I did see some minor infractions several times but nothing too serious to make me refactor my code. But here goes

I started my game on a different system, with a low end processor about 1/4 the power of mine( fair assumption). The game crashed in loading screen. Okay lets do that again. Finally starts and tanks are going off screen, dead tanks are not being de-spawned and ended up crashing game again. Wow okay again! Backround image didn't load, can only see black background. Again! Crashed when i used a special ability. Went on for some time and i gave up.

Prof saw the pain, he'd probably seen dis shit a million times, saw all the hard work and i got a good grade anyways. But god that was embarrassing, entire class saw that and I cringe at the thought of it.
I never looked at testing the same way again.

Vsauce has made all of its Mindfield content free on youtube...

Watched the episode about moral licensing

TL;DR; If you do something very good you tend to compensate and give yourself a free pass to do not so good

It happens to me in software when I accomplish something really fast, like a bumpy process that is undefined and in most cases should take X amount of time, but due to luck + experience + right mindset I get it done like 5 times faster...

I end up wasting the other parts of the time feeling good about myself and exploring google maps and writing rants here...

About two years ago I get roped into a something when someone was requesting an $8000 laptop to run an "program" that they wrote in Excel to pull data from our mainframe.

In reality they are using our normal application that interacts with the mainframe and screen scrapping it to populate several Excel spreadsheets.

So this guy kept saying that he needed the expensive laptop because he needed the extra RAM and processing power for his application. At the time we only supported 32 bit Windows 7 so even though I told him ten times that the OS wouldn't recognize more than 3.5 GB of RAM he kept saying that increasing the RAM would fix his problem. I also explained that even if we installed the 64 bit OS we didn't have approval for the 64 bit applications.

So we looked at the code and we found that rather than reusing the same workbook he was opening a new instance of a workbook during each iteration of his loop and then not closing or disposing of them. So he was running out of memory due to never disposing of anything.

Even better than all of that, he wanted a faster processor to speed up the processing, but he had about 5 seconds of thread sleeps in each loop so that the place he was screen scrapping from would have time to load. So it wouldn't matter how fast the processor was, in the end there were sleeps and waits in there hard coded to slow down the app. And the guy didn't understand that a faster processor wouldn't have made a difference.

The worst thing is a "dev" that thinks they know what they are doing but they don't have a clue.

DevRant rant:

I am on DevRant for quite a while now and I really enjoy it here. The overall atmosphere is great, as well as the community. (Yes, that includes you!)
Since I came here I've learned some very valuable lessons regarding work (conditions), annoying coworkers and programming itself. I like to think of DevRant as a huge ball of experience by very talented people, as well as a great place for discussions about a topic we all love: code. But lately I am seeing more and more memes on here, with titles like "I think everybody know this", "I think everybody can relate" and "Soo true". Those posts have no value at all and are (most of the time) reposted from 9gag or similar networks. Sometimes those "rants" don't even have anything to do with devs anymore, but are only here to farm ++'es. In the beginning I really enjoyed funny "rants", but now the majority of them just annoy me. It becomes especially annoying when you see the same meme three times in 15 minutes.
I'd be in for some kind of DevFun section, where everybody is able to post his or hers jokes/memes/etc, but the current situation just really gets on my nerves.

I hope that I am not the only one who thinks like that, because I really feel uncomfortable ranting about something I actually love.

end rant

Don't be ridiculous and say Mac's are good for gaming 😣, they aren't.

Their graphics are terrible CPUs are shocking ram ... Average the fact they have fast ssds is great

But that's it. For their price points it's not worth it end of story

I used to say Mac's are worth getting if your a designer or video editor...

I have now changed my position due to the shittyness of their latest products

I'm not really much of a gamer anymore to busy 😓 but I can read specs.

People won't build games for Mac's especially now it will lower the quality of their product. I actually don't even see a point of having a Mac in today's world.

Apple are meant to push boundaries ... They are doing it all wrong now 😐

Accept it... And get a PC 5 times faster then their apple counterparts

I do fucking hate apple but I respected them in the past, if nothing but their clever marketing getting sheep to buy their products . Now I just don't respect them, they could at least try to build something remotely worth the money

The exact moment when I understood what programming actually was.

I was getting hard times at my 3rd college grade, trying to implement the recursive sudoku solver in python. Teacher spent a lot of time trying to explain me things like referential transparency, recursion and returning the new value instead of modifying the old one and everything related. I just couldn't get it.

I was one of the least productive students, i couldn't even understand merge sort.

I was struggling with for loops and indexes, and then suddenly something clicked in my head, like someone flipped a switch, and i understood everything i was explained, all at once. It was like enlightenment, like pure magic.

I had sudoku solver implemented by the end of the lecture. Linked list, hash map, sets, social graphs, i got all of these implemented later, it wasn't a problem anymore. I later got an A for my diploma.

Thank you @dementiy, you were the reason for my career to blast off.

A lite story about how i was hired at 16 years old.
Me at 11. Modifying HTML templates to create a sign up page for a game. Me at 14. Created some worthless websites in the past (at a training), barely knowing the structure of HTML.
Me at 15. Made my first website for a customer (using WordPress for the first time, didn't know how to use it before). The website was selling apartments, it was looking very good and went on the first place on SEO. Got my first money (100E).
Me at 16. Made some other WordPress websites for other customers (one of them still haven't paid, the website was made way back in 2015), so i shut down the website and replaced it with a text saying "This website is currently down until the customers pays the developer".
Me still at 16. A friend of my mom sent my CV to multiple companies, to work as a intern to learn more, and one of them accepted me for a interview (a well known and one of the best company with 30~ people)
Went to the interview, asked me about what i realized, what i can do, about my knowledges in others languages etc (forgot to mention that i love the computers from young age, so i was very good in them, specially at the age of 11), so they were happy about it and asked called me for another interview with the boss. Went to it, the boss asked me some tricky questions, i answered them immediately, he was very surprised about my knowledge at that age and accepted me immediately. After working for 2 weeks, instead of hiring me as a intern for 4-6 months, they instead hired me as a normal person, as a front end developer, for an undefined date, making 250 E / Month (6 hours per day in summer)
Now, I'm in the 11 grade, working for them about 9 months, making 315 E / Month, working for 4 hours per day after school, the place is cool, my entire team (family) is very funny and very cool, and they asked me many times to help them with different problems they had and i fixed them immediately (they really didn't know some stuff which i knew). Worked on big projects and worked on some from scratch by myself and they were very happy about how it went.

TLDR: was talented in computers (software), I'm a fast learner, barely knew about making websites, hired as a front end developer at 16 yr.

Btw, I'm in love with DevRant, I'm feeling like home everytime i visit this community :').

P.S. Sorry for my bad English and the mistakes i made.

alert("Thanks for reading my first rant!");

I was offered to work for a startup in August last year. It required building an online platform with video calling capabilities.
I told them it would be on learn and implement basis as I didn't know a lot of the web tech. Learnt all of it and kept implementing side by side.
I was promised a share in the company at formation, but wasn't given the same at the time of formation because of some issues in documents.
Yes, I did delay at times on the delivery date of features on the product. It was my first web app, with no prior experience. I did the entire stack myself from handling servers, domains to the entire front end. All of it was done alone by me.
Later, I also did install a proxy server to expand the platform to a forum on a new server.
And yesterday after a month of no communication from their side, I was told they are scraping the old site for a new one. As I had all the credentials of the servers except the domain registration control, they transferred the domain to a new registrar and pointed it to a new server. I have a last meeting with them. I have decided to never work with them and I know they aren't going to provide me my share as promised.
I'm still in the 3rd year of my college here in India. I flunked two subjects last semester, for the first time in my life. And for 8 months of work, this is the end result of it by being scammed. I love fitness, but my love for this is more and so I did leave all fitness activities for the time. All that work day and night got me nothing of what I expected.
Though, they don't have any of my code or credentials to the server or their user base, they got the new website up very fast.
I had no contract with them. Just did work on the basis of trust. A lesson learnt for sure.
Although, I did learn to create websites completely all alone and I can do that for anyone. I'm happy that I have those skills now.
Since, they are still in the start up phase and they don't have a lot of clients, I'm planning to partner with a trusted person and release my code with a different design and branding. The same idea basically. How does that sound to you guys?

I learned that:
. No matter what happens, never ignore your health for anybody or any reason.
. Never trust in business without a solid security.
. Web is fun.
. Self-learning is the best form of learning.
. Take business as business, don't let anyone cheat you.

The end times are here!

Tip for devs (esp front end):

Sublime text (and few other inferior editors) has a plugin called "transparency" that allows your editor to be transparent.

Windows 10 powershell consoles can be made transparent.

1) Open browser
2) Open command prompt over it with 75% transparency
3) Open editor over both with 50% transparency.
4) Set editor to fullscreen, no-distraction mode to center the text (Shift+F11 in sublime)

Enjoy coding while constantly viewing the code, the browser and monitoring the cmd prompt at the same time, without having to click Alt+Tab a zillion times.

A lot of times during holiday parties, I meet new people.

Afterwards, often a quick group chat is created to share pictures with all the people there.

Every goddamn time we come at this point again where this is done and since WhatsApp is nearly considered a requirement to function in society (Netherlands) and I refuse to use it and other mainstream media...

The moment that I have to explain why I don't use WhatsApp arrives, yet again. I don't find it awkward anymore but it doesn't improve the atmosphere and getting called paranoid for the rest of the party also isn't the most fun thing ever!

In the end I usually get the pictures emailed.

Tragedies of Non-Technical Boss:

Boss: What happened yesterday, tried reaching you several times, you were just unavailable!

Me: My wifi stopped working as there was some issue at the ISP's end.

Boss: You could've atleast dropped a skype message that your internet is not working!

Me: Yes sir but the internet was not working, so I couldn't drop that message too!!

Boss: But you should have, I was in panic what happened to you...You were alright or not?...

Me: Yup I know, I didn't see the wifi tragedy coming.

Boss: If ever the internet goes down or anything sort of that happens just drop me a text on skype, that your internet is not working. Okay!

Me: *Confused* as to if he is high or just not listening to what I am saying...

The company i work for has a jenkins server (for people that don't know jenkins, it's an automated build service that gets the latest git updates, pulls them and then builds, tests and deploys it)

Because it builds the software, people were scared to update it so we were running version 1.x for a long time, even when an exploit was found... Ooh boy did they learn from that...

The jenkins server had a hidden crypto miner running for about 5 days...

I don't know why we don't have detectors for that stuff... (like cpu load being high for 15 minutes)

I even tried to strengthen our security... You know basic stuff LIKE NOT SAVING PASSWORDS TO A GOOGLE SPREADSHEET! 😠

But they shoved it asside because they didn't have time... I tried multiple times but in the end i just gave up...

Last year I applied for a similar position to that I have now (Front-end Dev), but with a higher salary and less responsibility.

The interview went fairly well I thought, but I was also given a short written exam, where I was supposed to point out errors in the code provided. I'm certain I got everything right but I took too long (about 20 minutes for 20 questions) and they got inpatient pressing me several times.

My excuse was that I haven't used a pen in about 3 years. My hand didn't know what was happening! Who even writes anything anymore nowadays?!

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.

It happened 2 nights ago.
We had a whatsapp project for the distributed application programming class, my project mate and me were coding for 2 weeks whole day to finish it, especially with the end-to-end encryption feature that teacher asked, till 2 nights ago the project was trash, the private chat wasn't working and and nothing else is done we had only the UI, we was really doomed especially we had 1 more day to deliver the software, and we decided to deliver the project as a trash and get marks from the UI and the presentation.....
Till the night before deadline at 8 pm
I wanted to try fix some interface pictures and to make it better......
The next thing it was 6 am and the project is full working..
When I told my project mate he was not believing, I had to swear multiple times fot him and hat to go and show him the project by the eye.
We delivered the prohect and got 22/25 😁😁😁
It was incredible I didn't believe my self at first place.
Sory for the long story 😓.

This is probably gona make me sound arrogant, but fuck it, you don’t know who I am, and I need to RANT!

I hate it when B.A.’s who have never studied UI or UX rail-road over my design decisions, and I just gota go along with it cos they in charge.
Then, when I make the interface the way they want it, all sorts of problems arise… Mother fucker, I saw this shit coming, and that’s why I designed it the way that I did.
Now I gota tell them how to solve the problems by doing what I originally said, and when they finally see the light, I gota waste more time re-doing the interface.
I once went through 5 fucking iterations of “Let’s try it this way”, Just to end up back with my original design spec cos these fuckers can’t even imagine what shit would look like, and how it will interact.

Now you would think after this happens a few times they would learn to trust my design skills, but noooo, Mr B.A. has to piss all over my ideas every time.
And every FUCKING time, we end up going back to what I originally proposed…
Learn your fucking lesson dumb ass!!!

*drops mic & goes straight to the bar*

Most of things I'm about to say are experienced by almost 99% of developers in Africa including my country so I'm going to make it a more general rant.

As an African developer, life is both exciting and frustrating at the same time. Some of the challenges that make life difficult for developers in Africa include:

1). Slow Internet Speed: The internet in Africa can be extremely slow and unreliable, making it frustrating to work on projects that require large file downloads. This is a serious challenge for freelance developers who work from home.

2). Unstable Electricity: Frequent power outages due to inadequate infrastructure, insufficient investment in energy production and distribution, and political instability makes it difficult for developers in Africa to work consistently. Most times I get frustrated because you can experience black out at anytime of the day which could last for hours to days automatically rendering you useless if you have no power backup generator at home.

3). Low Pay: While the opportunities for software developers in Africa are quite high, the salary is often disappointing. Many talented programmers end up seeking better opportunities overseas. In fact I quit my full-time job because of this reason.

4). Lack of Support for Tech Start-ups: There are few venture capital firms in Africa willing to invest in new ideas, which makes it difficult for tech start-ups to get off the ground. It's just sad, you can have an idea and just die with it.

So in summary, it's not a walk in the park to be a developer in Africa, but despite all of that I am glad to be a part of the African journey, having the opportunity to had work at a tech agency firm on various projects ranging from healthcare to finance, I find it rewarding to know that my work has contributed to a better future for my continent. 🤞

AAAAAARRRRGGHHHH FUUUCKKER!!!

The new MacBook Pro with touchbar is ABSOLUTELY SHITE.

I can't tell you how many times I have accidentally touched the escape key with my pinky while typing. Also accidentally touched "send" while in apple Mail halfway through writing something.

Apple clearly did no user testing with this as I have googled around and many folk are having the same frustrations.

I've just typed a massive note into jira and towards the end my pinky hit the escape key and I lost everything!!

FUCK CUNT BASTARD WANK!!!

So, my eyes have been bloodshot for a while now. It's been gradually getting worse. I've also had bags under my eyes for years.

Bit of info:
I'm soposed to wear glasses when I use my computer, or do anything up close for more than a few minutes because of some sort of focussing issue my eyes have. It's so that my eyes can stay at the same level of focus when I switch from short/long range.

Also, I don't spend all day on my computer and phone. So it's not like I'm constantly getting blinded by a screen. It's not unlike me to loose myself in thought, and pace around for hours on end. Some times in a day I will barely touch my Phone, and not even touch my PC.

That said, I'm going to do an experiment. I am going to cut out my Computer for three days, and reduce Phone usage to a minimal, and see if I can eradicate, or serverely reduce this redness. There could be something seriously wrong with my eyes, and I'd just be blaming screen fatigue. I've taken pictues of the current redness (which current blocks out half of the white of my eyes) and I'll use that as a reference.

Wish me luck!

I used to think Electron apps were gonna do great and make it more accessible for companies to produce high quality programs with ease.

Oh boy I was wrong. All it did is enable big companies with the ability to refactor all of their software to run 5 times slower, consume 10 times more memory and kill your battery 20 times faster.

I fucking hate all of this prototype fast optimize later bullshit. Can I get some value for my dollar? How come technology is just being degraded for the same of "ease of programming".

You save programming time but sacrifice end user time, cus our time just doesn't fucking matter.

“Don’t learn multiple languages at the same time”

Ignored that. Suddently I understood why he said that. Mixed both languages. In holiday rechecked it and it was ok.

Sometimes mistakes can lead to good things. After relearning I understood it much better.

“Don’t learn things by head” was another one. Because that’s useless. If you want to learn a language, try to understand it.
I fully agree with that. I started that way too learning what x did what y did, ... But after a few I found out this was inutile. Since then, I only have problems with Git

Another one. At release of Swift, my code was written in Obj-C. But I would like to adopt Swift. This was in my first year of iOS development, if I can even call it development. I used these things called “Converters”. But 3/4 was wrong and caused bugs. But the Issues in swift could handle that for me. After some time one told me “Stop doing that. Try to write it yourself.”

One of the last ones: “Try to contribute to open source software, instead of creating your own version of it. You won’t reinvent the wheel right? This could also be usefull for other users.”

Next: “If something doesn’t work the first time, don’t give up. Create Backups” As I did that multiple times and simply deleted the source files. By once I had a problem no iOS project worked. Didn’t found why. I was about to delete my Mac. Because of Apple’s WWDR certificate. Since then I started Git. Git is a new way of living.

Reaching the end: “We are developers. Not designers. We can’t do both. If a client asks for another design because they don’t like the current one tell them to hire one” - Remebers me one of my previous rants about the PDF “design”

Last one: “Clients suck. They will always complain. They need a new function. They don’t need that... And after that they wont bill ya for that. Because they think it’s no work.”

Sorry, forgot this one: “Always add backdoors. Many times clients wont pay and resell it or reuse it. With backdoors you can prohibit that.”

I think these are all things I loved they said to me. Probably forgot some.

Java:
Primitive streams. Their need to exist is a monument to legacy failure.

VB.net
OrElse and AndAlso short-circuiting operators. The language designers were too fucking lazy to process logic, so they give specific keywords for those cases.

PHP
Random Hebrew error messages

JS
Eval. It can be used responsibly, but most of the times you see it it's because someone fucked up.

C#
Lack of Tuple destructuring in argument specification. Tuples were added, and pattern matching was added, and it's been getting better. The gear grinding starts with how Tuple identity assignment in arguments is handled. Rather than destructuring into the current scope, it coalesces the identity specification into a dot property of whatever the argument name is. This seems like an afterthought given they have ootb support for ignore characters.

Typescript
This will probably be remedied in the next version or two, but Tuple identity forwarding between anonymous scopes normalizes to arrays of union types, because tuples compile to typeless arrays. It's irritating because you end up having to restate the type metadata in functional series even when there is no possibility for any other code branch to have occurred.

I'm a freelance web developer and I normally work on small to medium sized websites, 9 out 10 times based on WordPress and 10 out 10 times with a limited budget.

8 out of 10 times the sites content will be updated by someone with at best casual knowledge in website management.

Say what you will about WP but it's my bread and butter and it works great for just these kinds of websites; where the cost is a dealbreaker and the end product should be as user friendly as a standard word processor.

No, you probably wouldn't build a control panel for the next space shuttle or an online bank in WordPress, but I rarely need to concern myself with those kinds of projects so that really doesn't affect me.

Pretty much the same reason I have a Kia car even though I wouldn't win a Formula 1 race with it.

I for one am grateful that there's an open source tool available to my clients that more than adequately meets their needs (that's also fun to work with and build custom solutions on for me as a developer).

Why do so many people waste their time and their computers turning coal into heat? It really pisses me off.

Often I meet smart guys who are fairly decent coders and after what starts as an interesting conversation is instantly destroyed by cryptocurrency.

It is *exactly* like enjoying a discussion of the intriguing nuances of quantum chemistry only to have the guy say, "thats all cool, but how do you make meth?"

argh.

You want to use your decked out rig to make money? Fine. But please help us solve important problems instead of literally wasting electricity. Just google search "supercomputer physics" and you will find a thousand current problems requiring extremely fast computers for number crunching. All of them can make you more money than crypto and all of them help society at the same time.

We burn coal to make most of the electricity on this planet. Most coal stations burn around 20,000 tons of coal per day. The world burns about 250 tons of coal every *second*. This is converted into carbon dioxide. (coal = carbon, add two oxygens when you burn it, producing three times as much mass in CO2, which then goes out the smoke stack)

The big picture is this: currently we are forced to burn coal to make the world work. Turning off the boilers would result in an almost instant apocalyptic collapse of society. BUT, we don't need to burn it merely to produce waste heat in your video card array.

Please use your superpowers for good.

<end rant>

Well, it wasn't fun, but I switched jobs this month. And sadly, it was mostly because my old company started building custom applications for our larger customers. Now, normally that wouldn't be too bad (other than the fact that it distracts us form working on our main product...) but... it was decided that we would use the back end of our user-generated forms module as the data storage layer. Someone outside of my department thought it would be a great idea, and my boss kinda just rolled over without a fight because he always just figures he can "make it work" if he works hard enough...

You shoulda seen the database and SQL code...

Because of that decision, everything took at least 3x as long to write and there was always the looming possibility that the user could change the schema on a whim and break the app.

I think the reasoning behind it was to try and keep the customers tied to the aging flagship product (with a pricy subscription model), but IMO, it was not with it. Our efforts could've had much greater impact somewhere else. Nobody seemed to care what I thought about it though...

I had to start over as a front-end dev, but I'm trying to look on the bright side and seeing it as an opportunity to sharpen my skills in that area. I'm already learning a lot. And although it's a little scary at times, it's also so refreshing to work at a place where I know I'm not the smartest guy in the room.

To the future!

#rant

Instead of receiving a motivation in 2018, my boss decided to go anti mainstream and started with demotivation speech.

He started with how good we were last year even when he wasn't around. Well done team! But after that, it went downhill.

We were asked to work even harder, we got new policy (no unpaid leave, no paid overtime, minimum 40 hours working, etc) which some of them make sense and some don't, a specifically set break time (apparently to shut down smokers for smoking at random times), and warning for not being punctual.

And pay rise only after end of financial year.

To make it worse, we are not allowed to take naps or watch youtube on our desk on our breaks.

I seriously wonder what happened during his Christmas NY break. I'm not an entrepreneur so I have no idea if that is a right way to run a company or if Australia government just created new law. But surely I know this is when I say "New year, new company"

Microsoft be like :
"Oh, you're moving away from your computer for a while with all this stuff open? It would a shame if some were to.. UPDATE it!"

It asks with a pop up, and if you don't answer it, it thinks "Oh, you're not telling me if I should update now or not, but I think you probably want me to update. UPDATE!"

For me, if I keep ignoring the update, it starts to create problems for me out of nowhere. It starts to lag and then the task manager starts to lag. EVERYTHING IS NOT RESPONDING.
When I finally update it, it acts like there were no issues at all. Everything is fine..

Even with Xbox, if it wants to update, it doesn't let you go online until you do. If it loses connection mid-update for some reason, it begins the update again from the friggin START. All that time updating gone to waste. Recently, I'm having a lot of issues with it. It doesn't let me sign in a lot of times. "We couldn't sign you in" for some reason. It JUST CAN'T. If you have a slow internet connection, you can't play any game at all. I contacted Microsoft Support about that issue and they concluded that it was all because of the slow internet connection and there were no issues on their end and they told me to GIT GOOD (Not exactly those words). If it does sign you in, it kicks you out mid-game for some reason with the evil pop up saying "Bye User_Name". The game says that YOU signed out (Dumb game, doesn't understand Microsoft shenanigans) and returns you to the main menu. If your game didn't save, well, GOOD luck to you!
Everything takes forever to load, if it decides it's not gonna load, it gives me a really helpful error saying "Something went wrong".
Maybe it's just me, it just hates me particularly. It makes me think that Microsoft intentionally acts like a douche just to get attention..

(In the end I think, maybe, this all is not a big deal if you surrender and accept Microsoft as your overlord)

I tried a few ways to stop Windows from updating automatically, but nothing worked (Maybe, I should try again).

Maybe I should dual boot Linux, but that brings a whole new set of things that I'd have to deal with, doesn't it?

Sigh

Was joking with my sister about who has more steps. She had done more steps so far, so I said that I would walk 20 times around the McDonald's, where we were going to eat. She replied that she would walk 50 times around it, so I said that I would walk 2 times more around it than she would. She then said, that she would go once more around it. In the end, I explained recursion and infinite loops to her. Her comment was "großer Blödsinn" (German) -> "big bullshit".

My boss...

With `Back-End` he understands `the Dashboard`. The system that is used only from company's employees.

`Front-End`, the software that is used by our customers.

I have explained him many times that he was wrong, but he seems to use this term. And now I have to use these terms like him.

Project manager: I haven't seen an automated email go out in a while.

Me: ok let me check. Can you provide me a previous email for reference?

Project manager: no
*Itterate 3 times*
Me: ok, does this template resemble the email you're missing?
PM: no
*End itteration*
PM after 3rd attempt to identify the email they're missing: comes into my office and tells me he's not even going to answer my emails anymore cause I can't find his missing email.

Me: finally nails down the email he's *missing* and there's nothing wrong with it.

PM: doesn't believe me.

I fucking hate bad PM's. Asshole can't be bothered to provide usefull information to save his life then questions everything I tell him and thinks I'm the idiot when it takes me 3x as long to fix/find something.

I fucking hate "modern" front end. Just a little "hello world" and you already get a useless bundle of js, which is x times then other assets combined.
Not to mention that no fucking setup I tried works, documentation is as accurate and up-to-date as apple maps and all components are basically part of a civil (cock) war.

So far the most frustration aspect in programming I have to endure

CompanyYouNeverHeardOf sends you IrrelevantNewsletter512... so you hunt for the unsubscribe link, which you find buried in the boilerplate crap at the bottom of the mail, rendered in #eee on a #fff background, in 4-point type, and click that. End up on a web site that asks you like 8 times if you're sure you want to leave and please, reconsider, we're nice folk really, blah blah blah. And then you get *another* email from them saying they received your unsubscribe request, and *then* yet another to confirm that yes, you unsubscribed, and please feel free to re-sub anytime (as if!)

GOD I HATE MARKETEERS!!!1one

What you see in that screenshot, that was earned.

I'm on the plane and I want an hour of free Gogo (read: crappy) WiFi on my laptop (so I can push the code I'm probably the most proud of, more on that another time). The problem is that the free T-Mobile WiFi is apparently only available on mobile.

So after trying to just use responsive mode, and that still (almost obviously) not working. I realize it's time to bring in the big guns: A User Agent switcher. Small catch: I don't have an add-on for FF that can do that.

So on my phone I find an add-on that can and download the file. To send it to my computer, I initially thought to go through KDEConnect, but Gogo's network also isolates each system, so that doesn't work. So I try to send it over Bluetooth, except I can't. Why? Because Android's Bluetooth share "doesn't support" the .xpi extension, so I dump it in a zip (in retrospect, I should have just renamed it), and now I can share.

After a few tries, I successfully get the file over, extract the zip, and install the extension. Whew! Now I open up Gogo's page and proceed to try again, but this time I change the user-agent. Doesn't work... Ah! Cookies! I delete the cookies for Gogo (I had a cookie editor add-on already), but I had to try a few times because Gogo's scripts keep trying to, but I got it in the end.

Finally that stupid error saying it's for phones only went away, and I could write this rant for you.

Dear Atlassian Support,

In my life I had a lot of experiences...

But your software manages to replace all these experiences with a unique feeling of depression, hatred, anger... Only negative emotions.

Not once have I said anything good about your software - not once in > 5 years.

Whenever your chum bucket of mismanagement and misanthropy stops working, it's never the fault of the end user, the administrator or someone else.

It's entirely your fault.

Fucked up upgrades, lack of documentation, catastrophic handling of logging, lack of support of current database systems, lack of proper migration and clean up of plugins, ....

I could go on. But it's really just and endless tirade.

I wish I could stop management for even giving you money for the pile of poo you call software, but sadly they don't listen.

But there's hope on the horizon.

Thanks for making people go cloud only.

No one wants that.

It would mean entrusting that pile of poo to the craptastic hands of your irresponsible people.

No one really wants that.

Not even management who blindly paid the license fees all the times.

Thank you for your cloud only movement.

Maybe we can finally find an alternative and I can finally start a therapy for the PTSD I have thx to your software.

Being a Woman in Tech® is exhausting because every time we know something a male superior doesn’t, we have to end our statements with “but maybe I’m wrong, what do you think?” so they feel like it’s their idea and take the topic seriously.

I used to be adamantly against this type of coddling but they beat it out of me. You can only be straightforward and confident a finite number of times before you’re pulled aside and told you’re “cocky,” “arrogant,” “irritating,” etc. So many of us use this strategy to avoid those labels, but it’s a tiring part of the job we shouldn’t have to think about.

"If you use a css framework splat splat splat splat bullshit bullshit bullshit"

Listen fam, I write apps that a good portion of the time will be used internally by the company I represent or work for. They don't give 2 flying fucks if I write an entire webpack ecosystem for them to push out assets and 10k outher bs shit in to their frontend end. They just care that shit connects properly to their backend and it spits out the information they need, which 9 times out of 10 does not require a lot of the shit y'all cry about.

Bootstrap will suffice, bulma will suffice. I don't neckbeard over simple shit like this.

See, the problem with University students beginning programming is that they think that they're the hottest shit just because they know how to open cmd.exe. Since I'm a mentor, I have to give them pro tips while helping them through problems. I can't count the amount of times I've repeated "solve the problem on a notebook, write down how you should approach it before you begin typing your code, otherwise you'll end up spending more time debugging." They don't like to listen, cuz they're the next Zuckerberg. The following day I get a bunch of emails asking why their code doesn't work.

I did it - I went outside! Felt strange, like Y2K and Maya doomsday would have been together. Of course I went out only during daylight because THEY hide in the dark. Infrastructure was mostly still intact, I've even seen some houses. Occasionally, survivors scrambling the area.

GPS didn't work so I used my magnetic compass. OK, it was because I forgot my mobile at home, but anyway. Should I take petrol with me so that I could burn my clothing upon return? Or would this attract THEM? Occasional gunfire in the distance. Might also be some pneumatic hammer, that's what the media would try to tell me.

The local supermarket had still trolleys outside. I took note because I might need them to bar the stairwell, along with the land mines that I still have left over from New Year's Eve.

Deserted cars standing around. Looked like neatly parked, but that doesn't mean anything. When Germans turn into zombies, their last human action is to park their cars. That's so genetically hardwired that no virus can override it.

Dusk set in. I better returned home.

New job on the horizon after being unemployed for a couple of months. Moving away from full-stack a bit to focus in on front-end stuff. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Expect rage-filled rants in the near future 👌

Taking some time off was beneficial in all kinds of ways: got out of long term toxic relationship, got in betterer shape, learned stuff I'm actually interested in, mental health improved massively along with self-esteem, and I reconnected with friends and family. I'm actually enjoying life again. Don't get me wrong though, I had to claw my way out of a pretty dark hole... But I'm starting to think I fucking made it. This is a new start and I'm excited.

Fuck being in a toxic relationship.
Fuck working a job that is killing you.

If you're reading this and feel stuck: you deserve better. Listen to your gut, only you know what kind of life is good for you. It doesn't matter if it's a good job by every possible standard if it's making you miserable! A relationship exists to help you grow, to give you energy, to cultivate love. Sure, you'll go through bad times but if it's pathologically bad it won't get better on it's own. Trust me, I waited years for things to get better.

Anyways, good luck with whatever is challenging you right now, big or small. 😘

I hate people who don't value transparent and assertive communication. I'm saying this thinking about an specific client.

This client is a boss of Web agency, and has some contractors working on their projects. I worked for them for a year, doing Web projects from scratch and also maintenance.

Then, one week, the communication stopped. No answers, no feedback, nothing. For months. They ghosted me.

I tried contact a few times with no luck. After 3 months, they started to remove me from slack, git, base camp.

And that's it. I was discarded and it seems I don't even deserved a message to be aware of that.

I don't mind to end business relationship anytime, for any reason. There are lot of reasons a working relationship would not work, and that's OK. We should have partners that are a great fit for us.

But at least say it. Ghosting is something ridiculous and unethical.

So this one time me and my teammates had just started working on react (please note that we all were backend developers and no one has the basic understanding of javascript) and things were looking quite exciting..

But towards the end of the deadline we were sitting and refactoring each others code since we had not decided on the coding standards and practises and random code had been written left right and center.. It once happened that the same piece of code was refactored multiple times by only 2 people..

And it is obvious that we couldnt make it to the deadline and that code is sitting there like a mixture of weird things..

My internship is coming to an end and I think my boss is testing my limits.

So, in the beginning of this week, he assigned me a non reproducible bug that has been causing trouble to the whole team for months.

Long story short, when we edit or create a planned order from the backend, once in fifteen, a product is added to the list and "steals" the quantity from another product.
Everyone in the company has experienced this bug several times but we never got to reproduce it consistently.

After spending the whole week analyzing the 9 lines of JS code handling this feature, reading tons of docs and several libraries source code. I finally found a fix by "bruteforce testing" with selenium and exporting screenshots, error logs and snapshots of the html source.

This has been intense but was worth the effort, first, I fix a really annoying bug and second, I learned a lot of things and improved my understanding of Javascript.

Fuck. I can't take this shit anymore.

There was a project where we had to implement third-party system for government agency processes management. For some reason, probably because my work is cheap for my boss, the task was assigned to me. Just as a reminder, I'm a .NET Dev. Zero experience in server management. Zero experience in external services implementation.

Anyway, system producent, also an government agency, got angry, becasue they can only earn money on implementation. They have to give the software to other agencies for free. Because of that I've got client program, incomplete documentation and broken scripts for database creation. It took me 2 months to get it all to work but at the end client was happy, my boss got paid and I've got 500 PLN (~130 USD) bonus.

Everything was fine for a while, but after a month server has started freezing everyday, some time before 7 am. The only way I found to make it work again was to restore snapshot made everyday at 10 pm. For a month I was waking up earlier and restored snapshot, and after that my boss took it upon himself. I tried few times to find a bug and fix it, but to no effect. Even person with much more experience with it tried to help but also couldn't find anything.

My solution? Copy all the data and configuration, create new machine, copy everything and check if the problem persists. If not, kill old server. Client won't even notice. But nooooooooo... It would cost my boss a bit of money and I'd need to work on it and he can't let it be, because I'm the only developer working on his flagship product. He'd rather wake up everyday and restore snapshot. Okay, as you wish.

And today, finally, everything went downhill. Snapshot wasn't created, server froze, backup can't be created. Nothing can be done. Client is furious, because they have had reported this problem and a few times restoration was too late and they couldn't work. No one knows how to fix it, I'm not working today (I'm still studying and am available only 2 days) and situation is really shitty.

BUT SURE. ITS BETTER TO RESTORE SERVER EVERYDAY THAN JUST FUCKING FIX IT.

Oh, also, there's no staging or any other real backup. We have snapshots for each day and that's that. Boss' order. Why do I even care...

A couple of weeks ago, I got to the second stage of a recruitment process with a relatively big fintech in the crypto space (I know) - all went well and although I did not think much of it at first, with all the information I had gathered I came to realize this might as well be the best opportunity I've had in my pursuit of finding a new job (i.e looking for high technical challenges, unsure of where I see myself in 5 years, wanting to give full-remote work a try, etc.).

Cue to the end of the interview;
"That's great! I really enjoyed speaking with you, your technical background seems excellent so we would like to move to the next stage which is a take-home test to do in your free time.", said the interviewer.

"Wow! Much amaze, well of course! What's it gonna be?", said the naive interviewee.
"I'm sending you the details via email, please send it back in 48 hours, buhbye now", she hangs up.

...

"48 hours?? Right, this should be easy then, probably some online leetcoding platform, as usual.", thought the naive interviewee, who evidently went through this sh*t numerous times already.

A day later I receive the email: this was the whole deal. The take-home test supreme with bacon and cheese. A full-blown project, with tests, a project structure, a docker image, testing and bullet points for bonus points! The assessment was poorly written with lots of typos and overall ambiguity, a few datasets were also provided but bloated with inconsistent comments and trailing whitespace.

What the actual fck??? Am I supposed to sleep deprive myself to death while also working my day job? What are you trying to assess? How much of my life I'm willing to sacrifice for your stupid useless coding challenge? You are not all Google, have some respect, jeez.

I did not get the job.

Dear Boss

Would you.
Fucking.
PLEASE.
Stop.
Moving.
The Standup.
Time.

You've fucked around with the meeting time eight times since the end of Jan. Figure your schedule out, pick a time for our daily shit, and stick to it dude. PLEASE.

I'm a family man and you're making my mornings absolute hell to plan for.

Signed,

me.

Outsourcing front-end for web is like playing russian roulette, but with 6 bullets in 6 chambers.
You shoot yourself in the balls (or ovaries)... HARD.

I don't know how you can develop in a complete nightmare of a SCSS file - 3500 lines of insanity.
This dev must have changed his mousewheel at least 50 times!
SERIOUSLY, why the fuck use SCSS when you piss everything into one single fucking file???
What drives me completely nuts is the fact that he even used an @import to include his custom.scss file... how many more IQ poins are needed to realize that you could SPLIT your spaghetti into smaller, sane files?

I need a whiskey...

Our team was having a problem with very slow response times from a 3rd party web service they were contacting to get some device stats. No issues on the other end, but it had already been weeks. They ask me to take a look at it.

I take a few days, do a couple of benchmarks and tests and I isolate the section of code responsible. Turns out, the method they were calling would timeout if the device was offline. We ask the vendor, and they confirm this. They tell us to call methodX to check if it was up.

After having done that, lookup now only took seconds. They were annoyed that it wasn't documented but was just glad it was fixed.

After months of development, testing, testing and even more testing the app was ready for deployment to production. Happy days, the end was in sight!

I had a week's leave so I handed over the preparation for deployment to my Senior Developer and left it in his capable hands while I enjoyed the sun and many beers.

I came back on the day of deployment and proudly pressed the deploy button. Hurrah!

Not long after I got loads of phone calls from around the country as the app wasn't working. What madness is this?! We tested this for months!

Turns out my Senior didn't like the way I'd written the SQL queries so he changed them. Which is obviously both annoying and unprofessional, but even worse he got a join wrong so the memory usage was a billion times more and it drained the network bandwidth for the whole site when I tried to debug it.

I got all the grief for the app not working and for causing many other incidents by running queries that killed the network.

So...much... rage!!!

I just signed up to get this off my chest.
Dear Windows, you god damn moronic, ugly, unuseable abomination of an excuse for an OS. I wonder how we could end up here in this situation. You suck, in every way imaginable. I didnt choose Linux or Mac, you made me do it.
I know no other OS that can screw you up this bad when setting up. My friend is an experienced windows user and the last install took him 2 days. I just spend the last day trying to get this uncompatible sucker installed. I manage to set up an hackintosh quicker than I was able to install Windows the last three times I checked, you scumbag.
Your error messages suck ass, there is nothing I cant figure out given enough time, except your useless hints and pathetic attemps to get anything done on your own.
And you are fucking slow. Just why, do you keep installing stuff I didnt ask you to. Now I got this ugly ass Bing-Toolbar because I missed a damn checkbox in an .exe, which could have also been an exploit, you never know.
You are cluttered with useless stuff. I dont care about you lame ass app store, idc about your cortana annoying spy assistant and I certainly dont care about your forced updates.
Just sit back and feel your PC getting slower every day by background processes. Watch your productivity decline while dealing with their brain dead privilege and file system.
You ugly malformed mutation of software. When I look at your UI I feel disgust while wondering how you can fail with the most basic principles of UX.
How pathetic, badly supported, bug ridden and dangerously unsecure can an OS be you ask while trying to navigate through the settings, a pile of legacy software debt this garbage pile was build on. And your shell... what a sick joke.
I hate you Windows. For screwing other OS with your asshole boot manager, hardware driver requirements and making people send me .zip and .docx. You should be embarrassed to charge money for this unfunctional junk, but you do, a lot.
I really try to see the positive here. You got all the software, but thats not on you, thats because all those poor suckers are trapped with you and the effort to change is too big.
This OS is the most disappointing thing technology could come up with today. I would rather set myself on fire than work with this pain in the ass software professionally. I mean if you are a serious developer at some point you have to admit that you just cant develop on windows. You will get fucked 5 times as often as any Mac or Linux user. Fuck you, Windows.
Hey Microsoft, thanks for Typescript and VSCode and all the other good things you have done. But burn in hell for what you have done to all of us with this piece of shit OS.

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 finally fucking made it!

Or well, I had a thorough kick in my behind and things kinda fell into place in the end :-D

I dropped out of my non-tech education way too late and almost a decade ago. While I was busy nagging myself about shit, a friend of mine got me an interview for a tech support position and I nailed it, I've been messing with computers since '95 so it comes easy.

For a while I just went with it, started feeling better about myself, moved up from part time to semi to full time, started getting responsibilities. During my time I have had responsibility for every piece of hardware or software we had to deal with. I brushed up documentation, streamlined processes, handled big projects and then passed it on to 'juniors' - people pass through support departments fast I guess.

Anyway, I picked up rexx, PowerShell and brushed up on bash and windows shell scripting so when it felt like there wasn't much left I wanted to optimize that I could easily do with scripting I asked my boss for a programming course and free hands to use it to optimize workflows.

So after talking to programmer friends, you guys and doing some research I settled on C# for it's broad application spectrum and ease of entry.

Some years have passed since. A colleague and I built an application to act as portal for optimizations and went on to automate AD management, varius ssh/ftp jobs and backend jobs with high manual failure rate, hell, towards the end I turned in a hobby project that earned myself in 10 times in saved hours across the organization. I felt pretty good about my skills and decided I'd start looking for something with some more challenge.

A year passed with not much action, in part because I got comfy and didn't send out many applications. Then budget cuts happened half a year ago and our Branch's IT got cut bad - myself included.

I got an outplacement thing with some consultant firm as part of the goodbye package and that was just hold - got control of my CV, hit LinkedIn and got absolutely swarmed by recruiters and companies looking for developers!

So here I am today, working on an AspX webapp with C# backend, living the hell of a codebase left behind by someone with no wish to document or follow any kind of coding standards and you know what? I absolutely fucking love it!

So if you're out there and in doubt, do some competence mapping, find a nice CV template, update your LinkedIn - lots of sources for that available and go search, the truth is out there!

Well two days ago, i was in a sap codin g camp (ranted about that)
The challenge: moke a robot that avoid collisions and 6inds a black mm spot on tha floor
We marginally had enough time te implement sth but well i tried to do an algo.
10 mins before deadline i realized that it wouldnt work. So i took an old prototype (without algo) from the trash bin, fixed compilation errors and went to the competition without testing. Because we had to do a little explanation for the parents about arduinos, we all were shaky. A friend of mine even failed to remember his text xD

Asso, because of Fortuna wanting to beat us down, we were the last team driving in the arena. Everybody got pretty fast times. (with a random algo). At the end, we took our robot with the untestet thrash bin program.
It drove pretty well, avoided collisions and then it happened: it reached (only robot not to collide) the black spot in 1:09!!! 😁

I'm taking an Intro to Programming course along aside an Intro to Computers class so I already know about basic programing, still very new to it though! At the end of the Intro to Comp, we're learning about programming and a classmate was having a hard time understanding assignments and variables.

I explained the idea of the input command at least three times and he kept trying to print out a statement he just wanted to write in instead of printing out the input that the user will enter. He also assigned the same name to different variables.

Explained that what he was doing was not versatile and not useful, explained in an example situation, explained by writing some lines of code myself (THRICE), and he still had trouble understanding me. I didn't want to hold his hand the entire time.

Glad that I was called to leave early since I might get too frustrated if I had to stay back and continue to help him.

Hope he managed to finish the assignments successfully though! Feel kinda bad now...

Diary of an insane lead dev: day 447

pdf thumbnails that the app generates are now in S3 instead of saved on disk.

when they were on disk, we would read them from disk into a stream and then create a stream response to the client that would then render the stream in the UI (hey, I didn't write it, I just had to support it)

one of my lazy ass junior devs jumps on modifying it before I can; his solution is to retrieve the file from the cloud now, convert the stream into a base64 encoded string, and then shove that string into an already bloated viewmodel coming from the server to be rendered in the UI.

i'm like "why on earth are you doing that? did you even test the result of this and notice that rendering those thumbnails now takes 3 times as long???"

jr: "I mean, it works doesn't it?"

seriously, if the image file is already hosted on the cloud, and you can programmatically determine its URL, why wouldn't you just throw that in the src attribute in your html tag and call it a day? why would you possibly think that the extra overhead of retrieving and converting the file before passing it off to the UI in an even larger payload than before would result in a good user experience for the client???

it took me all of 30 seconds to google and find out that AWS SDK has a method to GetPreSignedURL on a private file uploaded to s3 and you can set when it expires, and the application is dead at the end of the year.

JFC. I hate trying to reason with these fuckheads by saying "you are paid for you brain, fucking USE IT" because, clearly these code monkeys do not have brains.

Recently applied at a local company. Webform, "enter some details and we'll get back to you"-like.

Entered my details, hit submit, lo and behold "Error 503 - something went wrong on our end".

I was just baffled. It's a well-established IT company and they can't even get their application form to work?

So I'm sitting there in the debugger console, monitoring network stuff to see if anything is weird. I obviously hit submit some several more times during that.

Eventually I give up.

In the night my phone wakes me up with a shitton of "we've received your application and will review it..." emails.

Yeah they didn't get back to me.

Psst, hey .
When you copy that shitty line 8 times, you will end up with nasty bugs later cause the shit will look the same and you won't understand they're getting values from the same variable.
Don't.

Warning: pretty sad thoughts. If you're having a blast of a day, please skip. It's for your own good.

That feeling when you finish watching a piece of art. Be it a film or anime or anything. You're confused why you feel good, but at the same time you're hurt. You smile but the pain is still there when you reflect on the feelings and the experiences you had and you realise that none of it will ever happen again. No art or any of the past will happen again exactly the same way how you felt and experienced.

You think of the best friend you once had. Think of the girl you held hands with and time stopped. The first time you embraced her and knew you loved her more than anything, even if she didn't know your feelings. Think of your first kiss. Your first serious relationship. The last time you saw your parents, your wife, your children, family.

Now look at the perspective of the future and the past you: blissfully ignoring the certain end to all experiences until they all abruptly end reminding you of this and it hurts. Damn it hurts.

I will never be able to see me best friend again, nor will I ever be able to hold hands with her either. First time I kissed is now long gone. It's almost like you wish you were aware of how valuable and important the experience was and to not just throw it away like the last time and the several times before that. But the sad part is, you don't know which experience will make you realise how much you missed it.

But even if you do realise by placing yourself in the place of your future self, and you cherish the experience, you blame yourself because you could have either avoided it's end or did something better.

Like your break up: could it be fixed? Was it worth the little time you have on this plante?
Like your friends argument you had: could you have done better? Could you have stopped it?
Like your parent's death: could you have been a better son to your now overworked dying mum? Could you see how hard they tried even though you thought they were total dicks?

Now you realise that literally anything you do, you will have a problem with somewhere down the line. You're destined to be sad shattered and broken by every day that is tragedy.

But it's similar to art. After all, your life is a piece of art about how you died. Which is why you smile and enjoy the last second of the experience which you just had. That chest warming feeling will only last a little. You smile through pain, yet you realise its not the end.

Then again, its just my thoughts that i need to vent. Take it with a pinch of salt.

css quick maffs

so you did this:

.foo:hover {
transform: scale(1.1);
}

and now ugly scrollbar is there when the element is scaled.

No, don't do overflow: hidden. There's a better way. Instead, do this:

.container {
padding: 1rem;
box-sizing: border-box;
}

the element total width is calculated based on the width of its content. That's true unless you specified width and height explicitly (if you did so, you're a doofus, I'm sorry).

Scaling makes content somewhat larger. With border-box, paddings work differently with the total width.

By default, if you set width to say 100px, and paddings are 20px, total width will be 140px — it's your 100px of content plus two paddings of 20px. width property set the width of the content, not the total width.

With border-box, width property sets the total width. So if you set width to 100px and paddings to 20px, total width would be 100px, just like you set it, and content will be 60px wide — it's 100px minus 20px times two.

The key part is it doesn't end with explicit width. The algorithm remains. When some node is rendered, its total width is calculated. When you use border-box, the total width will stay the same even if your content grows by some value that is less than your paddings. So, your content was 100px, you scaled it, and it became 110px. Well, then that extra 10px will be subtracted from your paddings, and they will be 15px each instead of 20px.

No more ugly scroll bar. Yaaay!

aight bye

Devs: Can we please get adequate hardware to do our job correctly? Please, just a new set of larger monitors.
Lower management: Sure, this is going to be easy.
Upper management: Wait what? This will cost us around 500€ times 10? Any maybe in the end other departments will want that to, so make it times 100.

We're a 4+ billion company ... but yes, please, I love scroll bars and they make my work so much faster.

Story time.....

I only had one mentor. I am a self-learned guy.

He was my mentor in a company where I was interning. He was a Senior Android Developer and I was just a rookie Android Developer working under him.

He never taught me directly but at times he used to send me links of a source for the problem I was having.

At the end of my first working day, I asked him-"Do you think I was useful to you today? "

He bluntly replied-"Nope, none at all"

Those words hit me so hard. My eyes became moist. When I thought about It I did realize that day I was overwhelmed by so many topics I was new to. I was determined to work my ass off from the next day. And I did.

Fast forward to the last day at the company. It was 31'st December, we were having New Years Eve's party. Everyone was a little drunk except for the interns. In front of everyone, my mentor said-"You were the best intern I have ever had such a good intern that I did not have to work last few days", everyone agreed and then he hugged me.

I was on the seventh heaven that day. Throughout my journey back home, I had a broad smile on my face.

So I wrote an application that loads data from a 3rd party API. It allows the user to enter a record locator number and pull it up. By design, the value can be a partial match and it will pull up the record still.

The first API call I make only took 2-3 seconds, so I didn't see an issue as it's loading most of the data the app needs. I keep the filters/fields as they are and move on.

Fast forward 6 months. The user is complaining that the records are taking 30-45 seconds to load. Sure enough, load times are terrible. I've made lots of changes to what fields I'm loading through the API, and I'm calling several additional APIs, so I start pulling pieces of code out to see if anything improves. They all barely make any difference--still 30+ second load times. I end up removing everything except the first API call I developed that was taking 2-3 seconds before. Still taking 30+ seconds.

The 3rd party API allows you to filter using "starts with" or "contains". I used "contains" initially and had no issue, but I decided to try "starts with" since it should fit most use cases.

Load time is less than one second. I add back everything else. Load time is just over a second.

It seems that the 3rd party updated the API and multiplied load times by 10 when using that particular filter. I spent almost an hour on this since the platform doesn't support performance or debugging tools very well, and it all came down to a one line fix.

So there was that paranoid schizophrenic person, a blonde girl with a buzz cut, and somehow she was a friend of mine. She used a Linux distro called “!!!!!!!!____!!!!!”, and convinced me it was the best distro out there. But the way she used it was… very specific.

She called me. She told me the new distro was out, this time it was called “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”, and _this_ was the best one. It finally allowed her to observe the area around her neighbourhood right from her PC, through some app, and make pits in the ground. It was done with a touchscreen of a Nintendo DSi connected to her PC with something that looked like an IDE cable. You touch the area of the screen, and the pit will appear outside IRL. This was needed to trap swine-looking creatures in those pits, as they infested the land and were attacking people in packs, turning them into dirty, greyish, half-transparent lumps of gel.

I went to see her, and somehow I knew exactly how it's going to end, as if I decided to replay a game level. She lived in a rotten, mouldy, dark, half-abandoned condo building. She was also a terrible hoarder. I approach the old wooden door of her flat. It was painted over 1000 times and was barely closing. She knew I would come. She rushed outside, looked at me with her moon-sized eyes, grabbed my arm and told me:
“We have to run.”

I felt a sudden crippling rush of anxiety. I woke up. My heart was absolutely racing. My sight became darker and darker. The chest pain was consuming me, and I could barely move. I almost vomited.

That was quite a night.

If anyone has been keeping up with my data warehouse from hell stories, we're reaching the climax. Today I reached my breaking point and wrote a strongly worder email about the situation. I detailed 3 separate cases of violated referential integrity (this warehouse has no constraints) and a field pulling from THE WRONG FLIPPING TABLE. Each instance was detailed with the lying ER diagram, highlighted the violating key pairs, the dangers they posed, and how to fix it. Note that this is a financial document; a financial document with nondeterministic behavior because the previous contractors' laziness. I feel like the flipping harbinger of doom with a cardboard sign saying "the end is near" and keep having to self-validate that if I was to change anything about this code, **financial numbers would change**, names would swap, description codes would change, and because they're edge cases in a giant dataset, they'll be hard to find. My email included SQL queries returning values where integrity is violated 15+ times. There's legacy data just shoved in ignoring all constraints. There are misspellings where a new one was made instead of updating, leaving the pk the same.

Now I'd just put sorting and other algos, but the data is processed by a crystal report. It has no debugger. No analysis tools. 11 subreports. The thing takes an hour to run and 77k queries to the oracle backend. It's one of the most disgusting infrastructures I've ever seen. There's no other solution to this but to either move to a general programming language or get the contractor to fix the data warehouse. I feel like I've gotten nowhere trying to debug this for 2 months. Now that I've reached what's probably the root issue, the office beaucracy is resisting the idea of throwing out the fire hazard and keeping the good parts. The upper management wants to just install sprinklers, and I'm losing it.

Teaching new devs, hired straight from India.

This is today.

Bug1: We have four lists, each item in these lists has a variable called "Charge". This var is a double and we need to convert it to currency.

Dev creates fifth list called "All lists" and converted it's charge to currency then questioned why it didn't work.

I explained, his solution? Convert each list into currency.

I explained that's wrong and told him what he needed to do. He did List1:Charge into currency, but left his other conversion in place just in case.

I walked him through fixing it which took 10 times as long as necessary, only to find out he randomly converted four booleans into currency for no reason.

Bug2: we take integer, convert to string and concat "Months" on the end.

Doesn't work for him, tells me he doesn't know why.

I told him that he's not outputting the variable that we did it to, he is instead outputting a custom variable he made and didn't do anything to.

Bug 3: followup to #2, he fixed it as I instructed, but then added months as static text to the output so now it reads "Months months".

Bug 4: to make his code cleaner, he presses enter in the text box. Unfortunately he did that IN A STRING so his output is full of random /r/n

How do you guys deal with coworkers like this? He isn't new, this is supposed to be an experienced developer. Im only in my 2nd year

Goddamn, why is Android SDK setup such a stupendous pain in the ass?

"Wah wah, can't find JDK!"

Wtf are you talking about you stupid fuck, JDK is right there, all IDEs find it, environment vars are set, it is the right version and is used on this machine for a billion development purposes! Stop being a useless cunt!

And this is everytime. Had to setup up Android SDK four or five times by now on different machines and it has NEVER gone smoothly. There is always a plethora of different issues and you end up wasting all day going through fucking dependency hell!

Read a book on ergonomics, you colossal android fucks. Just because you got JetBrains behind your IDE and they actually know what they are doing, doesn't make your setup process any less of a braindead nightmare.

Fucking hell.

General folks reads "!rant" and says grammatical error.. "!" should be in the end..
Developers can only understand.. and often end up using more times as prefix instead of at the end ...
RIP Grammar, we prefer logical operators..

Today I finished my last day at my customer and in the end my main company after complaining several times.

I give them a nice exit email as follow:
Title: [302 - 404 - 503] I'm out :-)
Content                        

So I'm sitting down coding at home, trying to work out some problems when I hear the Doorbell ring. Obviously I shouldn't ignore it so I go to answer it.
Its the fucking FedEx delivery guy, he ALWAYS rings the doorbell, waits a solid 2 seconds after ringing then leaves. By the time I am about to answer the door he is already walking away.
HE ALWAYS FUCKING DOES THIS, in the end I'm thrown off my rhythm for nothing to go answer a door where the person ringing doesn't even have the decency to wait a few extra seconds to see if anyone comes.
This has happened to me several times now, he rings the door for no damn reason, i come running over and he is already gone.
So bloody frustrating.

It's the end times: I've received a JIRA ticket asking me to fix something in JIRA

Well, everytime I build a pc for a friend I'll always end up telling myself "this is the last time". Not bc I have a problem with building pc's, I love it, but its the "free of charge" 24/7 IT-support my non techy (techii?) friends expects from me after the build is done I hate.

So here's the deal.
A week ago I built a brand new pc for a friend, as usual (bc he's a good friend) I told him that my "fee" would be a couple of beers and the train ticket up. So I got there, built the pc and we hooked it up to his monitor. About 5sec in to windows the screen went black. My friend started to panic, and I started to check if all the components and cables were hooked up right (tho I've done this a couple of times, shit can happen) but found nothing was wrong.
I had to take the train home, cause it got late AF and I live in another city, but I told him to try another cable. Felt bad AF for not being able to help him.
Flash forward 2 days, my friend started messaging me late in the evening, complaining about how he had tried everything and ultimately had to leave the pc at an (as he called it) "proffesional" who charged him 100$.
I felt even guiltier about that one, asked him if he tried to change the hdmi, but he said that's in The hands of this guy now.
Two days later this PC God gave him an answer.
Guess What he told him?
CHANGE THE ***** HDMI CABLE.
Well, shit..
Afterwards he wanted help installing drivers over fb-messenger.
I love my friends, but man why do I do this to myself.

I miss when my job was just about coding, I could spend entire workdays writing C# or TypeScript while listening rock or metal with few meetings in between, being very passionate in programming and computers sometimes I found was I doing so engaging which I spent more than my 8 hours workday on company's code base trying to improve it and my older coworkers were very happy with my code.

Then a "promotion" happened, I went to work directly with a client, a huge enterprise which is working on renovating his internal software and here the fun stopped. Long useless meetings are a regular occurrence, there are absurdly long procedures to do everything (for example since CI/CD is leaky we have to do dozens of workaround to get a microservice deployed) and having very little written documentation this gives an huge advantage to people which actually enjoy to spend their entire workdays on a MS Teams call over "lone programmers" like me which actually feel significant fatigue in doing that (alone sometimes I was able to log 12+ hours of programming daily between work and personal projects while after 3 hours of PP I feel drained) since the information passes in meetings/pair programming and I dread both.

I feel which my passion is still there, I still enjoy coding, tinkering with Linux and BSD, broadening my knowledge with technical books and having passionate conversation about tech but I dread my job, sometimes I try to look at it under a more optimistic eyes but most of the times I just end disappointed.

I think this is both a blessing and a curse for me.

Whenever I'm developing something, I ALWAYS keep coming up with new (good) feature ideas WHILE programming. Now, this isn't as bad because they enrich the software/service mostly but goddamn, it's so fucking annoying when I'm working on a certain function/feature and I change stuff three motherfucking trillion times before finishing it because I keep coming up with fifteen billion new ideas.

In the end it's all worth it but at some moments it gets really fucking annoying.

About a year ago I was doing work for a client that hired a separate contractor for SEO consultation. I could easily end the rant here.

This lady was trying to convince my client to write the same page or blog article several times over and merely change their physical address at the bottom of the page to one of their many respective clinics.

When I told them not to do this because they would suffer for stuffing and duplicating content, their response was to ask me to be respectful of the other contractor's skills and knowledge regarding digital marketing and to call her and sort it out.

I called. We argued. I called the client back and asked if they should respect the skills of an auto mechanic with pliers to remove a teenager's braces rather than send them to one of their orthodontic clinics.

So, it's time to fucking rant!

Location: A small startup where direct contact with C-Level members is frequent.

A while back we had a customer using our SaaS product who had gripes about the way it worked.

He contacted our CEO and made a bunch of claims based on bad assumptions.

In the end, he wanted all images removed from his site. I was pulled aside by the CEO and asked if I could handle this for him and make a new screen for them without images.

So I did. I tried to discuss and get deeper into the problem by saying "this seems like a symptom of a problem and not the actual problem. What do you think?" He responded with "That was his request so it must be the problem if it won't take long then let's fix it for him.

- a week later

The problem is fixed and in the wild. No more images. Now he has another request :/

He does not like the pagination on his site. He says " I shouldn't have to click a button when I scroll so I want the be able to scroll and see all my products!"

This time the CEO asks me if this can easily be done and I take him aside and say "no, this will be a big change to our system and will need to be discussed with the team."

The main point I make is that we should go down and spend some time with this customer to find out what the real problem is.

After a half hour of discussion about the real issue he decided to bring in the CTO.

In the end, we implemented infinite scroll, dropping our current product building tasks to service one customer (yeah, it's a bad scene). But we got infinite scroll built and shipped.

- 2 Weeks later

This time he demands that infinite scroll isn't good enough. "If I scroll fast then I have to wait for them to load, they should all load at once!"

This time I have had enough. I can see the CEO is coming over to me to as me how much work is in this. I tell him there are 3 things I have to say...

1. I'm going to implement exactly what he asked by the end of the day.
2. We will only release it to him because it is going to be a shit-show loading everything at once, the load times will be mental!
3. We should fire this customer, right now.

So, I built it. Customer hated it (of course, who the fuck wants to wait 30s for loading. That's basically a lifetime). We changed it back and he was still mad.

- 2 weeks later

Customer leaves. Good riddance.

- sometime later

I am in the customer's store on a road trip. I get a feel for how their store works and they have a different system for making things operate.

It turns out that they did not know what the real problem was. They actually needed a completely different system (from a UX perspective) for accessing their data.

To top it all off, the system would have taken less time to build than the shitty fixes we made over weeks of work. FFS

I guess the moral of the rant is to find the problem, not a symptom of the problem.

If your client doesn't know what the fuck he wants to see on his website even with all text and images included - don't take this fucking job.

They will let you choose a template and you end up switching it 5 times. "Oh we don't like it. What else do you have? Oh, this looks better." Next day "We don't like this theme anymore. We want to switch to what we had before."

If people can't draw their home page on a paper I tell them go fuck yourself straight in a face. I always put these people on my reference list so my future clients know I'm straightforward, not lazy, not low skilled, but honest with dumbasses like some of my previous clients.

You are asking for a basic website with 5 pages, you have a shitty budget and then I have to customize the entire theme and tweak every fucking possible element in CSS, HTML and PHP. Go fuck yourself. All you get for your money is WordPress with 15 min consultation how to copy paste your shit and save it. Never do fixed budgets, never work on projects like this if it's under $500-1000. Meet with the client to understand him/her better and see if he is a jackass-perfectionist or a chill person who won't be picky.

That's my memories of being a freelancer, trying to get any job for any budget just to build my portfolio. Never going back to this, at least not for small businesses with less than $5,000 budget. Reading people before you start working with them is a good thing.

True story, honest to god.
Developed a state or the art SOA web app. Front end communicates with backend through API.
Client meeting, this guy looks me right in the eyes and blurts out : « why does the submit button get disabled after first click ? Clicking it a few times gets my request high priority »
I folded back my laptop and left the meeting without saying a word. Pretty sure I’m getting fired tomorrow.

Finally got my Bluetooth earphones!
It's called Pamu Scroll, funded in Indiegogo.
I bought it for $49 without shipping fee.
Now let me write a review about it here after using for about an hour or so.

1. Shipment
Shipment from China is slow and hard to track unless it is classified as EMS, which mine wasn't, obviously.

2. Packaging
It has some shock protection layer, but without that, nope! It was staying still inside the packaging though.

3. Design
Beautiful. Just beautiful. Period. Just see the picture below.
It opens as a papyrus, maybe that's why it is called Pamu Scroll. Both the case's end, and earphones itself has magnets to hold each other.
It has a leather feeling to both the inside and outside of the case, and the touch control area of the earphones is also leather feeling, adding a nice touch that differs with other earphonnes.
The diamond feeling finish in the end of the case makes the case itself isn't earphones, more like some expensive jewelry case.

4. Fit
My ears are smaller than most people, for I am young, so it sometimes fall off when I jump, but when I put it the correct way, never falls out.

5. Audio
I am not an audiophile. I don't really care about the audio quality and how it sounds like unless the sound is too cringy and has so many white noise.
This earphones has white noise, but just a little bit, you won't notice except when you are in a quiet room.
The bass is boosted, but low sounds, and vocals can be cringy sometimes, so I should manually tune them with my phone's equalizer.

6. IPX6
Not tested yet, but they advertise as using it in the shower.

7. Stereo call
Yup. Stereo call. Call in both ears. But only right microphone seems to get the voice.

8. Pairing
Using BT 5, it is a breeze to connect.
Take both of them out, put to your ear, then ding! "Connected"
Done.

9. Charging
with micro-usb
wireless charging for optional purchase - 10 bucks

10. battery
Reasonable amount
You have 3.5 hrs of listening time in both ears, and you can charge 2 times more each by putting in the case.

===============

Overall, it is awesome and let's just pray it doesn't break for at least for an year.

One side note, I can activate assistant by double tapping in the left ear (yes it is touch control), but my S8 asks me if I want to customize with Automate/Tasker. Yup!
Will share that later as well.

If you have any questions, ask me! Thanks for reading my first ever product review in devRant! <3

Never buy crappy, consumer-grade SSDs for use in production servers/RAIDs. This might sound obvious but at the company I used to work for, through a series of bad decisions by management and cheapness, we ended up with the cheapest consumer SSDs you can imagine powering all of our storage.

This turned into a nightmare spanning years of failed hard drives and a continues cycle of ridiculousness. Drive failed after a few days, gets taken out, sent back to manufacturer and then replaced with another equally crappy drive destined to fail within days/weeks.

Our ops people were going to the data center multiple times per week to replace failed drives. Lesson I learned: cheaping out on system-critical hardware and software can have long standing consequences and in the end usually doesn't end up actually saving money when you account for time employees have to spend dealing with issues that result from it.

First company:

- being sat at an office that didn't have chairs with proper back support. It would kill my back every day. Like sitting on a bar stool coding.
- not having access to basic resources (cafeteria, salary bonuses)
- being seriously underpaid ($200 under)
- not having an IT process pipeline (yeah, this is a huge one): no JIRA, no git, no VCS, no continuous integration, etc. I fucking spend 45% of the time fixing coding-unrelated shit.

Second company (very aggravating):

- dumb frontend bitch and privileged colleague who both kept telling me months on end to shut up and who wouldn't listen to my advice on anything, while my advice would actually help the company advance in productive ways. The key here is being told to shut up while stagnating. i.e. dead end job.
- people advancing in the company based on nepotism and favoritism, based on having tits and ass, rather than skills and independence.

- pointlessssssssss meetings where decisions are made solely based on the opinion of Mr. favorite senior dev. The rest just sits there like a bunch of sad saps and yay-nodders. Incompetent PO's who "would like to hear your input" but then when you give it, they completely dismiss you.

- pointlessssssssss monthly meetings with stakeholders, where the dev teams do nothing but clash and act like pussies in front of the PM just to get in his favor, but behind scenes continue to make the same mistakes and telling the CEO everything is fine. Goodness, how can it get more unproductive.

- completely antisocial and nepotistic 'colleagues' who won't even talk to you, let alone smile at you or be friendly. You saying good morning and them pretending you're vapor that doesn't exist. Go go company atmosphere! Especially during lunch, those are the worst times. Imagine sitting at lunch where everyone looks like you killed their dog and the rest is huddled up in little high school groups.
What else? The incessant and pointless smalltalk that makes me want to bang my head against the wall. Talking about dogs, kids, what show was on tv last night. The fuck man, do you have a brain?!

Third company:

- HR bitches who think they are the shit and developers are antisocial, helpless misfits, but they work with computers and they don't even fucking know what a status bar is! The irony!

- forced socializing and stigmatization for the opposite. Imagine coming into a company and you don't say good morning. Should that be a problem? No. Instead, everyone starts dogging on you and hating you just because you didn't smile in their faces and said: hiiiiiiiiiiii how did you sleep? Did you feed your dog? Fuck you.
Elliot (Mr. Robot): "Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a mute button for life?" -boop, boop, boop, boop...- Ahh.. there.. that's much better."

- CEO's sucking up to you but when it comes to salary increase, they say shit like: "Ahhh ya know, it's kinda difficult." Yet another dead end job.

​I'm a junior dev in a scrum team with two senior devs: one actual senior and one average dev that's just been around for a long time. At stand up meeting, that average senior lists helping me as one of his task Every Single Day. 9 out of 10 times when I ask him a question we end up asking the senior senior together.

At 20 I thought my life would be an adventure. At 30 it seems like it's a rerun.

The reality is that life is full of grey areas, "good guys and bad guys" on all sides of most issues, and the story and excitement eventually end.

sometimes getting old feels like becoming comfortable with being numb and mediocre.

you are not the star at the center of your own story.

there is no story. there is only today, and then tomorrow, and then the day after that for as long as they happen to go on.

I can see no greater meaning or purpose behind this circus.

people think in months, seasons, years. maybe some of you even have five year plans.

but for me, rome was yesterday. and every rome to come. thats how near it is. It is so close, it and so many times before and after it, I cannot explain the sensation.

and in the vast gulfs of time, I see the wars, the conflicts, the narratives, and they unfold like dust or scum swirling on a pond, mechanistic, telling stories about nothing, algae struggling over territory on a rock.

as clearly as day, I see it all.

I saw your birth, and I saw your death. Your pain, and your greatest joy. How is it possible to love a total stranger and know them intimately because of their shared humanity? And still.

And from afar, in the stillness, I can't help being detached from the world and its problems.
And when we die, it is as if the world dies with us. Because it is not the end of the world, but the death of our own.

Softly go mortals, gently to their gods, like flowers in the fading summer. Never grasping that the permanence of the true identity and the temporality of the spirit are as fundementally distinct as the permanence of say "the G note", against the brief sound it makes when touched.

Eh. forget it. Sentimentality is a curse sometimes.

OK. This might sound incredibly stupid. But still...
I decided to help a friend of mine with asp.net assignment. I just know c# and he didn't attend classes. So he came to me with some pizza and beer. So we managed to finish the assignment. In the end we had to add audio to web page and I didn't know how to do it(I've never used Javascript until that moment) . So naturally I googled and tried literally 10 different methods to play audio and none of them worked. I lost my mind and hit the table a bunch of times. After 2 hours I realized that I was wearing my second headphone that is not connected to my laptop and audio is playing on my primary headphone as expected)

naiive idealism to the max:

medior+senior to junior: "hey, buddy, we need you to do this, here's the codebase, here's the button, here's what needs to happen when that button is clicked, here's the relevant files and classes, make it happen."

medior to senior: "so what you just said about how we should redo the whole order processing pipeline, na-ah, not possible. i've been in those parts of the code many times, and based on what i've seen, you either leave that thing mostly alone or nuke it from orbit and build a completely new module in its place, but these "medium adjustments" you're proposing... not feasible...

senior to medior: "okay, i've seen how slow your progress was on even the most basic-sounding bugs in those systems... looks like what you're saying makes sense."

senior to *EO: not possible to just do these changes with this budget and deadline, that wouldn't even cover the "unexpected bugs" overhead, either you let us do it properly as a new greenfield project, almost, or you're stuck with what we've got.

*EO: mmmkay, so that's 20 times more time and budget that is in the proposal?

senior: yup, something around those numbers.

*EO (with a pained but understanding expression) : go for it, imma explain to the rest of the EOs at the end-weeks's meeting.

2017 has ended and I want to throw this fucking rock of anger with it out of the Window.

I will tell you how my last 3 to 4 years as private IT Guy (IT Dumpster) for everything was.

My Gaming Community:
It was so fucking retarded that I would like to punch everyone there in the face over a thousand times.

Seriously there are over 60 People in that Community and they take every shit for granted and only cry about everything.

I'm Paying since 4 Years over 60 € for our Server every month. Some people donated some small bucks over the time and in the end it was around 150 € Donations over 4 years.

Im thankful for the Donations, but these people really think that they can demand for this Donations private Gameservers for over years for free or think that they now own the Servers. WTF?? FUCK YOU!!

Im managing 2 Linux Server with Web, MySQL, Voice and Gameserver. What did 1 guy donate? 10 € for 4 years, thats around 15% for just a month. You would get our Teamspeak for 7 Days for that price idiots!!

I did all the damn Webdev and am now writing a App in Kotlin for Android man!!

Since last everybody in the Community gets on my nerves, because they are so ignorant and dont appreciate the work of others 😡.

My Association where I support the hole IT with a friend:

We decided in the commitee that we would take on major changes in our infrastructure.

We need to finish the barebone concept in the end of January 18.
Early December 17 I wrote my friend, that we need to have a meeting and plan everything.

Well, now I mostly designed the roadmap by myself and didnt receive any reply from my friend 💀.

I really dont understand why the shit always sticks at me and I need to finish it.

I really love to code something, install or repair PC's with joy or manage Server but the people around me are in my free time like poison and they take out my fun for it.

The only fun and enjoyable IT Part for me is at my fulltime job. Thats the only good place left for me as Safe Heaven and the people there really appreciate my knowledge and work I do.

Haven't been here for a long time, kinda amazed I still had an account to be honest. There used to be a bunch of people I chatted with regularly on here, but my mentally ill self decided at some point to self sabotage (surprise surprise) and cut contact with almost everyone.

That said I've gone through quite a bit of therapy, which has definitely improved my outlook on life and allowed me to do some much needed self reflection. Has that made life better? Hard to say, but I like to think I've got a grasp on my mental health now, with the occasional relapse, because shit's a 🌈process🌈.

I'd like to apologize for the hurt I've caused some people here, you know who you are. My behaviour at times has been inexcusable. There's no sugarcoating it.

The past years have been a rollercoaster to say the least. Switched jobs multiple times. Went from doing frontend exclusively, to fullstack, then backend, and now engineering lead responsible for all architecture and infrastructure, learning a lot about myself and people around me along the way. Somehow I managed to get into a somewhat stable relationship, which is still a big WTF from time to time. The company I currently work for has had a metric fuckton of layoffs, just like the company I worked for before that. I can tell the lack of stability in work still affects my mental health a lot, but seeing how I've been growing a lot personally while the market seemingly has gone to shit gives me some level of confidence. I'll be alright.

This is mostly a sign of life to whom it may concern. I'm alive, existence is dreadful but manageable, shit's hard, but it's all gonna be okay in the end. I may or may not post a rant from time to time, as management loves unrealistic deadlines, and the PM can't say no to the CEO for some reason so her work ends up on my plate most of the time as well. Oh and of course the primary product of the company had a codebase which made me want to gorge my eyes out. So yeah, plenty to rant about.

Had a burnout at my last job when I worked myself to the bone to cope with stress, a failing relationship and not having much money. Also, made a crap ton of mistakes at work because of it.

Didn't sleep much, started skipping lunch to save what little money I had so I could commute (friends treated me every now and then, still grateful), dropped out of college because couldn't juggle work, studies and got chewed out by my family every day and just worked non-stop.

The end result was that I collapsed when I got home one night and woke up at 3 am with a severe migraine; stayed awake till sunrise then left for work again (got scolded really badly by everyone, felt loved). Fun times.

Fuck everything about Microsoft Dynamics. I'm supposed to use the REST API to make a web front-end. I notice all of the data comes back codified.

null == 0.
boolean true == 100000000
boolean false == 100000001

except sometimes when

boolean false == 100000000
boolean true == 100000001

or other times

string "Yes" == 100000000
string "No" == 100000001
string "Maybe" == 100000003

Hang on. Is the system representing a 1 bit value with base 10 numbers? Did the client set this up like this? Holy crap every number corresponds to a unique record in a table somewhere. That means it only returns numeric values instead of strings and I have to figure out what the number means in the context of the table.

A "key" is user typed? So every time someone starts to make a new record it saves a new "key" without a record? So I can pull a bunch of "0" records if I pull sequentially? So basically I need to see all of the data in Dynamics to have any context at all for what is returned from the Dynamics API? Fuuuuuuuuuu

Just got the most aggressive GDPR email so far, the title was "accept or we delete your account" the email contained lot of bullshit and at the end it says "if you don't accept our current terms of service, we will delete your account" and a very low res "yes I accept" button smashed 4 times throughout the entire email, well, watch if I care, just making it even easier for me to ignore that shit.

Anyone else ever just have those days where you just think of just giving up on programming all together?

I just seem to be having these days every second day or so, I mean I've been programming since I was 11 and I'm just about to turn 21... I've essentially stuck with game development in the same engine in the same language and to this day have nothing to show for the past 10 years other than a million half assed prototypes that seem to just rehash idea's already done by other but a million times better...

Tried learning other languages and none have stuck, I can't grasp C++, don't have a fucking clue how to use Vala and can't even think of anything to make with said languages...

Tried making a pushbullet front end in Vala and can't even learn how to use the fucking API's so once again, that project has been put on the shelf with everything else.

It all just drags me down and makes me think if all the trouble is worth the pain and annoyance.

Maybe I'm feeling sorry for myself (110% chance this is the case) or maybe I'm just not cut out to be a programmer...

I usually work in a two person team on a hybrid application we are developing, using AngularJS and node.

This normally works okay, because he handles the back end (he's been on the project since January last year, I joined in August as a placement student), and I handle the front end.

However, due to Christmas holidays and such, he's ended up taking an entire month off, and won't be back until the end of January.

I've dabbled in back end before, some routes and that for SQL queries, but nothing serious.

Last Tuesday our core service for the application that needs to be updated in real time broke and pissed off the API provider because we were hammering them with requests.

My first day on back end and this happened. I didn't really know what to do, and had to call my teammate to ask what to do. I essentially just restarted things, and left them as is, until I could find a solution.

From there, I had to mock the operation of the service (which is a complex enough beast) to figure out the problem, and find a fix. Our app more or less hinges on this service, so if it messes up, it's the end times.
All of this while flying on what I've interpreted because the guy that's on holidays was the only guy that knows more about this project than I do.

To make things worse, the clients are being very particular because they're waiting on investments and don't have money to pay our company. So, if they're paying for 5 days work, they're going to put in 5 days of project development. The problem is that their interpretation of 5 days of project development has not changed from when there were two people on this project.

There are 40 tickets in this sprint (ends Friday) and 35 of them are assigned to me. Granted, not all of those take a day to do, but estimates don't mean anything, I guess.

Ganbarimasu.

Looks like my left hand is slightly slower than my right hand. I end up writing things like pulbic stirng all the times! >.<!!!

Switched back to windows because I needed IIS for work and I did miss having a touch screen (could not get driver working on Linux).

A few gripes.

I mean, the standard "oh great, half a day downloading and updating my machine" applies.

The thing I forgot about Windows is that after everything I do it wants to restart. Updating itself forced the computer to restart several times, wtf.

Powershell (ironically) holds a shadow of bash's power

So many "power user" actions are done with a gui, dear lord give me a terminal command and a man page any day over the convoluted way to do some actions. Changing permissions for IIS was several layers of gui dialogues, where it would be a couple of commands in bash.

Sorry to be unoriginal and moan about an OS, as an end user windows is great and a lot more streamlined and arguably prettier, but as a programmer it doesn't make life half as easy as the realm of *nix

Spent the last month creating a really scalable chat application, with fast front end, all kinds of neat functions such as polls, and a really efficient database structure in Apache Cassandra.. Everything is built to use NoSQL, and even the front-end is using all kinds of features to speed up itself... Now, guess what... The company I'm doing an internship decided that everything needs to be done in MariaDB, and I can basically remove 1/3 of my program, event the front end will get a huge purge of code, and as much as I explained that MariaDB IS NOT FUCKING USABLE FOR A CHAT APPLICATION, and when there are many messages, the access times will get realllllyyy sloow, and that the whole structure there currently is based on NoSQL... Now I can remove all the clustering, custom data types, and bucketing of messages... And store FUCKING JSON IN 'TEXT' FIELDS IN A STUPID SQL DATABASE. FUCK ME

I don't know how managers are planning deadlines and counting December as a full working month!

Most companies that I worked with, count either half a month or push the deadline until the end of January when the workforce is back but not here.

Our division manager has promised the customer that the production environment will be ready on the first week of January, without even consulting the team or checking the schedule like WTF!
The person responsible for setting the infrastructure was on vacation for 2 weeks and he didn't hand over the access to production or share the progress done.
Fast forward, the manager went to slack and pinged the whole company with full caps message that the production should be done today.

Fun times :/

Wow so much hate for WordPress. Le me to the rescue 💀

Yes WP is bloated and crappy and full of security issues etc etc. Agreed. That doesn't mean it is useless though.

It is alright to use for someone who is not really good with web, someone who just needs a blog, someone who just needs a home page, about page and contact form with a possibility of updating photo and text once or two times a month.

It is not suitable for e-commerce nor lots of transactions/forms involving websites.

As long as you know what kind of horse/vehicle you are on, you won't end up in the dirt.

Why I hate typescript. Bored during quarantine so thought I rant a little more about this.
1. Compilation time, typescript increases project compilation time from 1 second to 3-4 seconds, which is basically triple or quadruple the time if you don't know math.
2. You write a minimum of 30% more code.
3. Many libraries are not written in TS by default, which means you end up having to manually install a fuckton of @types/(pckg name) manually which is incredibly shit.
4. Typescript is an absolute pain in the ass when using dynamic libraries. Plus when it works, it usually ends up finding maybe 1-2 errors in your code MAX, completely not worth it.
5.JSDoc is 100 times better. (Still don't use it though).
6. I actually enjoy loosely typed languages, having your compiler being smart enough to tell what the type of your input is is much better than it assuming you're a fucking retard so it forces you to manually type everything.

P.S if you hate loosely typed languages, kindly resort to Angular, C#, Java or whatever and leave JS alone, cunt.

The times when you just can't fall asleep and have to do something just to pass the time and end up getting up in the afternoon next day are the worst.

So my co-worker asked me to change something. It was simple, took me about 5min to do it and pushed to production right away!
Two minutes after, asked me to change two other things. In the span of 1h30, she came to my desk 3 times and asked for 3 different things!

The thing is: before I push anything to production, I have to ask my other co-worker who is currently on vacation.
Already sent him one email for the first thing, and now I feel bad because I have to send him another one...

In case she comes up with any more changes, I'm just going to wait for the end of the day and send one more email with every change I made. This is great. FML

Most of 2020 was a bad dev experience for me. I was paid to remake a system because it was

a ) insecure
b ) inconsistent
c ) hard to mantain (spaghetti code)

I thought I could focus on the backend and just reuse the front end but even that was unusable.

Basically had to redo it from scratch and since I made the fatal mistake of letting THEM estimate how long it would take, I worked most of the year instead of just 2-3 months.

Never again. After being done with the project I still had to be 'reachable' for the coming weeks if anything happened.

I turned off my phone during one weekend and then the next thing I know the only other dev at that small company is asking me for details on the project (meaning they just decided to offload everything to him). Never heard from them again and I'm hoping that won't change.

Beware small dev companies with less than 5 actual devs.

Best: Dev wise this year has been bad or not-bad but nothing 'great' comes to mind.

My fun times and enjoyments were not derived from dev activities.

Of course the shouting episodes all happened during the era I was doing WordPress dev.

So we were a team of consultants working on this elephant-traffic website. There were a couple of systems for managing content on a more modular level, the "best" being one dubbed MF, a spaghettified monstrosity that the 2 people who joined before me had developed.

We were about to launch that shit into production, so I was watching their AWS account, being the only dev who had operational experience (and not afraid to wipe out that macos piece of shit and dev on a real os).

Anyhow, we enable the thing, and the average number of queries per page load instantly jumps from ~30 (even vanilla WP is horrible) to 1000+. Instances are overloaded and the ASG group goes up from 4 to 22. That just moves the problem elsewhere as now the database server is overwhelmed.

Me: we have to enable database caching for this thing *NOW*

Shitty authors of the monstrosity (SAM): no, our code cannot be responsible for that, it's the platform that can't handle the transition.

Me: we literally flipped a single switch here and look at the jump in all these graphs.

SAM: nono, it's fine, just add more instances

Me: ARE YOU FUCKIN SERIOUS?
Me: - goes and enables database caching without any approvals to do so, explaining to mgmt. that failure to do so would impair business revenue due to huge loading times, so they have to live with some data staleness -

SAM: Noooo, we'll show you it's not our code.
SAM: - pushes a new release of the monstrosity that makes DB queries go above 2k / page load -

...

Tho on the bright side, from that point on I focused exclusively on performance, was building a nice fragment caching framework which made the site fly regardless of what shitty code was powering it, tuned the stack to no end and learned a ton of stuff in the process which allowed me to graduate from the tar pit of WP development.

A few weeks ago, I was kept up until the wee hours of the morning trying to figure out how in the hell the Monty Hall problem works. After finally getting it (I'm slow, okay?), I decided to write a program to run simulations of it.

First incarnation of program took user input. User enters what door they choose (1, 2, or 3), then is told what door Monty opens, then given the decision of staying with the door they originally chose or switching, then informed how that worked out for them.

Second incarnation of program ran on a loop. At the start of each loop, a random door is picked for the user guess. Then the door Monty opens is calculated from the remaining doors (excludes user guess and prize door). Then user switches doors (choosing the door that was not their original door or the door Monty opened). At the end of each loop, if the door they switched to was the prize door, it would increment a win counter, else increment a loss counter. After running the loop 1000000000 times, it printed to console `You always switched doors, resulting in ${wins} wins and ${losses} losses`.

THEN I decided to write a variation to run a while loop on the outside of the loop to increase the number of total doors until the point where the decision to switch doors hurt more often than it helped. At this point, I decided to incorporate file I/O and write to a file rather than a console. And that was neat!

And then I decided it would be cool to go back to the three door variation, printing on each loop the original door, the door Monty opened, the door that was switched too, the result of the switch (win or lose) and what the prize door was.

But for the life of me, I couldn't seem to get the file to write properly. It would, like, always crash my terminal. I tried open + append, I tried append. I tried createWriteStream. Still just failure.

And then I changed it to an appendFileSync and happened to look at one of the files that I was writing to. "Huh, over a gig seems a lot."

"Well, how much are you writing each loop? Did you forget to keep in mind how many bytes that would be?"

TLDR: If you're going to write a program that's going to write data to a file on a loop, you might want to figure out how much it's going to end up writing .... before trying to run it. And running a loop 1000000000 times may be a little excessive.

*face palm*

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

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

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

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

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

Here began the troubles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fucking this shit.

I'm in France.

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

I have this coworker who praises himself or being vegan an caring a lot about the world and his health, but smokes and drinks quite a lot. He also is very friendly with everyone but then he privately complains about them with me and goes back to be friendly.

I could ignored this behavior until it started affecting me. Now he is just passive aggressive with everyone, including me. The kind of guy who sends a slightly bitter comment with a wink at the end almost everyday. The kind of guy who will talk to you non-stop like he is your best friend and next morning don't even look at you. The one who will try to teach you some lesson whenever you say something publicly (which he did tons of times and ended up fucking up because he had no idea what he was talking about).

I feel like ignoring him from now on no matter what he says, because he is only waiting for the perfect opportunity to make you feel like a not caring human being so he can keep standing out and controlling everyone. Yes, if you ever try to organize something, he will make sure to criticize you.

So... that's it.

Ok, I am actually losing my mind at this bad excuse of a work place.

This guy, that I had only briefly talked to in email twice before, never met or even had a video chat, opened a ticket like this:

"Hi Alt-Tab,

I hope you enjoyed the end of last week, the weekend, and the beginning of this one! All well here. I ventured to [random place in London] for the first time on Saturday – liked it."

Now. I already can't fucking stand when colleagues that are not at all close start emails with "how was your weekend?" shit because then I have to waste another minute addressing that. But this guy took it to such another level that I literally had to read his email 3 times to believe what I just witnessed.

And of course he then went on and described the issue as folows:

"Just a quick note about the issue I have - could you let me know why the calendars are not syncing?"

Maybe if you fucking spent half of the energy of you writing a polite bullshit "hello" and instead used that to actually describe the issue I could help.

Fuck off.

Please just let me cancel my 1-year subscription for the end of that one year NOW without only giving me an option to cancel everything right now and still pay 54 € fee, that's not only silly, it's what makes customers shout FUCK YOU Adobe! Long gone the good old times, who needs your outdated stuff in 2022 anyway?

Lua is one of the stupidest languages to ever exist.

Oh, the language is easy to learn? The syntax is friendly? There's only like negative 10 functions you ever need to know? Everything is a table?

EVERYTHING IS A TABLE?! WTF CARES? WHAT ABOUT NIL?!

The arrogance this language has is extraordinary, literally. No lang, except Lua, imposes such an opinionated dichotomy. Everything is a fucking table, or, it's nil. -- That's so fucking stupid.

And look, I get it, this lang (oh sorry, scripting language (?)) CAN be good and fun and whatever... the moment you start to do IO is the literal end of days.

Everything is nil. Except, if it's defined... then it's not nil. -- OK. That sounds sensible/reasonable enough. -- What if it's not defined? You get nil. What if it's not the right data? You get nil. Do I get errors/exceptions or whatever? No, absolutely not, you get nil... unless the application you're using with Lua with has a lib that handles that.

There are so many more issues I have with this lang, but honestly... Am I fucking missing something? Is this lang like actually super dooper awesome and I'm missing something? -- I can't not look at this language as just dumb and arrogant. -- It's literally a language where you have to manage and remember ALL conceivable state at ALL times.

##Design to front-end conversion

Me - Send me the designs so i can start working it

Graphic Designer - Done ( Sends PSD files )

Me - Send me them separately, element by element, with transparency, color codes and flattened designs not PSD's

GD - Done

Me - Opens email to see elements that should be transparent saved as jpg's

Me - Opens PSD's, crop and save elements.

Meanwhile explains next time do this and that so it'll be easier.

Usually this happens few times a month

Dammit. I guess I will have to be a Project Manager.

It will truly be the end times.

- A girl asks on FB how to deal with a problem in her Windows computer: the system is asking her to introduce the serial key.

- I comment her the possibility of using Linux in case her use cases are simple enough (web, music, videos).

- First reactions are even enthusiastic, some people who had good experiences join the thread to express their delight with Linux.

- Then a guy arrives to tell us how irresponsible we are, telling a poor girl who does not even know how to introduce the serial key... to use Linux (a super complex system!)

- So I tell the guy that Windows is not simple at all, and that most of the times, people just rely o knowing someone else with higher expertise than them, who always end up paying the price of solving the problems caused by Windows, so the users don't really feel how painful is Windows compared to other systems.

- The girl, who was enthusiastic at first, and seems to be not very bright, to say the least, completely misunderstands my answer. She interprets that I'm insulting the poor guys that act as IT service for free, and calls me a "know-all/smartass" (those words are not even close to their Spanish counterpart on pushing down people who know stuff, we are experts on that there, we didn't loose an empire in the 17th century by respecting the wise ones).

This is, in part, why I stopped helping those dumbasses 18 years ago. I forbid myself to learn anything new about Windows (at user level) so I couldn't help these ungrateful and ignorant people who don't make any effort to learn anything by themselves.

"Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life" is probably the truest statement, but there's a lot of people who get the definition muddled.

They think "Oh well that means there wont ever be hard days and there'll never be times where I'll struggle or get frustrated, and it means I'll go home at the end of the day feeling refreshed and ready to do it forever ad infinitum"

There absolutely will be days where you're fuckin done with semicolons or that you've had it with other devs, but the saying doesnt mean any of that. What it means is that while you may dislike the corporate environment or the fact that you dont really care for it after work hours, while you're doing your tasks in their purest form, you're not really feeling all too bad.

I know a lot of people have gripes with this statement. Pull your finger out of your ass and admit that either you don't love it anymore or that you didn't really understand exactly what it was you were loving all that much in the first place.

I'm debugging a script...

It takes 1+ minute to start because it loads data from remote API and apparently loading 80k objects takes a lot of time, even though I need only headers

I could optimize it. Like, add a local cache. But I will not.

Instead I will waste 1 minute, then another minute, then another minute, each time hoping it's the last pass, but no. I will waste the whole day on it and at the end of the day I will still NOT have the slightest idea why it is slow. That is what will happen, I predict it.

Good times

Having a director who only got his position because the industry is so young and he was able to register domain names so seen as an expert by non-technical people. As few people do this role where I live he was able to move from role to role and rise up the ranks. Everyone in the company knows he's useless except a couple of older directors who are scared of technology so think he's knowledgeable.

He has no ability to plan, everything he says to clients is 'yes, asap' without getting proper requirements, then pulls the devs off one project mid progress to work on another. He also needs basic concepts explained to him many, many times. When pitching for work I end up writing most of his stuff for him and he also starts with the previous version of a document that I have proof read and corrected about ten times.

The frustrating part is I only have to deal with him due to a merger of two companies.

Agency hires me to convert a 4 column + sidebar + pattern backgrounds email to responsive, for a big client, I make a redesign, simplifying it (less columns, flat...) to avoid issues, client insists, exactly the same design is needed.

I tell him its almost impossible but I will try, and try, and try, many times, but on their old Outlook, some email parts are not aligned (just that), try, and try, many hours, many days beyond budget... all the times since first explaining that perfection is not possible with all possible email clients, and like 7% is using outlook... At that point, and before, email was so well.

Finally I put an end to this, tell them to pay and leave me alone, as they didn't take my advises and warnings serious, not my fault.

This story is nothing until the discovery I made today: the agency had signed a contract with the client, a bank, in that contract there was the obligation to replicate exactly the same design and should be perfect in all email clients...

At work, all errors within the site are logged into our database with a subject and error column. SQL errors are logged in the subject field while the traceback is put in the error column. However, a lot of SQL errors are really large and exceed the max character width of the subject field, causing yet another SQL error, and the cycle repeats. This recursive error has been the bane of my existence, because 1) it times my local dev instance out and 2) the error doesn't end up getting logged because the server both freezes and the error can't be inserted in the database. You can't even begin to imagine how many hours I've wasted trying to find what line I changed cause total and utter failure with absolutely 0 error logging. Next thing on my todo list is to fix this fucking issue since the head dev refuses to get it done.

Today's been majorly tough 😣, I might lose one of my fav an most high paying clients 😐

He's OK in taking risks in his business because he has money to fall back on 😐 I have none we are sorta partners in projects. So we have this one project he never wrote in this project brief/outline maintenance or sign off ,😐 it never occured to him .

So now this app is ongoing I got paid nothing they just released it I need to do these jobs to make money 😐 but I'm stuck helping him 😐

There have been so many issues it's been ongoing forever 😐 I dunno what I can do .

To make it worse the code is a pile of shit 😐 literally couldnt be worse.

Why ? Because there has been 4000 minor adjustments. I'm a good coder I swear , but this job is killing me 🙁

Here's an example start of the new year the new iOS kicked in on the 12 Dec I started get more n more bug reports! Saying iOS is messed up.

Because of an update it's not my fault. 😣, 6 months this project took 😐 every 2 weeks I've had a major issue come up like that.

😖 I'm near my wit's end I feel like the best move is to just say I'm sorry I can't anymore I understand that this app is important and that we need to get paid less to grow it etc but I can't let my business die because of that.

Times like this I really appreciate this app

I guess I have to stick it out 😧

College degree.

I don't have it. Not because I don't like to study or don't like to evolve.

I tried several times go back to college, but unfortunately I don't see myself wasting money and time inside a classroom hours per day for something I can read on a book and learn by myself in few days / hours.

I know there's some subjects it's quite hard and we need some guidance for help us, but, we have the community to ask, forums and a lot information on internet.

OK, but why I'm doing this rant?

Recently I got a good job offer in a good country but my potencial employer and me is facing issues to go trough the process because the country to give me the IT visa requires the college degree.

Sometimes I regret to not have enough cold blood to finish the damn college just becuase of the piece of paper (which doesn't proff anything and we cannot even use to clean the $_@#$"@).

My home country (which is a third world country) is already noticed that and they start doing some laws and visas to ease the hiring IT professionals and they're leaving at companies expanses and responsabilities to verify is a good professional or not, but, the price is high for that. But at least the companies there's a way now to get someone.

And also I start see a loot excelent and genius programmers and others IT professionals which are skipping the degree to see and face same issues as me.

I hope our field finally put a end to this burocracies.

I just can't use a trackpad. I've tried many times, tweaked all the settings but always end up plugging in a mouse. Maybe it's because I is shit?

!dev

I didn’t posted for a while cause I didn’t have anything interesting to say. My job is fine, got no major problems in life, everything looks good so I started thinking about the fucking civilization future stuff.
Either I’m to old or we’ll end up back in ancient Egypt one day.

The knowledge is still not moved from old to young, not categorized and protected well enough and we’re busy fighting with each other about nothing important. We’re carrying about stuff that have nothing to do with our lives. All those fucking movements make world worse place then it was. Just marginalize those that are good and give more powers to those who shout more and have more money.

As a result I think in a matter of couple generations there won’t be anyone who could replace grandfathers keeping this machine alive and future people will end up looking at pictures and videos of ancient stuff that nobody is capable of doing cause nobody understands it.

This super friendly human politics of the world like any other politics will make people unfriendly and not able to communicate with each other - stupid and unable to think reasonably.

My advice I also took as a mantra, turn off the internet and read or listen to the books - at least one book a month is your goal.
My last book I listened to was about history of gender and you know what ? I learned that clown fish can change gender when it’s young. I learned more from listening to this book for 8 hours then from a year reading stupid articles in the internet. I understand what gender is, what are the problems and all the fucking history of it staring in 1800-something or maybe even earlier. Maybe because there is still lots of difficulty to write something interesting that is more than 1 page of paper long. Most of stuff in the internet weather it’s an article or video have only 1 page amount of content. This content is none, it have no value to the community. You won’t learn anything from it. If you want to learn something read book cause making good quality book is very expensive and takes lots of person life and self esteem. Probably one book takes more time then most of influencers spend making their stupid pictures and stuff like that.

That’s sad truth of our times. We turned technology made for knowledge exchange to advertising tv - again.

So my colleague sees an iPad on a desk that someone has left by accident. He puts in the wrong password a bunch of times to lock it for an hour as a joke and accidentally wipes it!! Turns out it was about to be used for end of sprint client demo 😂

I'm I the only one who talks to an imaginary friend when debugging 🌚🌚

In my defense my imaginary friend helps me see things in a different perspective and most times I end up fixing my bugs

So a problem end client of mine made my life hell for 3 months.

She hired a design agency to design her a bespoke site, she signs off on it and then once I've made it she decides that it's just a draft.

She then spend the next 3 months emailing me multiple times a day, calling the office and calling my personal phone. I'm still not sure how she got my number.

after 3 months on a two week project, many conference calls and changing every single template so that the site is unrecognisable it is finally live.

This woman literally went around her whole office, building and street asking them what they thought should be changed.

Not only that but half way through she suddenly told me she wanted it live in 2 days with a list of changes as long as my arm. I managed it and she wanted more changes anyway so it didnt go live...

The moral of the story is, never go the extra mile for a client more than twice, make sure you charge them for your extra time, try not think about how someone so retarded is the head of marketing at a huge company and that a true rant has no structure.

PS she also complained to me often that the changes had not been made less than 24 hours after requesting them, showed a half built site to her board of directors and then moaned at me that it didn't look right.

!dev

Look what I'm fixing to say is gonna make seem like a cunt and it'll probably be deserved but at the same time, I think it should be said too.

The increasingly high number of people fishing for compliments and attention because of their CHOSEN profession being important in the current times is starting get old as fuck.

I've seen so many people fishing for compliments; rather it be medical workers or truck drivers because their job is more important now than usual.

Like don't get me wrong, they're all necessary for society to function. But for crying out loud y'all chose this profession for yourselves. You knew this could happen whenever you decided to go to school for your job. You don't hear server admins bragging and fishing for attention whenever they restore access to a service.

Just do your job, know that everyone appreciates what you're doing even if it's not being verbally said, and let it end there. Personally feel that if you went into the medical field for the praise and recognition, then you went in there for the wrong reason.

Anyways, y'all stay safe and let's get this shit show over with already. Ya boy is going insane

))| THE BEST AND WORST WAY|((
))| TO DELETE A LINE IN BASH |((

(Think you can do better? Vote
now on your phones!)

WORST: Hold backspace until satisfied
BEST: Using a pen or other pointing device capable of causing semi or permanent damage to your screen, count how many characters the line in question consists of. Write this down on a piece of paper (after all, your terminal is occupied) and using long division, or any other means, divide this number by two, rounding as you please. Press the "right arrow" key as many times as necessary to reach the end of the line. This might be 0 - if so, congratulations, you may skip this step! Once complete, refer to your piece of paper, and taking your newly calculated number, press the "left arrow" key exactly that many times. If you have a short attention span or are worried you will lose count, take a tally or use some other primitive count recording method. Once the key has been pressed the correct number of times, hold down either control key on your keyboard and take a deep breath - there's no going back now (!) - press the "k" key (you should still be holding a control key!) and take a sigh of relief. You're halfway there! If you need a break, take one. When you're ready to finish the task, hold a control key again and take another deep breath. When you are ready to complete the task (don't hold your breath too long!) press the "w" key. Congratulations!! Your line has been deleted!! Some may call you a fucking idiot for not just pressing ctrl-w at the start, but don't listen to those people! They probably delete stuff by accident all the time! Now, take a lie down, and give a moment's silence for the poor poor line you just brutally dissected and murdered.

Think you can do better? Vote now on your phones!

Oh fucking hardware virtualization.
how many times have I failed at setting sth up googled it and just read "check your BIOS ... and enable..."
Well I would IF I FUCKING COULD. THERE AIN'T NOTHING TO ENABLE ON THIS CHEAP CPU.

I know. I know. Should just get a newer setup, this lappy ain't that powerful anyways - but still - it's frustrating to get excited, start sth and than hit that dead end realizing they presupposed sth I don't have.

My previous employer, which I've described on here many years ago as "the best job I've ever had", pivoted a couple of times during my time with them.
I felt obligated to help them, next thing you know I'm no longer developing, the company focus changes and I end up in a general IT support position.
I knew I needed to get out, but the skills I'd picked up were mostly forgotten because they weren't being utilised. When I looked for other positions nowhere was taking on someone at my barely-existent skill level, despite being well liked in terms of company and team fit.
I was tired all the time, stressed out, miserable. I couldn't grow in the company and was starting to worry about finances due to company issues. I thought COVID and lockdowns would help me get myself back in the game, but I burnt out with everything I was trying to take on at once and didn't make much progress.
When I was made redundant I'd thankfully picked up enough to finally find a much better position. The old company was in a lot of trouble and it's a case of when, not if, it will fold.
Now I really am doing the best job I've ever had, feel much better about myself and my relationships have improved.

A little reflection on the relationship between me/my dad/computer:

When i was younger my dad showed and taught me how to work on his (10 - 15yrs+ old) laptop running windows xp. Soon we got a simple desktop pc (those ones that took nearly a minute to start). i remember my dad sayin something like "don't download anything cause (the pc will brake/it will be a virus/...)", I don't remember exactly ... but i know that i still did it (being fucking nervous😅) and it went well😌. later me and my little sister would go to "spielaffe.de" several times until getting some kind of "virus"😅😅.
Time passed and i got passionate about pc's (programming, trying Ubuntu, reading about internals of a pc,...). It didn't take long that i passed my dad's knowledge and so here i am studying CS😎.
In the end, regarding my dad:
first he was the master i looked up to, then he became the buddy i talked to and asked for problems, then ... he remained the light user who would like to return to his windows xp era and asks me first as his personal google when something happens out of his "comfort-zone"😅😌.
And sometimes i believe my dad is becoming incompetent for pc's😂😅

This year I could join the "Game Graphics" for my elective classes. After seeing that we are split almost exactly in half (graphics design and programmers) our tutor (graphic with 20+ exp in the field, worked on few Call of Duty titles and more) decided that instead of forcing everyone to draw something, we will be making games in groups.

So me, and my friend were grouped with two girls from graphic. I have to say, working close with them was an eyes-opening experience. They don't think like me, they don't see like me and they interpret everything different.

Anyway, as most experienced Unity dev (... Yeaaaah, one game self made and published) I was chosen to get rest of the programmers up to speed. Luckily no one objected and they did what I wanted them to do, so it wasn't bad.

Today was supposedly the last day to present finished prototype. After three weeks staying up till 1 am, working on this project, two other, and nornal job, it was supposed to end. But, no one was really ready. So tutor decided that we will only do this project, an 2D platformer, instead of two, this and 3D game.

While walking around and checking the progress he stayed with us at least two times, watching what we were doing. Since last two weeks were really hectic, we were finishing up animations, adding some polish and such. When he came to us for the second time, he played our prototype. He's a bit older guy, somewhere around his 60, and one could see he wasn't prepared for hard gameplay I presented him with my first level design ever.

He told us his feedback, about how hard it is and not really intuitive, but in the end, he was satisfied. We have made really great progress and brought him something he could play and finish. Which was more than most of other groups had at today. And, as a cherry on the top, he complimented me as a group chief. I don't remember the last time someone complimented my work. The feeling was... Incredible. Touching even.

So, yeah. My hard work wasn't in vain, even though we now have time till the end of the semester. Everyone in my team has given their all and now we can rest for a bit, while others are catching up. Right now I only have to polish some mechanics, rework a bit of level design and add tutorial, while girls from graphic design will be working on better background and sprites.

All in all, it was a pretty good day.

A time I (almost) screamed at co-worker?
Too many times to keep up with.

Majority of time its code like ..
try
{
using (var connection = new SqlConnection(connectionString))
{
// data access code that does stuff
}
catch (Exception e)
{
// Various ways of dealing with the error such as ..
Console.WriteLine("Here");
ShowMessage("An error occured.");
return false;
// or do nothing.
}
}

Range of excuses

- Users can't do anything about the error, so why do or show them anything?
- I'll fix the errors later
- Handling the errors were not in the end-user specification. If you want it, you'll have to perform a cost/benefit analysis, get the changes approved by the board in writing, placed in the project priority queue ...etc..etc
- I don't know.
- Users were tired of seeing database timeout errors, deadlocks, primary key violations, etc, so I fixed the problem.

On my tip of my tongue are rages of ..

"I'm going to trade you for a donkey, and shoot the donkey!"
or
"You are about as useful as a sack full of possum heads."

I haven't cast those stones (yet). I'll eventually run across my code that looks exactly like that.

The team leader call us for a serious meeting, and he wants it to be productive,

Leader: "we shall not procrastinate anymore. We don't have time left. We should not just talk random bullshit like we did the last few times. Aight?"

We all agree to be productive.

We also set a few main subjects and decision to be discussed. Then, we all get into the meeting room seriously. In a meeting, we try the idea of the upcoming project. But we suddenly went off topic. Then, My friend talk about L4D2. Then we start playing. And, I say, why not try some GTA5? I proudly reboot my expensive laptop from Ubuntu to Windows and playing GTA. Then, we start spotify and talk about song.

We laid in the sofa and talk sexually. My friend introduce me his favorite AV and we compare our manhood's size.

It was 4am already. One by one the attendee fall asleep.

It is lIke... the survival gamr of sleepiness? xD

Only my best boy friend and I were left awake, talking about ourselves, watching the beautiful midnight city.

Then, 2 of us ourselves start to talk about project idea. It is something cool and crazy to think about, like a friend making app. The 3 hours of brainstorming is gay and romantic.

"Okay, so we have the outline. let's sleep, baby" So we sleep till the noon. We wake up. Some left. Some were still sleeping. The birds twitter in the bequtiful skyline.
I did not forget to upload my idea to discord after going home in the morning. End of the meeting. Barely any goal was met in the meeting.

Those days, we make attempt of productive meeting again and again but end up procrastinating everyday. We had meeting in a small bedroom and it was our meeting room. We played different songs, tasted different wines.

And, finally one day, my friend say "I feel that it is much productive to work alone in a separate room. So we won't get distracted by each other."
Another friend: "yea..I know it is harsh... but yea... true... let's work alone"

I almost eant to cry. But we cannot indulge ourselves in the moments of dreamy romance.

We should start real work and don't be gay.

Well, I've been reading 'rants' in this community, and I'm amazed at how people discuss various softwares, languages, and sometimes even hardware!
I'd say I'm a noob. Can't even compare my 'coding knowledge' with what people know in this community, and I don't want to. I like that I'm now a part of this community. But I feel intimidated at times by the amount of things there are to learn! And I don't know how to start. I mean, we had a course on C for a semester, and I tried to build up on that myself. Other than that, I've been trying to learn web-dev, made a browser based game and tried to learn some back end. But I don't know exactly how to build up my proficiency with code, and solving problems, from here on out. So I would really appreciate if this golden community could help me out.(Not trying to flatter anyone. I don't express much, but all this is what I genuinely feel, and am grateful about.) I want to know how to go on about learning knew things in the realm of programming, and how I can apply it to solve actual problems. What language should I learn first? What will be valuable in this rapid-paced time? And some courses to help out?

I stumbled upon devRant one day out of nowhere, and I'm glad I did.

everything microsoft makes is SHIT
for example, windows, and the fact that they bought out minecraft and ruined it with their bullshit "child friendly" feature
vscode's liveshare is ACTUALLY MAKING ME LOSE MY DAMN MIND TRYING TO WORK WITH SOMEONE
just now i was writing code and i realized, it wasn't even updating the file at all, it was just pretending to save changes, while on the hoster's end, nothing changed. at all
i had to rejoin the session 500 times, tell the host to restart, and it was generally a whole nightmare
nothing i typed in applied to the other end, and there were already 50+ errors from nothing in the php file i was working on
and it was erroring out at the most RANDOM spots, where nothing is wrong at all with the code, it was picking up something invalid, but NOT SHOWING ME WHAT WAS WRONG
i rejoined and saw a shit ton of test, an if that i never saw before i rejoined
in general why does everything microsoft make have to be so bad, and unreliable
smh microsoft u can do better

to space, or to tab,
that is the question,
whether tis nobler to suffer
the slings and arrows
of outrageous space bar use
pressing four or eight times,
or to take arms against a sea of
manual spaces by using
the tab key, and by apposing
space bar's end them.

Many of them. Can't decide which one is the biggest.
- when the asshole in front of me picks up a call and is loud as hell. Wanna kick his nuts.
- Chats. Hangouts. Whatsapp. Just name it.
- retards who don't​ know how to google something or even worse..what to google and come straight to me to get a solution.
- My own fucking head at times. You start talking about space tech and i'll have to jump into it. And i end up wasting half an hour.

It's over.

I've been working on you for months, and thinking about you for near a year.
I built you with a shitty language first and some crappy ideas. I obviously got bad results, but I didn't lose courage and I continued you.
Got near the obsession to improve you. Every time. Switched to a fast but hard language. Got into my first low-level fuss. All for you.

Now I reached the end with no more improvements and tweaks I could imagine, I can tell that:

I had a lot of expectations from you.

But turns out you were nothing more than a nasty brain fart pretending to be a good idea.

The core of the concept was rotten. Blinded by my lust for success (perhaps cupidity ?) I didn't see you just couldn't work.
I'm utterly disgusted, of course. Who wouldn't, after working so hard on something that looks right but is completely useless ?

But even though this was all in vain, you taught me some great lessons down the road.
Efficiency matters over facility.
Get sure you're using the right tools, and stay open for changes of such.

But some others were harsher, though just as important.
There's times you just have to admit defeat.
Putting a lot of efforts into something doesn't always bring a reward.
If after a long time you can't get the thing right, then stop. Your time is precious. Don't waste your time or time will waste you (Thanks Muse, I love this sentence).

And the most important: next time I got some "grand" idea that is not about improving some random software, I'll bang my head to my desk enough times to forget about it.

So now the time has come.

Goodbye, project "hpym". You put me in grief, but I know I matured a lot in my concepts of development because of you.
Now take place into the project graveyard among the other clunky half-assed shit I got rid off.

No no no. That's it. Less than 2 years experience supposed to be leading a team of 12 soon to be 17 most of which have more experience than me! Been given sever admin responsibilities, training and managing 2 large frame works in addition to everything else I was doing before.

With the current set of projects we were given half the amount of time to do over twice the amount of work. Management seems to expect constant over time. And I keep being nagged by management to finish x,y,z. Every thing is high piority and I keep being asked to switch between tasks every hour or so nothing gets completed when this happens every time I make them aware this happens. The worse thing is that the CEO has a way of naming and shaming people who fall behind work infront of the entire company.

I have only been surviving thanks to a few saints in the team who just get on with the work without argument but now found out a bunch of these are moving to better companies!!!

I like helping people but with everything that is going on I can't find time to and I know at times I end up coming across inpatient with them that they don't deserve. But if you are part of a team please try and solve your issue yourself before asking others every half an hour there are too many of you and I need to get things done too.

And why is it so damn hot sitting at the desk sweating.

Ok I am prob on my meriod and being over the top grumpy. I want to find a new job but so tired in the evenings that I just want to collapse on my bed and do nothing. At end of writing this and feel a little better.

Last year in my job, I was temporarily assigned to another team to help out in their project as they were short-staffed. It was a massive project and of course there was a lot of code review to be done. But since I was only temporarily assigned, I still have to do code reviews for my base team, this other team I was assigned to, and for some reason, code review for another team that I barely know what their project is about.

There were times where all I was doing was code reviews that took anywhere between a few minutes to upto 3 days. The amount of mistakes and bugs I kept finding was phenomenal. But I think the one thing that got to me was finding the same bugs/mistakes that I kept pointing out to people to stop doing or to fix e.g DB queries inside a loop just to retrieve data.

To this end I still have to deal with the same issue, but thankfully now it's only to one team.

I am a Technical Lead in the department in my company that writes code for our clients that have money but doesn't have the technical expertise to handle the complexities of our own software.

Part of my tasks involve taking care of a few projects written by employees that have left after using third-party tools rather than using our own software. No one else in this department knows these third-party tools, they only know our own, and my *still limited* web development experience means I get dumped these things in my lap.

And I'm SO pissed at these projects and their authors and the manager that let these ex-employees write these things. There is this one project that was managed by two different "developers" (I don't know they deserve this title) at two different times, and it is so riddled with different technologies it makes me want to throw up almost daily.

Don't believe me? Here is a complete list of the dependencies listed in the package.json of this project: babel-polyfill, body-parser, cookie-parser, debug, edge, edge-sql, excel-to-json, exceljs, express, html-inline, jade, morgan, mssql, mysql, pug, ramda, request, rotating-file-stream, serve-favicon, webpack, xlsx, xml2js

What this doesn't even show, is that one part of this project (literally one page) is made using react, react-dom, react-redux, and jade. The other part (again literally one page) is made using Angular and Pug. In case you missed it while picking up your jaw, there's also mssql, mysql, edge and edge-sql. excel-to-json, exceljs, xlsx.

Oh you want *more* juicy details? This project takes the entire data object used by the front-end, stringifies it into JSON, and shoves it into the database *as a single field*. And instead of doing WHERE clauses in the SQL queries, it grabs the entire table, loops, parses the json, and does a condition on it. If even one of those JSON entries gets corrupted, the entire solution breaks because these "developers" don't know what try/catch is.

The client asked for a very simple change in their app, which was to add a button that queries the back-end for a URL, shows it in a modal dialog, after which a button is clicked to verify the link by doing a second query to the back-end before modifying a couple of fields in the page.

This. Took. Me. Two. Months*. Save me. Please, save me.

*between constant context switches between this and other projects that were continuously failing because of their mistakes.

Welp, good times to start a new run in Skyrim, then.

For the non-dragonborns: Argonians are Reptiloids.

He would probably end-up digging for silver in the Cidhna mine for all his criminal acts in Skyrim. Or eaten by a dragon.

In an IT management class, the professor wanted us to estimate the operation costs for a small IT company, breaking them down by service offered. I remember creating a markdown file, multiple times executing the line `echo $RANDOM >> estimations.md`. We rounded the numbers slightly, pimped the document a bit and submitted a nice PDF. When we had to present our work, the professor asked us how we had proceeded to calculate those results. We told him a story about an Excel file we worked on, but did not submit, because we thought he'd be interested in the end result and not care about those details. He asked us to submit that Excel calculation, because he wanted to comprehend our method. So we got together, created an Excel sheet, copied our "estimations" into column C and called it "service cost". For column B, we used the same "cost per man hour" value (scientifically estimated using the RAND() function) for every row. Finally, we divided the "service cost" by the "cost per man hour" for every row, put the result in column A and called it "effort (in man hours)". The professor, being able to "reproduce" our estimation, accepted our solution.

So I work for an IT consulting firm (web development) and was hired by a customer 7 months ago for coaching Git, implementation of VueJS on the front-end and fostering teamwork with devs who'd been in their solo comfort zone for the last 15 years.
I asked for confirmation multiple times on whether they were sure they wanted to go through with a bigger investment in front-end. Confirm they did, multiple times.

After half the team's initial enthusiasm faded (after 1 month), the 'senior' of them who's worked there for 18 years on a single -in the end, failed- project got a burn-out after half a week of showing up (without doing actual work) from the stress, and started whining about it with management that has no technical clue whatsoever. This and other petty office politics lead to the dumbest organizational and technical decisions I've seen in my short 5-year career (splitting a Laravel app that uses the same database in two, replacing docker container deployment with manual ssh'ing and symlinking, duplicating all the models, controllers, splitting a team in two, decreasing productivity, replacing project management dashboards with ad-hoc mail instructions and direct requests).

Out of curiosity I did a git log --author --no-merges with the senior's name on the 2 projects he was supposed to help on, and that turned up... ZERO commits. Now the dept. hired 3 new developers with no prior experience, and it's sad to see the seniors teach them "copy paste" as the developer's main reflex.

Through these 7 months I had to endure increasingly vicious sneers from the IT architect -in name only- who gets offended and hysterical at every person who dares offer suggestions. Her not-so-implicit insinuation is that it's all my fault because I implemented Vue front-end (as they requested), she has been doing this for months, every meeting at least once (and she makes sure other attendees notice). Extra background: She's already had 2 official complaints for verbal abuse in the past, and she just stressed another good developer into smoking again.

Now I present her my timesheet for January, she abuses her power by refusing to sign it unless I remove a day of work.
Earlier this week I asked her politely to please stop her unjust guilt-tripping to which she shouted "You'll just have to cope with that!", and I walked out of the room calmly (in order to avoid losing my nerves). She does this purely as a statement, and I know she does it out of bad faith (she doesn't actually care, as she doesn't manage the budgets). She knows she wields more power over me than the internal devs (I am consultant, so negative reviews for me could delay further salary raises).

I just don't know how to handle this person: I can't get a word in with her, or she starts shouting, and it's impossible to change her (completely inaccurate technological) perception.

We use at our company one of the largest Python ORM and dont code ourselfs on it, event tough I can code. Its some special contract which our General Manager made, before we as Devs where in the Project and everything is provided from the external Company as Service. The Servers are in our own Datacenter, but we dont have access.

We have our Consultants (Project Manager) as payd hires and they got their own Devs.

Im in lead of Code Reviews and Interfaces. Also Im in the "Run" Team, which observes, debuggs and keeps the System alive as 3rd-Level (Application Managers).

What Im trying to achieve is going away from legacy .csv/sftp connections to RestAPI and on large Datasets GraphQL. Before I was on the Project, they build really crappy Interfaces.

Before I joined the Project in my Company, I was a Dev for a couple of Finance Applications and Webservices, where I also did coding on Business critical Applications with high demand Scaling.

So forth, I was moved by my Boss over to the Project because it wasn't doing so well and they needed our own Devs on it.

Alot of Issues/Mistakes I identified in the Software:
- Lots of Code Bugs
- Missing Process Logic
- No Lifecycle
- Very fast growing Database
- A lot of Bad Practices

Since my switch I fixed alot of bugs, was the man of the hour for fixing major Incidents and so on so forth. A lot of improvements have been made. Also the Team Spirit of 15+ People inside the Project became better, because they could consult me for solutions/problems.

But damn I hate our Consultants. We pay them and I need to sketch the concepts, they are to dumb for it. They dont understand Rest or APIs in general, I need to teach them alot about Best Practices and how to Code an API. Then they question everything and bring out a crooked flawed prototype back to me.

WE F* PAY THEM FOR BULLCRAP! THEY DONT EVEN WRITE DOCUMENTATION, THEY ARE SO LAZY!

I even had a Meeting with the main Consultant about Performance Problems and how we should approach it from a technical side and Process side. The Software is Core Business relevant and its running over 3 Years. He just argumented around the Problem and didnt provide solutions.

I confronted our General Manager a couple of times with this, but since 3 Years its going on and on.

Im happy with my Team and Boss, they have my back and I love my Job, but dealing with these Nutjobs of Consultants is draining my nerves/energy.

Im really am at my wits end how to deal with this anymore? Been pulling trough since 1 year. I wanna stay at my company because everything else besides the Nutjob Consultants is great.

I told my Boss about it a couple of times and she agrees with me, but the General Manager doesnt let go of these Consultants.

Even when they fuck up hard and crash production, they fucking Bill us... It's their fault :(

In a previous job, I was trying to organize a common repository with our shitty business partner so we could both be able to contribute our part so our work would not overlap. Not like they cared anyways.

One thing I quickly noticed is those fuckers would just straight up commit untested changes on master and cripples our whole testing and prod deployment at times because we were depending on a shitty IoT service they provided us onto which we had no control whatsoever.

I told my boss, who was often complaining about them being unreliable in the first place, I would simply restrict them from merging and commiting to develop or to master without my approval. We cannot keep working like this.

He told me that we could not impose on them our work practices and that I should not try to piss them off. To be diplomatic.

I politely and professionally refused to do it, but he did change his mind in the end. He and I left not too long after. I guess he felt obliged to respond that having his job at stake but you cannot condone voluntarily shitty work.

Second big school project. Designed for at least 2 people. Quite a lot of work for the given time but not impossible to do, as I thought. Oh boy was I wrong.

My partner and I chose a networking project which included setting up a ESXi-Server, a VM (with Windows Server 2008 R2) and a router. We are both not unknowledged so I thought this would be easy-going.
I quickly recognised that my partner liked to spend his time at home rather than actually doing something so I ended up doing nearly everything.
When it came to documenting everything he tried to write something, but it had so many mistakes i had to correct it over and over again.
I asked him multiple times, if we should split and he denied every time and promised to work harder.
End of that story was him being expelled from school because of to many missed lessons and me finishing the project alone. Got a B+ for it.

Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.

Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.

Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.

I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.

Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.