It saved me from suicide.

You have to understand first that things in India work differently. Academics are not personal, but a social business. Academic competition in India is very high and not in a good way, or for the good reasons.

As a teenager was sent off from my home to the other side of the country. I didn't like it. My studies suffered, and I failed my exams. Came back home and faced months of emotional abuse (guilt trips, scornful comments, plain insults) from my parents, neighbours and relatives. Indian society is just built that way. They didn't know they were damaging my psyche, or they were too angry to care. Lots of other shit (lost friends, lost love) happened at roughly the same time period and everything started to fall like dominos.

I fell into severe depression. Lost appetite, lost sleep. Nothing mattered anymore. There were mornings when I would wake up and not get up from my bed for hours, and not even move a finger. Self-hate became the motto of the day. I became violent and anti-social. I would either be angry or trying not to break down and give up all the time. Many a night, I considered suicide. I would end up googling for easy ways out to take.

But what gave me a way out of the pains of my reality was programming. It helped my keep my head, figuratively and literally. It kept my mind distracted and gave me a sense of purpose. I would shut myself in, plug in my headphones, shut the world out and just experiment.

I am not saying that I am the best at what I do, but those sleepless and troubled nights, and many other similar nights over the years have given me a definite edge over my colleagues.

Even today, when everything is falling to pieces, I know I have something to fall back on. I still get episodes of depression every now and then, but I know I can always pick up a new project and distract myself. It probably isn't healthy, but eh...

I am alive. I code. I kick ass. My colleagues respect and value my opinion. I love my job.

Computer does what I tell it to do (mostly :p) and I feel good. Because for that small moment, I am in control of everything. For that infinitesimally small moment of my average, boring, and somewhat painful life, I am God.

I stare through the blueish black backgrounds and blurry colorful syntax into a somewhat familiar office within a mirrored world. That damned reflective glass layer covering these meaningless pixels is certainly not on my side.

The rushing sound of transactions flowing through cables is silenced today. Some blood cloth in the invoicing system is zeroing out everything after the currency mark.

While sighing I spin a one-and-a-half pirouette on my desk chair — even when desperate, you shouldn't give up on style — I take three steps away from my screen and try to harmonize my thoughts.

So much noise, everywhere... Noise from within?

I have been stuck at the apogee of an inhale for a while now. Locked into some masochistic constriction, self-punishment for the blindness which stings my ego.

Just fucking take a deep breath you asshole...

I freeze in place, and fall backwards.

Patterns on the creamy drywall rapidly vibrate and synchronize on vivid rhythms of respiration and resonating basslines. Deep indigo rainbows ripple through tiny veins, in-between chalky grains, raining as fine magenta dust through the ceiling frames.

My bare feet slide over soft oscillating concrete, fine flows of unsievable sand surrounded by toes, toes surrounded by streaming variables veiled in obscure vile abstractions.

A jadegreen field of vectored compressions resiliently rumbles and bounces through the clearances and corners of the vibrant concrete office cave, whispering in tongues. I try to voice my woes in little blips and bleeps but I seem to be missing an asymmetric key to their shrouded sequenced speech.

Suddenly, a wild turbulence breaks up all signals.

Joanna floats by in her tipsy effervescent cloud of disordered black hair and alcohol perfume, one hand grasping grapes, her other waving at me.

With every finger she moves a thousand tensors propagating paradoxically flawed but perfect pieces of an intricate surreal picture, sketching whole constellations of possible paths throughout the leafs of the giant Ficus next to her desk.

She stops dead in her tracks, and asks somewhat hypocritically: "Are you high?"

I can not discern the meaning of her words, and respond stoically.

"Joanna! Check out those branches!".

"Pun intended?", she giggles.

I'm focused on her grapeless hand, her fingers stretching to reach the lush little tree.

On touch, the plant shivers, grappled in the tight net of the puppet master. She pulls her strings, applying measured weights, all nodes normalize, and Joanna speaks in an oddly soft tone:

"Isn't it beautiful, how so many models emulate nature"

Her cheek buried in foliage she babbles on about unbalanced search trees and machine learning models... but from the tips of her fingers tables and indexes flow into the plant. Users, payments, tariffs, invoices and taxes crawl over the bark, joining at thicker branches, joining at the stem....

Joining. JOINING. A JOIN.

"IF THERE'S NO FUCKING TAX MULTIPLIER IN THIS LEFT JOIN, EVERYTHING COALESCES TO ZERO" I shout at a perplexed Joanna who squeezes grape juice over her desk. I hop on the beat to my keyboard. She looks puzzled, hugs her Ficus tightly, and reaches for the whiskey bottle behind her monitor.

Attracted by my exclamation, Tom from finance swings open the door, while I push my branch.

I look at Joanna still half hiding between the leaves, and I laugh at her: "Branches! Oh, lame, I finally got it!"

Tom's heavy voice interrupts me: "Does this mean... does this mean that the invoicing bug is resolved?".

I smile at Tom with his tailored suit and waxed hair. "The money is flowing once more. All debts are being settled."

He releases his breath in relief, which he seems to have held since that morning as well.

Joanna adds: "Although I think he is forever indebted to my Ficus".

I nod.

Most satisfying bug I've fixed?

Fixed a n+1 issue with a web service retrieving price information. I initially wrote the service, but it was taken over by a couple of 'world class' monday-morning-quarterbacks.
The "Worst code I've ever seen" ... "I can't believe this crap compiles" types that never met anyone else's code that was any good.

After a few months (yes months) and heavy refactoring, the service still returned price information for a product. Pass the service a list of product numbers, service returns the price, availability, etc, that was it.

After a very proud and boisterous deployment, over the next couple of days the service seemed to get slower and slower. DBAs started to complain that the service was causing unusually high wait times, locks, and CPU spikes causing problems for other applications. The usual finger pointing began which ended up with "If PaperTrail had written the service 'correctly' the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess."

Only mattered that I initially wrote the service and no one seemed to care about the two geniuses that took months changing the code.

The dev manager was able to justify a complete re-write of the service using 'proper development methodologies' including budgeting devs, DBAs, server resources, etc..etc. with a projected year+ completion date.

My 'BS Meter' goes off, so I open up the code, maybe 5 minutes...tada...found it. The corresponding stored procedure accepts a list of product numbers and a price type (1=Retail, 2=Dealer, and so on). If you pass 0, the stored procedure returns all the prices.
Code basically looked like this..

public List<Prices> GetPrices(List<Product> products, int priceTypeId)
{
foreach (var item in products)
{
List<int> productIdsParameter = new List<int>();
productIdsParameter.Add(item.ProductID);
List<Price> prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, 0);
foreach (var price in prices)
{
if (price.PriceTypeID == priceTypeId)
{
prices = dataProvider.GetPrices(productIdsParameter, price.PriceTypeID);
return prices;
}
* Omitting the other 'WTF?' code to handle the zero price type
}
}
}

I removed the double stored procedure call, updated the method signature to only accept the list of product numbers (which it was before the 'major refactor'), deployed the service to dev (the issue was reproducible in our dev environment) and had the DBA monitor.

The two devs and the manager are grumbling and mocking the changes (they never looked, they assumed I wrote some threading monstrosity) then the DBA walks up..

DBA: "We're good. You hit the database pretty hard and the CPU never moved. Execution plans, locks, all good to go."
<dba starts to walk away>
DevMgr: "No fucking way! Putting that code in a thread wouldn't have fix it"
Me: "Um, I didn't use threads"
Dev1: "You had to. There was no way you made that code run faster without threads"
Dev2: "It runs fine in dev, but there is no way that level of threading will work in production with thousands of requests. I've got unit tests that prove our design is perfect."
Me: "I looked at what the code was doing and removed what it shouldn't be doing. That's it."
DBA: "If the database is happy with the changes, I'm happy. Good job. Get that service deployed tomorrow and lets move on"
Me: "You'll remove the recommendation for a complete re-write of the service?"
DevMgr: "Hell no! The re-write moves forward. This, whatever you did, changes nothing."
DBA: "Hell yes it does!! I've got too much on my plate already to play babysitter with you assholes. I'm done and no one on my team will waste any more time on this. Am I clear?"

Seeing the dev manager face turn red and the other two devs look completely dumbfounded was the most satisfying bug I've fixed.

I was actually successful in one that I literally got from the American version of The Office.

I conditioned one of my employees to want chewing gum after I did a clap motion with my hands: snap the fingers on both hands really quick and do a fist to palm tap and say "hey bud, want gum?" and because I specifically bought his favorite he would always say yes.

Eventually, and after months of doing it, I was walking around the office when I did the motion, but this time without gum. Now, he was on the fifth levek of the virtual world doing his shit fully concentrated and he STILL looked up at me looking anxious. I said "what's up?" and he just said nothing, that he felt that he was missing something but couldn't put the finger on it.

Just like in the show, he then complained that his mouth felt funny. Eventually he waddled his way to my office to ask for gum 🤣🤣🤣🤣

tl;dr I successfully Pavlov'ed one of my employees to have a need of chewing gum every time I do a finger snap clap motion.

I am the best manager in the world.

How I met python
[long read but worth]

There's nothing wrong with falling in love with a programming language for her looks. I mean, let's face it - Python does have a rockin' body of modules, and a damn good set of utilities and interpreters on various platforms. Her whitespace-sensitive syntax is easy on the eyes, and it's a beautiful sight to wake up to in the morning after a long night of debugging. The way she sways those releases on a consistent cycle - she knows how to treat you right, you know?

But let's face it - a lot of other languages see the attention she's getting, and they get jealous. Really jealous. They try and make her feel bad by pointing out the GIL, and they try and convince her that she's not "good enough" for parallel programming or enterprise-level applications. They say that her lack of static typing gives her programmers headaches, and that as an interpreted language, she's not fast enough for performance-critical applications.

She hears what those other, older languages like Java and C++ say, and she thinks she's not stable or mature enough. She hears what those shallow, beauty-obsessed languages like Ruby say, and she thinks she's not pretty enough. But she's trying really hard, you know? She hits the gym every day, trying to come up with new and better ways of JIT'ing and optimizing. She's experimenting with new platforms and compilation techniques all the time. She wants you to love her more, because she cares.

But then you hear about how bad she feels, and how hard she's trying, and you just look into her eyes, sighing. You take Python out for a walk - holding her hand - and tell her that she's the most beautiful language in the world, but that's not the only reason you love her.

You tell her she was raised right - Guido gave her core functionality and a deep philosophy she's never forgotten. You tell her you appreciate her consistent releases and her detailed and descriptive documentation. You tell her that she has a great set of friends who are supportive and understanding - friends like Google, Quora, and Facebook. And finally, with tears in your eyes, you tell her that with her broad community support, ease of development, and well-supported frameworks, you know she's a language you want to be with for a long, long time.

After saying all this, you look around and notice that the two of you are alone. Letting go of Python's hand, you start to get down on one knee. Her eyes get wide as you try and say the words - but she just puts her finger on your lips and whispers, "Yes".

The moon is bright. You know things are going to be okay now.

Yeah, it's fucked. My fuck is fucked. Fuck the world ftw.

This started as an update to my cover story for my Linked In profile, but as I got into a groove writing it, it turned into something more, but I’m not really sure what exactly. It maybe gets a little preachy towards the end so I’m not sure if I want to use it on LI but I figure it might be appreciated here:

In my IT career of nearly 20 years, I have worked on a very wide range of projects. I have worked on everything from mobile apps (both Adroid and iOS) to eCommerce to document management to CMS. I have such a broad technical background that if I am unfamiliar with any technology, there is a very good chance I can pick it up and run with it in a very short timespan.

If you think of the value that team members add to the team as a whole in mathematical terms, you have adders and you have subtractors. I am neither. I am a multiplier. I enjoy coaching, leading and architecture, but I don’t ever want to get out of the code entirely.

For the last 9 years, I have functioned as a technical team lead on a variety of highly successful and highly productive teams. As far as team leads go, I tend to be a bit more hands on. Generally, I manage to actively develop code about 25% of the time to keep my skills sharp and have a clear understanding of my team’s codebase.

Beyond that I also like to review as much of the code coming into the codebase as practical. I do this for 3 reasons. I do this because as a team lead, I am ultimately the one responsible for the quality and stability of the codebase. This also allows me to keep a finger on the pulse of the team, so that I have a better idea of who is struggling and who is outperforming. Finally, I recognize that my way may not necessarily be the best way to do something and I am perfectly willing to admit the same. I have learned just as much if not more by reviewing the work of others than having someone else review my own.

It has been said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. This describes my relationship with software development perfectly. I have known that I would be writing software in some capacity for a living since I wrote my first “hello world” program in BASIC in the third grade.

I don’t like the term programmer because it has a sense of impersonality to it. I tolerate the title Software Developer, because it’s the industry standard. Personally, I prefer Software Craftsman to any other current vernacular for those that sling code for a living.

All too often is our work compiled into binary form, both literally and figuratively. Our users take for granted the fact that an app “just works”, without thinking about the proper use of layers of abstraction and separation of concerns, Gang of Four design patterns or why an abstract class was used instead of an interface. Take a look at any mediocre app’s review distribution in the App Store. You will inevitably see an inverse bell curve. Lot’s of 4’s and 5’s and lots of (but hopefully not as many) 1’s and not much in the middle. This leads one to believe that even given the subjective nature of a 5 star scale, users still look at things in terms of either “this app works for me” or “this one doesn’t”. It’s all still 1’s and 0’s.

Even as a contributor to many open source projects myself, I’ll be the first to admit that have never sat down and cracked open the Spring Framework to truly appreciate the work that has been poured into it. Yet, when I’m in backend mode, I’m working with Spring nearly every single day.

The moniker Software Craftsman helps to convey the fact that I put my heart and soul into every line of code that I or a member of my team write. An API contract isn’t just well designed or not. Some are better designed than others. Some are better documented than others. Despite the fact that the end result of our work is literally just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, computer science is not an exact science at all. Anyone who has ever taken 200 lines of Java code and reduced it to less than 50 lines of reactive Kotlin, anyone who has ever hit that Utopia of 100% unit test coverage in a class, or anyone who can actually read that 2-line Perl implementation of the RSA algorithm understands this simple truth. Software development is an art form. I am a Software Craftsman.

#wk171

This happen last year during a one day workshop over zoom. We where around 16-18 strangers plus the tutor. We started with everyone introducing themselves (most showing their faces on camera), then it was just the tutor with his shared screen. Two hours in, one of the participants accidentally turned her camera on. I know it was accidental because I still cringe from what happened next: she started picking her nose. At this point, I have to clarify that I'm not familiar with zoom, because I'm on Microsoft teams almost exclusively thanks to my organization. While I looked frantically on how to DM this person (something along the lines of "hey, your cam is on :)" or whatever), I watched in horror as the second act of this play unfolded as she put her finger in her mouth and started to eat it. At this point I was actively dying from second hand embarrassment. Like girl, our orgs payed good money to be on this workshop, gave us a day off (so to speak) and know all I can focus on is you going gold hunting and bringing home some cured cave meat. My boss basically paid so I can get traumatized! And all this while being being in the comfort of my own home. Thanks, zoom! Anyway, she went in for seconds. That is when I died. I am dead at this point. My eyes glued to the screen. Ears ringing. Brain fried. It is done. Now, that the cringe has peaked, does it even matter If I figured out how to dm her? It is too late at this point. We all saw it. The tutor must have seen it. We all witnessed it. We are all witnesses, your honor. She has been witnessed! What else can I do at this point? Me, one bystander amongst bystanders. Idle and powerless.This is exactly how the holocaust started! At this point, I'm no better than your average Joe, who doesn't really like the new regime but doesn't fight it either. At this point, I ask myself what would Jesus do? Or Hollywood? What would happen in the movies in this situation? If I cant fight them, join them? Starting my cam, knuckles deep and double fisting my air holes to save what? It is done. Nothing left. She made her statement. She basically played us for fools. By god, what a freaking boss move that was! Like, can you imagine? Here we were, during the end of a world wide pandemic, bound to our homes, advised to regularly clean our hands, protected ourself and our loved ones and, yes, not eat buggers. And here comes miss fuck-it-all showing us degenerates how its done. You go girl! You showed us the light while we dwelled in darkness. You are our queen! Long may be her reign and just her punishments! I have seen true power and wept with the angles! I was born again. My mind at peace. I was Gandalf the Grey, now I am Gandalf the White. This is the day I will tell my children about. Songs have been written for less. I will never forget this!

Anyhow, I could go on, but that this is basically what happened over the span of a couple of moments in late 2022. I will never forget her. And now you won't either ❤️

Nothing infuriates me more than how Safari on iOS supports less standards than IE6. How can we live in a world of standards with Apple giving us the middle finger.