Long but worth it...

So I was cleaning out my Google Drive last night, and deleted some old (2 years and up) files. I also deleted my old work folder, it was for an ISP I worked for over 2 years ago. After deleting the files I had a little twinge of "Man I hope they're not still using those". But seriously, it'd be a pretty big security risk if I was still the owner of those files... right? Surely they copied them and deleted all the info from the originals. IP addresses, Cisco configs, username and passwords for various devices, pretty much everything but customer info.

Guess who I get a call from this morning... "Hi this is Debbie from 'ISP'. I was trying to access the IP Master List and I can't anymore. I was just told to call you and see if there's any way to get access to it again" (Not her real name...)

I had to put her on hold so I could almost die of laughter...

Me: "Sorry about that Debbie, I haven't worked for that company for over 2 years. Your telling me in all that time no one thought to save them locally? No one made a copy? I still had the original documents?!"

Long pause

D: "Uh... Apparently not..."

Another long pause

D: "So is there any way you can give me access to them again?"

Me: "They're gone Debbie. I deleted them all last night."

D: Very worried voice "Can... Can you check?"

This kids is why you never assume you'll always have access to a cloud stored file, make local copies!!

A little bit of background on this company, the owner's wife fired me on trumped up "time card discrepancy" issues so she could hire her freshly graduated business major son. The environment over there was pretty toxic anyway...

I feel bad for "Debbie" and the other staff there, it's going to be a very bad week for them. I also hope it doesn't impact any customers. But... It is funny as hell, especially since I warned the owner as I was clearing out my desk to save copies, and plan on them being gone soon. Apparently he never listened.

This is why you should have a plan in place... And not just wing it...

PS. First Post!

Best quotes from IT teacher:

- "C# is a language to program your IDE."
- "C# is a language for beginners, and is not really used in production."
- "We won't use Python to learn programming, because Python is a very old, slow and useless language, and is not really used anymore."
- "Yeah, your algorithm is fantastic, but you wrote 'The answer is: ' instead of 'Answer: ', so it's just a B."
- One of my classmates was bored and opened Notepad++, and when the teacher saw it, she said "I have been teaching programming for years, but I've never seen this program, what do you use it for?"

I feel so lucky that I have started learning programming years before at home, I just couldn't start if I had to learn this way.

Today my oldest son is 8 years old and with pizza and cake we discussed how to hack his friends tablet, star Wars vs star trek and how to hijack wifi networks when friends parents won't give password.
And he told me how to evade detection and bypass the schools filters that he figured out alone.
I feel so damn proud.

We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.

When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.

A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.

I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.

When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.

I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.

After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).

OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.

I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.

Computers helped me through a tough childhood.

They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.

I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...

But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.

Another day, another hit piece against gaming.

So, a 15-year old boy hanged himself and the media goes all „This was caused by this game“, even though NO FUCKING TRACES OF THE GAME WERE FOUND ON THE LAPTOP OF THE DECEASED!!!

And then of course my freaking parents go all lecturing me about how the internet twists the brain into not being adequate towards reality etc.

First off, CAN THE FUCKING COLLECTION OF COCKSUCKERS that is the fucking media just fucking get a grip on reality? It was literally said in the same sentence that the supposed game that caused that was not found in any form on the person's laptop. You would think an online game that you take months to play through would need at least some fucking download to run, right? Unless it was a freaking video chat bullshit that they call a „game“ just for the fucking spite of gamers.

Second, HOW FUCKING LONG WILL IT FUCKING TAKE FOR PEOPLE TO FUCKING ACCEPT THAT IT'S NOT THE TECH THAT MAKES PEOPLE KILL THEMSELVES? How hard is it to fucking understand?

Third... How do people in their 60s freaking think they understand anything about modern gaming when they have no freaking way of interacting with it other than these hit pieces? They certainly give more fucks about what a hired bitch of a lying „journalist“, that cannot even talk properly, says. Oh, they care so much about the children. Have they never thought that people are killing themselves exactly because they feel nobody cares about them?

Fourth. How fucking long do parents like mine deny the reality that just as long as they see me as an incomplete copy of my sisters I will be suicidal? Let me guess... It's video games causing me to be oh, so inadequate when I've not played any of them for quite some time...

Fifth... How am I out of touch with reality when these people have never known how I „work“, so to speak, as a person, and they've been the ones basically dictating all my life? Let me see why I'm unhappy...

I know I complain a lot. Sorry for that. But I just cannot stand people like them. People that lie all the time and project that on you while depriving you of any means of defending yourself in a debate...

29-year veteran here. Began programming professionally in 1990, writing BASIC applications for an 8-bit Apple II+ computer. Learned Pascal, C, Clipper, COBOL. Ironic side-story: back then, my university colleagues and I used to make fun of old COBOL programmers. Fortunately, I never had to actually work with the language, but the knowledge allowed me to qualify for a decent job position, back in '92.

For a while, I worked with an IBM mainframe, using REXX and EXEC2 scripting languages for the VM/SP operating system. Then I began programming for the web, wrote my first dynamic web applications with cgi-bin shell and Perl scripts. Used the little-known IBM Net.Data scripting language. I finally learned PHP and settled with it for many, many years.

I always wanted to be a programmer. As a kid I dreamed of being like Kevin Flynn, of TRON - create world famous videogames and live upstairs my own arcade place! Later on, at some point, I was disappointed, I questioned my skills, I thought I should do more, I let other people's expectations make feel bad. Then I finally realized I actually enjoy a quieter, simpler life. And I made peace with it.

I'm now like the old programmers I used to mock 30 years ago. There's so much shit inside my brain. And everything seems so damn complex these days. Frameworks, package managers, transpilers, layers and more layers of code. I try to keep up. And the more I learn, the more it seems I don't know.

Sometimes I feel tired. Yet, I still enjoy creating things and solving problems with programming. I still have fun learning. And after all these years, I learned to be proud of my work, even if it didn't turn out to be as glamorous as in the movies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The way 90% of the population wears their face masks really explains a lot about their approach to using software, apps & websites as well.

I feel like giving up.

I am not a developer for the salary, or just to solve analytical puzzles. Those are motivators, but my main drive is to make the world more comfortable and enjoyable, better optimized, build ethical services which bring happiness into people's lives. I want to improve society, even if it's just a tiny bit.

But if users invest absolutely zero percent of their limited brain capacity into understanding a product that already has a super-clean design and responds with helpful validation messages...

...why the fuck bother.

I used to think of the gap between technology and tech-incompetent people as an optimization problem.

As something which could be fixed by spending a fortune on UX research. Write tests, hire QA employees, decrease tech debt, create a bold but unified & simple design.

But the technologically incompetent just get more entitled with every small thing you simplify.

It's never fucking fool-proof enough.

Why can't I upload a 220MB PDF as profile picture? Why doesn't the app install on my 9 year old Android Froyo phone? Why can't I sign up if my phone number contains a  U+FFFC? Why does this page load so slowly from my rural concrete bunker in East Ukraine? WHY DO I HAVE PNEUMONIA, HOW DID I GET INFECTED EVEN THOUGH I WAS WEARING A MOUTH MASK ON MY FOREHEAD?

This is why I ran away from Frontend, to Backend, to DBA.

If I could remove myself further from the end user, I would.

At least I still have a full glass of tawny port and a huge database which needs to be normalized & migrated.

Fuck humans, I'm going to hug a server.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have this old lady that I help from time to time with her computer issues.

She is nice, so I feel compelled to help her.

Get a call one day.

Lady : "hello, my internet and email isn't working, I've tried everything, could you maybe help me?"

Me : "Sure, ill come over after work and check it out"

*arrive at her house*

Lady : "you see, none of the web pages load, and my email refuses to sync. Should I call (insert isp name), or can you fix it?"

Me : I'm sure I can get it, gimme a sec.

*find the issue in a sec or two, dunno how to tell her about it, she isn't totally stupid*

Me : "Uhh, I don't know if you checked, but the ether.. internet cable isn't plugged in"

Lady : *realizes the wtf moment I'm having, obviously feeling very stupid*

Me : "Don't worry, happens to the best of us"

Obviously I lied a little, most of us would probably check the damn cable. Sometimes is just better to make people not feel like its their fault. People learn better when they don't feel like something is making a fool of them.

I have helped this lady with so many things that are just straight out of this world.

The one time she tried emailing 37mb tiff files over her 315kbps network.

Another time she said her email was not syncing, so I went to her house and clicked the "sync" button.

She even once phoned me to get their wifi password.

I just like helping her, somehow it makes me feel as if we all have something to learn.

A while ago (few months) I was on the train back home when I ran into an old classmate. I know that he's a designer/frontend/wordpress guy and I know that he'll bring anyone down in order to feel good. I also know that he knows jack shit about security/backend.
The convo went like this:

Me: gotta say though, wordpress and its security...
Him: yeah ikr it's bad. (me thinking 'dude you hardly know what the word cyber security means)
Me: yeah, I work at a hosting company now, most sites that get hacked are the wordpress ones.
Him: yeah man, same at my company. I made a security thing for wordpress though so we can't get hacked anymore.
Me; *he doesn't know any backend NOR security..... Let's ask him difficult stuff*
Oh! What language did you use?
Him: yeah it works great, we don't get hacked sites anymore now!
Me: ah yeah but what language did you use?
Him: oh it's not about what language you use, it's about whether it works or not! My system works great!
Me: *yeah.....right.* oh yeah but I'd like to know so I can learn something. What techniques did you use?
Him: well obviously firewalls and shit. It's not about what techniques/technology you use, it's about whether it works or not!

That's the moment I was done with it and steered the convo another way.

You don't know shit about backend or security, cocksucker.

My biggest dev blunder. I haven't told a single soul about this, until now.

👻👻👻👻👻👻

So, I was working as a full stack dev at a small consulting company. By this time I had about 3 years of experience and started to get pretty comfortable with my tools and the systems I worked with.

I was the person in charge of a system dealing with interactions between people in different roles. Some of this data could be sensitive in nature and users had a legal right to have data permanently removed from our system. In this case it meant remoting into the production database server and manually issuing DELETE statements against the db. Ugh.

As soon as my brain finishes processing the request to venture into that binary minefield and perform rocket surgery on that cursed database my sympathetic nervous system goes into high alert, palms sweaty. Mom's spaghetti.

Alright. Let's do this the safe way. I write the statements needed and do a test run on my machine. Works like a charm 😎

Time to get this over with. I remote into the server. I paste the code into Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio. I read through the code again and again and again. It's solid. I hit run.

....

Wait. I ran it?

....

With the IDs from my local run?

...

I stare at the confirmation message: "Nice job dude, you just deleted some stuff. Cool. See ya. - Your old pal SQL Server".

What did I just delete? What ramifications will this have? Am I sweating? My life is over. Fuck! Think, think, think.

You're a professional. Handle it like one, goddammit.

I think about doing a rollback but the server dudes are even more incompetent than me and we'd lose all the transactions that occurred after my little slip. No, that won't fly.

I do the only sensible thing: I run the statements again with the correct IDs, disconnect my remote session, and BOTTLE THAT SHIT UP FOREVER.

I tell no one. The next few days I await some kind of bug report or maybe a SWAT team. Days pass. Nothing. My anxiety slowly dissipates. That fateful day fades into oblivion and I feel confident my secret will die with me. Cool ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm 54 y.o.

I think I'm completely outdated in my skill, as in the last 14 years, I worked on a specific business problem, with an old technology: a JSP application + javascript + postgres.

I do understand software development, agile, web application development, linux server, basic/moderate AWS skills, etc.

Now they laid me off instead of including me in the evolution of version 2 of the software. Maybe covid, company had almost no cash-flow. Well they have now...So basically they fired me to find money to rewrite the application.

I feel without hope at my age.
I'm a generalist.
I can understand fairly well everything you'll throw at me, reactnative, angular, nosql, python, but I have little first-hand experience.

I don't have a lot of management skills, even if I've given frequent presentations to C-roles and board, and I implemented a whole agile methodology in my team.

I don't know what to do.
The amount of technology to study is huge nowadays. When I was younger I could get away with some php and java.

Full-stack developer is a big word for me. Maybe I could handle a full stack web application, but not from scratch.

I feel at my age, I'll compete with 20-something guys with better skills and lower salary requests.
I don't think I can pull a night anymore.

I'm trying to shoot high to management positions with no much success.
I'd like to go on developing, I know that there are 50-something developer out there, but who managed to find a new position at 55? at 60?

As soon as I finish the few money I spared, I'll be on the street, I'l be the "website for food" guy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One year ago, I quit my job in order to "make life easier". And by that I mean work+home in the same city. I went from 40 minutes commute - to 3 minutes. I had a blast the first week.

Then I realized that it was actually a mistake. I did not like working with "that kind of systems" and "that kind of tasks". It was tedious, stupid, and I was angry every, single day because the previous ones had built a system on 10-15 year old hardware because "it is cheaper".

That continued for a year. I discovered new stupid "solutions" every week that was potentially dangerous for the company. It built up a huge pile of shit and I started to feel that my mental health was disappearing, fast.

And equipment such as servers, switches, routers, storage started to fail because of age. Despite my warnings from day 0 to the CEO who only kinda laughed it off and said "you can to solve that", but I never got the approval to actually buy the equipment that was needed. Because "the company did'nt have the money for it". Somehow, the company had the money to buy expensive cars for the CEO - I can't really figure out that equation.

So today, one VERY old UPS died at our office. It caused some powerspike that killed off some switches and a NAS.
"Whatever" I thought, I just have to find the backup of the files and get a new one.

Then I discovered, that the NAS that acted as a iSCSI target for VM's and document storage was backed up using VEEAM on another server - that was configured to backup everything to the same NAS. I just wanted to cry, because I could not take anymore shit.

So I picked up my phone, called my old employer and asked if I could start working for them again. My old boss got insanely happy and gave me a great offer which I immediately accepted.

So tomorrow, is the day that I am going to walk into my current boss and say that I will quit. My last day will be on Christmas day. And I will start my new year with a few weeks off, and then back to the job that I actually loved.

Life is to short to work with something you hate.

How I went from loving my job to wishing i dont wake up tomorrow just to avoid it.

Ive been a backend dev in the company im at for 2 years now.

First year was a blast, i loved my work so much, I used to get so many random features to do, bug fixes, campaigns, analytics, etc..

Second year i started getting familiar with the part of the code that has to do with Search in our music streaming app. Nobody wanted to work on it, so i wanted to take initiative and start doing a few tasks.

A few tasks turned into sprints, and sprints turned into months worth of sprints. And because the code was the definition of tech debt, and because it was so messed up that changing one thing can blow up everything else, working on Search was not too fun.

However, people seemed to be happy search tasks are no longer piling up and someone is handling them so that used to make me feel good about it. They also gave me so much freedom and i felt like my own manager because no one told me what to do (not even my actual manager) they just let me be and were happy i was handling the part they want nothing to do with. I was also given an intern to mentor and have her work on Search tasks with me which turned out amazing.

During the last few months, I completely rewrote search, made it 10 times more performant in such a neat way, made an inhouse dashboard to automate certain tasks so we wont need to waste developers on them (all of which were extra effort on my own time without being asked), all meanwhile still tending to the fixes of the old implementation.

I felt so accomplished, and in a way, i felt like a lead (even tho im not managing any employees, i had so much freedom and I was literally responsible for everything about Search and if i decide to play with the sprint task order i can even do that).

Then 6 or so weeks ago my manager left the company, and while i thought id be a standalone team / person (single person teams are not uncommon in the company) i was instead put under someone else. Someone who likes to micro manage the fuck out of me. I have been happy working on shit code because it was my baby, my project, no one interferes and no one tells me what to do and everyone would call me the search lead (unofficially). now if i dont report to that guy every two hours he calls to see if im working. preplans sprints i no longer have a say in, and im the only dev who knows the code so all tasks go to me. I feel i got demoted so fucking much. I felt like a lead on a project and now im back to being a normal code minion. From deciding everything about a project to blindly following a some irrelevant manager's opinion. (who btw is making Search worse) And after all the extra effort i put in, after actually caring, after actually embracing Search as my responsibility i get rewarded with losing everything i liked about my job...My Independence. From feeling like a lead to feeling demoted. I am so demotivated.

I love the company, but this is hell for me and this made me hate a job i always loved. I am thinking of talking to the CTO asking to work on other stuff because i no longer want this. If i am to be a code minion at least let it be on code i like, let me go back to dealing with PMs, fuck my new manager I dont wanna work with that guy he can take the project along with all its poopoo.

This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.

Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.

I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.

The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).

Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.

He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.

After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".

I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.

So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.

I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.

And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.

And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).

I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.

I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.

With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!

I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!

After months and months of unrealistic deadlines, pulling late night shifts coupled with an insane commute and two very small children at home I had a total burnout. Turned up to work one morning, and stared at the Java code I had been writing for the past couple of days and it might as well have been written in Martian. The more I stared, and the more I tried to keep things together internally the less I was able to make sense of anything - just a random jumble of characters on screen that were as intelligible as the green scrolling lines from The Matrix.

My office manager saw that I was obviously in some distress and took me into a meeting room to have a quick chat - and there I was, a grown man of 35 bawling my eyes out like a two year old. Not the most edifying moment of my life.

However, the company couldn't have been more supportive afterwards; one of my colleagues drove the 100 miles to get me home in my car and took a train back up to the office; my GP signed me off work for six months and treated me for severe depression; the office instituted stricter working policies - not on the developers, but the sales/PM teams that were handing down ridiculous timescales simply so they could get a sale.

For my part, I've learnt to push back and say "NO!" - work is not your life, it's an important part of your life, but my no means everything. Don't feel beholden to a company to meet unrealistic targets that you haven't agreed to. Talk.

Fuck you fucking piece of self taught shit. Self taught my ass you dont even know how to use git or how to use modern IDE. You dont even know how to use debugger. You dont read other peoples code because you are an arrogant kid who thinks that everybody elses code is trash. Yet after couple days when you need to work on your own code you usually rewrite entire fucking thing because of how fucked up your spaghetti implementations are. Even worse you dont even know fucking english so documentation is useless to you unless I dumb down everything for you and spoon feed you like a 5 year old. Motherfucker you cant even stick to a proper work schedule, you go to sleep at 7am and wake up at 18.00 and I have to fucking work overtime because Im blocked by your spaghetti code. Fuck you fucking self taught arrogant piece of shit who never ever worked as a dev profesionally yet you have the nerve to feel cocky.

So I've mentioned that I work in a lingerie store. I'm not ashamed of it, as I make good enough money for a 19 year old living at home and it allows me to spend my free time learning dev technologies and practices while I try to decide on a career. Not to mention I have more bras and panties then I'll ever need, so there's that...

But sometimes when I sit here watching my customers, talking to them, measuring them for bras... I just want to set the store on fire. I never would, of course. I generally like helping these women and talking g to people. Yet sometimes I feel like I am wasting away. Like a little part of my soul dies when I sell some things to some girl while I have a Linux distro download at home waiting for me. Ugh.

Anyway, this is just some pointless venting from me. As you were.

Easy - an actress. My drama queen skills are out of this world, and I am a master emotional manipulator.
I was accepted to acting school but my mom put a veto on it, and said first I need to get a real profession and then I can make stupid choices.
But after my engineering degree and army service I was too old for sucking cock in LA.
So here I am doing my robotics PhD. Feel sorry for my lab mates having to take my melodramatic shit on the daily.

I grew up poor. First time I saw a computer face to face was when I was 11 years old. Back then any other references to computers came through media. I genuinely believed that hacking was as seen on TV, didn't even question 2 idiots 1 keyboard and thought it was genius to unplug a computer during "an attack"

Fact is I arrived in this country when I was 11. By the time I had my first laptop I was around 13-14, as you can imagine it went really poorly for someone who was just awarded a machine of never-ending stories and entertainment with absolute fear that a single mistake can cause everything to crash and burn. Heck, I remember when I went to Vodafone and someone recommended Firefox, it was such a novelty back then, heh.

I didn't understand computers. My IT lessons were replaced to work on my dialect, but truth be told it was an awful waste of time. I've learned more from forums than I ever learned from any English teacher. I just sat there twidling my thumbs in agitation.

With no concept of what IT industry entitles (my idea of programming was cubicles and call centres), I never had a slightest clue programming could be for me. I always thought of myself closer to engineering or physics type, but that never really drew my interests. So I dwelled in depression thinking I'm broken. Useless. That there was no calling for me.

I'm 22. For the past year I dipped in and out of programming, it still felt like such black magic.vLast month or so the spell dispelled and I finally feel like my eyes have been opened. I've spent the past 3 days sitting in front of my computer learning or actively programming, with occasional dips into DevRant reading your stories, frustrations and victories and I truly feel at home.

In retrospect I feel like I made the right decision for not chasing any mathematical/physics/engineering degrees, while certainly a goal of mine, I feel like I'd be miserable in those communities. They're closer to hobbies, really.

I guess what I wanted to say is thank you. Thank you DevRant for being the spark in my null future and giving me a sense of purpose and belonging. For the first time I feel like I can make it, like there was hope somewhere over the horizon.

Back when I was in school (about 15 years old) and I played games, I had a particularly favourite game that I would play. It was a lesser known strategy game made by a single hobbyist Dev.

I was already known in the community for making some mods for the game and chatbots.

What most people didn't know was that I had made a map hack and various other cheats that made it significantly easier to win by reverse engineering the game and modifying the x86 assembly in ollydbg.
One thing in particular I had been working on at the time was a game replay editor. I had reverse engineered the saved game (replay) format and was able to replay them, edit them and generate them.

During one particular match, a person in the community particularly annoyed me and I edited the saved game to change what his moves were and the words he spoke. It made him look a bit like an idiot but IMHO was only a slight exaggeration of the truth.
I posted the game replay on the forums and everyone was in hysterics about the crazy things he did and said in the replay.
As no one knew I had this capability they all believed the replay and even the guy in the replay couldn't believe it himself and didn't understand what happened. He just kept telling everyone it didn't happen and the 'truth is in the pudding'.

Although I originally intended to tell everyone what I did, I never did and whenever the guy entered in to a game everyone would laugh about it and say 'the truth was in the pudding'.

He was no longer annoying me and it sort of made me feel like a god at the time.
So that's my wk65.

Root encounters HR at her new job.

So, I left my job a few weeks ago. I was pretty sad about it, so I didn't want to write anything about it. It was a great place to work, with great managers, decent coworkers, and interesting work. I also had free reign over how I built things, what to improve, etc. Within about four months, I authored over half of the total commits on their backend repo, added a testing suite with 90% coverage, significantly improved the security (more accurately: added security), etc. but I got a job offer that allowed me to work remotely, and make well over six figures (usd). I couldn't turn it down, even though I wanted to. So, I left. I'm still genuinely sad about that. I had emotions and everything. 🙁 I stayed on long enough to finish the last of the features for their new product launch, and make sure everything was stable. I'm welcome back whenever, though they don't want to have remote employees, and I want to move, so. that's probably not going to happen. sigh.

Anyway, I started my new job this week. Rented an office (read: professional closet) and everything! It's been veritable mountains of HR paperwork so far. That's all I've done besides some accounts setup. I've seriously only worked on and completed one ticket so far in two and a half days, and I still have six documents/contracts to sign! (and benefits; that'll probably take my weekend.)

But getting an I9 thing notarized? Apparently I only have three days before I'm legally unemployable by them or something, idk. HR made it sound ridiculously dire and important, and reminded me like five or more times. I figured it was just some notary service; that takes like 10 minutes, right? So I put it off until my second day so I didn't have to disappear in the middle of my first day. Anyway, I called a bunch of notary services on day 2, and apparently only like 5% of them both do notary services this time of year and aren't booked full. And of those, probably another 5% will notarize I9 documents.. No idea why it's rare, but whatever, I'm not a notary.

The HR lady assured me that I didn't need any special documents; I should just go there, present my IDs, and the notary will provide or draft documents for everything else. Totally doesn't sound right, but fine; I'm not a notary nor will I ever work in HR, so I'm not very knowledgeable about this. So, against my better judgement I decided to just go anyway. I called around and finally found a place that wasn't closed, busy, or refusing, and drove over there. Waited. Waited. Waited. Notary lady was super slow in every single action. (I should mention that it's now 10am, and I have a meeting with the Senior VP of Engineering [a stern, stubborn old goat who enjoys making people feel inadequate] at 12:30pm.) The notary lady looks like she's an npc updating in slow motion (maybe at 0.25x speed?) and can't seem to understand what I need. Eventually, she tells me exactly what I had assumed: if there's no document, she can't notarize said document, and she doesn't have an I9 for the company I'm trying to work for. (like, duh.) So I thank her for proving the flow of time is variable, which she ignores in slow motion, and drive back home. It's now about 11.

I message the same HR lady, and the useless wench gawks in surprise and says she's never heard of that ridiculous request before. It took prodding to get her to respond every time, but after some (very slow) back and forth, she says she wants to call the notary personally and ask what they need. I waited around for another response that never came, and eventually just drove to the notary place again to have them notarize the required ID documents. That plus my chat history with HR should be enough to show that I bloody well tried, and HR just shit the bed instead. I finally got them notarized at like 12:10, and totally broke the speed limit the entire way to the office, found the last remaining parking spot, and made it to my office just in time for the meeting. seriously, less than two minutes to spare. Meeting was interesting (mostly about security), but totally made me facepalm, shout "Seriously!? What the hell are you thinking!?" and make slapping motions at some of the people talking. I will probably rant about that next.

But anyway, I'm willing to bet that the useless wench won't get back to me before the notary closes, if at all, and will somehow try to blame it completely on me if I bring it up again. Passive aggressive bitch. She's probably thinking: "If I don't help her with these mandatory legal processes, it'll be her fault she didn't get them done in time. I mean, they're so easy! She's just doing it wrong." I fucking hate HR.

I have this little hobby project going on for a while now, and I thought it's worth sharing. Now at first blush this might seem like just another screenshot with neofetch.. but this thing has quite the story to tell. This laptop is no less than 17 years old.

So, a Compaq nx7010, a business laptop from 2004. It has had plenty of software and hardware mods alike. Let's start with the software.

It's running run-off-the-mill Debian 9, with a custom kernel. The reason why it's running that version of Debian is because of bugs in the network driver (ipw2200) in Debian 10, causing it to disconnect after a day or so. Less of an issue in Debian 9, and seemingly fixed by upgrading the kernel to a custom one. And the kernel is actually one of the things where you can save heaps of space when you do it yourself. The kernel package itself is 8.4MB for this one. The headers are 7.4MB. The stock kernels on the other hand (4.19 at downstream revisions 9, 10 and 13) took up a whole GB of space combined. That is how much I've been able to remove, even from headless systems. The stock kernels are incredibly bloated for what they are.

Other than that, most of the data storage is done through NFS over WiFi, which is actually faster than what is inside this laptop (a CF card which I will get to later).

Now let's talk hardware. And at age 17, you can imagine that it has seen quite a bit of maintenance there. The easiest mod is probably the flash mod. These old laptops use IDE for storage rather than SATA. Now the nice thing about IDE is that it actually lives on to this very day, in CF cards. The pinout is exactly the same. So you can use passive IDE-CF adapters and plug in a CF card. Easy!

The next thing I want to talk about is the battery. And um.. why that one is a bad idea to mod. Finding replacements for such old hardware.. good luck with that. So your other option is something called recelling, where you disassemble the battery and, well, replace the cells. The problem is that those battery packs are built like tanks and the disassembly will likely result in a broken battery housing (which you'll still need). Also the controllers inside those battery packs are either too smart or too stupid to play nicely with new cells. On that laptop at least, the new cells still had a perceived capacity of the old ones, while obviously the voltage on the cells themselves didn't change at all. The laptop thought the batteries were done for, despite still being chock full of juice. Then I tried to recalibrate them in the BIOS and fried the battery controller. Do not try to recell the battery, unless you have a spare already. The controllers and battery housings are complete and utter dogshit.

Next up is the display backlight. Originally this laptop used to use a CCFL backlight, which is a tiny tube that is driven at around 2000 volts. To its controller go either 7, 6, 4 or 3 wires, which are all related and I will get to. Signs of it dying are redshift, and eventually it going out until you close the lid and open it up again. The reason for it is that the voltage required to keep that CCFL "excited" rises over time, beyond what the controller can do.

So, 7-pin configuration is 2x VCC (12V), 2x enable (on or off), 1x adjust (analog brightness), and 2x ground. 6-pin gets rid of 1 enable line. Those are the configurations you'll find in CCFL. Then came LED lighting which required much less power to run. So the 4-pin configuration gets rid of a VCC and a ground line. And finally you have the 3-pin configuration which gets rid of the adjust line, and you can just short it to the enable line.

There are some other mods but I'm running out of characters. Why am I telling you all this? The reason is that this laptop doesn't feel any different to use than the ThinkPad x220 and IdeaPad Y700 I have on my desk (with 6c12t, 32G of RAM, ~1TB of SSDs and 2TB HDDs). A hefty setup compared to a very dated one, yet they feel the same. It can do web browsing, I can chat on Telegram with it, and I can do programming on it. So, if you're looking for a hobby project, maybe some kind of restrictions on your hardware to spark that creativity that makes code better, I can highly recommend it. I think I'm almost done with this project, and it was heaps of fun :D

So I have this best friend who is almost 10 years younger than me. (I'm turning 40 this month). He's a full stack web dev, nodejs-god, react-maniac, you name it. He fucking LIVES to code the most amazing shit I have seen to date.

I, on the other hand, am that old, little overweight PHP coder webdev with a shitload of experience in that field (17th year now), also with linux webserver administration and all the JavaScript knowledge I need in m job.

Sitting next to him and doing some fun coding sessions always makes me feel like I am that "slow, fat kid in class"... while he is the coding master.

Sitting at work (marketing agency) where I started as the new webdev 10 months ago, I still feel like the coding guru because even the web 'developers' don't know jack shit yet (coz they never had to).

It's fine, they are learning and want to learn.

All I wanna say that even though one might be seen as a senior dev by some, he might sometimes feel like a junior dev when he's around others.

This codebase reminds me of a large, rotting, barely-alive dromedary. Parts of it function quite well, but large swaths of it are necrotic, foul-smelling, and even rotted away. Were it healthy, it would still exude a terrible stench, and its temperament would easily match: If you managed to get near enough, it would spit and try to bite you.

Swaths of code are commented out -- entire classes simply don't exist anymore, and the ghosts of several-year-old methods still linger. Despite this, large and deprecated (yet uncommented) sections of the application depend on those undefined classes/methods. Navigating the codebase is akin to walking through a minefield: if you reference the wrong method on the wrong object... fatal exception. And being very new to this project, I have no idea what's live and what isn't.

The naming scheme doesn't help, either: it's impossible to know what's still functional without asking because nothing's marked. Instead, I've been working backwards from multiple points to try to find code paths between objects/events. I'm rarely successful.

Not only can I not tell what's live code and what's interactive death, the code itself is messy and awful. Don't get me wrong: it's solid. There's virtually no way to break it. But trying to understand it ... I feel like I'm looking at a huge, sprawling MC Escher landscape through a microscope. (No exaggeration: a magnifying glass would show a larger view that included paradoxes / dubious structures, and these are not readily apparent to me.)

It's also rife with bad practices. Terrible naming choices consisting of arbitrarily-placed acronyms, bad word choices, and simply inconsistent naming (hash vs hsh vs hs vs h). The indentation is a mix of spaces and tabs. There's magic numbers galore, and variable re-use -- not just local scope, but public methods on objects as well. I've also seen countless assignments within conditionals, and these are apparently intentional! The reasoning: to ensure the code only runs with non-falsey values. While that would indeed work, an early return/next is much clearer, and reduces indentation. It's just. reading through this makes me cringe or literally throw my hands up in frustration and exasperation.

Honestly though, I know why the code is so terrible, and I understand:

The architect/sole dev was new to coding -- I have 5-7 times his current experience -- and the project scope expanded significantly and extremely quickly, and also broke all of its foundation rules. Non-developers also dictated architecture, creating further mess. It's the stuff of nightmares. Looking at what he was able to accomplish, though, I'm impressed. Horrified at the details, but impressed with the whole.

This project is the epitome of "I wrote it quickly and just made it work."

Fortunately, he and I both agree that a rewrite is in order. but at 76k lines (without styling or configuration), it's quite the undertaking.

------

Amusing: after running the codebase through `wc`, it apparently sums to half the word count of "War and Peace"

Quick recap of my last two weeks: 15 year old production server is basically dead, boss has taken over calls and claims credit for "resolving" outages (even though my coworker and I did the work, but ultimately the traffic died down enough to where it wasn't an issue anymore).

I go to a meeting to plan migration to a better server, boss bitches about not getting invited, I tell him I invited myself, and then he lectures about how that's not our job.

Different boss says we're migrating a schema for an application that should have been decommissioned 5+ years ago to use as a baseline. I explain what's going on, he says he understands, and proceeds to tell higher bosses it's perfect because there will be no user impact. OF COURSE THERE'S NO FRICKING IMPACT, YA DUNCE! there are no users!!!!

I merge two email threads together, since they discuss the same thing, but with different insight, and get yelled at, even though they requested it.

The two bosses I like are OOO for the next week, too, so I'm just sitting here hoping I don't say something that'll get me fired or sent to sensitivity training.

I'm just starting my on call rotation and don't know that I can do this. I cry when my phone rings, now, because I experience physical pain with how hard I cringe.

I got yelled at today by a guy because SOMEONE I DON'T KNOW assigned a ticket to him directly, rather than to the proper team (not his team). So I had to look into that, which at least had the benefit of preventing a catastrophic outage to our customers world wide, but no one will know because I don't brag at work; I'm too busy doing my job as well as most of my division/section/larger team, whatever the hell it's called. I saved us probably 25+ hours of continuous troubleshooting call from noticing something tiny that the people "smarter" than me missed.

**edit: sorry for typos; got my nails done yesterday but they feel like they're a mile long and I have to relearn how to type**

3 rants for the price of 1, isn't that a great deal!

1. HP, you braindead fucking morons!!!

So recently I disassembled this HP laptop of mine to unfuck it at the hardware level. Some issues with the hinge that I had to solve. So I had to disassemble not only the bottom of the laptop but also the display panel itself. Turns out that HP - being the certified enganeers they are - made the following fuckups, with probably many more that I didn't even notice yet.

- They used fucking glue to ensure that the bottom of the display frame stays connected to the panel. Cheap solution to what should've been "MAKE A FUCKING DECENT FRAME?!" but a royal pain in the ass to disassemble. Luckily I was careful and didn't damage the panel, but the chance of that happening was most certainly nonzero.
- They connected the ribbon cables for the keyboard in such a way that you have to reach all the way into the spacing between the keyboard and the motherboard to connect the bloody things. And some extra spacing on the ribbon cables to enable servicing with some room for actually connecting the bloody things easily.. as Carlos Mantos would say it - M-m-M, nonoNO!!!
- Oh and let's not forget an old flaw that I noticed ages ago in this turd. The CPU goes straight to 70°C during boot-up but turning on the fan.. again, M-m-M, nonoNO!!! Let's just get the bloody thing to overheat, freeze completely and force the user to power cycle the machine, right? That's gonna be a great way to make them satisfied, RIGHT?! NO MOTHERFUCKERS, AND I WILL DISCONNECT THE DATA LINES OF THIS FUCKING THING TO MAKE IT SPIN ALL THE TIME, AS IT SHOULD!!! Certified fucking braindead abominations of engineers!!!

Oh and not only that, this laptop is outperformed by a Raspberry Pi 3B in performance, thermals, price and product quality.. A FUCKING SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER!!! Isn't that a great joke. Someone here mentioned earlier that HP and Acer seem to have been competing for a long time to make the shittiest products possible, and boy they fucking do. If there's anything that makes both of those shitcompanies remarkable, that'd be it.

2. If I want to conduct a pentest, I don't want to have to relearn the bloody tool!

Recently I did a Burp Suite test to see how the devRant web app logs in, but due to my Burp Suite being the community edition, I couldn't save it. Fucking amazing, thanks PortSwigger! And I couldn't recreate the results anymore due to what I think is a change in the web app. But I'll get back to that later.

So I fired up bettercap (which works at lower network layers and can conduct ARP poisoning and DNS cache poisoning) with the intent to ARP poison my phone and get the results straight from the devRant Android app. I haven't used this tool since around 2017 due to the fact that I kinda lost interest in offensive security. When I fired it up again a few days ago in my PTbox (which is a VM somewhere else on the network) and today again in my newly recovered HP laptop, I noticed that both hosts now have an updated version of bettercap, in which the options completely changed. It's now got different command-line switches and some interactive mode. Needless to say, I have no idea how to use this bloody thing anymore and don't feel like learning it all over again for a single test. Maybe this is why users often dislike changes to the UI, and why some sysadmins refrain from updating their servers? When you have users of any kind, you should at all times honor their installations, give them time to change their individual configurations - tell them that they should! - in other words give them a grace time, and allow for backwards compatibility for as long as feasible.

3. devRant web app!!

As mentioned earlier I tried to scrape the web app's login flow with Burp Suite but every time that I try to log in with its proxy enabled, it doesn't open the login form but instead just makes a GET request to /feed/top/month?login=1 without ever allowing me to actually log in. This happens in both Chromium and Firefox, in Windows and Arch Linux. Clearly this is a change to the web app, and a very undesirable one. Especially considering that the login flow for the API isn't documented anywhere as far as I know.

So, can this update to the web app be rolled back, merged back to an older version of that login flow or can I at least know how I'm supposed to log in to this API in order to be able to start developing my own client?

Man, I think we've all gotten way too many of these.

Normally most interactions that I have are through email. Eventually some would try to contact me via phone. These are some:

"Hey! We are calling you from <whatever company name> solutions! (most of them always seem to end on solutions or some shit like that) concerning the Ruby on Rails senior dev opportunity we were talking about via email"
<niceties, how are you doing, similar shit goes here...eventually>

So tell us! how good/comfortable would you say you are with C++?"

Me: I have never done anything serious with c++ and did just use it at school, but because I am not a professional in it I did not list it in my CV, what does it have to do with Rails?

Them: "Oh the applications of this position must be ready to take in additional duties which sometimes happen to be C or C++"

Me: Well that was not anywhere in the offer you sent, it specifically requested a full stack Rails developer that could work with 3 different frontend stacks already and like 4 different databases plus bla bla bla, I did not see c++ anywhere in it. Matter of fact I find it funny, one of the things that I was curious about was the salary, for what you are asking and specifically in the city in which you are asking it for 75k is way too low, you are seriously expecting a senior level rails dev to do all that AND take additional duties with c++? cpp could mean a billion different things"

Them: "well this is a big opportunity that will increase your level to senior position"

Me: the add ALREADY asks for a senior position, why are you making it sound that I will get build towards that level if you are already off the bat asking for seniors only to begin with?

Them: You are not getting it, it is an opportunity to grow into a senior, applicants right now are junior to mid-level

ME: You are all not making any sense, please don't contact me again.

=======

Them: We are looking for someone with 15 years experience with Swift development for mobile and web

Me: What is up with your people not making these requirements in paper? if I knew from the beginning that you people think that Swift is 15 years old I would have never agreed to this "interview"

Them: If you are not interested in that then might we offer this one for someone with 10 years experience as a full stack TypeScript developer.

Me: No, again, check your dates, this is insulting.

===

* For another Rails position

Them: How good are you with Ruby on Rails in terms of Python?

Me: excuse me? Python has nothing to do with Ruby on Rails.

Her (recruiter was a woman) * with a tone of superiority: I have it here that Python is the primary technology that accompanies Rails development.

Me (thinking this was a joke) : What do you think the RUBY part of Ruby on Rails is for? and what does "accompanies Rails development" even means?

Her: Well if you are not interested in using Rails with Python then maybe you can tell us about your experience in using Javascript as the main scripting platform for Rails.

Me: This is a joke, goodbye.

====

To be fair this was years ago when I still didn't know better and test the recruiters during the email part of being contacted. Now a days I feel sorry for everyone since I just say no without even bothering. This is a meme all on itself which no one has ever bothered to review and correct in years for now. I don't know why recruiters don't google themselves to see what people think of their "profession" in order to become better.

I've even had the Java/Javascript stupidity thrown at me by a local company. For that one it was someone from their very same HR department doing the rectuiter, their shop foreman was a friend of the family, did him the service of calling him to let him know that his HR was never going to land the kind of developer they were looking for with the retarded questions they had and sent him a detailed email concerning the correct information they needed for their JAVAscript job which they kept confusing with Java (for some reason in the context of Spring, they literally wanted nothing with Spring, they wanted some junior to do animations and shit like that on their company's website, which was in php, Java was nowhere in this equation)

I think people in web development get the short end of the stick when it comes to retarded recruiters more than anywhere else.

April 30, 2058

GNU? Linux? Ha! How ancient! Everyone uses systemd-coreutils and systemd-kernel. Nobody needs those useless old programs. In fact, systemd is so good that even Microsoft recently released their own systemd distro, and adopted the motto: “We Really Do Love Open Source This Time”. To show their love for open source, they’ve released the source for Snipping Tool under a BSD license.

systemd is super lightweight! My system uses around 600 gigs of RAM, whereas Windows uses upwards of a terabyte! I currently use the systemd-gnome desktop environment. I used to use KDE Plasma 18, but it didn’t integrate well with the rest of my operating system. systemd-braininterface doesn’t work very well with my Nvidia graphics card, so I use systemd-x11 like a hipster.

I’ve had no regrets switching to systemd. I feel bad for those BSD nerds. What a laughing stock, sticking to POSIX. Nobody writes POSIX programs anymore.

I wonder what lies in the future for systemd... I hope they fix systemd-oomd.

So yesterday was a regular old day where I came into the office and began my work. My office mate that sits next to me happens to be having an issue with her batch script. It wasn't running correctly so she had decided to call in IT and have them take a look at it. What she was trying to do was process some images through a dedicated super-computer located on site.

So as you can imagine with both of them standing right next to me it was hard not to listen in on their conversation. The IT guy decided to go through a barrage of different troubleshooting methods to figure out what was happening with her script. And soon enough they discovered what was wrong. It happened to be an issue with how Windows decides to deal with new line characters. FYI it looks like this shit "\n \r"

The fucking \r looked like a directory to Linux. So it would squeal to a halt every single time she tried to run.

How this happened was due to her using notepad to edit her batch file.

At this point, I made a comment about her use of Notepad.
"Oh, you're using notepad? I've had similar issues like this in the past when I've used notepad. I really hate notepad." I said with a slight chuckle.

And that was pretty much the end of our encounters. However, at the end of the day, she decided to speak up about this.

"I don't appreciate you making comments about my use of Notepad. That was a form of microaggression towards me, and I don't want you to do it again."

Completely taken aback I replied.
"I'm sorry you took it that way, it was a joke and wasn't meant to be taken personally."

"Well, your intent does not change impact. And by the way, I take pride in my code and scripting. I don't need your commentary about my code nor your micro-aggressions." She said in a huff.

"Well again, I'm sorry you feel that way," I replied back

*I'd like to say that this situation is loosely paraphrased, but the essence of what happened is still there.

At this point, this is what I have to say about this situation. Why the FUCKING FUCK are you using notepad to program anything. There ARE A SHIT TON of differing programs that are available for your use and you decide to use fucking notepad?!?! $%&*@#$^

You could use notepad++, you could use Sublime, you could use every-fucking-thing except Notepad!!! If anything I think I had every right to make a comment about your stupid use of notepad. And darling, your script not working was well deserved, I hope you run into more errors like this because you deserve nothing less for your arrogance. So you can take your opinions and shove them up your fat-ass because at the end of the day I don't give a FUCK about your opinions on my micro-aggressions that you're spouting off about.
I suggest the next time you feel attacked about your code perhaps you should take a cold hard look at yourself before thinking that I'm the one that is the FUCKING problem.

Still trying to get good.

The requirements are forever shifting, and so do the applied paradigms.

I think the first layer is learning about each paradigm.

You learn 5-10 languages/technologies, get a feeling for procedural/functional/OOP programming. You mess around with some electronics engineering, write a bit of assembly. You write an ugly GTK program, an Android todo app, check how OpenGL works. You learn about relational models, about graph databases, time series storage and key value caches. You learn about networking and protocols. You void the warranty of all the devices in your house at some point. You develop preferences for languages and systems. For certain periods of time, you even become an insufferable fanboy who claims that all databases should be replaced by MongoDB, or all applications should be written in C# -- no exceptions in your mind are possible, because you found the Perfect Thing. Temporarily.

Eventually, you get to the second layer: Instead of being a champion for a single cause, you start to see patterns of applicability.

You might have grown to prefer serverless microservice architectures driven by pub/sub event busses, but realize that some MVC framework is probably more suitable for a 5-employee company. You realize that development is not just about picking the best language and best architecture -- It's about pros and cons for every situation. You start to value consistency over hard rules. You realize that even respected books about computer science can sometimes contain lies -- or represent solutions which are only applicable to "spherical cows in a vacuum".

Then you get to the third layer: Which is about orchestrating migrations between paradigms without creating a bigger mess.

Your company started with a tiny MVC webshop written in PHP. There are now 300 employees and a few million lines of code, the framework more often gets in the way than it helps, the database is terribly strained. Big rewrite? Gradual refactor? Introduce new languages within the company or stick with what people know? Educate people about paradigms which might be more suitable, but which will feel unfamiliar? What leads to a better product, someone who is experienced with PHP, or someone just learning to use Typescript?

All that theoretical knowledge about superior paradigms won't help you now -- No clean slates! You have to build a skyscraper city to replace a swamp village while keeping the economy running, together with builders who have no clue what concrete even looks like. You might think "I'll throw my superior engineering against this, no harm done if it doesn't stick", but 9 out of 10 times that will just end in a mix of concrete rubble, corpses and mud.

I think I'm somewhere between 2 and 3.

I think I have most of the important knowledge about a wide array of languages, technologies and architectures.

I think I know how to come to a conclusion about what to use in which scenario -- most of the time.

But dealing with a giant legacy mess, transforming things into something better, without creating an ugly amalgamation of old and new systems blended together into an even bigger abomination? Nah, I don't think I'm fully there yet.

VueJS FTW!

Today I realised I've been a fucking idiot.
For the last few years I have familiarized myself with libraries like React, VueJS, Preact etc.

All while playing around on my own side projects but when it came to doing actual work (perhaps from a lack of confidence/working experience with them) I always reverted to vanilla js or jQuery because I convinced myself it wasn't the `right` use case or `the project was too simple or small`.

I WAS AN IDIOT.

The below screenshot is a prototype of a n invoicing tool I needed to write which uses VueJS and is implemented in 50 beautiful, clean, maintainable loc. Combined with TypeScript it is a dream - never did I think I would see the day where I could grab an inputs numerical value without prepending the variable with + so I don't end up concatenating them as strings.

If your like me and haven't started using some kind of data binding view framework stop procrastinating and just do it. I feel like I wasted a large chunk of my life clinging onto my old ways.

Why is Java so comfy?

I don't know why, but every time I try to use Javascript and Python I feel lost in those functional gimmicks and fancy libraries.

Java feels like the warm, soft old couch at home.

I've been a hardstyle fan/freak for about 8 years now and this music helps (rawstyle in particular) me through anything really.

But, since I love this genre/music to the point, I'm looking at producing it myself currently and fresh/new music is a good thing for me because it allows me to get in touch with loads of different techniques.

So there's this YouTube channel (the only Google service I use) which makes it easy for new rawstyle talents to enter the scene. You can send them tracks and if they meet a certain quality criteria then they're uploaded with proper credit given.

So anyways, when I've got a bad dev/sysadmin day, I go there to look for new tracks and re-listen 'old' ones in order to feel better, get to know more awesome music/new talents and listen to new techniques 😃

WHY THE FUCK DOES IT HAVE TO END?

WHY THE FUCK DOES ANYTHING HAVE TO EVER END?

When I left my previous employer, I was so connected to people there. In fact my entire direct team was just few months old.

I ended up crying like a baby on my farewell call in front of everyone. I just couldn't stop.

Definitely not the brightest or smartest people, but surely great at heart. I did hate them at times and we had our ups and downs but they made the place tolerable.

The work culture is created by colleagues at any organisation and not the leadership/management. And work culture was one of the major reasons why I stayed back for 7.25 years even when a rat was earning more than me.

I joined new organisation with a big smile on my face that, I will learn and earn more. And as I was buckling up, my lead quit.

She was one of the smartest person I met. She inspired me so fucking much. Our entire team is geographically located in multiple time zones. Still she never hesitated to jump on calls as early as 07:00 AM or as late as 12:00 AM. Yet she pinged me every time on Slack to check on me and made sure I was doing well. Kept pushing me to get enough sleep, take care and not burnout myself. Always handling her daughter while on calls with us without impacting the discussions.

She taught me like her own child. So patient with a retard like me. Gave me good feedback and insights on how can I grow as a person and what all to look for in the organisation.

She bids her final goodbye early next week and with every meeting we have, I get more emotional. Doesn't feel like we are in different continents but just in same room, talking like we have known each other for years.

And you know what, after joining this org, I came to know that they hired me for a level below what I was in previous org (because how the job titles were structured here and I don't really care for titles). The product I am working on is highly ambitious and everyone is keen to make it live.

And now everything falls on me. Kickass opportunity to get a promotion, relocation, good hike, and all that I desire. And my employer is known to be quite employee friendly to actually fullfil all my wishes.

But that's not what I want. I want my people with me. It would have been so fucking awesome if she wouldn't have quit and together we would have built the product and have had so much fun doing so.

I am sure, the reason of my death will be empathy. I am next to tears while I type this.

I suck at goodbyes. Even though, with the help of technology, people are and will be connected, but still goodbyes are the shittiest things to ever exist.

I've uncovered the complot.

I clearly remember buying my first monitor, it was 15 inch, 1024x768. Then I went to a 19 inch 1680x1050 one, then 24 inch 1080p, then 27 inch 1440p...

Now I used two 32 inch 4K screens at work... and I come home, and the three 27 inch screens look a bit smallish, with the old 24 inch one being absolutely tiny on my desk.

It wasn't that tiny when I still owned the 15 inch screen? And my 5.5 inch phone doesn't feel as big as when I bought it either?

So the complot... All monitors slowly shrink over time, and they start shrinking faster when new monitors are brought into the household.

'your good with computers right'?

Me: I work with one every day so I guess...

Can you fix a problem I have with my pc? (relatively old man, and I feel bad for him so I agreed)

Next day he had me fix 4 laptops (from his kids) and a Macbook of his own almost all had shady malware and were WAY behind of their windows updates... Like sub wannacry level...

Rip one of day of my vacation 😠

Allright, I'm pissed.

Warning: more than 4k characters written by a non native english speaker ahead.

Legend:
Storytelling
> Short summary of the current situation
> "Something being said"
> (Something being thought)
* Actions *

-- Background --
In an attempt to reorganize my desktop I accidentally deleted a folder I called "development". In there I stored links to all my IDEs (Not sure how you call these in english), but also some workspaces like unity (Not much stuff there, processing (just some hobby stuff) AND Eclipse (FUCKING EVERYTHING RELATED TO SCHOOL WEB DEVELOPMENT). Now 3 days have passed and I realized this important folder was missing. Cleared that windows trash the instant I deleted the trash on my desktop.

> Shit, Regret

Install a file restore programm. Do every possible search. Nothing found.

> Big shit

Deadline was in like 3 days. Week was fucking rough so:
> "Screw this, the teacher nevet corrects the assignments and also fuck JSP"

Fast forward 2 months to last week. Teacher starts checking assignments.

> Fuck

* Sees pattern: Only students with missing or bad marks are checked. *

* Feels save *

Teacher approaching me while working on current projects.
* Doesn't feel save anymore *
> "Well, I'ld like to see your THAT programm"
> Well fuck
* Tells the truth *
> "Well that's unfortunate, but I must write a mark. Do you really have nothing to show?"
* Remember that I worked on the school pcs when I started *
> (Better than nothing. Gotta try it)
* Teacher checks programm, not pleased *

> (Fuck me, but at least it's over...)

> Nope

* Teacher calls me over *
> "With the mark I had to write today you can't reach that good mark even with a good examination, what are we gonna do about this?"

> "Well, there were other assignments that were never checked. Could we replace that mark with one of those?"

* Teacher agrees *
> (Srly bless this guy for that support)

My best choice was an Android app we had to develop during December in pairs. I did the front end (90% of the whole work) and my partner the backend (10 %). I also did 30 % of these 10 %, because I had to review the shit he wasn't able to debug himself.

> brainlogic.exe provided by windows vista

This distribution was partly my fault since I overestimated the work needed for the backend, but also the fault of that fucker. I mean, he didn't tell me the professor already provided 90 % of the backend...

Rest of the week was really busy (always 1 or 2 things to study for each day, workout and family stuff).

Yesterday (It's past 12 already) I arrived at ~9 pm in the dorm I could finally start reviewing my code.
Internet gets shut down at 10 pm.
Gotta hurry.

* Opens project *
* Sees half a year old code *
* Fights urge to puke *
> (Alright I gotta do this. For the mark!)
* waits for gradle to index files *
* Remembers the fact that I haven't opened Android Studio in the last 2 months *

For those who don't develop with android studio: This is an equivalent to ~10k windows updates waiting to be installed

> (Well, gotta work with this kinda old version)

"gradle sync failed"
> ( Ok, just restart it. You're fine )
* Android Studio doesn't react anymore and/or renders *
* Waits 5 min *
* Restarts laptop *
* Android Studio is reacting again*
"gradle is synching"
9:45 pm: gradle is done and I can finally compile my app

> FML

* Sees App launched on phone *
* Almost pukes again *

> (This was the assigment for the UX chapter, so design doesn't matter)

UX is decent. Proceeds with testing stuff. Save paths work, but some bugs can be caused by going of it

* fixes as much as possible *

* Takes quick look at backend *

Date date = new Date (GregorianCalender.getInstance().getTimeInMillis());

C'mon, I asked you to be the backend. You got 90% of the methods already written by the teacher and had 2 months to write the interfaces to my Front end AND you come up with shits like that.

Note: this example is a minor example of brainlogic.exe

I did what I could to make improve my situation. Hopefully he doesn't discover the bugs. And If it's a backend bug then I could't care less, since that was not my job!

Wish me luck for today!

Yeah, if my so called "friends" can just stop making me feel guilty for staying in with my son instead of going out having beers in pretentious clubs, with music blasting at a billion decibels that we can't even have a decent conversation.

If you could just stop; that would be great.

I'm sorry I have to work. I'm sorry I can't leave my 6 year old alone in the house on a school night. I'm sorry I don't have an army of maids to look after him. I'm sorry I don't have personal drivers to take him to school. I'm sorry if your family or your wife's family is so fucking rich you're basically a kept man and now bored out of your wits.

Please, just fuck off with this toxic behavior. We are not in our 20s anymore.

Thank you.

Long rant ahead.. so feel free to refill your cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂

It's completely useless. At least in the school I went to, the teachers were worse than useless. It's a bit of an old story that I've told quite a few times already, but I had a dispute with said teachers at some point after which I wasn't able nor willing to fully do the classes anymore.

So, just to set the stage.. le me, die-hard Linux user, and reasonably initiated in networking and security already, to the point that I really only needed half an ear to follow along with the classes, while most of the time I was just working on my own servers to pass the time instead. I noticed that the Moodle website that the school was using to do a big chunk of the course material with, wasn't TLS-secured. So whenever the class begins and everyone logs in to the Moodle website..? Yeah.. it wouldn't be hard for anyone in that class to steal everyone else's credentials, including the teacher's (as they were using the same network).

So I brought it up a few times in the first year, teacher was like "yeah yeah we'll do it at some point". Shortly before summer break I took the security teacher aside after class and mentioned it another time - please please take the opportunity to do it during summer break.

Coming back in September.. nothing happened. Maybe I needed to bring in more evidence that this is a serious issue, so I asked the security teacher: can I make a proper PoC using my machines in my home network to steal the credentials of my own Moodle account and mail a screencast to you as a private disclosure? She said "yeah sure, that's fine".
Pro tip: make the people involved sign a written contract for this!!! It'll cover your ass when they decide to be dicks.. which spoiler alert, these teachers decided they wanted to be.

So I made the PoC, mailed it to them, yada yada yada... Soon after, next class, and I noticed that my VPN server was blocked. Now I used my personal VPN server at the time mostly to access a file server at home to securely fetch documents I needed in class, without having to carry an external hard drive with me all the time. However it was also used for gateway redirection (i.e. the main purpose of commercial VPN's, le new IP for "le onenumity"). I mean for example, if some douche in that class would've decided to ARP poison the network and steal credentials, my VPN connection would've prevented that.. it was a decent workaround. But now it's for some reason causing Moodle to throw some type of 403.

Asked the teacher for routers and switches I had a class from at the time.. why is my VPN server blocked? He replied with the statement that "yeah we blocked it because you can bypass the firewall with that and watch porn in class".
Alright, fair enough. I can indeed bypass the firewall with that. But watch porn.. in class? I mean I'm a bit of an exhibitionist too, but in a fucking class!? And why right after that PoC, while I've been using that VPN connection for over a year?

Not too long after that, I prematurely left that class out of sheer frustration (I remember browsing devRant with the intent to write about it while the teacher was watching 😂), and left while looking that teacher dead in the eyes.. and never have I been that cold to someone while calling them a fucking idiot.

Shortly after I've also received an email from them in which they stated that they wanted compensation for "the disruption of good service". They actually thought that I had hacked into their servers. Security teachers, ostensibly technical people, if I may add. Never seen anyone more incompetent than those 3 motherfuckers that plotted against me to save their own asses for making such a shitty infrastructure. Regarding that mail, I not so friendly replied to them that they could settle it in court if they wanted to.. but that I already knew who would win that case. Haven't heard of them since.

So yeah. That's why I regard those expensive shitty pieces of paper as such. The only thing they prove is that someone somewhere with some unknown degree of competence confirms that you know something. I think there's far too many unknowns in there.

Nowadays I'm putting my bets on a certification from the Linux Professional Institute - a renowned and well-regarded certification body in sysadmin. Last February at FOSDEM I did half of the LPIC-1 certification exam, next year I'll do the other half. With the amount of reputation the LPI has behind it, I believe that's a far better route to go with than some random school somewhere.

Summary: Burnout, and everything's broken.

I don't feel like doing a damn thing today. I look at the code and cringe. I look at Slack and think "ugh. i can't." Mental capitals are even too much work.

(I've started reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" to try and combat burnout. I'll write a rant/story about it here if I find it helpful. but all I want to do today is drink tea and read.)

But onto the story:

Heroku is deprecating support for and will automatically upgrade any old verisons of Postgres running on its platform after August something (like five days from now).

I performed the upgrade to PG10 on Sunday (and late into the night), provisioning a new follower, blah blah blah.

However, the version of Rails we're using (4.2.x) doesn't support PG10 sequences, so I manually added in support via a monkeypatch. I did this on our QA servers first, obviously, and everything worked as expected. After half a day of no issues, I did the same on production, and again: everything worked as expected.

But today? I keep hearing about new things that are broken. One specific type of alert doesn't work for one specific person (wat). Can't send [redacted] at all. Can't update merchants! Yet there are magically no errors logged.

That last one (well, two) are just great; let me explain: when there's an error concerning merchants, the error gets caught, isn't logged or recorded anywhere so it just disappears, and the rescue block triggers a json response instead and happily exits. This is for an internal admin tool, so returning a user-friendly error is kinda stupid anyway, but masking what actually happened? fuck that dev with an obelisk made from spikes and solidified pain. That json response is also lovely: it's a 200 OK returning {status: 1, data: "[generic message containing incorrect IT jargon]"}. Doesn't even say "error" anywhere. Bloody everything about this pattern is absolutely wrong. Even the friggin' text.

Fucking hell. I want to pipe the entire codebase into shred and walk out the door.

But I digress. So many things are broken, my motivation is wanning to a sliver, and I have a conference call today where I'll undoubtedly be asked why everything is on smoking and/or on fire, and my huge and overly productive week last week will ofc mean nothing by contrast.

Ugh.

`shred ~/dev/work -zfu -n 32 &; ./brew tea --hot && wine ~/takeabreak.exe`

Why the fuck do people care about age so much?
Unlike other activities, you can be 15 years old and be as good as a senior dev, so why the fuck do you need to degrade me because you found out my age?
I still deliver the promised work, so what the fuck?

As for kids who try to get recognition because they're young and program, well, fuck you too!

Programming isn't about age or maturity, since in this age of tech, anyone can pick up a computer and an internet connection and learn, so why do you feel that younger individuals have less capabilities?

I just had to get that out of me since it pisses me off a fuck load.

I'm extremely lucky I'm not violent person. What happened today for some reason just completely pissed me off. I'm not sure why it got under my skin so much, but I feel completely disrespected.

I went to our marketing person's office to discuss a basic requirement for our api. Very simply, we have a lot of old shitty date that doesn't have a lot of fields filled out (worse yet, some are simply bogus values like crazy random dates and whatnot).

She put in a ticket claiming our most recent change started changed the creation dates to be empty. Easy enough to disprove, because the marketing software we have shows a records of all the edits for each contact, and if it came from our api it'll be labeled as "Web API". So of course I check the example contacts she give us, and there's no history of changes, meaning they never had the date to begin with (which is correct, as until now we didn't track creation date WHICH IS NOT MY DECISION. So dude 10 years ago probably made that decision).

So I start asking what exactly we're using it for. She does an absolutely horrible job of describing it and keeps telling me "no you absolutely have to be able to do all this, it's our requirements". By "this" she wants me to magically give all these contacts correct creation dates after the fact.

Eventually she gets the whole campaign idea out and I point, politely, that they're probably violating GDPR. She starts yelling saying her and her boss have been doing marketing for years and they know what they're doing. So I (less politely this time) said that's fine, I just want to talk with her boss to make sure he understands he's in the grey area and that if I'm the one building this, I'm kind of liable as well.

She clearly didn't like that, but I thought whatever, let's just agree on some requirements and I'll pass it on to my boss (who genuinely shits on her every single day and is constantly saying she never knows what she's doing).

So I go back , do some work. A little later I have to go print something off which is next to her office. Her door is shut, but I can hear her from down the hall yelling at someone about the conversation we just had. She actually starts mocking me. Doing the "stupid person" voice. This goes on for longer than our conversation.

Like I said, I know I'm right and she's just venting because she doesn't want to admit she's made a mistake. But for some reason it just completely broke me. I'm new but up until this point everyone had been pretty open about how they feel about me and my co-worker. But she just didn't need to go that bloody far.

This isn't really a Dev related rant, more of a life rant. Things have been going pretty badly for me lately, so I apologize if this comes across as complaining or whining.

This morning, I got in a car accident that totaled my car. It was a 1996 Chevy Camaro that I had been fixing up and restoring over the last few years and I had it running pretty well. The accident was my fault and I told the police as much, because I value honesty over screwing over others for my own benefit. Money has been very tight lately because my wife was out of work for the last bit of her pregnancy, so we ended up having to move to a 1 bedroom apartment that I could afford rent on my own. She also has a son who is now 13, so space is pretty tight. Money got even tighter once we had the baby. She's 10 weeks old now.

I've barely made the $1500/month rent on my own here, usually paying 1-2 days late because we're living paycheck to paycheck. Our lease is up at the end of July and they won't let us renew because of this.

The bad part is that I was driving a car that had expired registration because I couldn't fix it to pass the state smog test and my license expired two weeks ago. I haven't been able to afford insurance, so every time I drove, it was a gamble.

I'm now going to have to pay these damages out of pocket for the other car.

We're now having to move into my mother in law's house for about 4 months so we can get out of this financial hole we've gotten into.

I feel like I've failed as a father and a husband.

!dev !sex I promise this is a good read

I once read the whole bible.

Not in one sitting, ofc. I read it in a period of a year, just 3-4 chapters a day.

Is it something to boast about?
I'm not sure.

I mean, I guess being able to read through it despite not being exactly entertainment material (except some fun parts) kinda is. So I might feel a tad bit proud about that.

But I'm actually more happy that I did instead.

The reason I'm more happy than proud is because I took awareness of the religion I was in.

I became christian when I was an early teen. I grew up in an agnostic family. My dad was kinda hippie and my mom was into leftist ideas.

So me becoming a christian was a bit orthogonal to their philosophies.

I started assisting a church because I was very alone and misunderstood, and found some people there that seemed to get me, and viceversa.

But as time went on and I got more exposed to christian doctrine, my level of commitment grew.

I wanted to save people from going to hell. It sounds funny, maybe egotistical, but it's true.

3, 4 years of being in the church go by. I collaborate in the church, I make some very personal friendships, I was very deep in church by that point.

I then decide that I should take it to the next level and read the bible. So I did. And unknowingly, it started this feeling in me that I didn't liked being a christian at all.

I'm not gonna deny there are some christian values that are still compatible with today's modern society, such as being a good samaritan, working hard, being honest.

But there were too many verses in both old and new testament that I found morally repugnant,

The ones that made me feel the worst about christianity, though, were the ones that condemned homosexuality with death.

Since my dad was a hippie, he used to be in artsy things, like theater or music, and through that he had some gay friends

And for real, I think they were the nicest and most cheerful people I'd met as a kid. So I could not be part of that anymore.

Let me clarify that I didn't stop being a christian immediately after finishing the bible, but it did start a spark "of "what tf do I even believe in...?"

That spark turned into flame when I started the university, a place where people think for a living.

It's no wonder my mind started completing the puzzle, and slowly I started liking church and christianity less and less.

Until one sunday I didn't want to go, and I didn't, and from then on, I pretty much severed ties with that church and christianity.

Which is crazy considering I went every sunday without interruption for 6 years, and several saturdays too.

Anyhow, that's my story of me getting in n out of christianity. Like in the previous post, it sure how to end this, so go fuck a rock or something.

Old rant about an internship I had years ago. It still annoys me to this day, so I just had to share the story.

Basically I had no job or work experience in the field, which is a common issue in the city I live in - developer jobs are hard to come by with no experience here. The municipality tried to counter this issue by offering us (unemployed people with an interest in the field) a free 9-month course, linked with an internship program, with a "high chance" of a job after the internship period.

To lure companies to agree to this deal, the municipality offered a sum of money to companies who willing to take interns. The only requirement for the company was that they had to offer a full-time position to the interns after the internship, as long as there were no serious issues (ex. skipping work, calling in sick, doing a bad job etc.).
On paper, this deal probably makes sense.

I landed an internship fairly quickly at a well-known company in the city. The first internship period went great, and I got constant positive feedback. I even got to the point where I ran out of tasks since I worked faster than expected - which I was fairly proud of at the time.

The next internship period was a weird mix between school (the course), and being at the company. We would be at the school for the whole week, expect Wednesdays where we could do the internship at the company.

When I met at work on that first Wednesday, the company told me that it made no sense for me to meet up on those days, as I was only watching some tutorial videos during that time, while they were finding bigger tasks for me - which in turn required that they got some designs for a new project. They said that due to the requirements they got from the municipality (which I knew nothing about at the time), they couldn't ask me to work from home - and they said it would "demoralize" the other developers if I just sat there on Wednesdays to watch videos. Instead, they suggested that I called in sick on Wednesdays and just watched the videos at home - which is something I would register to the workplace, so I wouldn't get in trouble with the school. It sounded logical to me, so I did that for like 5-6 Wednesdays in a row. Looking back at this period, there's a lot of red flags - but I was super optimistic and simply didn't notice.

After this period, the final 2 months of the internship period (no school). This time I had proper tasks, and was still being praised endlessly - just like the first period.
On the last day of the internship, I got called to a meeting with my teamlead and CEO. Thinking I was to sign a full-time contract, I happily went to the meeting.. Only to be told that they had found someone with more experience.
I was fairly disappointed, and told them honestly that I would have preferred if they had told me this earlier, since I had been looking forward to this day. They apologized, but said that there was nothing they could do.

When I returned for the last school period (2 weeks), the teacher asked me to join him for a small meeting with some guy from the municipality. Both seemed fairly disappointed / angry, and told me what still makes me furious whenever I think about it.
Basically after my last internship period, the company had called the municipality, telling them that I had called in sick on those Wednesdays, and was "a lazy worker", and they would refuse to hire me because of that.
I of course told them my side of the story, which they wouldn't believe (unemployed person vs. well-known company).

Even when I landed a proper job a few months later, the office had called my old internship for a reference - and they told the same story, which nearly made them decline my application. This honestly makes me feel like it's something personal.

So basically:
Municipality: Had to pay the company as the deal / contract between them was kept.
Company: Got free money and work.
Me: Got nothing except a bad reputation - and some (fairly limited) experience..

Do I regret taking the course? .. No, it was a free course and I learned a lot - and I DID get some experience. But god, I wish I had applied at a different company.

Sorry for my bad English - it's not my first language.. But f*ck this company :)

So recently we re-orged to a product vs engineering (yes, I meant vs, it’s contentious) organizational structure. One of the former dev leads got picked for product and went on this lovely ass-kissing spiel about how great this was in front of our new bosses. The next day(!) he was telling his old team what to do directly to his buddy the scrum master, who works for me and casually mentioned it. How am I supposed to run engineering and deliver if every P.O. can end run around the structure? I hate all this.

Also, if the new PE tells me one more time all my problems can be solved with SQS, I’m gonna explode. Not all dev problems are a nail to fix with an sns hammer. Asynch comms has its uses, it is not the *only solution.

I feel like I’m over reacting, and yet, I still feel rage…and happy to find an anonymous place to rant about it.

So, I was gonna rant about how it can be difficult to design event-based Microservices.

I was gonna say some shit about gateways APIs and some other stuff about data aggregation and keeping things idempotent.

I was going to do all this but then as I was stretching out the old ranting fingers I decided to draw a diagram to maybe go along with the rant.

Now I’m not here to really rant about all that Jazz...

I’m here to give you all a first class opportunity to tear apart my architecture!

A few things to note:

Using a gateway API (Kong) to separate the mobile from the desktop.

This traffic is directed through to an in intermediate API. This way the same microservices can provide different data, and even functionality for each device.

Most Microservices currently built in golang.

All services are event based, and all data is built on-the-fly by events generated and handled by each Microservices.

RabbitMQ used as a message broker.

And finally, it is hosted in Google Cloud Platform.

The currently hosted form is built with Microservices but this will be the update version of things.

So, feel free to rip it apart or add anything you think should change.

Also, feel free to tell me to fuck right off if that’s your cup of tea as well.

Peace ✌🏼

A kid that went to my daughter's preschool class died (they are in the 3-4 years old range)

The parents still don't know what their kid died from some virus.

They said the kid became braindead so I'm guessing meningitis?

Meanwhile we're pretty scared, and unsure if we should keep sending our kid.

I'm very disappointed in the way the school handled this, like no quarantine, no fucking notice on our kid's book about how they're going to deal with this.

Fucking piece of shit school.

Everyone on the whatsapp group is sad, saying religious shit. Hello!!!! Can I know what this kid died from so my kids don't die too????

I feel sad for the parents and the kid but... everyone is reacting in a very stupid way to this.

Like no one's gonna even fucking ask if this kid went to class this week and potentially passed it to other kids?

Fuck this dumbass mediocre country.

Heh, so I was working in tech doing the physical side of the department (going and moving computers or hardware fixes etc.)

Anyways since I got that job I noticed some of our recurring systems tickets are time consuming so I wrote some scripts to speed up the parts that I could.
(Like getting us all the useful information for hunting down missing machines or machines that haven't been able to be backed up in a while)

So yeah, made the scripts and some higher ups were like great you should submit them to our repo so they don't just disappear. Do it and get told by one of the like cto kinda guys that, "instead of doing a script to do what the original script should do, maybe go in and fix our original one."

So I told him, I don't get paid enough to fix your guys scripts, I don't know perl(which is what those ones are in) and honestly it's not my department for fixing those scripts, it's yours.

I had made a big post about what my scripts did and gave access to them and what they could have fixed in an hour they argued with me for months about just fixing their originals instead.

So now I've just actually gotten promoted out of that dept and into another where I will finally get paid to do more code, so I was closing my last tickets and the "trying to add my scripts to their repo" was one. The guy had denied my PReq Esso I closed the ticket thinking meh.

This guy re opens and again says just fix the scripts. Luckily I had done a personal repo for the scripts so others in my (now old) dept can keep using them. So I said I'm not in that department anymore, I made them available to the others and I still don't know perl. Not sure what your wanting me to do...

Got a laugh when he replied "oh yeah, just heard about the promotion... Congrats.. Where's the repo?"

I feel like I won finally

How to profesionally say: you fucking illiterate and incompetent piece of shit, I am tired of spoonfeeding you because you dont use your fucking brain. I am fucking tired of explaining same concept over and over again for the past 2-3 months. Open fucking google for once and lookup latest practices, and learn what functional programming is and learn how to use operators instead of fucking inventing wheel again and again with your 100 lines boilerplate of code functions. Open your fucking mind for once and lookup stuff for yourself, instead of asking me to explain everything for the 100th time you lazy fuck. Oh and stop asking me "to be nice", this is gaslightling. I am being professional and I am the only person in this company who actually tolerates u on some level, others are just avoiding you you useless piece of shit. If I need to explain something for 5th time and I make you feel bad, it means you should feel bad. So maybe grow some balls and start putting in some effort, instead of playing the victim when you are the supposed 6 year senior and I am the 3 year junior, who has to do your fucking job half of the time. You are incapable of even using the standard architecture, what you use is fucking 6-7 years old. Fucking code monkey with broken english who doesnt understand what hes doing. You dont like my methods? I dare you to schedule an appointment between me and manager or your useless techlead, but I know you wont do that because I know you are afraid of everyone finding out how incompetent you are. You low fruit hanging task licking incompetent shit.

Hi guys!
That is my first...well, rant? No, not at all.

I found this community by accident. I was looking for something like this, but did not realize til now. I scrolled through some posts and it is awesome to read awesome stories and rants from awesome people.

I am a 21 year old SAP ABAP developer from Germany. I have finished my bachelor's degree (business informatics/business information management? German: Wirtschaftsinformatik) last August. I have always been interested in web development and teached myself some php basics when I was younger. I would love to do more things like that, but things have changed. There are lots of different frameworks, languages and stuff. It's complicated.

I am not sure if I have understood how this community works, but I am very excited to find out.

And, as I already mentioned, I am German. So please feel free to bash my shitty English. :D

Im gunna get a lot of flak for this but just hear me out:

People keep asking me what it's like working in a male dominated industry. They have conferences for women in tech empowerment and I get forced to go to them because I'm the only female in the office.

The thing is. I don't feel oppressed. I get that we "need" more women in tech but from my experience and from talking to various women at my old university, the reason women are avoiding the tech industry isn't because it's male dominated and they feel out of place. It's because a) it doesn't interest them or b) they never thought of it as an option (like myself).

Computer programming should be in grade schools and highschool's just like math and science to help educated not only women but people in general that it's an option. That's what's going to help more women get in the tech industry. Not these bullshit conferences and women's rights in tech movements, and hiring women over men (even if she's worse than him in skill level) just because she's a woman.

Frankly I think it's downright shameful that companies that are male dominated feel the need to hire women over men just because of gender. If I'm applying somewhere and there's a better male candidate, hire him! I'd much rather your company have a good team then a "balanced" team. Great tech teams are what will bring along new and better technologies, not balanced ones.

Keep in mind I'm talking about Western Civilization here, I get that a lot of countries are still struggling with the balance of women's rights at all but this is Canada.

I also get that there are probably some women who want to join tech but won't because it's too male dominated but frankly that's a shit poor excuse. If you really wanted to join tech then being surrounded by make co-workers wouldn't deter you from living your life the way you want to. If you feel so uncomfortable around men that you won't go into an industry you love because it's male dominated then I'm sorry for you and you should probably see a councillor to get that worked out.

I feel more oppressed by having to put aside my programming and being forced to go to these conferences than I do in the every day workplace. My boss is literally more offended that I don't feel offended about being a woman "minority". He spent a week pestering me about how I would feel about this, that and the other thing if it happened to me.

I'm not saying nobody ever says anything even remotely sexist to me but frankly I could give two shits- I'm here. I'm coding. I'm good at what I do and I'm comfortable enough with myself that I can just blow off the comment (which probably wasn't even meant to offend me) and continue working. But you're going to get that wherever you go, this isn't a flaw of the tech industry. This is a flaw of the world and it goes both ways (men get flak too).

I fucking love HP.

Why, you may ask, given that I've ranted about their crap so many times now? Great question!

I love HP because every time I go to town on their hardware because yet again it got me infuriated somehow, I don't feel bad about it afterwards. Instead I feel oddly satisfied, liberated from another piece of crap from them. And besides, usually it's their or Acer's shitty hardware that gets me worked up anyway.

That said, fuck you HP. Filthy Microsucking pieces of shit.

.. anyway. I've just went around disassembling an old vacuum cleaner this morning, to liberate its 800W single phase AC motor. I'll probably have to underrun it with a step-down transformer but at e.g. 200VAC it should probably work no problem 🙂

So today I realized that Im not happy.

When I was a kid I wanted to do many things because I had time and energy but I had no money. Now that Im an adult and I have the money, I have no energy and no will power to try and have personal life in these few hours left of my day. I spend 9 hours at work everyday and totally 1hr 30min is wasted on commuting.

I spent 4 years in uni between lectures and working on my side projects, and I really believed that after uni I will get a job and my life work balance will improve.

After uni I spent 2 years working abroad in 3 jobs at 3 countries. I work as android dev and now Im making a really decent salary.

However Im not happy at all. I realized that life is not about the money. Im changing countries like socks and dont even feel the need to socialize or enjoy my life anymore. Im european and these other eu countries are not that different at all. It came to a point where relationships are meaningless to me. I became an office drone who cares only about work and outside of work I care only about my projects and more work.

At this point im only 25 years old with around 2 years of experience and money is really good, but fuck it Im so tired of being an emigrant and having no stability in life. Im so drained. I spent past 6 years (4 in uni combined with side projects and 2 years working in 3 jobs in different countriee) working my ass off and lying to myself that after the next big thing Im gonna take a break and enjoy life. But its never enough. I dont want to hit 30s or 40s and realize that I wasted my life on pursuing money and didnt get to enjoy life..

Im really considering taking a 6-12 months vacation. I need to find myself. Probably going back to my own country. Just learn how to enjoy life, attend workshops, get to know new city area, meet new people, do some interesting hobbies. Maybe do a little freelance (max 10hrs a week).

Im tired of feeling like I need to make as much money as I can and learn as much about my work as I can. Its not rewarding because its never enough.

Whats the point in that money if I cant enjoy it?

Whenever something goes mainstream and becomes buzzword there are annoying consequences of it.

First, it’s harder to find anything meaningful about the topic.
Second, suddenly everyone is an expert and web search starts to show not related products like promo codes, stupid videos, tutorials for dumb.
Third, old content that was interesting is lost under pile of shit or gets deleted.

I feel like I’m living in middle ages and before I try to watch something interesting it’s deleted by Spanish inquisition and replaced by some crap.

Most of expert content I have in favorites is returning 404 and youtube videos are deleted or private so from some time I started to backup all content I read or watch and find interesting in public networks.

Fortunately I have couple of terabytes of storage to backup interesting topics but I’m not happy that I’m back to times when I was saving internet page to floppy disk to show it to my friend later.

What a fucking nightmare.

an 18 year old youtube multimillionaire known as McSkillet lost $200,000 on csgo skins and $700,000 gambling and trading csgo skins so he fell into depression. he took his $265,500 McLaren supercar and ran into the highway in opposite direction to commit suicide, but in doing so he also killed a mom and a 12 year old girl from the car collision explosion.

life is very hard to be an 18 year old teenage millionaire, better commit suicide instead.

how do you guys feel about this?

Is it just me who sees this? JS development in a somewhat more complex setting (like vue-storefront) is just a horrible mess.
I have 10+ experience in java, c# and python, and I've never needed more than a a few hours to get into a new codebase, understanding the overall system, being able to guess where to fix a given problem.
But with JS (and also TS for that matter) I'm at my limits. Most of the files look like they don't do anything. There seems to be no structure, both from a file system point of view, nor from a code point of view.
It start with little things like 300 char long lines including various lambdas, closures and ifs with useless variables names, over overly generic and minified method/function names to inconsistent naming of files, classes and basically everything else.
I used to just set a breakpoint somewhere in my code (or in a compiled dependency) wait this it is being hit and go back and forth to learn how the system state changes.
This seems to be highly limited in JS. I didn't find the one way to just being able to debug, everything that is. There are weird things like transpilers, compiler, minifiers, bablers and what not else. There is an error? Go f... yourself ...
And what do I find as the number one tipp all across the internet? Console.log?? are you kidding me, sure just tell me, your kidding me right?
If I would have to describe the JS world in one word, I would use "inconsistency". It's all just a pain in the ass.

I remember when I switcher from VisualStudio/C# to Eclipse/Java I felt like traveling back in time for about 10 years. Everyting seemd so ... old-schoolish, buggy, weird.
When I now switch from java to JS it makes me feel the same way. It's all so highly unproductive, inconsistent, undeterministic, cobbled together.
For one inconveinience the JS communinity seems to like to build huge shitloads of stuff around it, instead of fixing the obvious. And noone seems to see that.
It's like they are all blinded somehow. Currently I'm also trying to implement a small react app based on react-admin. The simplest things to develop and debug are a nightmare. There is so much boilerplate that to write that most people in the internet just keep copying stuff, without even trying to understand what it actually does.
I've always been a guy that tries to understand what the fuck this code actuall does. And for most of the parts I just thing, that the stuff there is useless or could be done in a way more readable way. But instead, all the devs out there just seem to chose the "copy and fix somehow-ish" way.
I'm all in for component-izing stuff. I like encapsulation, I'm a OOP guy by heart. But what react and similar frameworks do is just insane. It's just not right (for some part).
Especially when you have to remember so much stuff that is just mechanics/boilerplate without having any actual "business logical function".

People always say java is so verbose. I don't think it is, there is so few syntax that it almost reads like a prose story. When I look at JS and TS instead, I'm overwhelmed by all the syntax, almost wondering every second line, what the actual fuck this could mean. The boilerplate/logic ration seems way to off ..

So it really makes me wonder, if all you JS devs out there are just so used to that stuff, that you cannot imagine how it could be done better? I still remember my C# days, but I admin that I just got used to java. So I can somehow understand that all. But JS is just another few levels less deeper.
But maybe I'm just lazy and too old ...

Please allow me to share my thoughts since I can't totally outrage my frustration because we have this so-called fasting to control our anger towards a person we currently disagree with.

A letter from your loving, sincere, pretty and gorgeous working partner to my young, chubby, smart and clever colleague:

Please do cooperate in times of live editing from the FTP since CTO is not and will never be going to appreciate version control since CTO is too tired for giving a shit and just want deliverables be delivered as fuck perfectly regardless of the resources that we have.

As you know, I tolerated you for not getting the freedom of live editing as what you've experienced from your previous team lead. All I ask of you is to get fresh file from FTP whenever we touch the same file because firstly, God knows how frustrating it is how your hard work is going to be replaced and be gone as much as I do. Secondly, I don't want you to experience how pain in the ass could this be in the long run, and lastly, I don't want any hard feelings to be wasted just because of this.

P.S. I'm too shy to send this to you because I don't want to hurt your feelings and don't want to sound too seriouz and feel old. I also hope we share the same telepathic understanding so we can agree with each other.

Your loving, sincere, pretty and gorgeous working partner,
xoxo ❤️

(thinking of stating my first name) 😂

Oh fucking Huawei.
Fuck you.
Inventory:
- Honor 6x (BLN-L22C675)
- Has EMUI4.1 Marshmallow
- Cousin brother 'A' (has bricking XP!)
- Uncle 'K'
- Has Mac with Windows VM
Goal:
- Stock as LineageOS / AOSP

Procedure (fucking seriously):
- Find XDA link to root H6X
- Go to Huawei page and fill out form
- Receive and use bootloader code
- Find latest TWRP
- Flash latest TWRP
- TWRP not working? Bootloops
- XDA search "H6X boot to recovery"
- Find and try modded TWRP
- TWRP fails, no bootloop
- Find & flash TWRP 3.1.0
- Yay! TWRP works
- Find and download LineageOS and SuperSU
- Flash via TWRP
- Yay! Success.
- Attempt boot
- Boot fails. No idea why
- Go back to TWRP
- TWRP gives shitload of errors
"cannot mount /data, storage etc."
- Feel fucked up
- Notice that userdata partition exists,
but FSTAB doesn't take
- Remembers SuperSU modded boot
image and FSTABS!
- Fuck SuperSU
- Attempt to mod boot image
- Doesn't work (modded successfully
but no change)
- Discover Huawei DLOAD
Installer for "UPDATE.APP" OTAs
Note: Each full OTA is 2+ GB zipped
- Find, download, fail on 4+ OTAs
- Discover "UPDATE.APP Extractor"
Runs on Windows
Note: UPDATE.APP custom format
Different per H6X model
- Uses 'K''s VM to test
- My H6X model does not have
a predefined format
- Process to get format requires
TWRP, which is not working
- FAIL HERE
- Discover "Firmware Finder"
Windows app to find Huawei
firmwares
- Tries 'K''s VM
- Fails with 1 OTA
- Downloads another firmware ZIP
- Unzips and tries to use OTA
- Works?!
- Boots successfully?!
- Seems to have EMUI 5.0 Nougat
- Downloads, flashes TWRP
- TWRP not working AGAIN?
- Go back to XDA page
- Find that TWRP on EMUI 5 - NO
- Find rollbacks for EMUI5 -> EMUI4
- Test, fail 2-4 times (Massive OTAs)
- DLOAD accepts this one?!!!
- I HAVE ORIG AGAIN!!!
- Re-unlock and reflash TWRP
- Realise that ROMs aren't working on
EMUI 4.1; Find TWRPs for EMUI5
- Find and fail with 2-3 OTAs
Note: Had removed old OTAs for
space on Chromebook (32GB)
- In anger, flash one with TWRP
instead of DLOAD (which checks
compatability)
- Works! Same wasn't working with
DLOAD
- Find and flash a custom TWRP
as old one still exists (not wiped in
flash)
- Try flashing LineageOS
- LineageOS stuck in boot
- Try flashing AOSP
- Same
- Try flashing Resurruction Remix
- Same
- Realise that need stock EMUI5
vendor
- Realise that the firmware I installed
wasn't for my device so not working
- FUCK NO MORE LARGE DLs
- Try another custom TWRP
- Begin getting '/cust mounting' errs
- Try reflashing EMUI5 with TWRP
- Doesn't work
- Try DLOADing EMUI5
- Like before, incompatability
- DLOAD EMUI4
- Reunlock and reflash TWRP
- WRITE THIS AS A BREAK
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I'm exhausted.
After one and a half year after my last rant, I'm here again. I left the previous job as web developer after almost 12y. At the time I found 3 new jobs as developer; I chose the one with the largest company, the premises were really good. My 3 interviews were excellent. But what I found next was almost a nightmare.
I was literally "confined" for the first 2 months, no internet connection, no email address, very little communication with colleagues. My near colleague was sharing the code were I would work via a usb key. All this for "safety" purposes, because "here you start this way".
For me it was not so bad, I could take my time to study my work and do it (without Stack Overflow and only by reference guides, when needed - I felt proud in an old way). But the next months were really tough: no help to understand what I missed about the work I was doing (consider that I was working on a large database, previously used by an old ERP, on which other developers - prior me - wrote a lot of code, to make the company continue use all the data after the expiration of the ERP licences - speaking about a year 2000's Java application).
Now I find myself struggling, because the main project on which I was working has been set aside (apparently for some budget decisions); my work team constantly make me do some manteinance on the old code, but the main tasks are done by the old mate, "because deadlines are always pressing and there would not be enough time to explain you anything". I'm not growing.
I'm really becoming reluctant to write code, and whenever I do it, I constantly feel under pressure, and this makes me nervous and inclined to make errors.
Don't take me wrong, I was/am good at my work, but it's like I'm loosing that sparkle I had till a few years ago.
When I'm at home I try to study or write code, just to keep training my mind, but I'm really struggling and I'm worried about losing my brain for doing this job. I constantly forget things and lose focus.
Never felt this way. I am thinking about the chance to switch again and search for another company.

I am now officially 23 years old.

So many hours of work invested
So many countless blood spilled
So much sweat made
So many years passed
So many projects worked on

Summed up in 0 successful projects

If someone were to ask me to showcase what I had done in 23 years of my life, I cannot show them something that no longer exists. The projects are dead. I cannot even prove my friends what I had done other than blindly say what I had done. But behind the scenes I worked so much and am completely demotivated by all of the pressure from failure. I have actually never felt so bad on my birthday. 2020 really is the worst year ever. I feel like a failure while life is just exponentially passing by.....

Today was not a good day for me at all ,being considered a junior developer is not a good thing.
Yes I know due to my lack of the understanding of your 3 years old code base I could not meet up with the deadlines.
So as a punishment one of our senior devs asked me to bring my chair to his desk and told me to commit and push my progress every ten minutes .
He'll then review reading each code line by line ., Reverting too.
The worst part was that for the ten minutes I'll need to wait another 5 , because he was watching some Fifa19 gameplays on YouTube.
This went on for 3 hours .

It worked because I feel like a title noob today .

Please, don't take this post seriously. I wrote it from anger.

I hate a lot of humans.

I was at a church today because family ties. I'm agnostic. That sums it up.

And now, I'm at a mall, and it's crowded, and I'm bumping into a lot of people with very low common sense. These fucking apes here have ZERO walk awareness. And a lot of them probably drive, which scares me.

When they make a line in a food shop, and the line gets too big, they curve the line so that the line can continue, like an L, but they leave TOO LITTLE GODDAMN SPACE TO WALK THROUGH!

There's a narrow ramp, next to some stairs, that I use to get to the nursery of the mall, but it also leads to the bathrooms. A lot of these disgusting beings use the ramp. Jesus fucking christ, USE THE SHITTIN FUCKING STAIRS.

tiday I was walking with the stroller the 9 month old which was (thank you alpha omega) sleeping.

I see one of those nice comfy couches, and there's a couple hugging in it but there's an empty spot. I come closer and it's occupied by their trash, some cups with ice cream.
I could not believe my eyes.
That shit's expensive. I would never leave shit with ice cream in my couch, and it's also a horrible gesture because it looks like you're denying it from others with your trash.

I just stared the trash down like really disappointed. They took the trash but I moved on because I was very salty at that point.

I find a seat next to a dad and his kid. I sit down, relieved. His daughter comes over, and almost yelling complains about him buying his brother.
I stared this little shit straight in her face because she could wake up my kid. She and her family was totally oblivious.

These are just minor events, but I come across a plethora of situations like this every day, like people turning on their turn lights 1/2 second before turning, or people that I meet on the street giving me fucking advice on raising kids.

That's the average mall experience. It's a place where selfful people thrive.

I shit you not, sometimes I imagine that a meteor strikes earth and while it makes me sad that all the people I consider kind will die, I orgasm at the thought of these filthy parasites just evaporating.

But then I realize that I'm being very cruel and intolerant. And feel guilty.

Sometimes I think that I should live in Japan or a similar place.
Japanese city people are very organized.
But then I remember that Japan has a suicide problem. And that it has a poverty problem. And a lot of outcasts. And that they barely have sex.
i dunno.

What the hell happened to devRant?

So we have this person who is digging up old posts, harassing people (@LotsOfCaffeine here, me as well, probably more) and some fucking how is getting 14 updoots while obviously being, or at least portraying themselves as a misogynistic hater of everyone and everything. What the actual hell is up with devRant? How are there FOURTEEN OTHER PELPLE who AGREE WITH THIS PERSON. How many active users are we here? I'm sure 14 users is a pretty significant percentage of the active user base.

People, I feel bad for this person. I've been a bit of a dick to them and so have many more, but what the hell happened to devRant, the place where you went to rant about stupid colleagues and bosses, share funny coding stories and other bulshittery? We're turning into fucking 4chan with politics, sexism and racism being the main story line here. I dont fucking get it. I'm on the brink of just leaving. I'm so fucking tired of this shit...

I've never used Windows in my day-to-day life. No kidding.
When I got my father's first computer, I used an old distribution called BBC Linux. I didn't have any computer knowledge, it was my first contact with a computer, so I went to a friend's house and asked for a CD to install on my computer. I don't know if this friend ended up making a "gotcha" and thought I'd give up, but I just read the manuals and fell in love. That was year 2000.
Then I used Conectiva Linux, then I went to Red Hat 9, then Slackware, then in 2007 I started using Solaris. And I stayed on Solaris (Solaris 10, Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris) until 2011.
In 2011 I bought a Mac. I stayed at Apple until 2020, when I couldn't stand Apple forcing me to buy new computers (I still don't understand how a 2011 iMac, i5 (4 Hyper Thread cores) with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD only runs up to High Sierra).
Then I bought a Dell. It came with Windows 10, the first thing I did was install WSL2. I could not stand it, the system is bad, sorry. I installed OpenSuse and have been using it for two years.

It's just that every day someone tells me "how can you use this"? "There is no alternative to Windows, do you want to be different?"

I know that my story was the reverse of the "mainstream", so I'm going to talk about my vision of Windows, that in my brain it is actually the "alternative".

- Having a file explorer without "tabs" in 2022 is unthinkable for me.
- I love terminal. And the Windows terminal is very limited. "ps ... | awk ... | xargs ..." is a must for me. "find ./ -name '...' -exec ..."... these things on Windows are totally "different" and have the "powershell way" while all other operating systems keep the same form. And cygwin is not an option. As Wine for serious work is also not.
- Dragging a file into the terminal, and having it write its path, is so natural, that when Windows didn't do it, I was dismayed.
- I've always used StarOffice, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. All the people in my story received my documents and reports as a PDF and no one complained. Until a coworker saw me editing in LibreOffice and said "oh I want it in word format". As long as he didn't know, everything was fine, right?
- Windows is paid. And is there advertising? I don't understand. And I refuse. If you want to display advertising, then excuse me. I have no problem paying, I'm not an opensource shiite. It's just that paying and not working bothers me much more than an opensource that I can fix or expect a fix knowing the good will of the people involved.
- Hyper-V is a joke. QEMU/KVM is better, and Bhyve on FreeBSD which is a very young project, is already a million times better than Hyper-V.
- Developing in C/C++ for Windows is only possible in two ways: Either you've always lived in Windows and your brain is conditioned, or you compile with MSYS2 (CLang or GCC).
- There is no significant evolution of the windows desktop since 95.
- Multiple workspace support with multiple monitors, not ready. It's another joke.
- REGEDIT does not need any comment.
- The system loses performance over time. I still don't know how Windows achieves this.
- I've seen people complain about desktop fragmentation on Unix and Linux. Many DEs end up leaving applications with different themes (like running a Qt application in Gnome and GTK in KDE), but to be quite honest, the lack of Windows standard bothered me much more. Even Microsoft's own software is completely different: Control Panel, Calculator, Paint and Office, To-Do, and Settings, have horrible style differences and look-and-feel fragmentation.
- Dark mode has not been implemented. It's another joke. Many applications are white while everything else is dark. Sorry, even on Linux which is a mess, this has been resolved. And well resolved.
- NTFS? Serious?
- C:, D:.. It doesn't convince me since DOS.
- Bloatware.
- News "biased" in the search bar is a lack of respect for those who use the computer to work.

And that. For me, Windows is the alternative operating system. I can't take Windows seriously, for me it's an experimental one like Haiku or ReactOS. It's good to play.

About market share, it doesn't convince me to use it. But convinces me to sell. I've always developed applications to run on Windows. And when I need it, I turn on a VM to compile the project. But in everyday life? Impractical.

RETARD MASTER: So how did you feel about this sprint DEV?

*nothing is planned, new tickets added each day and old ones removed - inconsistent sprint*

DEV: Well, it’s a bit chaotic, but it’s understandable. I’m used to it. Nothing’s to blame here. Client can’t produce their end of the bargain on time.

*3 week later*

DEV MANAGER: So RETARD MASTER gave a feedback. He told me you insulted him.

DEV: Can I please die now? Not funny.

So my company hired this very old guy. The oldest developer I have worked with. I feel they took him just because of diversity.

Because he was absolutely incompetent.

Nothing he wrote ever worked, he got in conflict with everyone, made stupid jokes at meetings, asked the dumbest questions. His stories would hang for weeks, hopping sprint over sprint. Once he delivered something, his code had to be re-written from scratch. A code review couldn't even be applied as the code was worthless, so it just made sense to reassign his tasks to someone else and move on.

So after much drama he was let go. It was maybe two years ago and I recently connected with him on LinkedIn. He's changed four or more jobs since then. Prior to coming to our company he also job-hopped all the time (but most likely he was actually fired every time). His average job duration was like 6 months. Apart from that, he had a 20+ year stay with some government agency.

I fail to grasp how he ever gets hired anywhere with all the red flags. Over two decades with some govt agency (in my country they are all crap). Then change jobs every half an year or so. Then the asshole attitude. And finally, they probably never asked him any technical questions, because he knew nothing. Our interns who were just one month into the job were better by a WIDE margin.

Friends of mine have a new flat.

It's a nice flat. Cheap. Noone wanted it. 100 square meters.

Reason noone wanted it...

Previous owners were bastards from hell.

Really. Every motherfucking room needed to be completely renovated by the owner.

Door frames were made of wood, nice and old - at least the part that was left of them. Splinters, scratch marks, partially broken out of the wall.

2 windows needed to be fully replaced. Rest of the windows needed to be bleached, PET abrasive cleaning solution and the frames needed repair with resin as they drilled into the frames. Then treatment with sealant of course.

Yes. There was no other solution. After bleaching you recognized the windows were white. Before... Let's not talk about it.

The previous owners even managed to destroy the bathtub.

The kitchen tiles... Fat cleaner. Bleaching. Abrasion. Polishing.

Soooo.

Day of moving.

The apartment is in the 6th floor / level.

Cran / lift was ordered.

16 people wanted to come.

7 people came.

2 including myself couldn't lift heavy stuff nor walk the stairs due to health issues.

Crane broke after first try.

Today. I want to murder the previous owners. After torture and crucification.

I'm feeling levels of pain I couldn't Imagine before.

Only hate and beer let's me keep my shit together.

I REALLY didn't think after renovating and cleaning the flat for my friends in the last several weeks that it could get worse.

Boy. I was wrong.

Thanks for letting me vent here. I really feel devastated currently -.-

And I need to help them tomorrow, too.

Bikini Atoll, tchernobyl and every other atom bomb desaster Zone combined looks better than the chaos in their flat.

Everyone who could lift shoved everything inside.

I solo carried everything that wasn't too large in the room and then, as every room looked like desaster, completely managed the kitchen (cleaning, unpacking, trash, placing everything where it belongs and so on) :( :(

Ok going to rant about other developers this time.

Can you please stop doing just the minimal amount of work on your games/apps?!

I understand you may not have the time to go through with a fine tooth comb but just delay it, delay it and finish the product to a state that doesn't feel half assed and broken right at the get go.

A small note that the thing that triggered me with this is Android Devs at the moment, with Google requiring you support the adaptive icons and a newer SDK, so many Devs are just scraping by and putting in no effort to bring things up to date (also put more effort into adaptive icons rather than just putting your old square Icon on a white background)

This shit is just leading to everything being 'early access' or in a constant 'beta' stage with the promise of polish later.

Don't be that guy, put the extra few days of polish in... Just please...

Today I tried medication (concerta 36mg) for my ADD for the first time in my life (im 26 years old).

Result is fuck yeah! I feel like a human being whos able to focus on shit. Im so jealous of normal people having a decent attention span and decent working memory.

Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer

Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....

Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while

But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...

The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm

He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.

I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.

Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.

My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"

I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)

He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)

Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.

Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.

I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.

Am really Fed up with it all

!rant

Hey all, I just wanted to spread some aware to mental health issues in this industry since I'm very close to burn out according to my psychiatrist.
I'm not even 25 years old, just worked 1 1/2 years full time and 3 years apprenticeship before that. So, I'm pretty young and "new" as a software developer.
Many projects got wrong horribly and fights with the clients felt as they were carried out on the back of the developers. Timings and specifications were communicated poorly, deadlines were undoable but no one listened.
I thought, this is normal. Now, after weeks of on-off-working because of reoccurring small illnesses, clearly caused by the permanently high stress levels, my psychiatrist, which I visited yesterday for the first time, was totally shocked. She was surprised, I could even handle it so long. That hit me quite a bit. I already expected it to be bad, but close to burn out... That came, I don't want to say unexpected, but quite unexpected.
It was really hard holding the tears back while telling her my story.
And now here I am. I'm currently on sick leave till the end of the year (then my employment at this company ends) and I feel bad for them, to leave them. I know, they could use my knowledge and abilities, but I shouldn't damage my mental health even more.
I will not work for the entire January. If my psychiatrist thinks, I shouldn't work in February as well, I will do so even though my plan was to work again.
I will not work full time again, since my brain seems to not be able to handle it. Maybe some time in the future.

This turned out to be way more sad than expected. I just wanna leave this here. Thanks for reading.

If you people are in such horrible situations, try to break out.

The story of how I got my dream job.

I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.

--A few weeks pass--

It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!

I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)

The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.

--D-day--

I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!

Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.

We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.

I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.

--Two days later--

I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.

--A few months later--

I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.

I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).

I dropped my kid off at preschool and went my way home.

She's 2 so I transport her on a stroller.

While coming back, I came across an old lady sweeping the sidewalk of her house, and it got narrow to pass through because there was a tree next to her.

I carefully slowed down as to not collide with her, and while going through, we noticed each other.

I did a tiny smile as a way of saying "hi" like I usually do to people on the street.

To which she gave back the most innocent and sweet smile I've ever seen a stranger give on the street.

I could honestly feel my heart crack as it happened.

I guess the stroller must have caused her sympathy thus that reaction.

(which is why I like going around with the stroller, because people tend to treat you nicely which feels nice, like butterflies)

I know it might seem like an ordinary story without a punchline, but let me explain that I walk this city everyday.

And even though the people here is very nice compared to other cities I've lived in, it is very rare to get smiled at with such joy.

You might still think that is not a good story. But I can explain its relevance.

As some of you know, I post triggering content on this account, closeted parts of me that I normally hide,

Such as sexual stuff, some people think I'm a degenerate but I like to think I just have normal sexual thoughts that don't affect others in real life AT ALL.

And I'm also very argumentative, again, some people might see it as troll behaviour. On my side though, I just don't like bullshit and call it out when I see it.

But with this post, I'm not trying to be more likable or negate all the weird shit I said. This post is just another closeted part of me, being emotional.

And the reason I hide that is because it is not generally well accepted when a man is sensitive, at least where I'm from.

For example, if a female friend at work had a nice haircut, sometimes I feel the urge to be like "omg girl you look so prettyyyy!!!!".

But if I did that I know what will happen based on DIRECT experience: people will assume I'm gay or weak, and will make fun of that.
Or the actual friend will think I'm hitting on her.

No, fucking thank you, not having that shit.

But even if people accepted that, they just can't conceive I'm also very direct and honest, so when they do get to know me better, they get shocked.

So what do I do? I just hide that. That might change in the future, but I don't have the energy right now to deal with some people's simplemindedness.

I'm not making any sort of political statement, like "people should be treat me correctly or else get fired because of offending my gender".

But I'm not gonna lie, it would feel very nice if I was around more progressive people. I wished I had just just standard male behaviour and thoughts.

I guess some people in progressive cities are more accepting of the whole gender fluid thing, so I wished I lived in one (let me clarify though, I'm not a mindless gender fanatic).

I'm also not perfect and sometimes the line between "I love your haircut" and "I'm into you" blurs the fuck out, so that's on me... I don't know if it's something I can change though...

Hopefully all this shit I'm saying doesn't make me look like a lunatic. Veeeery hopefully.

Though, If you think for real I'm a lunatic or bad person, you can suck donkey dick.

To long to read. So don’t do it.

I feel disappointed. It’s not about job or stuff. I’m disappointed about world in general. I don’t see my future on this planet anymore.

The world more or less looks like that :

Politics are trying to help you by stealing more money from you. The more you’re lucky the more money you will pay for it.

Media punch you with some family stuff from everywhere, give you young rich and far away, beautiful picture photos of places, people and food that you at most could visit once or twice per year during holidays that are break from work concentration camps.

If you’re lucky you’re rich or got rich or wealthy and infamous so you can walk wherever you want and don’t give a fuck what you wear but again your old friends are not so lucky bastards so you need to find new friends that are probably assholes. At the end most of the days you you’re doing nothing except killing time to meet with people you like during weekends or evenings.

Then there are families and everyone want to tell you that’s important. Family is like herd of assholes, if you’re weak they will sacrifice you and tell that you’re looser behind your back but when you get wealthy they will come back to tell you that when you were young and stupid they played with you so now you have to buy them some stuff or get them a job.

At the end there are people with “I wrote that book” certificate of excellence try to sell you opinions on everything starting from sexual positions ending on how to take a good dump. The problem is that the moment they wrote that book it becomes obsolete. Teachers of useless knowledge from last century that forgot about google or wikipedia.

All of them are playing your emotions, cause impulses and hormones are what makes you weak and people are looking for your weaknesses to take advantage of you. Get your money or get your attention and maybe even both at the same time. Cause views matter you know it. So like and subscribe dumb fucks.

If you’re lucky you find couple of them who aren’t doing that. Who the fuck knows why but this shit happens. It doesn’t matter if they’re family or you met them month ago. Those are only to keep and hardest to find. Unluckily those also can change by other people they meet or when they’re young.

If you can’t find a friend get a dog or cat or whatever animal you like. Their love is unconditional and obvious to read.

Well that’s most of the “I want to be spotted” culture that is all boring as fuck. Personalized ass and glamorous pictures and short movies of everything you don’t need but looks awesome. And as you see it’s still growing with more specialized portals like onlyfans, twitch and tiktok. We all need to look at what everyone else have or want to have cause 99% of time 99% of us are boring and is bored as fuck. Most of us can repeat same small amount set of stories all their life cause we’re not created to entertain.

I don’t feel joy looking at this shit fucked full of shit people arguing who’s dick is bigger. Who can post most dumb thing. I think I need a break but how to break from everything ? How to break from culture of money where to live on your country land you need to pay property tax ?

That’s all fucked up. Life’s fucked up.

Had a blast from the past the other day. Testing an issue with an AngularJS app in IE11 on a project managers Surface.

Nothing works. Just a blank screen. I open the JavaScript console to hundreds, maybe thousands of errors. They all seem eerily familiar, but I can't place them. It's like something from a past life.

Then I see one that brings the issue into sharp focus.

"{{variable_name}} is a reserved word"

No it isn't, I think. That hasn't been a reserved word in JavaScript since...

Me: "Is your browser in Compatibility Mode?"

PM: "Yeah, it's for one of our legacy programs"

Me: "You need to turn that off to test this app. It thinks you're using IE6, so it's having a 2 decade old shit-fit. I haven't seen those errors since I was a teenager making crap on Geocities"

I never thought an error message could make me feel so old 😩

This scene is an 8-year-old.
My friend(F) got his first mobile. First featured mobile.
Maximum smartness in that mobile was a snake game and Bluetooth.
So I decided to prank him.
M: Bro do you know this particular model need a network to use Bluetooth?
F: I am not stupid to believe you.
M: I can prove that.
F: K prove me, I will give you treat.
M: ok, turn on your Bluetooth paired it with my Bluetooth.
F: Ok
*start sending him the movie. We were on the train, a train was about to enter the tunnel*
M: When the train will enter a tunnel, We will lose network and sending will fail.
F: ok let's see.

*when a train enters in a tunnel, we shift light to black in meantime for 3-4 sec our eyes feel blindness. so I closed eyes before entering a tunnel and once train enter in the tunnel immediately restart Bluetooth *

M: look sending failed
F: Seriously man, I didn't know that.
M: It's ok bro next time inform me before buying any electronics.
F: sure
M: my treat?
F: Yup

*for next few days, he was thinking that Bluetooth need a network to send files until whole group laugh on him*

I don't know why I am a programmer. I went into engineering because I wanted to make video games. I did controls engineering to make physical systems go vroom. Now I mainly write software to make specialized physical systems go vroom. When I was a kid this was not what I would have wanted to do with my life. My 10 year old version of me is standing over me looking down saying "Pathetic". I feel like I need to do something about this before I die.

I want to make a game system for RPGs that is similar to an authoring tool to allow me to make games with some very specific features. Think creation kit for arbitrary RPG games. I am thinking I could make the authoring tool a product as well. If people want to make their own games. But I also want to make moddable RPG games using the authoring tool. I want to give people the ability to mod the game. So I am struggling with how to allow modding and sell an authoring tool. License to distribute unique games? I dunno, maybe I will just keep it as a modding tool for the games I make. I feel like good quality games are moddable. I hardly want to play anything that isn't.

A bit of backstory...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, a few words about this setup :
- I am not Portuguese, my girlfriend got this poster while on a trip
- The second monitor is very old and uses fluorescent tubes. It's shitty and not stylish, but useful at times
- Yes, I use a standalone scanner. Every multifunction printer I've had ended up suiciding itself, and suicided the built in scanner with it. A standalone scanner should be indestructible.
- The case is open because I haven't paid much attention to fans and stuff, so it gets pretty hot when gaming
- Talk about gaming : I dual boot W10/Ubuntu but use the original Gnome DE with Adwaita Dark (I love it). However, W10 is only useful for Lightroom and games. When Steam released proton, I decided to start using Darktable for photo editing in order to ditch Windows once and for all. That will probably happen in the coming months.
- I have not wired my home yet, so I use a router as Wi-Fi receiver.
- The top of the desk is not the original one. It used to be a glass one, but I didn't like the feel and it was too small. So I made a wooden one and painted it with paint my father had left over. However, it ended up looking hideous and sticks to the skin when resting on it for a long time. It has to be changed/fixed.
- The headphones hanger is just a big ass screw, and the headphones jack has been fixed at least a dozen times. I even changed the cable two times.
- The mic is shitty but cost only 8€ on eBay.

I haven't really known what to post. But I've decided not to care about being relevant or care about the like count. I'm a very competitive person so things like like count tend to effect the way I see the quality of a post.

I want devRant to be a place where I can be honest and feel safe even if I don't get the validation I sometimes wish I had. And hey maybe someone will think my opinions or thoughts are interesting.

So let's start with a little about me. I'm a 17 year old kid that loves programming. I work full time as a full stack web developer and I'm really the only web person. The current system is built on WordPress because of fucking course it is. I don't like it but I gotta keep it user friendly for less techy people to manage. No one likes have all minor changes and tweaks having to go through one person when they could do it themselves. So I manage.

I'd say my passion is more backend development but I do love having a pretty UI to display the results.

I've struggled with mental health the past few years but I'm doing much better. Even just last week I had an anxiety attack during a social event. I came here for the community and I do enjoy it, but I'm gonna try to make it an outlet. My best friend went off to university and I don't really have any IRL friends I can just be me around.

I don't have anything special to say. But if you read this thank you for listening to some random kid on the internet. I hope you have a great day.

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

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

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

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

Most painful code error you've made?

More than I probably care to count.

One in particular where I was asked to integrate our code and converted the wrong value..ex

The correct code was supposed to be ...

var serviceBusMessage = new Message() {ID = dto.InvoiceId ...}

but I wrote ..

var serviceBusMessage = new Message() {ID = dto.OrderId ...}

At the time of the message bus event, the dto.OrderId is zero (it's set after a successful credit card transaction in another process)

Because of a 'true up' job that occurs at EOD, the issue went unnoticed for weeks. One day the credit card system went down and thousands of invoices needed to be re-processed, but seemed to be 'stuck', and 'John' was tasked to investigate, found the issue, and traced back to the code changes.

John: "There is a bug in the event bus, looks like you used the wrong key and all the keys are zero."
Me: "Oh crap, I made that change weeks ago. No one noticed?"
John: "Nah, its not a big deal. The true-up job cleans up anything we missed and in the rare event the credit card system goes down, like now. No worries, I can fix the data and the code."
<about an hour later I'm called into a meeting>
Mgr1: "We're following up on the credit card outage earlier. You made the code changes that prevented the cards from reprocessing?"
Me: "Yes, it was my screw up."
Mgr1: "Why wasn't there a code review? It should have caught this mistake."
Mgr2: "All code that is deployed is reviewed. 'Tom' performed the review."
Mgr1: "Tom, why didn't you catch that mistake."
Tom: "I don't know, that code is over 5 years old written by someone else. I assumed it was correct."
Mgr1: "Aren't there unit tests? Integration tests?"
Tom: "Oh yea, and passed them all. In the scenario, the original developers probably never thought the wrong ID would be passed."
Mgr1: "What are you going to do so this never happens again?"
Tom: "Its an easy addition to the tests. Should only take 5 minutes."
Mgr1: "No, what are *you* going to do so this never happens again?"
Me: "It was my mistake, I need to do a better job in paying attention. I knew what value was supposed to passed, but I screwed up."
Mgr2: "No harm no foul. We didn't lose any money and no customer was negativity affected. Credit card system may go down once, or twice a year? Nothing to lose sleep over. Thanks guys."

A week later Mgr1 fires Tom.

I feel/felt like a total d-bag.

Talking to 'John' later about it, turns out Tom's attention to detail and 'passion' was lacking in other areas. Understandable since he has 2 kids + one with special-needs, and in the middle of a divorce, taking most/all of his vacation+sick time (which 'Mgr1' dislikes people taking more than a few days off, that's another story) and 'Mgr1' didn't like Tom's lack of work ethic (felt he needed to leave his problems at home). The outage and the 'lack of due diligence' was the last straw.

this just happened a few seconds ago and I am just laughing at the pathetic site that is Facebook. xD
4 years ago:
So I was quite a noobie gamer/hacker(sort of) back then and i had a habit of having multiple gmail/fb accounts, just for gaming, like accounts through which i can log in all at once in the same poker room, so 4/5 players in the game are me, or just some multiple accounts for clash of clans for donations.
I had 7-8 accounts back then. one had a name that translated to "may the dead remain in peace "@yahoomail.com . it was linked to fb using same initials. after sometime only this and 2 of my main accs were all i cared about.even today when i feel like playing, i sometimes use those accs.

2 years ago.
My dad is a simple man and was quite naive to modern techs and used to hang around with physical button nokia phones.But we had a business change, my father was now in a partnership in a restaurant where his daily work included a lot of sitting job and and casual working. So he bought a smartphone for some time pass.
He now wanted to download apps and me to teach him.I tried a lot to get him his own acc, but he couldn't remember his login credentials.
so at the end i added one of my own fake ID's(maythedead...) so he could install from playstore, watch vids on youtube and whatever.

The Actual Adventure starts now
Today, 1 hour ago:
I had completely forgot about this incident, since my parents are now quite modern in terms of tech.
But today out of nowhere i recieved an email that someone has JUST CHAINGED MY FB PASSWORD FOR ONE OF MY FAKE ACCS!?!??
what the hell, i know it was just a useless acc and i never even check my fb from any acc these days, but if someone could login into that acc, its not very difficult to track my main accs, id's, etc so i immediately opened this fb security portal and that's where the stupidity starts:

1)To recover your account they FUCKIN ASKS FOR A PHYSICAL ID. yeah, no email, no security question you have to scan your driving license or passport to get back to your account.And where would I get a license for some person named "may the dead remain in peace"? i simply went back.
2) tried another hack that i thought that will work.Closed fb help page, opened fb again , tried to login with my old credentials, it says" old password has been changed,please enter new password", i click forget password and they send an otp. i thought yes i won, because the number and recover mail id was mine only so i received it.
when i added the otp, i was first sent to a password change page (woohoo, i really won! :)) but then it sends me again to the same fuckin physical id verification page.FFFFFFFFFuck

3)I was sad and terrified that i got hacked.But 10 mins later a mail comes ,"Your Facebook password was reset using the email address on Tuesday, April 10, 2018 at 8:24pm (UTC+05:30)."
I tried clicking the links attached, hoping that the password i changed(point<2>) has actually done something to account.NADA, the account still needs a physical license to open:/

4) lost, i just login to my main account and lookup for my lost fake account. the fun part:my account has the display pic of my father?!!?!
So apparently, my father wanted to try facebook, he used the fake account i gave him to create one, fb showed him that this id already has an fb account attached to it and he accidently changed my password.MY FATHER WAS THE HACKER THE WHOLE TIME xD.
but response from fb?" well sir, if you want your virtually shitty account back , you first will have to provide us with all details of your bank transactions or your voter id card, maybe trump will like it"

30 and feel too old to learn programming. suddenly get opportunities to code at work in a framework that I hate. asp.net

also manager approves my request to give a windows server exam with Microsoft which is in a month. never been so stressed :/

When I started off working on this particular project under a new technical manager, I used to love working overtime because the work and the problem we were trying to solve was really interesting. My technical lead was also a really awesome dude and I was able to learn a lot of things under his guidance. A couple of times, I didn't even mind working on the weekends too in case we wanted to meet some strict deadlines. I wanted to make sure that my team's brand name does not get spoiled and we deliver on what we promise.

It was all good until all the management started taking our overtime and weekend work for granted. It took me some time to realize this. Now it almost became a part of standard expectations. It was getting irritating. Managers could see this uneasiness but chose to do nothing.

The work increased, so did the team and the communication channels. The newbies in the team now worked overtime and on weekends. And everybody started acting as if it was normal. That's when it stuck me that I am responsible for inculcating this unsustainable and life sucking culture in the team. I stopped working overtime and started questioning the set deadlines, often asking them to postpone things. Management got furious and changed their focus on the newbies who'd work overtime, often rewarding them to reinforce the behavior.

I tried undoing it, asking managers that the team will not work on weekends. There was friction and managers would agree but the old bad habited cultural spore would pop up tume and again and the team would go back to the regular overtime and working weekends thing. As more time passed, the managers would circumvent me and start talking to others in the team, giving them work and deadlines directly because I started to say 'No' when I felt the need to do so. I tried to protect some folks in the team who would not be able to speak up but were frustrated. I started caring less about the team's brand and more about colleagues who were suffering due to such unethical (and illegal?) practices being normalised in the team.

Trying again and again to get back to 'normal', I failed everytime. Unsure of how far I'll be able to go on with this without getting severly burnt in the process and seeing no respite, I decided to move on. I put in my resignation two weeks back and want to start a fresh in another company.

I feel I am responsible for bringing this into the team without realizing the repurcussions of my working overtime. Staying in the team for more than 3.5 years, I could actually feel how managers have no fucks about your personal life and work life balance (despite showing oh so much concern about the well being of my family) and would reward anyone who works as per their whims and fancies. I wish I never get to work for a management such as this.

Sorry I haven't been as active lately, however this is one of the better prompts, so I feel I should have it in my track record. Beware, it's a long one...

Let's trace the roots: My uncle was building desktops and he told my dad he'd build him one if my dad paid him for the components. These days I know builds aren't rocket science, but back then my parents didn't do their research. So my dad paid him.

Give or take some time, and most of the parts are complete. He underestimated the prices of a few things and had to ask for $200 more to complete the build. This...caused my dad to explode.

Later, I heard my dad ranting to my stepmom in January 2017 about how the last convo he had with his brother was a "Fuck-you conversation" - it was the last because my uncle had died in 2003.

Flash forward to March 2017. My mom and I are sitting in a Fazoli's, a nice sunset out of the full-length windows. I had to probe. HAD TO.

"You promise you won't tell your dad I told you this?" she asked.

"You know Kellie and I can't stand to be around him." I replied.

As the story goes, that last "Fuck-you conversation"? Over a fucking measly $200. Yup, the last conversation between my dad and his brother to ever happen was a shouting match over a relatively short amount of money. I wish I could say my dad had remorse, but he doesn't. He still talks shit. He's also technologically illiterate, so I doubt there was a way his brother was going to be able to reason with him.

In late 2003, my uncle, who had been a smoker, passed away due to cardiac arrest. The build was still not finished. This was one of the OTHER things that I have mixed feelings about.

After my uncle passed, my aunt paid someone to finish the build and get it shipped to my dad. We'll get back to why I feel this is fucked up, stay tuned...

---------

It's Spring 2004. I'm in the last half of what I think is Kindergarten or some shit...too lazy to do the math. Anyway, my dad announces we have a family computer - however, I couldn't read yet. That didn't stop the waste of oxygen that is my father from going in the Windows XP screensavers and putting text in that said "GAGE MORGAN WILL NOT TOUCH THIS COMPUTER." He's such a fuckin' dick, now AND back then.

My mom had an issue with this. I don't know why, but she did. Later, I was slowly taught how to use the mouse, under heavy supervision. Then I went to my grandma's house. She taught me one very specific thing on her old Win98 (386, maybe? IDK my old hw shit man), and because I know you guys are gonna love this one:

"The blue "e" opens up your games!"
The blue "e" does not open up your games, it opens something that can lead to your games.

I went home and tried this...without permission. My dad came down and discovered my lollygagging on the homepage - this is fucking weird. It was before Nextel, IIRC, so Sprint's logo was red still. Yes, we had broadband from Sprint. I don't know what saga led to that going the way of the dodo, but...

Back on track, I literally got my pants pulled down and had my bare bottom beat. He was gonna drag my ass upstairs and lock me in my room, but before he could, he accidentally slammed MY FUCKING RIGHT TEMPLE into the corner of a hardwood table at the bottom of the staircase.

The wailing that resulted probably was different than the previous form, which is probably what got my mom involved. My dad had a way of going too far, and in retrospect I'm more terrified now of what could've happened than I was then.

Later, I was given access to games in the form of my own account and bookmarks bar. That wasn't the end of the madness/drama from my use of that machine, but it was the earliest form.

Ever since Kindergarten, that one fateful day, I've been defying any/all imposed limitations on tech set on me by my parents...well, not anymore, but literally grades K-12. I'm living on my own, aka "adulting" now. It sucks more than you think, man.

---------

Let's tie this up before I reach the limit. I said I thought it was fucked up when my aunt paid to have the build finished and shipped to us after my uncle's death.

Yes, my aunt's intervention led to me ultimately majoring in computer science.

That doesn't change the fact that she shouldn't have done it.

My dad was an asshole to her husband, who passed. She is ultimately too caring. I don't think my jackass father should've been able to get by with that, he didn't deserve the freebie. Someone else should've told him his brother did in fact need that $200.

I haven't seen her IRL since the funeral when my grandpa passed in 2005. 2006 spelled the end of my parents' marriage.

Hope you guys enjoyed this - it's only a small segment of how I got to where I am now - tiny, actually.

Stupid ass nimble fucker of an old friend talks to me for a whole week after a reunion saying stuff like "I'm glad we got to spent time together bro and stuff", the soul eater of poop being sets up a conversation over a week talking like he was a true friend. He only had to manage it for a week more, hell he had to resist his urge for a puny ass week and I would've considered that maybe good people existed. Well the universe along with this Pseudo-panty fuck decided it was time, they pitch me an "idea". Well after demonstrating kindly that I could technically pull (n) such ideas from my virtual butthole. The guy finally believes his idea was stupid and moves away. A minute later. SURPRISE MOTHER FUCKER! he says, telling me that he got an amazing idea along and if I could help him with some stuff. Well.. What? I jumped at this amazing opportunity. Not because of the dangling-dickina of an idea, because this was my way out of this misery fucks life. Alright should buy me some time right? He would go watch some tutorials, make a logo and call me when there's a problem. We'll in the milli fucking time that even a big bang couldn't have recurred, the bitch calls and says.. Bro, sorry for disturbing you, I need some help... [What did your mother from another son tell you she only gave birth to half of you?]
APPARENTLY, THE GUY JOINED FORCES WITH SOME INTELLIGENT MINDS AND SETUP A LEAGUE OF LIKE MINDED NECROPHILES AND I COULD HELP THIS DREAM TEAM with a name and a logo.
It started, I could sense it. I wasn't THE CHOSEN ONE. Tired, I said I'll see what I can do while attempting to block his number. A few hours later, he calls from another number with no shame and asks BRO? DID YOU. Did me what you bloody dick lubricator. Yeah I watched your mom a couple times, then I got bored when I found out it was an ad.

Unfortunately no I did not tell that, instead I used the kindest words I could pull out of my frustrated ass to tell him I won't do it cause I have better things to do.

The guy comes back a few hours later with an emotional back-story of how this is his way out of his sad ass life and saying stuff like sorry to disturb you bro, I never meant to.

Oh my gawd! Give this douche manufacturer an Oscar. Actually give him two!!

————

After this traumatic experience I often feel for such people. They have around 90 years to live. They have a free fucking brain. They have money. They have less problems.

Why can't they come up with a worthy idea with all these factors to compound the ideation process.

And why on the earth can't they make the Idea on their own. I'm completely self taught so I don't see it being a problem. I could well say that I'm more knowledgeable than a few grads out of my stupid college but I don't wanna compare myself to those stupid beings.

If you have an idea? Make it. Die for it. But never approach another being, either he eats you or you eat him.

I have nothing to play recently so I started playing old games.

Today I launched gta vice city on my old pc. Got more than 200 hours in that game during my childhood. Game from 2002 and I laughed when driving a car. It was so natural and fun. Michael Jackson singing Billy Jean and police chasing my ass when I’m trying to find a bribe in the city. That was fun.

For me most of today’s games can’t compete in gameplay mechanics with that game from 20 years ago.
Maybe we have better graphics but gaming fun got worse.

I think it’s cause most of games are made on commercial engines to save money and game studios focus on graphics cause it’s cheaper than paying software developer.

They focus on games to be competitive between players so ai got worse.

Big studio games became generic like movies, they don’t want you to have fun but they want to give you a story around by delivering lots of content in game, achievements, stars but the gameplay itself is bugged and meh.

They don’t focus on things people want to do but they focus on target groups. Most today’s big title games are meh cause they’re made by people who don’t play them.

They don’t play them cause they don’t have time cause of management that changes requirements cause they asked target groups and that would sell. Well if I play a game I’m not interested in story despite some basic stuff to keep the progress forward, if I wanted a big story I would watch a movie or tv show. I play games to explore, feel the world and have fun. I don’t need a linear deep story for that cause I’m in game so give me good gameplay so I can feel the world.

Most of classic game hits didn’t had tons of text and tons of stuff to do but they somehow wanted you to play more. Cause they were competitive between player and computer, the controls felt natural and while progressing you was eaten by the game mechanics more and more not by the story but by amount of stuff you could do as you progress or difficulty increase or enemies behavior change.

Now we’re getting all at once, mostly pointed and with detailed tutorial what you can do. There’s no explanation there’s no discovery what you can and what you can’t do at start. You get all and you decide to throw game away because the moment you launched it you got everything so you spent money just to get stuff you won’t play cause it’s meh and you go back to cs or other looter shooter to kill people cause you’re pissed off that the game was meh.

Well I’m glad I was a kid in 90s and 2000s cause I could enjoy gaming before it was targeted to broader public and become another shallow mass media industry that don’t give a fuck about gameplay cause they want to tell you so many things, they want you to know them cause they’re so important that they forgot that I can read a book and I came to play game to get a different feeling then reading book.

Modern games are like books filled with small stories and nice graphics where you can open it on every page and read a little piece of shitty crap.

Just take this piece and go to toilet so you can wipe your ass with that story and begin other one, look around, puke and go to toilet to take a dump again. I lost my hope to get something fresh or filled with nice gameplay from gaming industry. It’s dead.

! rant

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

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

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

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

It got worse. Much, much worse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So about 3 weeks ago I was laid off from my dream job due to corporate bullshit. From the feedback received since then it is clear that the company made a mistake hiring a brand new React dev while they really needed an experienced one. Because the consultants who were supposed to be weren't. And the other in-house front end dev was an elitist asshole. And I never received proper feedback until it was too late. Actually I still don't have proper feedback save for some vague stuff which really sounds like the kind of feedback you'd give someone in the middle of their learning process. They even said eventually given more time I could have made it. But alas they felt they had to make a call in the best interest of the company.

Things moved fast since then, I took a week to recover and then I spent time updating my resume before getting back in touch with the recruiter who got me my last job. Great guy and he was happy to help me again. Applied to some positions, got some replies, first in person interview I go to they are immediately willing to take me on.

So now I'm supposed to start tomorrow but somehow I'm having my doubts. The company isn't an IT company but rather a fashion company. They believe in developing in house tools because past attempts with external companies resulted in them trying to push their vision through. Knowing who they worked with I agree, they tried to oversell all the time. But after talking with their developers I noticed they are behind on their knowledge. But so am I. So there was no tech interview which means I am getting an easy way in. And if they honour their word I'll be signing tomorrow for around my old wages.

So you'd think that sounds good right? And yet I'm worried it's going to be another shit show working on software without proper analysis or best practices. I mean the devs aren't total idiots, they are mediors like me and I think their heart is in the right place. They want to develop a good project but it will be just us 3 making a modern .net wpf application with the same functionality of the old Access based system currently in use. I was urged by the boss to draw on my experience and I think he wants me to help teach them too. But I'm painfully aware for my decade since graduating I'm a less than average .net dev who struggles with theory and never worked a job where I had someone more experienced to teach me. I coasted most of the time in underpaid jobs due to various reasons. But I'd always get mad over shitty code and practices. Which I realize is hypocritical for someone who couldn't explain what a singleton class is or who still fails at separation of concerns.

So yeah my question for the hivemind is what advice would you give a dev like me? I honestly dislike how poor I perform but it often feels like an insurmountable climb, and being over 30 makes it even more depressing. On the other hand I know I should feel blessed to find a workplace who seems to genuinely believe that people grow and develop and wishes to support me in this. Part of me thinks I should just go in, relax, but also learn till I'm there where I want to be and see if these people are open to improving with me. But part of me also feels I'm rushing into this, picking the first best offer, and it sure feels like a step backwards somehow. And that then makes me feel like an ugly ungrateful person who deserves her bad luck because she expects of others what she can't even do herself :(

Longest I've worked without rest + why?

Over 24 hours. Why?

In our old system, the database had fields, for example, a customer like Total97, Total98, etc. to store values by year (or some date-specific value).

Every January 1, we had to add fields to accommodate the upcoming year and make the appropriate code changes to handle the new fields.

One year the UPS shipping rates changed and users didn't want to 'lose' the old rates, so they wanted new fields added (Rate98, Rate99, etc) so they could compare old vs. new. That required a complete re-write of most of the underlying applications because users wanted to see the difference on any/all applications that displayed a shipping rate. I'll throw in asking 'why?' was often answered with "because we pay you to do what we say". Luckily, we had already gotten to work on a lot of this before January 1st, so we were, for the most part, ready.

January 1st rolls around (we had to be in the office at 3:00AM), work thru changes, spend some time testing, and be done before noon. That didn't happen. The accounting system was a system that wasn't in (and had never been) in scope, and when we flipped the switch, one of the accountants comes into the office:
E: "Guys? None of our Excel spreadsheets are working. They are critical to integration with the accounting software"
Us: "What? Why would you be using Excel to integrate with the software instead of their portal?"
E: "We could never figure it out, so we had a consultant write VBA scripts to do the work."
Us: "OK, a lot of fields changed, but shouldn't be a big deal. How many spreadsheets are we talking about?"
E: "Hundreds. We have a separate spreadsheet for every integration point. The consulting company said it scalable, whatever that means."
Us: "What?! Why we just know hearing about this!?"
E: "Don't worry, the consultant said making changes would be easy, let me show you, just open the spreadsheet..click here..<click><click><click>...ignore that error, it always happens...click that <click><click><click>.."
Us: "Oh good lord, this is going to take hours"
E: "Ha! Probably. All this computer stuff is your job and I've got a family to get to. Later"
Us: "Hey 'VP of IS', can we go home and fix these spreadsheets as-needed this week?"
VP-IS: "Let me check with 'VP-FS'"
<few minutes later>
VP-IS: "No, he said Excel is critical to running their department. We stay until Excel is fixed."
Us: "No, no...its these spreadsheets. I doubt FS needs all of them tomorrow morning."
VP-IS: "That's what I said. Spreadsheets, Excel, same thing. I'll order the pizza. Who likes pepperoni!?"

At least he didn't cheap out on the pizza (only 4 of us and he ordered 6 large, extra pepperoni from one of the best pizza places in town)

One problem after another and we didn't get done until almost 6:00AM. Then...

VP-IS: "Great job guys. I've scheduled a meeting at 8:00AM to review what we did so we can document the process for next year. You've got a couple of hours. Feel free to get some breakfast and come back, or eat the left over pizza in the breakroom fridge. There is a lot left"
Us: "Um...sorry...we're going home."
VP-IS: "WHAT!!...OK...fine. I'll schedule the meeting for 12"
Us: "No...we're going home. We'll see you tomorrow."

I need some advice here... This will be a long one, please bear with me.

First, some background:
I'm a senior level developer working in a company that primarily doesn't produce software like most fast paced companies. Lots of legacy code, old processes, etc. It's very slow and bureaucratic to say the least, and much of the management and lead engineering talent subscribes to the very old school way of managing projects (commit up front, fixed budget, deliver or else...), but they let us use agile to run our team, so long as we meet our commitments (!!). We are also largely populated by people who aren't really software engineers but who do software work, so being one myself I'm actually a fish out of water... Our lead engineer is one of these people who doesn't understand software engineering and is very types when it comes to managing a project.

That being said, we have this project we've been working for a while and we've been churning on it for the better part of two years - with multiple changes in mediocre contribution to development along the way (mainly due to development talent being hard to secure from other projects). The application hasn't really been given the chance to have its core architecture developed to be really robust and elegant, in favor of "just making things work" in order to satisfy fake deliverables to give the customer.

This has led us to have to settle for a rickety architecture and sloppy technical debt that we can't take the time to properly fix because it doesn't (in the mind of the lead engineer - who isn't a software engineer mind you) deliver visible value. He's constantly changing his mind on what he wants to see working and functional, he zones out during sprint planning, tries to work stories not on the sprint backlog on the side, and doesn't let our product owner do her job. He's holding us to commitments we made in January and he's not listening when the team says we don't think we can deliver on what's left by the end of the year. He thinks it's reasonable to expect us to deliver and he's brushing us off.

We have a functional product now, but it's not very useful yet and still has some usability issues. It's still missing features, which we're being put under pressure to get implemented (even half-assed) by the end of the year.

TL;DR
Should I stand up for what I know is the right way to write software and push for something more stable sometime next year or settle for a "patch job" that we *might* deliver that will most definitely be buggy and be harder to maintain going forward? I feel like I'm fighting an uphill battle in trying to write good quality code in lieu of faster results and I just can't get behind settling for crap just because.

Today I learn discord is not my thing at my age. 😔

Chatroom is not my thing anymore 😔

Anyone else feel that the main code base they work on is so old and clusterfucked it could do with a rewrite?

I have a 16 year old son who is off-and-on showing interest in learning electronics. He wants to work for NASA someday. I’ve looked at dozens of Arduino and Raspberry Pi kits but I feel like he would benefit not so much from “mostly done for him” types of kits that are more like toys, but the kind that teach more fundamentals like resistors, capacitors, transistors, relays, etc. In other words, knowing first what the principles are behind the fancier kits. Do any of you have a recommendation of kits that start with the fundamentals, but that can still be inspiring and engaging?

Anyone else have people that seem to constantly try to "prove" themselves to you in this weird, competitive way that only makes them seem... very annoying? I'll call him Bob here, but it's always something like:

Bob: Hi Almond, how's it going?
Almond: Ah not bad thanks, PSU blew up in the PC over the weekend though so that was a bit of a faff!
Bob: Ah no! How old's your PC?
Almond: Oh, like 7-8 years old now. I don't replace it often.
Bob: Really?! I replace mine completely every year.
Almond: Ah, cool.
Bob: Yeah, I'm a dev so I feel I need to. It's like my tool, you know.
Almond: Sure thing!
Bob: I actually spend quite a lot on it. I make sure it's got the fastest memory I can afford. Like, DDR5 stuff. That's really important, you know.

...etc., while I try to get out of said conversation for the next eternity.

Or:

(while in a conversation about a frontend bug I was looking at in Chrome devtools)
Bob: Hey Almond, you know Firefox actually had a plugin that did all this stuff before everything else?
Almond: Err, yeah, I think so. Used it back in the day.
Bob: It was called firebug. It was really good. Revolutionary.
Almond: Certainly was.
Bob: It was launched in January 2006 you know.
Almond: Right...
Bob: I used it back then.

...I mean damn, I'm all for being civil, but no-one cares you replace your PC every year, or that you know the year firebug was released, or that you once set up 5 identical PCs with different versions of Linux to run some benchmarks...

This isn't a funny rant or story. It's one of becoming increasingly unsure of the career choices I've made the path they've led me down. And it's written with terrible punctuation and grammar, because it's a cathartic post. I swear I'm a better writer than this.

The highlights:
- I left a low-paying incredibly stable job with room to grow (think specialized office worker at a uni) to become a QA tester at a AAA game studio, after growing bored with the job and letting my productivity and sometimes even attendance slip
- I left AAA studio after having been promoted through the ranks to leading an embedded test tools development team where we automated testing the game (we got to create bots, basically!) and the database, and building some of the most requested tools internally to the company; but we were paid as if we were QA testers, not engineers, and were told that wouldn't change; rather than move over or up, I moved out to a better paying, less fabulous web and tools development job for a no-name company
- No-name company offered one or two days remote, was salaried, and close to home. CTO was a fan of long lunches and Quake 3 Arena 1-2 hours at the end of every day. CTO position was removed, I got a lot of his responsibilities, none of his pay, and started freelancing to learn new skills rather than deal with the CFO being my boss.
- Went to work as a freelancer for an email marketing SaaS provider my previous job had used. Made loads of money, dealt with an old, crappy code base, an old, cranky senior dev, and an owner who ran around like the world was on fire 24/7; but I worked without pants, bought a car, a house, had a kid, etc;

Now during ALL of this, I was teaching game dev as an adjunct at my former uni. This past fall, I went full time as a professor in game dev. I took a huge pay cut, but got a steady schedule (semester to semester anyway) and great benefits. I for once chose what I thought was the job I wanted over more money and something that was just "different". And honestly, I've regretted it so much. My peer / diagonally above me coworker feels untrustworthy half the time and teaches the majority of the programming courses when he's a designer and I've been the game programming professor for 8 years (I also teach non-game programming courses, but those just got folded into the games program...); I hate full-time uni politics; I'm struggling with money for my family; and I am in the car all the time it feels like. I could probably go back to my last job, which had some benefits, but nowhere near as good; my wife doesn't want me back to working in the house all the time because that was a struggle unto itself once we had a kid (for all of us, in different ways); and I have now less than 24 hours to tell my university I want to not pursue longer term contracts for full-time and go back to adjunct next Fall (or walk away entirely), or risk burning a bridge (we are reviewing applicants for next year tomorrow, including my own) by bailing out mid-application process.

I'm not sure I'm asking for advice. I'm really just ranting, I guess. Some people I know would kill to have the opportunities I have. I just feel like each job choice led me further away from a job I liked, towards more money, which was a tradeoff that worked out mostly, but now I feel like I don't have either, and I'm trapped due to healthcare and 401k and such. Sure, I like working more with my students and have been able to really support them in their endeavors this semester, but... that's their lives. Not mine. The wife thinks I should stay at the university and we'll figure out money eventually (we are literally sinking into debt, it's not going well at all), while most people think I should leave, make money, and figure out the happiness factor once my finances are back on track and the kid is old enough to be in school.

And I have less than 24 hours it feels like to make a momentous decision.

Yay. Thanks for reading :)

Man wk89 awesome... bringing back a lot of memories. The one thing really stands out to me though is the software.

I see a lot of rants about people shocked that turboC is still in use or other DOS programs are still in production. A lot can of bad be said here but I think often it's a case of we truly don't build things like we did in the good old days.

What those devs accomplished with such limited resources is phenomenal and the fact that we still haven't managed to replicate the feel and usability of it says a lot, not to mention just how fucking stable most of it was.

My favourite games are all DOS based, my most favourite of all time Sherlock is 103kb in size. When I started coding games I made a clone of it and to this day I am still trying to figure out what sorcery is in the algorithm that generates/solves puzzles that makes it so fast and memory efficient. I must have tried 100+ ways and can't even come close. NB! If you know you can hint but don't tell me. Solving this is a matter of personal pride.

Where those games really stand out is when you get into the graphics processing - the solutions they came up with to render sprites, maps and trick your eyes into seeing detail with only 4-16 colours is nothing short of genius. Also take a second to consider that taking a screen shot of the game is larger than the entire game itself and let that sink in...

I think the dramatic increase in storage, processing power and ram over the last decade is making us shit developers - all of us. Just take one look at chrome, skype or anything else mainline really and it's easy to see we no longer give a rats ass about memory anywhere except our monthly AWS/GCE bill.

We don't have to be creative or even mindful about anything but the most significant memory leaks in order to get our software to run now days. We also don't have constraints to distribute it, fast deliver-ability is rewarded over quality software. It's only expected to stay in production 3-4 years anyway.

Those guys were the true "rockstars" and "ninja" developers and if you can't acknowledge that you can take ya React app and shovit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it looks like my 80+ yr old grandma finally managed to get hang of her touch screen smartphone. She was recently set up with WhatsApp.

She has called me quite a few times today and when i ask what's up, she says she is just testing it out. It's so cute *-* and makes me happy to know she has learned to use it and called me.

I wonder how it must feel for her to be able to use this technology which was probably never even imagined during her young age.

I need to rant about life decisions, and choosing a dev career probably too early. Not extremely development related, but it's the life of a developer.

TL;DR: I tried a new thing and that thing is now my thing. The new thing is way more work than my old thing but way more rewarding & exciting. Try new things.

I taught myself to program when I was a kid (11 or 12 years old), and since then I have always been absolutely sure that I wanted to be a games programmer. I took classes in high school and college with that aim, and chose a games programming degree. Everything was so simple, nail the degree, get a job programming something, and take the first games job that I could and go from there.

I have always had random side hobbies that I liked to teach myself, just like programming. And in uni I decided that I wanted to learn another language (natural, not programming) because growing up in England meant that I only learned English and was rarely exposed to anything else. The idea of knowing another fascinated me.

So I dabbled in a few different languages, tried to find a culture that seemed to fit my style and attitude to life and others, and eventually found myself learning Korean. That quickly became something I was doing every single day, and I decided I needed to go to Korea and see what life there could be like.

I found out that my university offered a free summer school program for a couple of weeks, all I had to pay for was the flights. So a few months later I was there and it was literally the best thing I'd done in my life to that point. I'd found two things that made me feel even better than the idea of becoming the games programmer I'd always wanted to be. Travelling and using my other language to communicate with people that I couldn't in English. At that point I was still just a beginner, but even the simple conversations with people who couldn't speak English felt awesome.

So when I returned home, I found that that trip had completely thrown a spanner into my life plan. All I could think about after that was improving my language skills and going back there for as long as possible. Who knows what to do.

I did exactly that. I studied harder than I'd ever studied for anything and left the next year to go and study in Korea, now with intermediate language skills, everyday conversations no longer being a problem at all.

Now I live here, I will be here for the next year and I have to return to England for one year to finish my degree. Then instead of having my simple plan of becoming a developer, I can think of nothing I want to do less than just stay in England doing the same job every day, nothing to do with language. I need to be at least travelling to Korea, and using my language skills in at least some way.

The current WIP plan is to take intensive language classes here (from next week, every single weekday), build awesome dev side projects and contribute to open source stuff. Then try to build a life of freelance translation/interpreting/language teaching and software development (maybe here, maybe Korea).

So the point of this rant is that before, I had a solid plan. Now I am sat in my bed in Korea writing this, thinking about how I have almost no idea how I'm going to build the life that I want. And yet somehow, the uncertainty makes this so much more exciting and fulfilling. There's a lot more worrying, planning and deciding to do. But I think the fact that I completely changed my life goals just through a small decision one day to satisfy a curiosity is a huge life lesson for me. And maybe reading this will help other people decide to just try doing something different for once, and see if your life plan holds up.

If it does, never stop trying new things. If it doesn't (like mine), then you now know that you've found something that you love as much as or even more that your plan before. Something that you might have lived your whole life never finding.

I don't expect many people to read this all, but writing it here has been very cathartic for me, and it's still a rant because now I have so much more work and planning to do. But it's the good kind of work.

Things aren't so simple now, but they're way more worth it.

I got a median-pay front-end job through a contractor (after a contract from hell...but yeah I didn't learn...) and I'm getting zero assignments after a month and nobody seems to know what my role is.

I'm one month in, and every week I have to email my boss to remind her to sign my paycheck, which is stressful because I'm charging for my time because my assignments are like "Research this" or "look at this Wordpress theme or brand guide". The team never communicates but once a week, and I'm beginning to believe that I'm not a good fit for the team because they are impossible to get a hold of and the sysadmin won't give me access to anything even when I CC my boss. (I don't want to grief this guy...) Despite this, I've been told privately by higher-ups on a few occasions that they plan to hire me full time by November...

My SO thinks that the reason people are so dodgy toward me is because they literally do nothing and I'm breaking the flow of that by asking for things. I'm used to agency output, which can be toxic and where everything is 'due yesterday', and I'm watching this team work on assignments ten times slower than normal. ("You want to change a phone number on a website footer? You'll get it next week...maybe." I can't step on toes because I don't have access...) I'm perfectly fine with having to wear several hats at a low-stress job, but I can't even get my first assignment and I'm still being asked who I am in weekly meetings, or asked things like, "Would you even be willing to relocate here?" (I actually live DOWN THE STREET FROM THE OFFICE!! WHY DO I HAVE TO BE REMOTE? Why am I being asked this question?) It feels like my boss impulse hired me, with zero input from the team, and had no real reason to hire me in the first place...

It could also be another issue: Yeah, my experience is in PHP/JS/React, "but here have a seven year old .NET project and a company laptop with zero documentation and make this form import data to a database we know nothing about." Lead dev won't even talk to me.

I feel like a joke.

College is worse than cancer.

Worse than tumor.

Worse than any (un)imaginable death or torture.

I feel dull.

I feel DUMBED DOWN.

I FEEL DUMBER AFTER 6 YEARS OF COLLEGE COMPARED TO BEFORE STARTING COLLEGE.

6 fucking years of wrecking my healthy brain in college.

Has now became unhealthy and mentally unstable.

I forgot almost EVERYTHING i knew about coding.

Because in a "COMPUTER SCIENCE" college they teach everything BUT coding.

The professors and assistants have no morals.

They are INHUMANE.

Professors are ready to walk across a fucking corpse.

If your mother gets cancer and you are unable to come to class or study, the professors dont give a FUCK, they will drop you down so you have to study for exams again instead of helping your ill mother.

Professors have NO COMPASSION.

NO DIGNITY.

They are just BRAINLESS robots.

Sentients, agents working for the matrix.

They keep reading the same script every year and call that a successful career.

IF PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS AT COLLEGE ACTUALLY KNEW TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL IN LIFE, THEY WOULD NOT BE PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS FOR THE MAJORITY (OR WHOLE) OF THEIR LIFE.

I gave my maximum effort.

I SACRIFICED MY LIFE FOR SCHOOL.

Just to end up with school spitting on my face.

I feel DUMBED down.

Robotic.

Procedural minded.

As some brainless retard who has to follow orders as if im a 6 year old who doesn't know what to do.

Like a computer.

Because of college - i have no will to live.

Because of college - i no longer have passion for coding.

Because of college - i no longer know what is my purpose in life.

Because of college - i feel like im floating in cosmos, somewhere far deep into the space, without knowing where im going, what im doing, why im doing what im doing...

I feel void inside me.

I also feel vengeance inside me.

SCHOOL HAS RUINED MY LIFE.

It made me mentally insane.

It made me mentally so sick that i had to watch head decapitation gore videos to calm myself down, so i can imagine the victims being murdered are the professors and assistants from my college.

PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS HAVE 0 UNDERSTANDING FOR OTHER HUMAN LIFE.

MILLIONS of people have private problems going on in their lives every day.

What if someone cant pass an exam because of private problems that's going on in their life?

What if the student is abused by a family member?

What if the student has ANY non-self destructive negative event happening to them, which they're not at fault, and can not control?

What if the student got cancer and cant study for exams, is he supposed to fail?

What if the student came home and the police knocked on his door and said "sorry for your loss, your whole family just died in car accident" and student falls into depression and cant study for exams, is he supposed to fail???

There are infinite multitude of random events this damned universe can do to a human life.

BUT PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS;
DO
NOT
GIVE
A
FUCK.

I feel soulless.

I feel like i signed a contract with the devil when i started college by selling him my soul.

School (when i say school, i also mean college, because its the same fucking shit under a different name) is supposed to represent "education".

Lets talk about it.

What exactly are we being "EDUCATED" in school?

To memorize pdf slides?

Memorize textbook?

Memorize notes?

Memorize formulas?

Memorize memorize memorize???

First of all, all of what we're "studying" is BULLSHIT, second of all MEMORIZING all of this means you're gonna forget 60% of it tomorrow, 80% in the next 2 days and you'll forget 100% of what you "learned" by the 7th day.

SOCIETY TOLD YOU TO MEMORIZE USELESS BULLSHIT AND TOLD YOU THAT YOU'RE BEING EDUCATED THAT WAY. YOU MUST BE FUCKING DUMB TO BELIEVE THAT.

If memorizing == education, then i do NOT want to be a part of this "education".

BEFORE starting college i coded many projects.

I self-learned everything.

6 years of college and it taught me LESS THAN ZERO.

NOT EVEN ZERO.

LESS THAN ZERO because i got dumbed down, below the underground, and had to dig myself up on the surface.

I built software for an american real estate agency and sold it for 5 figures.

I built software for 3 people from New York for another 5 figures.

I even got offers to work in local software companies without having a degree.

At internship i was given a task to finish in 2 weeks. I finished it in 3 days. They were shocked and wanted to hire me for further work.

At another internship there was 4 of us working together as a team. At the end company contacted only ME and told me i showed the best results on their list out of ALL the teams and the team members that were with me.

Ever since i had to study for disgusting college i had to stop working.

Because of college, i have no source of income for MONTHS now.

Because of college, i had several mental breakdowns.

---

To all professors and assistants:

I pray that karma ruins your life with lethal outcome, and your kids die of cancer in pain.

A /thread.

I have to say something important. As the story progresses, the rage will keep fueling up and get more spicy. You should also feel your blood boil more. If not, that's because you're happy to be a slave.

This is a clusterfuck story. I'll come back and forth to some paragraphs to talk about more details and why everything, INCLUDING OUR DEVELOPER JOBS ARE A SCAM. we're getting USED as SLAVES because it's standardized AS NORMAL. IT IS EVERYTHING *BUT* NORMAL.

START:

As im watching the 2022 world cup i noticed something that has enraged me as a software engineer.

The camera has pointed to the crowd where there were old football players such as Rondinho, Kaka, old (fat) Ronaldo and other assholes i dont give a shit about.

These men are old (old for football) and therefore they dont play sports anymore.

These men don't do SHIT in their lives. They have retired at like 39 years old with MULTI MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN THEIR BANK ACCOUNT.

And thats not all. despite of them not doing anything in life anymore, THEY ARE STILL EARNING MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS PER MONTH. FOR WHAT?????

While i as a backend software engineer get used as a slave to do extreme and hard as SHIT jobs for slave salary.

500-600$ MAX PER MONTH is for junior BACKEND engineers! By the law of my country software businesses are not allowed to pay less than $500 for IT jobs. If thats for backend, imagine how much lower is for frontend? I'll tell you cause i used to be a frontend dev in 2016: $200-400 PER MONTH IS FOR FRONTEND DEVELOPERS.

A BACKEND SOFTWARE ENGINEER with at least 7-9 years of professional experience, is allowed to have $1000-2000 PER MONTH

In my country, if you want to have a salary of MORE THAN $3000/Month as SOFTWARE ENGINEER, you have to have a minimum of Master's Degree and in some cases a required PhD!!!!!!

Are you fucking kidding me?

Also. (Btw i have a BSc comp. sci. Degree from a valuable university) I have taken a SHIT ton of interviews. NOT ONE OF THEM HAVE ASKED ME IF I HAVE A DEGREE. NO ONE. All HRs and lead Devs have asked me about myself, what i want to learn and about my past dev experience, projects i worked on etc so they can approximate my knowledge complexity.

EVEN TOPTAL! Their HR NEVER asked me about my fycking degree because no one gives a SHIT about your fucking degree. Do you know how can you tell if someone has a degree? THEY'LL FUCKING TELL YOU THEY HAVE A DEGREE! LMAO! It was all a Fucking scam designed by the Matrix to enslave you and mentally break you. Besides wasting your Fucking time.

This means that companies put degree requirement in job post just to follow formal procedures, but in reality NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT IT. NOOBOODYYY.

ALSO: I GRADUATED AND I STILL DID NOT RECEIVE MY DEGREE PAPER BECAUSE THEY NEED AT LEAST 6 MONTHS TO MAKE IT. SOME PEOPLE EVEN WAITED 2 YEARS. A FRIEND OF MINE WHO GRADUATED IN FEBRUARY 2022, STILL DIDNT RECEIVE HIS DEGREE TODAY IN DECEMBER 2022. ALL THEY CAN DO IS PRINT YOU A PAPER TO CONFIRM THAT I DO HAVE A DEGREE AS PROOF TO COMPANIES WHO HIRE ME. WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY MAKING FOR SO LONG, DIAMONDS???

are you fucking kidding me? You fucking bitch. The sole paper i can use to wipe my asshole with that they call a DEGREE, at the end I CANT EVEN HAVE IT???

Fuck You.

This system that values how much BULLSHIT you can memorize for short term, is called "EDUCATION", NOT "MEMORIZATION" System.

Think about it. Don't believe be? Are you one of those nerds with A+ grades who loves school and defends this education system? Here I'll fuck you with a single question: if i gave you a task to solve from linear algebra, or math analysis, probabilistics and statistics, physics, or theory, or a task to write ASM code, would you know how to do it? No you won't. Because you "learned" that months or years ago. You don't know shit. CHECK MATE. You can answer those questions by googling. Even the most experienced software engineers still use google. ALL of friends with A+ grades always answered "i dont know" or "i dont remember". HOW IF YOU PASSED IT WITH A+ 6 DAYS AGO? If so, WHY THE FUCK ARE WE WASTING YEARS OF AN ALREADY SHORT HUMAN LIFE TO TEMPORARILY MEMORIZE GARBAGE? WHY DONT WE LEARN THAT PROCESS THROUGH WORKING ON PRACTICAL PROJECTS??? WOULDNT YOU AGREE THATS A BETTER SOLUTION, YOU MOTHERFUCKER BITCH ASS SLAVE SUCKA???

Im can't even afford to buy my First fuckinf Car with this slave salary. Inflation is up so much that 1 bag of BASIC groceries from Walmart costs $100. IF BASIC GROCERIES ARE $100, HOW DO I LIVE WITH $500-600/MONTH IF I HAVE OTHER EXPENSES?

Now, back to slavery. Here's what i learned.

1800s: slaves are directly forced to work in exchange for food to survive.

2000s: slaves are indirectly forced to work in exchange for money as a MIDDLEMAN that can be used to buy food to survive.

????

This means: slavery has not gone anywhere. Slavery has just evolved. And you're fine with it.

Will post part 2 later.

It was funny. But when I told the head of my dptmnt that I was getting bored at work they kinda freaked out. I really love my workplace. The people are nice everywhere and this is something I am not used to.
I started working when I was 13 at one of my dad's business. It was a lot of manual labor and every day my hands would be bruised because of all the cleaning and shit I had to do. Then he moved me to another one of his businesses and it was worse but I continued doing it for only 1 year. By 16 I had moved to simpler things, I was a waiter and even tho I hated it I was making enough money to go out on dates and buy whatever a 16 year old wanted. I continued being a waiter until I was 17(changed to two other places) and before I turned 18 I joined the U.S Army. That broke my body in ways that I would normally not believe a 18 year old capable of. It was around the time that I discovered programming but even after I left the military(at 22 I believe) I never worked on a programming job. Back at home I worked in retail. And believe you me....it is far more pleasant to be constantly getting blown up and broken than dealing with the most retarded people imaginable(this is what made me hate Mexican people even tho I am Mexican myself)

Fast forward at 23 and I landed my first programming jobs. As stated in other initial rant it was surrounded by assholes. Assholes everywhere that would cower at the idea of speaking to me face to face due to the possibility of being left as physically broken as I am.

But at 27 now I found myself in a happy place. With nice people, good coworkers, an amazing manager that also serves as eye candy and good benefits. But the job is boring, boring beyond belief and this is due to the fact that they have a self taught and academically trained computer scientist doing the most menial things on a daily basis. The shit that I do would be more becoming of a designer, which has a different set of mental skills that would probably engage them more. But I really don't want to work on the web unless I am doing something that actually takes some challenge, even tho I maintain Java and PHP web services, the shit is so boring that anyone would be able to finish the proceadures in hours on a day leaving one with nothing engaging to do. Sometimes I let shit get close to the deadline just to feel some sort of pressure that would keep me awake.

I just wanted to vent on how ceremoniously BORED i really am.

I want more shit to do. Can't really have much patience for the freelance shit since it doesn't make sense to hire me in exchange of having some indian dude doing it for a quarter of the price.

!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

I recently tried to apply the same data analytics rationale that I use at work to my personal life. This is not a rant, it is more like an data storytelling of an actual use case I would like some input on.

I set a goal - gotta thin up a bit and calm down my ticker - and got a (almost unreasonably expensive) field expert consultant to yell at me about it for a couple hours.

I unravel the metrics - there is like a million weight-related KPIs and most say nothing at all. I have never seen an non-infrastructure measurable subject that could not be resumed to 2-5 performance metrics. I got overall weight, how well my nine-years-old business suit fits me, heart rate, and day-after relative muscle pain (it will make sense soon).

Then its data-pipeline time. I bought a cheap weight scale and smartwatch, and every morning I input the data in an app. Yes, I try to put on the suit every morning. It still does not fit.

After establishing a baseline, I tried to fit different approaches. Doing equipment-free exercises, going to the gym, dieting. None was actually feasible in the long run, but trying different approaches does highlight the impacts and the handling profile of each method.

Looking at the now-gathered data, one thing was obvious - can't do dieting because it is not doable to have a shopping list and meals for me and another for the family.
Gym is also off the table - too much overhead. I spend more time on the trip there and back than actually there.
And home exercise equipment is either super crappy or very expensive. But it is also the most reasonable approach.

So it is solutions time. I got a nice exercise bycicle (not a peloton), an yoga mat (the wife already had that one) and an exercise program that uses only those two resources. Not as efficient without dieting, not as measurable and broad as the gym, but it fits my workflow. Deploy to production!

A few months pass and the dataset grows. The signal is subtle but has support - it works! The handling, however, needs improvement, since I cannot often enough get with the exercise program. Some mornings are just after some hard days.

I start thinking about what else I can improve in the program, but it is already pretty lean and full of compromises.
So I pull an engineer and start thinking about the support systems and draft profile. What else could be draining my willpower and morning time?

Chores. Getting the kids ready for school, firing up the moka pot, setting the off-brand roomba, folding the overnight-dried clothes, cooking breakfast, doing the dishes, cleaning the toilets. All part of my morning routine. It might benefit from some automation.

Last month I got that machine our elders call "wasteful" and "useless crap lazy entitled Americans invented because they feel oh-so-insulted for simply doing something by hand like everyone always did" - a "dish-washer".
Heh, I remember how hard was to convince my mother-in-law that an remote-controled electric garage door would not make she look like an spoiled brat.
Still to early to call, but I think that the dishwasher just saved me about 25 mins every morning. It might be enough to save willpower for me to do more exercise.

This is all so reflective of all data analytics cases really are out in the wild - the analytics phase seems so small compared to the gathering and practical problem-solving all around. And yet d.a. is what tells you that you are doing the wrong thing all along. Or on what you should work next.

I've been struggling with some financial issues lately. I haven't told this to my family bc I am helping my mom with money, hat wouldn't help.

Sadly, I got two general tickets for WebSummit 2019 and I thought "okay, I am nearby Portugal rn, somebody of my circle could go with me and have some fun, I feel so blue..."

No one. Not a single one. Nobody.

"Maybe with those Telegram groups of JS developers..."

No one.

Maybe it sounds like some fraud or something, so they didn't answer. I even mentioned to an old entrepreneur friend of mine, and he didn't even answer me.

Disheartened is the word for today. I don't know, I am not expecting that people can join this adventure just bc is awesome, we all have bills to pay, but at least an answer would be fine.

I know it is not a fun story, and there are people in worse situations than mine. I just wanted to do some catharsis bc I lost my laptop.

I still have bills, two tickets, and a new kind of miserable mood.

Thank you for reading.

I have been working on this software for 3 years now. The code base was a working prototype made by my boss before I came, not more, not less. Php + Angular. Have been refactoring a lot, backend is backed with hundreds of tests now, frontend still lacks a lot. Still a lot of programm structures are still the same weird ones my boss once created in a rush between two meetings while learning Angular to get the prototype finished. Now it's used in production which makes hard to refactor, because we have to maintain backwards compatibility. Neither the parts I added or refactored completely are satisfying, because they are built on this structures, because i never got any feedback for anything I decided and because I changed my own paradigms over time.

So I am all alone on this project. All genuinly new projects are assigned to the new team members (i was the first one, no we are five plus my boss) because I wont have time, have to maintain the old one. So I never can do something new which is quite frustrating.

I did a little side tool, the only thing I invented and did completely by myself in our repertoire - and now some stakeholder shows big interest onto this. Instead of giving me the task to make a real project from this my boss wants to give it to them to develop it. Why? Because I need more time for the main application.

Also the more the software is used the more bug tickets and feature requests come. I was crying for help for months but the others had appareantly more important stuff to do.

This might be true to some extend. Yesterday we had some kind of crisis meeting and my boss wanted again to assing pur junior to help me, who has a shit load of other things to do and is a student. I insisted that this would not be enough, and one of the fulltime devs has to get involved because the thing is our core application and I am only part time btw. So my boss said we wont decide today but one of them should do it. They should have some time to figure out who which is understandable but it's not that I didn't keep saying this for months. Now they are all like whimp whimp when I have to do php i will quit. The new projects are all typescript, with node backend if any. But alas, one of them even said yesterday he doesn't want to do js anymore. Okay... but... this is our tech stack then get another job allready?

And I should do the same probably. But then again I feel very sorry for my boss who helped me in very dark times of corona and more. If both of us leave, the project he worked on for decade (including convincing poeole, collect money..) might be suddenly at it's end while he is so exited about it's access today...

I also get insecure if it's really that they hate php so much or that they don't want to work with me personally because maybe I am a bad team Player or what?

I experienced the same at my old workplace, got left alone with big parts of the project because they didn't want to do php and js in this case and it ended up five devs doing the python backend and me doing the frontend and the php cms part all alone. Then I quit and now everything seems to happen again.

And then again I think I am only fucked up so hard by this stuff because I do not really like being a developer at all. I only do it for the money and because I am good at it (at least i think so. Nobody ever bothers to ever to read my code and give me feedback, because you know, php and js). So I guess I would hate any other job in the field maybe likewise?

This job *is* convinient, salary, office
position, flexibility could not be better. At the end of the day it's not that stressfull. And i don't have any second of freetime (due to family) or energy i could offer a new and more demanding employer, can't work over time or even take a fulltime position, can't home office, can't earn less, can't travel very long to the office and especially can't go back to school to learn something completely new. Some of these constraints are softwe then other naturally but still my posibilities at the Moment are very limited. That might change in about five years if the family situation changed. So it would most likely be reasonable to stay until then at my current job? And bear being alone with this app, don't getting involved on any new project, don't learn anything new, don't invent anything.

There was one potential way out, they considered offering me PHD position to the upcoming ml part of the project... But I learned that I would attend to a bunch of classes at university first, which i would like to, but I don't think i have the time.

I feel trapped somehow. I also feel very lonely in the Office because those fucktards keep saying in home office.

Man, I don't want to go to work today.

Aren't you, software engineer, ashamed of being employed by Apple? How can you work for a company that lives and shit on the heads of millions of fellow developers like a giant tech leech?
Assuming you can find a sounding excuse for yourself, pretending its market's fault and not your shitty greed that lets you work for a company with incredibly malicious product, sales, marketing and support policies, how can you not feel your coders-pride being melted under BILLIONS of complains for whatever shitty product you have delivered for them?
Be it a web service that runs on 1980 servers with still the same stack (cough cough itunesconnect, membercenter, bug tracker, etc etc etc etc) incompatible with vast majority of modern browsers around (google at least sticks a "beta" close to it for a few years, it could work for a few decades for you);
be it your historical incapacity to build web UI;
be it the complete lack of any resemblance of valid documentation and lets not even mention manuals (oh you say that the "status" variable is "the status of the object"? no shit sherlock, thank you and no, a wwdc video is not a manual, i don't wanna hear 3 hours of bullshit to know that stupid workaround to a stupid uikit api you designed) for any API you have developed;
be it the predatory tactics on smaller companies (yeah its capitalism baby, whatever) and bending 90 degrees with giants like Amazon;
be it the closeness (christ, even your bugtracker is closed and we had to come up with openradar to share problems that you would anyway ignore for decades);
be it a desktop ui api that is so old and unmaintained and so shitty, but so shitty, that you made that cancer of electron a de facto standard for mainstream software on macos;
be it a IDE that i am disgusted to even name, xcrap, that has literally millions of complains for the same millions of issues you dont even care to answer to or even less try to justify;
be it that you dont disclose your long term plans and then pretend us to production-test and workaround-fix your shitty non-production ready useless new OS features;
be it that a nervous breakdown on a stupid little guy on the other side of the planet that happens to have paid to you dozens of thousands of euros (in mandatory licences and hardware) to actually let you take an indecent cut out of his revenues cos there is no other choice in a monopoly regime, matter zero to you;
Assuming all of these and much more:
How can you sleep at night with all the screams of the devs you are exploiting whispering in you mind? Are all the money your earn worth?

** As someone already told you elsewhere, HAVE SOME FUCKING PRIDE, shitty people AND WRITE THE FUCKING DOCS AND FIX THE FUCKING BUGS you lazy motherfuckers, your are paid more than 99.99% of people on earth, move your fucking greasy little fingers on that fucking keyboard. **

PT2: why the fuck did you remove the ESC key from your shitty keyboards you fuckshits? is it cos autocomplete is slower than me searching the correct name of a function on stackoverflow and hence ESC key is useless? at least your hardware colleagues had the decency of admitting their error and rolling back some of the uncountable "questionable "hardware design choices (cough cough ...magic mouse... cough golden charging cables not compatible with your own devices.. cough )?

As I went through old open PRs, to sort them out and resolve them, I started to feel you do when you look at your childhood photos or in case of YouTubers at their old videos.

That is to say, I'm dying of shame.

*Well at least I'm cleaning them up now so~*

Hitting a really deep, deep low in the manic-depressive roller-coaster of the development cycle:

There comes the crunch time. No meeting goes by hearing the odious: "We don't have time for that." - One critical component needs to be finished for Big Sur and instead of addressing the real issues we keep changing design and goal. One main dev already gave up fighting the PO and team lead(!) - and now I'm next. So that dev build this really clean and minimal library as the core part. But now it's just like, yeah, take that nice Porsche engine put it on the old rusty bicycle from the shed,.. but maybe because that's so shitty we need that specially formed exhaust pipe to tune it. Yeah, very 'agile' - Only thinking about it makes me shudder in disbelief and anger. I shouldn't take that shit so serious, be emotional about shit code, I know, but I can't. Let them drive some rounds around the block, if it runs at all,.. because until now we still didn't make it run on the fuckin' street. It's all so insane. Will make some nice fireball, when it goes up in flames.

Well, I have been part of quite some shitty projects. Real suicide commandos set out to fail, and somehow stood them through or made it even "work" though it should never have. But what enrages me here is, that it needn't to be that way. We had plenty of time. Our team was often rowing along in good rhythm. And now I just feel drowned in resignation and sarcasm.

Only 25 days left to get my Fanatic gold badge in stackoverflow and my browser decides to open up the new window instead of the old one with all my pinned tabs in it... So I forget to log into stack overflow for a day resulting in me going back to 99 days of everyday visiting the site until I get my Fanatic badge... I feel so fucking depressed FML

I'm using framework X, I managed to google and fix the bug in a few seconds, nice!

I'm using framework X with library Y, I managed to google and fix the bug in a few minutes, nice!

I'm using framework X with library Y and Z that adds certain features, I managed to google and fix the bug in a few hours, I need a bathroom break and coffee but great!

I'm using framework X, runtime environment version 3, library X and Z and am trying to achieve T because god knows why and managed to only find 2 old stackoverflow topics and 1 reddit post almost completely unrelated but I tried their code anyway and I feel so miserable I'm behind schedule and can't seem to be able to fix this stupid issue what am I doing with my life oh please...

The one they say they fire you and say that everything will be all right and you’re nice but you have to live.

If you ever be in such situation remember at the end to thank them a lot that they decided to fire you but also ask why it took them so long to figure this out. ( especially if you work more than couple of years ).

Their faces after your question - priceless.

Thank again and immediate leave afterwards so they can ask themselves this question till the end of their lives and you will actually feel better and remember their stupid faces that will make you laugh when you’re old.

And yeah everything gonna be probably all right but you need to find better job not same stupid deep shits.

I can't decide on a linux distro because all I've tried are great. Seriously.

I'd call myself a novice-to-intermediate linux user (heavy on the novice part) and since I work as a web developer it's been a great learning experience to use the same OS on my workstation as the webservers my projects run on. (Ie I started out with Ubuntu and a LAMP setup).

The thing is I distrohop ad infinitum... Feels like I've tried out every desktop environment known to mankind (I just can't stop myself when I see a new one or a new take on an old one) and I've dipped my toes in Arch territory to. Loved Antergos when that still was a thing. Found EndeavourOS this weekend, kernel panic ensued. I'm a noob with sudo and that's never a good thing. 😆 (Try out in a virtual machine first you say? Bah. Where's the fun in that?!)

So now I'm on Linux Mint w Cinnamon because why not. (Because it's sluggish and boring, that's why...) I had to just get something up and running quickly so I could get back to work. 😬

But one day in and I'm realising I actually miss GNOME. And Ubuntu feels like home. I would feel much cooler using Arch but honestly I don't think I can be trusted with it. I love tinkering with settings, look and feel and whatnot but I can honestly do that just as well in an Ubuntu/GNOME environment.

Maybe Pop!_OS... could be something for me. 😏

Sometimes when I read old code of mine I'm ashamed. But more often when I read others I just feel better.

(I'm talking about other webdev freelancers, not OS projects or so...)

Really didnt feel like working today so i marathoned old disney cartoons. I fucking love robin hood, the music is a solid banger.

We support a system we inherited from another company, it’s an online document store for technical specifications of electronic devices used by loads of people.

This thing is the biggest pile of shite I’ve ever seen, it wasn’t written by developers but rather by civil engineers who could write vb...so needless to say it’s classic asp running on iis, but it’s not only written in vbscript oh god no, some of it is vb other parts is jscript (Microsoft’s janky old JavaScript implementation) and the rest is php.

When we first inherited it we spent the best part of 2 months fixing security vulnerabilities before we were willing to put it near the internet - to this day I remain convinced the only reason it was never hacked is that everything scanning it thought it was a honeypot.

We’ve told the client that this thing needs put out of its misery but they insist on keeping it going. Whenever anything goes wrong it falls to me and it ends up taking me days to work out what’s happening with it. So far the only way I’ve worked out how to debug it is to start doing “Response.AddHeader(‘debug’, ‘<thing>’) on the production site and looking at the header responses in the browser.
I feel dirty doing that but it works so I don’t really care at this point

FUCK I hate this thing!

The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.

That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.

A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.

One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).

The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.

Enter "situated environments."

In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.

We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.

I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.

No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.

In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.

It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."

This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.

One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.

Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.

What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.

I am a manager of an entry-level employee who share with another manager. Our shared employee, let’s call her “Jane,” is terrific — a hard worker, very smart, quick, and organized. Jane has been with us over two years and we would like to promote her, something she’s clearly earned, but our progress has been stalled by the pandemic. And though we’re working to push the promotion forward as quickly as possible, with budget cuts to contend with, this has been slower and more difficult than expected.

Meanwhile, Jane has shared with our team (including my boss, her grandboss) that she’s interested in returning to school for graduate study but was not sure when she’d want to attend. However, later Jane confidentially asked me to write her a recommendation letter to include in an application for study beginning this fall. I happily agreed and we discussed that she didn’t want this shared more widely, so I wrote the letter and kept it to myself. A few weeks ago, Jane texted me that she’d been accepted to grad school. I was thrilled for her but concerned about her departure. She stated that it was her intention to defer until 2021 due to the pandemic. We love Jane and I’m happy to have her as long as she’d like to stay, and again kept it to myself per her wishes.

Today, to my surprise, my boss called my attention to a tweet that Jane had shared, publicly on her personal account, announcing that she’d been accepted to grad school. My boss was blindsided since she didn’t think of this as an immediate plan and was particularly upset because HER boss (my grandboss and Jane’s great-grandboss, our president) was the one who saw it and alerted her of it. What’s worse is that my boss’s boss has been the one doing the hard work in negotiating Jane’s promotion with HR. Worse worse, after sharing this development, my co-manager (who shares management of Jane with me) revealed that she too had learned of Jane’s acceptance on Twitter. For the record, this tweet is about 10 days old at this point — time for Jane to have made a plan to speak directly and openly about it at work if she chose to.

I’m all for private use of social media and the right to have an online presence that is separate from your work. However, this puts me in an embarrassing position. I was honest with my boss when confronted, confessing that I did know about her acceptance and had provided a reference, but I can’t help but feel a little taken advantage of after Jane had asked me to keep it confidential. Additionally, her other boss heard of this news on social media and so did people above her who are gunning for her promotion — valued coworkers of mine and superiors of Jane who now feel disrespected for being out of the loop. I do not believe that Jane’s attendance at or deferment from grad school should affect her eligibility for a promotion, but it will surely be another hurdle to overcome among many other pandemic-related ones now that the news is out in this manner.

Extra notes: 1) Jane has previously announced 10-day vacations on Instagram (plane tickets booked) before asking for the time off. 2) Jane runs our company social media channels, so people look at her personal ones with scrutiny.

I feel compelled to speak with Jane in a friendly but direct way to explain that it’s her choice how or with whom she’d like to share her news, but that social media is not the place for bosses, grandbosses, or great-grandbosses should discover employment-altering news. Ever, really, but particularly when we’re working hard for her promotion. How can I do this without overstepping? Am I overstepping?