As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.

I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.

These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.

Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.

All I want to say is:

No time was lost.

This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.

Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.

One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.

You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.

You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.

You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.

You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.

Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.

Please, for the love of code...

Start and fail as many projects as you can.

Holy s**t, I was wondering why my fans were noisy and my computer so warm lately. So I checked inside to see this. The CPU fan is fucking resting on the graphics card like Dr House on his stick.

(Written March 13th at 2am.)

This morning (yesterday), my computer decided not to boot again: it halts on "cannot find firmware rtl-whatever" every time. (it has booted just fine several times since removing the firmware.) I've had quite the ordeal today trying to fix it, and every freaking step along the way has thrown errors and/or required workarounds and a lot of research.

Let's make a list of everything that went wrong!

1) Live CD: 2yo had been playing with it, and lost it. Not easy to find, and super smudgy.

2) Unencrypt volume: Dolphin reports errors when decrypting the volume. Research reveals the Live CD doesn't incude the cryptsetup packages. First attempts at installing them mysteriously fail.

3) Break for Lunch: automatic powersaving features turned off the displays, and also killed my session.

4) Live CD redux: 25min phonecall from work! yay, more things added to my six-month backlog.

5) Mount encrypted volume: Dolphin doesn't know how, and neither do I. Research ensues. Missing LVM2 package; lvmetad connection failure ad nauseam; had to look up commands to unlock, clone, open, and mount encrypted Luks volume, and how to perform these actions on Debian instead of Ubuntu/Kali. This group of steps took four hours.

6) Chroot into mounted volume group: No DNS! Research reveals how to share the host's resolv with the chroot.

7) `# apt install firmware-realtek`: /boot/initrd.img does not exist. Cannot update.

8) Find and mount /boot, then reinstall firmware: Apt cannot write to its log (minor), listed three install warnings, and initially refused to write to /boot/initrd.img-[...]

9) Reboot!: Volume group not found. Cannot process volume group. Dropping to a shell! oh no..

(Not listed: much research, many repeated attempts with various changes.)

At this point it's been 9 hours. I'm exhausted and frustrated and running out of ideas, so I ask @perfectasshole for help.
He walks me through some debugging steps (most of which i've already done), and we both get frustrated because everything looks correct but isn't working.

10) Thirteenth coming of the Live CD: `update-initramfs -u` within chroot throws warnings about /etc/crypttab and fsck, but everything looks fine with both. Still won't boot. Editing grub config manually to use the new volume group name likewise produces no boots. Nothing is making sense.

11) Rename volume group: doubles -'s for whatever reason; Rebooting gives the same dreaded "dropping to a shell" result.

A huge thank-you to @perfectasshole for spending three hours fighting with this issue with me! I finally fixed it about half an hour after he went to bed.

After renaming the volume group to what it was originally, one of the three recovery modes managed to actually boot and load the volume. From there I was able to run `update-initramfs -u` from the system proper (which completed without issue) and was able to boot normally thereafter.

I've run updates and rebooted twice now.
After twelve+ hours... yay, I have my Debian back!

oof.

So just about to head to the pub and I got the dreaded call from my boss.

The support team had developed some fixes. They "tested" and deployed without letting us know... And you guessed it there was failures all over the shop!

So it turned out their testing was running on a local base install with no integration compared to the live system with 15 years of customisation and complex integration. My they thought this was acceptable I don't know...

And the best part was the developers who made the changes didn't understand their own code (I found the tutorial they copied online) they just blindly copied it without understanding how it worked!

So 4 hours later we found the bug, nothing like having a query and s SQL connection but not executing the query....

There goes my Saturday evening. Now we're was my beer!

A personal memo to all developers on devRant:

* Assume every external line of code, (including every service you consume) is an unreliable crock of flaming shit. These services can and will fail in the most glorious ways. Write your code to be resilient, and ASSUME FAILURE of dependencies. Even if it's your own team writing the other service.

Heard in a meeting today: "Your team's service outage is going to cause my service to corrupt the database!"

Response I wanted to give: "No, you asshat, my service outage is a normal part of living with microservices. Your app should have been smart enough to recognize the failure."

Doing exams at the moment. Finished phase one out of four successfully at Monday but now stuff is going bad again as usual. Seriously, with me, everything goes perfectly fine until stuff gets official, then code starts failing, self doubt comes up and fair of failure and low self esteem hit me like a bomb.

I'm using my own framework which I actually also use in production and it works fine! But then it has to start to fucking fail at the moment I need it to work the fucking most.

I've worked towards this for five years now, I don't want to fail this! I don't want to disappoint either myself or my friends or my parents.

Fuck.

If you are programming in C++ please always return a type from a function as the function prototype return type.

I had to debug some old code that failed to return a boolean on one of its flow paths. It would work on linux in release and debug, would work on windows in debug, and fail on windows in release.

The failure was NOT straightforward at ALL. It would return exit code 3. Then if I added a debug print to the function it would segfault.

Why the hell would popping something extra off the return/call stack not crash more readily? Wth is the point of debug compile if it won't catch shit like this?

That moment you receive an email: your CI build is failing.

Ok. What went wrong?

Three new commits that do not seem to alter anything related to the failure.

*reverts commits and tries again*

Still failing.

WTF?!

*restarts previous builds*

They now fail too.

FUCK! BASTARD! Are you kidding me?

*investigates*

Turns out that repo of dependency changed and is not compatible anymore.

Argh! Son of bitch!

Dat moment when your contact person phones you and ask If you delete the whole Release Folder...

YEAH SURE I WAS IT BECAUSE I LIKE TO WORK ON WEEKEND

Fyi: FTP with one user for everyone - harhar stupid bricks

Clown manager put three juniors (and ”senior” dev on work visa) on new project.

They will never finish it.

It’s too hard for them with some legacy dynamically created complex database queries which will spook the hell out of them!

But managers like, ”it’s going to be good” and ”making good progress”.

Fuck no! Putting juniors together? With little support? It such a waste. They spent weeks just to get even the slightest progress.

No best practise. No tests. Just hacking away.

It’s a failure of the management! We fail our juniors and they will quit as soon as they get the chance and they feel like they have some wind under their wings.

”It’s going to be good”

Pff. Clowns leading this company.

"Stop throwing errors in your library! They cause my app to crash"

Who amongst us hasn't hear of the popular maxim: "Fail late even after you know something is wrong, and then make sure the failure cascades over the whole app in mysterious ways"

This happened yesterday during 1-2-1 meeting

My dear teamleader telling me.

"You're just a stupid consultant"

Well, this 'stupid consultant' has had enough of your bullshit and will look for future endeavors elsewhere.

You are free to consider your options and make the bad decisions, dear team 'leader'.

Cry at the sheer amount of work 'your' project really entails and I will revel in your failure

I'm done with this guy.

Team leaders should be ousted if they fail their team members and the projects they are responsible for.

Stakeholder: Is it possible for you to set up the website to automatically resubmit failed online orders? Last time there were failed orders, we tried submitting manually but a lot failed because they were tickets for the previous day.

Product Manager: What are your thoughts, Developer?

Me: This wouldn’t be worth the labor. It’s something that would rarely be used. There are very few orders that fail. I’d be surprised if it was even once a week. The recent bunch of order failures that SH is talking about happened because the ticketing server (separate from the website) couldn’t handle all the requests. Let’s say you had resubmission logic to try 3x before allowing the fail. It wouldn’t work because the server was overwhelmed already. Let’s say you had a background task to check for failures every ten minutes and resubmit those. It might not be helpful because the customer could have already gone to a ticketing window for help with the failed order.

SH: But what if it happens again???

Me: The solution is to make sure the ticketing server can handle the influx of requests. We can coordinate with that team. Wait. Why did you wait until the next day to resubmit orders in the admin panel? A lot of those failures happened when there were many hours left in the business day. For each order failure, an email notification is sent to the sales support email in real time. Who is monitoring that inbox? Someone must be looking at it because the sales support email is listed multiple times on the ticketing website as the technical assistance email.

SH: I know that email notification goes to the engineering team.

Me: My question is not about the engineering team. I asked who is monitoring the sales support inbox.

SH: That email … gets filtered.

Me and Product Manager: 😧🤯🤬

PM: First, you need to stop filtering that email notification. Second, your team needs to come up with a flow to handle failed orders because you told us you don’t have one. After you tried this and there’s still an issue, then we can revisit.

—-
If you’re wondering why I said no, I’m a team of one and I have a bunch of other development tasks on my plate. I’m not automating a manual task that rarely has to be performed.

Old but gold. 😂😂

Most recently... taking something previous devs had failed at and knocking it out of the park.

Best example was a statistical regression and graphing tool on ASP MVC.

The devs were doing a massive brute force recalculation on the server layer. It would take 24h then fail to save (Entity framework brute force).

We moved it to the database layer and got it down to a passable time.

The same devs were outputting charts to ie 9, chrome, firefox... same deal, half an hour on the initial request (parser churn in the browser)... then failure.

Again got it into a passable time by switching to web sockets and long polling then outputting 1000 or so points at a time to give the browser time to render.

Taking those two cock ups and making them a workable solution was awesome.

Since then, teaching. We have apprentices, newcomers, interns all jumping in and looking to get working. They're all different, what works to teach one person won't the next, each of them so far has caught on to what I was teaching. It's a proud moment to be able to impart knowledge and see someone pick it up, enthusiastically... it's also awesome to see someone excited about what you do.

My eyes hurt everytime our backend guy gives me a new REST API to implement in our app and always the formatting of the json is something like this. Like why can't you just fucking format it properly so I won't have to look at my code and feel disappointed for writing such ugly code. All because your lazy ass didn't care to understand the fundamentals of how json objects and arrays work !!! It's been a month since I've joined this company and I'm tired of explaining why we should use the status code for failure checking and not this stupid pass/fail status flag. I don't even remember how many times I've brought it up but everytime I get reasons like "Dude, you know what our server is never going to go down or fail so it doesn't even matter". And at that point I feel like I shouldn't even argue with him anymore.

SO MAD. Hands are shaking after dealing with this awful API for too long. I just sent this to a contact at JP Morgan Chase.

-------------------
Hello [X],
1. I'm having absolutely no luck logging in to this account to check the Order Abstraction service settings. I was able to log in once earlier this morning, but ever since I've received this frustratingly vague "We are currently unable to complete your request" error message (attached). I even switched IP's via a VPN, and was able to get as far as entering the below Identification Code until I got the same message. Has this account been blocked? Password incorrect? What's the issue?

2. I've been researching the Order Abstraction API for hours as well, attempting to defuddle this gem of an API call response:

error=1&message=Authentication+failure....processing+stopped

NOWHERE in the documentation (last updated 14 months ago) is there any reference to this^^ error or any sort of standardized error-handling description whatsoever - unless you count the detailed error codes outlined for the Hosted Payment responses, which this Order Abstraction service completely ignores. Finally, the HTTP response status code from the Abstraction API is "200 OK", signaling that everything is fine and dandy, which is incorrect. The error message indicates there should be a 400-level status code response, such as 401 Unauthorized, 403 Forbidden or at least 400 Bad Request.

Frankly, I am extremely frustrated and tired of working with poorly documented, poorly designed and poorly maintained developer services which fail to follow basic methodology standardized decades ago. Error messages should be clear and descriptive, including HTTP status codes and a parseable response - preferably JSON or XML.
-----

This whole piece of garbage is junk. If you're big enough to own a bank, you're big enough to provide useful error messages to the developers kind enough to attempt to work with you.

MTP is complete garbage. I want mass storage back.

The media transfer protocol (MTP) occasionally discovers new creative ways of failure. Frequently, directory listings take minutes to load or fail to load at all, and it freezes up infinitely (until disconnected) when renaming an item, and I can not even do two things simultaneously.

While files are being moved, I can not browse pictures or watch videos from the smartphone.

Sometimes, files are listed with the date 1970-01-01 (Unix epoch) instead of their correct date. Sometimes, files do not appear at all, which makes it unsafe to move directories from the device.

MTP lacks random access. If I want to play a two-gigabyte 4K 2160p video and seek in the video, guess what: I need to copy it to my computer's local mass storage first because MTP lacks random access.

When transferring high numbers of files, MTP has to slooooowly enumerate (or "prepare" or "calculate the time of") them all, which might even take longer than mass storage would need for the entire process. This means MTP might start copying or moving the actual files when mass storage is already finished.

Today, the "preparing to move" process was especially slow: five minutes for around 150 files! How am I supposed to find out what caused this random malfunction?

MTP sometimes drives me insane. I want mass storage back, at least for the MicroSD memory card, which uses a widely supported file system.

Imagine a 2010 $100 Android phone is better at file transfer than a 2022 $1000 Android phone (or iPhone, for that matter).

Fuck you negative bastard! I really hate when someone "predicts" failure to meet the deadline of some project we haven't started yet. This bastard thinks we will fail only because he is a complete mess at coding and fears learning new things.

!dev

Sorry if this is a bad read, pretty new to devRant and writing in general.

I can't help but think and think of how much I fucked up my opportunities to completely change my life/financial status a couple of times. Damn.

A few years back (it was 2009, I think) I was playing Diablo II online, helped some random guy get through the hard levels. Normally, in such situation the lower lvl player allowed the higher level guy to grab the valuable boss loot; however this time the guy except sharing the loot with me asked me if I want his spare 2000 bitcoin. I asked if it's of any value, he said "not really".

I said I'd contact him later, when I figure out how this thing works and how to setup a wallet.

Guess what, I was too lazy and forgot about this thing completely. Then we lost contact.

In 2010, I made a comeback to bitcoin, but instead of buying it, I downloaded the bitcoin client, the blockchain (it was 800 mb in size, I remember) and have been contributing by running it on my PC for like a year.

Finally decided to get it ~3 years ago. Bought 2.5 BTC for 400$.

Was holding it, until I fell for the "free OmniseGO" scam and somebody stole them off me.

All of these can't get out of my head.
I visit coinmarketcap literally every hour to see how much I could have now. My girlfriend, friends, family, all fail to cheer me up. I still made a pretty good deal buying 5.5 ETH for 45$ and thats like 2500$ soon, its nice but this much I can make by coding

Shit, what do I do to stop being stressed except for seeing a psychologist.

May my failure make you smile today

It was around for a while but I didn’t realize it was it for a long time. I was fixing computers for cash and spending in on booze while in primary school. Making websites for cash and for fun while in high school. Some guys wanted to buy my databases at the time and sending me emails that my websites rocks. I didn’t cared cause I party a lot and I didn’t need money.
Sex drugs and rock and roll was my life not a fucking computer.
Since I never had problems with math I passed exams and got myself to university and dropped out cause of those 3 funny things above. Turned out to pass exams after second year when math and physics disappeared you need to study more then 1 day before exam and party was more important for me.

I failed tremendously. My girlfriend left me I was out of money I got back to my hometown with my laptop and I somehow between depression, drugs, alcohol and killing myself reminded I was getting money from websites and I can try to follow that movie.

At that time I didn’t read single book in english in my life. I know some basic english so I decided to try to read some actionscript2 pdf. Why actionscript ? I liked those simple games. Those were fun and there was nothing better. I was reading first book at least 10 times with vocabulary that took about a month until I remembered whole book and second book was faster like 1 week third was 1 day and from then thing moved a little faster. I discovered flex just before adobe acquired macromedia and started writing in it. Started answering to some questions on forum and build some portfolio website with fancy 3d animations and stuff and finally applied for 2 jobs.
They both were amazed by my website and one of them sent me some task to do and I did it overnight and sent them back. They wanted to hire me and I need to respond to them.
Second job they invited me for talking and asking about math, if I’m ok with 3d and stuff and they offered me job closer to my home town so I picked them. The code was amazing, 3d equations, quaternions, complicated stuff bit very well written by some company that dropped project before launch and my first task was add some small feature.
I remember first day in elevator with my former boss who told me to not to get scary and take it slowly I was trying to do my task as fast as I can worried I will be fired if I don’t do it and nobody else will hire me and I won’t manage to recover from second failure. It was even more fighting with myself that I will fail again then with this task lol.
I’ve done the feature third day and when they said it’s cool and I can commit my changes it appeared to me that It might be this shit that will get me out of trouble.
I was never again wrong about programming and so wrong about trouble but that’s a different story...

I'm working on a codebase that is terminally ill. It's split so badly into microservices that no matter what you do, every one of them talks to every one of them over and over. If there's any way they can avoid just invoking a method on a class and send themselves a message or make an HTTP request, they'll do it. One of the services just sends messages to itself for no apparent reason. Except it doesn't even send messages to itself. It sends an HTTP request to a controller in another app, and that controller sends a message which is received by the same class that made the request.

The point is that this application is screwed. The defects pile up and there is literally no one who can understand what it's supposed to do in any scenario. I'm good at this. I can follow confusing code and document it. But not this one. It's overwhelming. It's insanity.

When these defects come in we're told to just run the app from the UI, see what HTTP requests it makes, and start tracing the code manually. Running and debugging it locally would be a nightmare but it's impossible anyway.

They decided that we all need to understand the application better so we can work on it, so we were each given six poorly-define five-hour tasks to "understand" various things. Those things don't make any sense. It's like if someone gave you the source code to Excel and told you to spent five hours understanding columns, five more understanding rows, and five more understanding cells.

Here's the thing: I'm okay with learning and understanding some code. It's part of the job. But I'm not going to abandon my career as a software developer so I can become an expert on debugging their awful code. I didn't make this mess. I'm not going to live with it. I'm moving on as quickly as I possibly can.

I've tried to explain to them that if they want the situation to improve they need to improve the code. They need to learn how to write tests. If your plan is that people will study your code, know it inside and out, and then spend all their time debugging it, that's a plan for failure. Everyone who can will leave and take what they know with them.

These companies just don't get it. They need their software to work, but the types of developers who can help them don't need that software to work. No one capable of doing good work is going to spend several years debugging their awful code unless you pay them a crazy ton of money.

Just don't make a mess in the first place. Hire developers who can do a good job. If you hire the cheapest people you can find you won't be able to get someone else to fix it later. It's not personal but I wish failure on those projects or even those companies. I want them to fail because failure is so expensive. I want them to fail so that others learn from it and don't repeat the same mistakes.

As an industry we're a bunch of genuine idiots. We just keep doing the same things over and over again no matter how much it hurts.

Lua users, have you used moonscript?

It's a little language that has it's own interpreter or can be compiled down to Lua and it's absolutely lovely (currently using it with Love2d).

Of course, as with most things, what I love about it also royally pisses me off sometimes.

For starters local has to be declared for variables, unlike lua.
Otherwise the variable goes to _
Also note, that some tutorials literally tell you the opposite.

all variables are local by default
unless you don't declare them
then they go to _ (throwaway)
Some tutorials get this wrong too.

all variables have to be declared local
except tables. failure to declare a table WITHOUT a local will cause things like
table.insert to fail with "nil" values for no god damn reason.
No tutorial I could find mentioned this.

Did you know we call methods with '\'?
By the way, we call methods with '\'.
Why? Who the fuck knows.
Does make writing web routes more natural though.

Variables in the parameters of new are declared and bound for you. Would have loved to know this before hand instead of trying
to bind to them like a fucking idiot.

Fat arrows are used to pass in self for methods.
Unless you're calling a method. Then you use backwards slash. This fact is unhelpful when you're a beginner and dealing with the differences between the *other* arrow, the backslash, the fat arrow, and the fact that functions can be called with or WITHOUT parenthesis.
And on that note..

While learning all this other shit, don't forget parenthesis are optional!
Except when they're not!
..Like when you have a function call among your arguments and have to disambiguate which args belong to the outer call and to the inner call! Why not just be fucking consistent?

But on the plus size, ":" is now used for what it should have been used for in the fucking beginning: binding values to keys.
And on the downside, it's in a language thats built on top of another language that uses it for fucking *method calls*, a completely
different fucking usage.

And better still, to add to that brainfuckery thats lost in the mental translational noise like static on a fucking dialup modem, you define methods with the fat arrow. Wait, was that the single arrow or fat one? Yeah the fat one. Fuck. But not before you do THIS shit..

someShit: =>

yeah, you STILL include the god damn colon just so when you're coming from lua you can do a mental double take. "Why am I passing self twice? Oh right, because fuck me, I decided to use moonscript." It's consistent on that front but it also pisses me off.

A lot of these are actually quality of life improvements disguised as gotchas, but when you're two beers in to a 30 minute headscratcher it sure doesn't fucking feel like it.

Nevertheless, once I moved beyond the gotchas, it was like night and day. Sure moonscripts takes a giant steaming dump all over the lua output, like a schizophrenic alcoholic athena from the head of zeus, but god damn, when it works it just WORKS.

Locals that act like locals? Check.
Sane OOP? Check.
Classes, constructors, easy access to class methods, iterators? Check, check, check, check, check.

I fucking hate ceremony. Configuration over convention is for cunts. And moonscript goes a long ways toward making lua less cunty.
If you've ever felt this way while using lua, please, give moonscript a try.

You'll regret it, but in a good way!

When you testing your exception handling by throwing an exception, but the code throwing the exception has a bug and throws an exception, so you think it works... d'oh

"The Phoenix project" alternative ending:

Bill Palmer manages to avert disaster with heroic efforts, working 18 hours per day for weeks.
His wife files for divorce. He starts to sleep at office, next to the servers room.
At the last moment a huge hacker attack almost destroys everything, but he finally manages to announce that Phoenix is ready on time, security auditing passed and any kind of great improvements.

Steve, the CEO, calls him and says: "are you crazy? we put you on an impossible project with short notice to make you fail! All our investors have been secretly short selling our stocks, so now they are waiting a big failure to cash in. We also paid korean hackers to bring you on your knees. But you are really stubborn! "

All Phoenix Project is rolled back, huge shit happens, stocks fall, investors ripe great benefits. All IT is outsourced to an external company (owned by members of the board)

Bill is fired. His reputation tainted by the failure, he can't find job anymore. his technical skills and knowledge are out of date.
As he didn't have time to take care of divorce he has lost also all his personal wealth.

He writes a book about his experience, well, actually a rant, but the company sues him forcing him to pay more money.

In the final scene, police arrests him, drunk while trying to burn a server farm with matches.

How the fuck am I supposed to fucking keep working if these fucking clowns add mandatory peer code review and passing build gating on main repositories (which I completely agree with to be fair) but they don't fucking review pull requests at all? For fuck's sake, am I the only one that reviews them seriously and promptly in this shit ass fuck company? I follow all the recommended guidelines so don't bullshit me with "iT iS nOt FuN tO rEvIeW pUlL rEqUeStS", do your job or just remove yourself from the fucking gating process, you worthless admin ass crust.

And don't get me started on fucking builds that fail randomly because some worthless shit bucket added unstable networking tests as unittests somehow, making your pull request get auto-disapproved by peers upon failure.

I got so many pending pull requests and management won't do fuck all about it because they won't force people to do their job by fear of pushing them around and get HR complaints that I am tempted to simply give up and just start playing videogames.

I subscribe to many copywriting newsletters. Here's an article that shows how it's like on "the other side", marketers struggle, too.

How Kevin's Massive Mistake
Completely Changed His Life

Kevin H. made a huge mistake.

The biggest, he would say, if he could tell you himself.

And he knew it immediately.

It was, he said, "instant regret."

Within milliseconds, he was asking himself "What have I done..."

Kevin, see, had just jumped the rail of the single most popular suicide spot in the world, the Golden Gate Bridge.

On average, the site gets another distraught jumper every two weeks. Kevin was one of them.

It wasn't like he hadn't tried to quiet the voices in his head. Therapy, drugs, hospitalization.

Time to die, those voices still said.

And yet, in the minutes his bus dropped him off at the bridge, he hesitated and paced with tears in his eyes.

"I told myself if just one person comes up to me and asks if I'm okay... if one person asks if they can help... I won't do it. I'll stop and tell them my whole story..."

But nobody did, so he jumped.

It was in those next milliseconds, he would later say, he knew it was the biggest mistake of his life.

He didn't want to die.

But now, he was sure, it was too late.

From its highest point, it's a 245-foot plummet into the icy bay waters below.

Out of the 1,700 people that have jumped from the bridge since it first opened in 1937, only 25 have survived.

Kevin, against all odds, would be one of them.

He slammed into the water like hitting concrete. Three of his vertebrae instantly shattered.

When he surfaced, he couldn't hold his own head above water. But, incredibly, a sea lion kept pushing him up.

The Coast Guard soon arrived and pulled him out.

From there, he began a long recovery that required intense surgery, physical therapy, and psychiatric care.

While still under treatment, a priest urged him to give a talk to a bunch of seventh and eighth graders.

Afterward, they sent him a pile of letters, both encouraging and full of their own pained thoughts.

He also met a woman.

Today, Kevin lives in Atlanta and he's been happily married for the last 12 years.

And he tours the country, sharing his story.

So why re-tell it here?

Obviously -- I hope -- you don't get lots of copywriters looking to snuff it after a flopped headline test.

Just the same...

We've talked a lot in this space about the things one needs to get by in this biz.

My friend and colleague Joe, over at the publishing powerhouse Agora Financial, likes to list requirements.

You need intense curiosity...

You need a killer work ethic...

And you must, MUST have... resilience.

Meaning, you must have or find the capacity to bounce back from failure and flops, even huge ones.

Now, again, Kevin's story is an extreme and in this context -- I hope -- a hyperbolic example of somebody giving up. In the worst way possible.

It is also, though, a metaphor.

See, I get a lot of notes from some of you guys... and at conferences, I get to talk to a lot of people...

And I often get the sense, from some folks, that they're feeling a little more overwhelmed than they let on.

Some are just starting out, and they've got a lot on the line. For some, it's everything. And some are desperate to make it work.

Because they have to, because their pride or livelihoods or a family business is at stake, because it's a dream.

And yet, they're overwhelmed by all the tips and secrets... or by piles of confusing research or ideas...

For others, even had some success, but they're burned out, feel antiquated, or feel like "imposters" that know less than they let on, in an industry that's evolving.

To all those folks... and to you... I can only say, I've been there. And frankly, go back there now and again.

Flops happen, failures happen. And you can and will -- even years and decades into doing this -- make the wrong choices, pick the wrong projects, or botch the right ones.

The legendary Gene Schwartz put it this way, according to a quote spotted recently in fellow writer Ben Settle's e-letter...

" A very good copywriter is going to fail. If the guy doesn't fail, he's no good. He's got to fail. It hurts. But it's the only way to get the home runs the next time."

Once more, nobody -- I hope -- is taking the trials of this profession hard enough to make Kevin's choice.

And believe me, I don't mean to make light of the latter. I just want to make sure we hit this anvil with a big hammer. To drive home the point that, whatever your struggle, be it with this biz or something bigger, that you don't want to give up. Press on.

As Churchill put it, "Success, is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm."

Or even more succinctly when he said, "If you're going through hell, keep going."

Because it's worth it.
.
John Forde

Is a BS in CS even worth it? I’m struggling so much right now with many different aspects of “online learning”, to the point where I spend the entire day shaking in misery. I was fine until I realized how close we are to finals this semester. The worst part is, this semester isn’t my last hard semester. Taking two miserable CS courses in the Spring as well, so it isn’t as easy as just keeping my head up and making it through this semester.

I finished my AA in CS from a local Community College, and I’m wondering if it’s worth the stress of the next two years in this degree track?

I’ve never tested well, but these CS and Math courses hit differently when online. I pass every single coding project with ease, but fail exams (literally). I realize my AA doesn’t mean much, but I do have lots of experience coding (Way beyond what I’ve learned in school).

Truth be told, I think I just want to hear you guys say it’s not worth it. Most companies that I see requires either a BS or equivalent experience, how do I get that experience, especially with COVID?

I feel like a failure, and I can’t deal with this pressure on me daily. My mental health has taken a giant hit recently. I know for a fact that I cannot endure another two years of this.

Someone, guidance. Please.

Honestly, nothing. I'm just a human. I know I will fail multiple times, over and over. I allow myself to do that, learning and taking precautions for each new failure.

When Do You Stop Taking Responsibility?

Let me clarify by describing four scenarios in which you are tasked with some software development. It could be a large or small task. The fourth scenario is the one I'm interested in. The first three are just for contrast.

1. You either decide how to implement the requirements, or you're given directions or constraints you agree with. (If you hadn't been given those specific directions you probably would have done the same thing anyway.) **You feel accountable for the outcome**, such as whether it works correctly or is delivered on time. And, of course, the team feels collectively accountable. (We could call this the "happy path.")

2. You would prefer to do the work one way, but you're instructed to do it a different way, either by a manager, team lead, or team consensus. You disagree with the approach, but you're not a stubborn know-it-all. You understand that their way is valid, or you don't fully understand it but you trust that someone else does. You're probably going to learn something. **You feel accountable for the outcome** in a normal, non-blaming sort of way.

3. You're instructed to do something so horribly wrong that it's guaranteed to fail badly. You're in a position to refuse or push back, and you do.

4. You're given instructions that you know are bad, you raise your objections, and then you follow them anyway. It could be a really awful technical approach, use of copy-pasted code, the wrong tools, wrong library, no unit testing, or anything similar. The negative consequences you expect could include technical failure, technical debt, or significant delays. **You do not feel accountable for the outcome.** If it doesn't work, takes too long, or the users hate it, you expect the individual(s) who gave you instructions to take full responsibility. It's not that you want to point fingers, but you will if it comes to that.

---

That fourth scenario could provoke all sorts of reactions. I'm interested in it for what you might call research purposes.

The final outcome is irrelevant. If it failed, whether someone else ultimately took responsibility or you were blamed is irrelevant. That it is the opposite of team accountability is obvious and also irrelevant.

Here is the question (finally!)

Have you experienced scenario number four, in which you develop software (big as an application, small as a class or method) in a way you believe to be so incorrect that it will have consequences, because someone required you to do so, and you complied *with the expectation that they, not you, would be accountable for the outcome?*

Emphasis is not on the outcome or who was held accountable, but on whether you *felt* accountable when you developed the software.

If you just want to answer yes or no, or "yes, several times," that's great. If you'd like to describe the scenario with any amount of detail, that's great too. If it's something you'd rather not share publicly you can contact me privately - my profile name at gmail.com.

The point is not judgment. I'll go first. My answer is yes, I have experienced scenario #4. For example, I've been told to copy/paste/edit code which I know will be incomprehensible, unmaintainable, buggy, and give future developers nightmares. I've had to build features I know users will hate. Sometimes I've been wrong. I usually raised objections or shared concerns with the team. Sometimes the environment made that impractical. If the problems persisted I looked for other work. But the point is that sometimes I did what I was told, and I felt that if it went horribly wrong I could say, "Yes, I understand, but this was not my decision." *I did not feel accountable.*.

I plan on writing more about this, but I'd like to start by gathering some perspective and understanding beyond just my own experience.

Thanks

"I want to risk hitting my head on the ceiling of my talent. I want to really test it out and say: O.K., you’re not that good. You just reached the level here. I don’t ever want to fail, but I want to risk failure every time out of the gate." - Quentin Tarantino

Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm the Charlie Brown of development and Lucy with the football is the XAMPP/MAMP/WAMP software in this world. EVERY. TIME. I. TRY. TO. SPIN. THIS. UP. IT. FAILS. It doesn't matter which tutorial I follow for which technology stack or CMS, the result is always the same. Something about the database or htaccess or some other stupid setting makes it impossible for me to create a simple dev environment on my system.

I have been doing this dance for 24 YEARS NOW!!!! The original programmer of Apache is a 2nd-degree acquaintance who used to be available to help me with this, but no more. I feel like a complete and utter failure as a web developer every time I try to set up XAMPP, and, the rare times I've succeeded and gotten a basic CMS up and running, I fail again and again with all these build/run/task tools I'm now supposed to be using. After a week of fiddling with my local dev environment, I give up and delete it all. I go right back to on-server development "the old fashioned way". WHY!? WHY IS THIS SO HARD?

I'm stepping on rakes here and about to quit. I'm probably just too OLD and STUPID for all these stacks and frameworks and tools and maybe even for this career now. I should probably quit and become a "facilities manager" at a tech firm somewhere, cleaning up the bathrooms and sweeping floors and watching all these young geniuses tut-tut about "Poor StackODev. I hear he had 24 years as a web developer, but then he snapped and he's never been the same."

We have an unit test that tests the average of a sequence of numbers generated randomly using a gaussian distribution. Of course it fails from time to time, it's random! Failing to fail, would mean that the generator is not generating random numbers, therefore failure means success, but success does not mean failure.

Wait, why did we add this test in the first place?

Visual Studio Code is a joke.
it's always auto update but always fail and then delete itself.
When i ask what happened or post a discussion on the official site they close it and send /redirect it to fucking different issue like changing language code or adding extension while the real issue about auto update failure is ignored or discarded/deleted/closed without solving anything

I need help to share this to everyone until they fix this shitty perfomance

ps: i always need to redownload that fucking visual studio code everytime it has update

Im beginning to think im stuck in an infinite loop of learning. This fucking bullshit never stops. I just continuously keep learning new shit and the more shit i learn the more i realize how much bullshit i still have to learn

It creates an illusion as if i know nothing

Just when i thought i see the end of the horizon and reach it only then i realize it just keeps on going into oblivion, as a sphere

Its like im trying to catch and find a corner of a sphere

There aint none

Its pointless

Is it also pointless to keep learning like this?

Perhaps this whole existence is pointless

Real talk now whats the point of existence bro

No matter what you do or dont do it doesnt matter

No matter if you're successful or not it doesnt matter

No matter if you learn all the bullshit in the world you're still gonna die and it wont matter

No matter how much i learn, it still and will always appear as if its not enough to these shitface recruiters and companies, to them it doesnt matter

Nothing matters. Everything is empty and meaningless. The entire life itself is. I dont value life. I dont care if i live or die. I feel no joy when i succeed and i feel no sadness when i fail

The tiny little bit of joy or success cannot outweight the years of sadness depression emptiness and failure the life has dumped onto me in spite of my hard work and continuous learning

Hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

grrrr

last week my laptop died out of nowhere. it stopped recognizing the one drive in it. I lost a bunch of files, code. evidently ssds fail out of nowhere unlike hdds which slow down and error all the time before ultimate failure

my warranty for this 4k$ laptop expires in 12 months and this was month 13. nice. I don't like warranties anyway, and the site said they would replace things with "comparable hardware, sometimes refurbished" wtf no thanks

so I found some guides of people upgrading the drive in this laptop. seemed easy enough, unlike older laptops from back when I was in school where you had to take out 12 things first to get to anything
unfortunately I needed a specific screwdriver. I walked several miles to the nearby hardware store thinking they would have said screwdriver. the old guy in the basement said there was a kit where it started from t4 (I needed t5), but he had just sold out his last one. I checked their online store with a friend for a while on my way back home and we kept finding torx screws but the wrong sizes. fuck.
he said screwdrivers this small are only used for electronics, asked if there's any other hardware stores and there aren't near me
however it occurred to me this strip mall has a lot of suspicious computer stores on it. so I walked back up the street looking for one.
found one with a suspicious poster, saying it was an internet cafe but the last point on their poster said they do repairs. walked in. nobody is in there, suspiciously 2 desks with old computers all empty, then you go forward in this dark cave, with plastic wrapped implements on the walls, you finally find a glass shield and behind it was a meek Asian man that took me a moment to notice
I asked him if he had t5
he handed me a plastic baggy full of tiny screwdrivers, for me to take one
I asked if they're t5
the shape looked right, but I can't tell the size
I took one out and tried to find size marking, but nothing
he didn't seem to know what I was asking when I asked about its size
he said if it's wrong I can come back and trade what I took for another. lol
I asked him if I can buy it, since that wasn't evident to me due to how sus this random bag of screws is being thwarted on me lmao
he said 5$ cash
I gave him a fiver
this sus shop literally avoiding taxes lmao

walked back home, ate food cuz starving, tried the screw and FUCK, it's too big. put laptop in a bag and hauled ass fast, checked on maps the store I got this from closes in a few minutes so I really wanted to make it there because what if the receptionist changes and they don't know I took this screw. I got no receipt

got there right before closing, put my laptop down, said it was too big. he used a few screws until he found one that fit, said I could try it and I did (so scam aware!). bingo bango. now I got a screwdriver that fits the laptop.

walked home, sat down and took apart the laptop. been a few years since I did so. the hardware inside looks entirely unrecognizable to me. started cycling through YouTube videos of laptops of the same name as mine, but their insides don't look like mine. is this ram? is this the NVMe? what the fuck is anything?
finally found a video guide where the guy was quite informative. not the same laptop but he's informative enough I figure it out. ram and drives are so different and weird now. took parts out, put them back in, rebuilt laptop, tried to boot, same problem. jiggling parts like this works with desktops often, guess not with a failed NVMe

so I'm screwed. get on Newegg and bought a new NVMe. should arrive in 3 days via Purolator

yesterday was day 3. it was at a sort facility near me, then out on delivery, but nobody ever came. then it went back to sorting. now it's out on delivery again. I'm sitting here thinking that's a little weird, wasn't Purolator the delivery company that had me go 2 hours outside of town to pick up a 15lb desktop case once?

... and then I looked up Reddit comments... then reviews on the purolator facility it's at... I am screwed. last time iirc they were out for delivery for 3 days, never tried delivery, then on the last day at the end of day they stated they attempted delivery but no go. that was bullshit. then it ended up at that facility. which takes 2 hours to fucking reach.
the reviews are so bad... the facility has 1.2 star reviews with thousands of them. they won't leave even a stub, then seem to not know where your package is at the facility, or they deny you have the right to pick it up despite ample IDs, or someone ELSE picks it up and it's not there. they also ship your package back after 5 days, so if they don't leave a note and you miss it tough luck...

fucking hell
also rumours that they just hire "contractors" in normal cars to drop off packages? wat? lol
AND EVERY REVIEW HAS A BOT COMMENT. THEIR SUPPORT IS JUST A CHATBOT

I thought this was just a small hiccup
I think I might not have a drive for weeks now
fucking hell
now I'm sitting on my porch

Finish a client project, with Laravel 5. Got a hang with the features and for once felt like I am "there" . nothing can beat me. then client request for the network to have no single point of failure.

I am like "whuttttt" how do I even replicate database and have fail over on it.

"I want to risk hitting my head on the ceiling of my talent. I want to really test it out and say: O.K., you’re not that good. You just reached the level here. I don’t ever want to fail, but I want to risk failure every time out of the gate." - Quentin Tarantino

Browser automation is a PITA. I’m going on my fourth side mission with this crap and I honestly still look like a newbie. I’ve tried Java Selenium with Chrome, Excel VBA with IE9, Vanilla JS in the browser console, and tonight I’m thinking to concoct some kind of hybrid CDP & Selenium approach in Chrome. Never used CDP before, not even sure where to start but I heard it sucks like anything else unless you get some extra libraries and plugins and stuff.

It doesn’t help that I can’t get just anything I want from our IT Department. It would be another PITA to ask for puppeteer. If puppeteer is totally legit please let me know.

Selenium sucks. The buttons don’t click, the waits don’t wait. Its unusable. Iframes are annoying as all hell but I can deal with that. HTML Tables suck too. It doesn’t help I have to restart my whole java program and whole Chrome every time an element doesn’t get picked correctly. Scripting one single element can take all fucking night.

Chrome dev tools what the fuck. Why the fuck is the DOM explorer in the same window as the web page I’m working on?? I can’t undock it. Am I supposed to use a fucking TV screen to work with this bastard?? If I use the remote chrome tools on port 9225 or whatever - It Still Renders The Whole Fucking Page Alongside The Console. Get Out Of My Way!!! The nested HTML CODE IS ONE CHARACTER WIDE ALL THE TIME. I can’t for the life of me figure out what the fuck I’m looking at. Haven’t you people ever heard of A HORIZONTAL SCROLL BAR at least.

Fuck I tried using getElementById, and the Xpath thing and its not all that great seeing I have seemingly 1000s of nested Divs all over the god damned place oftentimes containing a single element. I’m finally on chrome now should I learn Jquery now? I mean seriously wtf.

I use this one no code tool for dev it has web automation built in. As you can imagine its just as broken as anything else!! I have 10 screens to navigate it gets stuck on the second screen all the damn time. Fuck I love clicking the buttons when my script misses and playing catch up with it.

So as a work around to Selenium not waiting even 1 millisecond when I use explicit wait or implicit wait or fluent wait, I’m guessing maybe I can attach both Chrome Dev Tools Protocol (CDP as ive called it earlier) and selenium to the same browser and maybe I can use CDP to perform a Wait with any degree of success. Selenium will do nothing more than execute vanilla javascript Element.click(); This is the only way I know to even ACTUALLY use selenium beyond the simplest html documents possible. Hell I guess CDP can execute js idk.

I can’t get the new selenium that has CDP but I do have some buggy ass selenium from a few years back. Yeah, I remember reading there was a pretty impactful regression defect in the version I have. Maybe I’m being gaslighted by some shit copy of selenium?

The worst part is that I do seem to be having issues that the rest of the internet’s devs do not seem to be having. People act like browser automation is totally viable and pretty OK. How in the fuck hell is my Selenium Test Suite going to be more reliable my application under test?!!?? I’ll have more fucking bugs in my test suite than in my application. Today, I have less than half a test script and, I. already. fucking. do.

I am still SUPER PISSED at the months of 12 hour days (always 8 hours spent on normal sprint work btw only 4 to automation) I spent trying to automate our regression tests. I got NOWHERE.

I did learn a lot about HTML and JS though like I’m not that mad…but I’m just trying to emphasize my achievement on my task was zero.

The buttons don’t click. There are so many divs and I swear you sometimes need to select a div somewhere in the middle sometimes to get it working. The waits don’t wait. XHR requests are invisible. Java crashes 100 times before I find an xpath and thread.sleep() combo that works. I have no failure modes to use — Sometimes I click the same element 20x in a script because I have no way to know if it clicked the first time! Sometimes you gotta scroll the page to make the click work. So many click methods all broken. So many wait methods all broken. Its not just the elements don’t click! There are so many ways to click that almost work but surely they all fail the same in the end. ok at this point I’m just repeating myself…

there yet even more issues that I can’t remember…and will soon remember as I journey into this project yet again…

thanks for reading I hope I entertained and would love to hear your experience!

Google Exoplayer had a bug on some devices when initializing AudioTrack.

Their fix: Just retry on init failure.

So if some device decides to fail more often than Google predicted: Boom!

Exoplayer is used by rarely known apps like Youtube.

And the best of it: The one to blame is not Google or Android. The ones to blame are most likely the Hardware vendors, who think that a custom android for every whatever is a good idea.

Luckily for my purposes SSD doesn't have to be accurate it just has to fail royally in a way which is highly accurate in its persistent failure :P