An entirely typical exchange at work:

PM: How long would it take to build an application that collates Gubblefluffs and exports them as a PDF?

ME: Hard to say. What’s a Gubblefluff?

PM: Nothing complex. Its basically an object with some stuff in.

ME: Erm, okay. So I’ll define a Gubblefluff object plus methods to add edit and delete, then for each Gubblefluff have it write a line to a PDF.

PM: It will need to email that PDF to somebody.

ME: Okay, cool. “Gubblefluffs-by-email” should take about a day.

6 hours later…

ME: I’ve done Gubblefluffs-to-pdf, I’m not clear on what’s in a Gubblefluff but I’ve made it flexible so it can take almost anything.

PM: No, a Gubblefluff can ONLY be one of 4 Snigglefingers plus a timestamp and some JSON.

ME: What? Right. Okay. What’s a Snigglefinger?

PM: (sighs) A Snigglefinger is the collection of relevant Babelsets.

ME: Babelsets?

PM: Yeah, a user can have any number of Babelsets but they must correspond to one of the four types of Snigglefingers.

ME: There are users!?

PM: Of course!

ME: But I’ve not coded anything for users.

PM: Shit. I’ve told the client they can have it today. How long to add in users?

ME: And Babelsets, and Snigglefingers and the new Gubblefluff rules?

PM: Yeah.

6 days later…

ME: This is done now. It’s a beast but it works. Who should it email the PDFs to?

PM: Client X, plus cc to Y and bcc to Z.

ME: What? It doesn't support CC and BCC!

1 hour later…

ME: This is done. I’ve tested it and sent you a copy of the PDF it generates.

PM: Okay thanks. Is the cron running daily?

ME: What cron?

…

ME: Okay, so the cron’s running once a day at 8pm.

PM: Oh, it’ll need to be at 3:15pm. That’s when we’ve told the client they’ll get it.

ME: Right. I’ll change it...

PM: Also, the PDF you sent me looks nothing like the visual.

ME: What visual?
...

I always like to approach a new coding project by concentrating on the data model first. I've seen a lot of projects built on extremely convoluted database structures and it really hurts because it makes it hard to add new features to the project.

So I look at the requirements of the new project and try to come up with a basic data model. Then I like to think about what logical future additions to the project could be. And using those, I try to see if the data model is flexible enough to be able to handle those additions fairly easily or if complex migrations or hacks would be needed to account for new use cases and features.

I think once you have a solid data structure and database technology, planning out an API or rest of the software is pretty straight forward. I like to create reusable pieces of middleware early on in the project which makes it easy to apply consistent functionality with ease to different API endpoints.

Me and my love-hate Linux.

I lost virginity really early. In the age of 5 it was my first time with windows 95. I spend almost 10 years with Windows before something happened that would change everything. I met Linux. Her forename was Arch. I had a crush on her right from the beginning. It didn't take long for me to abandon windows. Arch had everything I wanted. She had latex which was pretty hot and looked simply and elegant on her. Sometimes she was really hard to deal with and almost drove me crazy, but I knew I fell in love.

Until that day. I had to write a short paper which was quite fun and Linux helped me alot. It was a breeze to work with her. The evening before the deadline she was quite thoughtful. She sometimes was, so I thought it'll be alright, but this time was different. She struggled a bit, so I put her to sleep and she never woke up. I brought her to the emergency lab which was open 24/7. Since no one was there I had todo the surgery myself. After 5 hours I was almost to tired to continue when she finally woke up. I asked her about the things she should remember for me - then I killed her. I started to hate Linux for what she had done to me. The unbelievable stress and horror.

I returned to Windows. Besides that she got a bit more curious what I was doing when and where nothing really changed and she was glad to have me back. I just was happy how simple our relationship was.

One day then, I couldn't believe it at first, I met Archs sister. Manjaro. No matter how strange that is, but it was as if I would meet Linux again for the first time. She was just a bit simpler but as flexible as arch. Since then we are happy together. It seems that we both just grew up a little.

And with Windows? She got even more curious! Actually I have the feeling she is stalking me now, but I don't regret anything!

You know who sucks at developing APIs?

Facebook.

I mean, how are so high paid guys with so great ideas manage to come up with apis THAT shitty?

Let's have a look. They took MVC and invented flux. It was so complicated that there were so many overhyped articles that stated "Flux is just X", "Flux is just Y", and exactly when Redux comes to the stage, flux is forgotten. Nobody uses it anymore.

They took declarative cursors and created Relay, but again, Apollo GraphQL comes and relay just goes away. When i tried just to get started with relay, it seemed so complicated that i just closed the tab. I mean, i get the idea, it's simple yet brilliant, but the api...

Immutable.js. Shitload of fuck. Explain WHY should i mess with shit like getIn(path: Iterable<string | number>): any and class List<T> { push(value: T): this }? Clojurescript offers Om, the React wrapper that works about three times faster! How is it even possible? Clojure's immutable data structures! They're even opensourced as standalone library, Mori js, and api is great! Just use it! Why reinvent the wheel?

It seems like when i just need to develop a simple react app, i should configure webpack (huge fuckload of work by itself) to get hot reload, modern es and jsx to work, then add redux, redux-saga, redux-thunk, react-redux and immutable.js, and if i just want my simple component to communicate with state, i need to define a component, a container, fucking mapStateToProps and mapDispatchToProps, and that's all just for "hello world" to pop out. And make sure you didn't forget to type that this.handler = this.handler.bind(this) for every handler function. Or use ev closure fucked up hack that requires just a bit more webpack tweaks. We haven't even started to communicate to the server! Fuck!

I bet there is savage ass overengineer sitting there at facebook, and he of course knows everything about how good api should look, and he also has huge ass ego and he just allowed to ban everything that he doesn't like. And he just bans everything with good simple api because it "isn't flexible enough".

"React is heavier than preact because we offer isomorphic multiple rendering targets", oh, how hard want i to slap your face, you fuckface. You know what i offered your mom and she agreed?

They even created create-react-app, but state management is still up to you. And react-boierplate is just too complicated.

When i need web app, i type "lein new re-frame", then "lein dev", and boom, live reload server started. No config. Every action is just (dispatch) away, works from any component. State subscription? (subscribe). Isolated side-effects? (reg-fx). Organize files as you want. File size? Around 30k, maybe 60 if you use some clojure libs.

If you don't care about massive market support, just use hyperapp. It's way simpler.

Dear developers, PLEASE, don't forget about api. Take it serious, it's very important. You may even design api first, and only then implement the actual logic. That's even better.

And facebook, sincerelly,

Fuck you.

Client: Our meeting is going to be on March 27th at 9am. Clear your schedules and add it to your calendar.

Me: I'm not sure why this wasn't cleared with me, but I'm 3 hours behind you guys and that will be 6am for me. If you want to have a meeting at that time, I'll be sleeping.

Client: We start our days early, so we need you to make yourself available at that time. We have other stuff on our agenda so this is the time it will be taking place.

Me: I will not, repeat will not be available at that time. I have the 29th and 30th available at that time, but any day before that will have to be scheduled at 1pm or later. Mondays however are a no go. We have standing appointments on Mondays that we cannot reschedule.

Client: Monday, April 2nd at 9am is the new time. Please clear that time.

Our Company owner: we just said Mondays are a no go.

Client: we're getting frustrated that you are not being flexible with your schedule. Here is what you are going to do. Give us a calendar with every day and time you have available and we'll tell you what works.

Owner: We just gave you a bunch of dates. We're the ones trying to be flexible while you've been dictating what time's we've been available. That's not how this works. Mondays aren't happening. The 27th isn't happening because I'm not going to expect my developer to get up at 6am because it's convenient for you. This is a not a one way street. Let us know when you're ready to find a date and time that works for all of us.

----

This is the same guy I argue with on a daily basis and tell to fuck off when he's being a douche, but when it matters, he's pretty badass dude.

Every day.

I am a PHP developer.

Yeah, "another PHP is awful" rant... no, not really.

It's just unsuitable for some ambitious projects, just like Ruby and Python are.

First of all, DO NOT EVER use Laravel for large enterprise applications. The same goes for RoR, Django, and other ActiveRecord MVCs.

They are all neat frameworks for writing a todo app, as a better-than-wordpress flexible blogging solution, even as a custom webshop.

Beyond 50k daily users, Active Record becomes hell due to it's lazy fat querying habits. At more than a million users... *depressed sigh*.

PHP is also completely unsuitable for projects beyond 5M lines of code in my opinion. At more than 25M lines... *another depressed sigh*.

You can let your devs read Clean Code and books about architecture patterns, you can teach them about SOLID & DRY, you can write thousands of tests... it doesn't matter.

PHP is scaffolding, it's made of bamboo and rope. It's not brick or concrete. You can build quickly, but it only scales up to a certain point before it breaks in multiple places.

Eventually you run into patterns where even 100% test coverage still doesn't guarantee shit, because the real-life edge cases are just too complex and numerous.

When you're working on a multi-party invoicing system with adapters for various tax codes, or an availability/planning system working across timezones, or systems which implement geographical routefinding coupled to traffic, event & weather prediction...

PHP, Python, Ruby, etc are just missing types.

Every day I run into bugs which could have been prevented if you could use ADTs in a generic way in PHP. PHP7 has pretty good typehints, and they prevent a lot of messy behavior, but they aren't composable. There is no way to tell PHP "this method accepts a Collection of Users", or "this methods returns maybe either an Apple or a Pear, and I want to force the caller to handle both Apple/Pear and null".

Well, you could do that, but it requires a lot of custom classes and trickery, and you have to rewrite the same logic if you want to typehint a "Collection of Departments" instead of "Collection of Users" -- i.e., it's not composable.

Probably the biggest issue is that languages with a (mostly) structural type system (Haskell, Rust, even C#/JVM languages to some degree, etc) are much slower to develop in for the "startup" era of a project, so you grab a weak, quick prototyping language to get started.

Then, when you reach a more grown up phase, you wish you had a better type system at your disposal...

This genius made his very own super-flexible-and-versatile-never-seen-before-mvc-framework, with no documentation about the code, instead of just donwloading and implementing a popular one.

He left the company.

I maintain it.

Fell my pain.

*deep breath*

Remain calm, don’t freak out, remain calm, don’t freak out.

*deep breath*

Ok, so my sort of new manager (had a slightly different manger-ish role on the team), has for the third time in as many months, just sent an email criticizing the dev team for our working from home-ness (which for the record has not been that bad, 2/3 or 3/3 have been in everyday for the past month)

In this same period, there has been late nights, weekends, successful releases, I’ve been invited to talk at a conference about my work (not a particularly big one, but still). Point is, everything is going well, very well in fact.

There has been no emails discussing our great work, thanking us for extra work, thanking us for picking up slack from other teams who are down a few people etc. no our major concern it seems is the “optics” of our team not being present in the open space.

Our contracts list flexible working hours, and his boss has frequently told us WFH is fine when things are too busy. But no he is complaining for us to get our hours in the office in line and make sure we are in the office more.

It’s been a particularly long and frustrating week, and I’m very tempted to inform him that if he is concerned about my chair and desk looking empty, that I can put them somewhere for him where they will always be occupied until a surgeon can remove them.

However, thanks to the deep breaths, I’ve managed to restrain myself long enough to run this past you all first and ask advice.

Please help,
Sincerely,
My sanity

Dev manager: great news guys. We’ve built a new tool to do automated testing on apps. We’ve gotten rid of the old Appium solution we were using and built this new one.

Me: why not just use the inbuilt native stuff? Click to record works really well.

Manager: nah we thought it would be more flexible to build it ourself.

Me: ... ok ... moving on ... how does it work?

Manager: well this new .jar, you download it, pass in a config file, setup up your simulator and appium and the jar will do everything for you.

Me: ... wait you said you hate Appium? Now you’ve built a wrapper around it? And it doesn’t even set everything up, you’ve to do it all by hand?

Manager: oh we had too, would be too much effort to replace it. Don’t worry we can now write all our tests in .yaml config files instead of using Appium.

Me: so we’ve lost the ability of auto-complete and type ahead, everyone has to upskill on a new tool, it offers no new features over what’s available out of the box and we’ll have to deal with new bugs and maintenance and stuff our self ... because we need more flexibility?

Manager: oh don’t worry. The guy who built it is staying here. He’s going to deal with bug fixes and add features. He’s only one guy, but he’s really sharp, it’ll be great for us and the team.

Me: ... ... ...

*audible noise of soul breaking*

Me: ... ok thank you. I’ll look into this new tool

This is a long rant. Sorry in advance. I just want to let it all out.

I don't really know what John (not his real name) did to my boss, who I shall name as Steve. Does he have a personal grudge? Like wtf?

John wasn't even incompetent. He even helped us mobile developers in our designs using photoshop. He's flexible. Ok sure, he isn't a top performer, but he isn't a low performer either. But why the fucking hate? really.

We currently have a new project, and are assigned to our posts. Then Steve goes, "Ok John, you will remain in the old project." He already said it once, which is fine. But did he really have to bring it up EVERY TIME? "John doesn't have to go overtime because he's in the old project, so it'll only be us." Like really? Of course we know that. why do you have to keep repeating that John isn't included? He even pointed at John during this. John shouldn't have been in the meeting then. Dipshit.

There was a meeting with the Web team in regards to what the progress was. When it came to John, Steve had to say, "The design is so ugly." Ok.. first off, you are not the QA to say that. And everyone else says it's fine. Even the QA says it's fine. So wtf? Why do you hate him so much?

We have these friday meetings in where we present our topics to the team, like Object Oriented Programming, SDLCs, and the like. We presented our stuff, and Steve listened attentively to everyone. But when it came to John, guess what? he ain't listening. He's on his phone, on his EARPHONES even. fucking rude. When John finished, he said, "You didn't present everything." He talked for an hour and a half. His topic has many things. Of course he can't present everything. And that is all you have to say? What about the others then? The others didn't present everything but you didn't complain. Why do you have to humiliate him to everyone else?

Way to demoralize your employee. What a lead. Fucking piece of shit. I am treating John pizza since I can't do anything else for him. It's frustrating. I wouldn't be surprised is John left the company.

Attack problems you've never solved.

Don't fear projects which you're not familiar with the technology.

Read books, blogs, and code.

Refactor every opportunity you have.

Don't always be the smartest developer in the room.

Be flexible. Tools are tools, don't fall in love with any one till and neglect others.

I JUST FINISHED MY FIRST NEURAL NETWORK!!!

But first of all, as I know you guys, it's spaghetti code and even I as a newb see places where I used too few-dimensional array or passed useless parameters or simply wrote too many redundant lines of code. I know it. I will make it MUCH better next time. Period.

But OMFG this made me scream from happiness today!! Just these few seemingly random numbers... I'm really done.. That's why I jumped into coding year or two ago..

And for some background, I didn't study any IT school, I'm just highschooler (general grammar school) who traded gaming for learning. Also my maths teacher teached NNs on university and is very keen to teach me, so that's that.

Now I wanna make the best out of it and I'm looking forward to write some well documented and flexible library, parallelized and everything (I'm gonna learn a lot in the process of doing this) better then FANN.

Maybe I'm gonna fail(99% probability but hey, I'm programmer beginner, I still think I can code everything I want). But if there is just one moment like when I saw this screen today, I'mma trade my life for it.

Sorry for taking your time guys, I was just genuinely stunned... A lot

FML
B: boss
M: me

B "Do this work (basically a document parser) "
A "Done using regexp"
B "The data coming in is different now"
A "ok, updated the regexp parts to account for this"
B "hmm, I you should rewrite it using library tool coworker made"
A "eeer ok, redone all the work now but it's a little hacky"
B "oh, library tool isn't flexible enough. Hmmm maybe use regexp?"
A - literally dead

Why do HR people ask stupid questions like the following ones? Everytime I get those questions, I have imaginary answers like the ones right after each question.

Why do you want to work here?

- Obviously, because I need the money to survive. I'm not here because I love working for you and having to endure your stress. I'm not that type of a kinky person.

Are you flexible?

- Why? Do you want to annoy me when I'm sleeping in the middle of the night because of a sudden deadline or because a god damn employee didn't show up?

Do you see yourself as a perfect fit for both developer and tech support roles?

- Read my fucking resume, moron. I applied for a developer role. Nothing else.

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

- As if you would care. It's none of your business, but since we are at it. I see myself as your manager in 5 years. Hope that you like that thought.

We didn't bother reading your CV. Would you like to tell us about yourself?

- Nope. Have a nice day and suck my dick. I'm leaving.

Can you give us your phone number and the phone number of your girlfriend?

- I didn't know that I am selling my soul to your company by accepting this job offer. I'm not your slave and you will not call me whenever I'm enjoying my private time.

What's motivating you?

- Money and the peaceful vibe at work when you are shutting the fuck up when I'm fully focused during my projects.

How do you handle stress?

- I dick slap everyone infront of me.

Do you see yourself as a hard worker?

- Nah, I'm not interested in sucking dicks, eating her ass and bending over to get a little bit of a raise.

List of benefits given by some random company to its developer,
1- Medical, Dental, AD&D
2- Generous paid time off and holidays
3- Free fitness center in our building
4- Flexible schedule
6- Mac or PC, your choice
7- We and our customer don't use IE
8- Starbucks on the 1st floor
9- Generous 401k match
...

But I like 7th one the most!

I'm not even that old and I've had it with young cocksure, full of them self language/environment evangelists.

- "C# is always better than Java, don't bother learning it"

- "Lol python is all you need"

- "Omg windows/linux/mac sucks use this instead"

The list goes on really, at some point you have got to realize that while specialization is great, you have to learn a little bit of everything. It broadens you horizon a lot.

Yea, C# does some nifty stuff, but Java does too, learn both. Yea I'm sure Linux is better for hosting docker containers, but your clients are on mac or windows, learn to at least navigate and operate all three etc. Embrace knowledge from all the different tech camps it can only do you good and you will be so much more flexible and employable than your close minded peers :)

Hell even PHP has a lot to teach us (Even more than just to be a bad example, har har)

That moment when your manager tells you that he's okay with ultra-flexible schedules, because "I trusts you 100%. You proved your value, please come late if you prefer"

I love my job

Wrote a rant yesterday (or recently?) in which I explained that I needed to rewrite the core of something I'm writing in order to make it more extendable/flexible/modular.

Finished the rewrite yesterday and started to write a module (it exists our of modules and one can write a specific module for a specific kind of task) for another use case that has shown itself in the past few weeks.

Fun thing is that part of the core stayed the same and I hardly made changes to the libraries which the core uses a lot but the modules are, except for a few similarities (like one default invoke methods), completely different but do use the libraries to make sure they've got all functions needed to properly fulfill their task.

Ran a rule (what I call something in the project) hoping that everything works together the way it's supposed to and that the config files are interpreted well by the parsing 'engine' (pretty much switch cases and if-elses 😅).

FUCKING BAM IT FUCKING WORKS 😍

I'm glad I'm a dev with flexible work hours...

If you don't let the company enslave you then you're not a team player.

Also, you're definitely NOT flexible!

I was told there's gonna be:
- good salaries
- informal company setups with benefits
- lots of jobs available
- non-dev people look at you in amazement
- get to work on really interesting stuff

What I'm actually doing:
- carrying a team of people in uni because you're the only one who knows how to code
- deal with shitty uncommented legacy code at work
- be reminded that if you don't do something super-sophisticated you're easily replaceable
- spend unpaid overtime hours because you're the only one at your job that is on the issue (I see a pattern of being alone in a problem here)
- requestion all my career decisions
- cry and be stressed
- hate every minute of work, yet be stuck in it because it's a source of income that is flexible enough for me to be able to study full-time

So dunno man, I'm still waiting on what I've been told, people say there's lotsa money and satisfaction waiting for me after grinding through 5 years of high education, it'd better be worth it

TL;DR :

"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"

STORY TIME

Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.

As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.

The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.

Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.

It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.

Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.

Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).

The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.

So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.

Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.

So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.

We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.

Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.

My tech stack progression:

Started with PHP without any frameworks, using a homegrown MVC architecture. Used to use `mysql_` functions everywhere. And only jquery + vanilla CSS in the front end.

Then moved to use PDO functions in PHP and Backbone.js + Less CSS in the front-end.

Then moved to Django in the back-end. Did not like Django very much as it is too opinionated and not flexible (although it's damn good for rapid development if you buy into their type of things).

Then moved to Flask + SQLAlchemy and using a home grown architecture. This is a sweet spot for me in terms of back end and stayed in this spot for the longest time.

Moved to Postgres from MySQL as I fell in love with Postgres.

Then learnt React+Redux. Liked it. Made most sense to front-end development this way. Moved front-end stack to React+Redux.

Learning Haskell and been working with Scotty and eyeing Servant for a while now.

Let's see where it goes from here.

PS: this is my personal journey through various tech stacks in various products at various companies I have worked. I'm not talking about moving a product through these many tech stacks. That doesn't make any sense.

Right after high school, I was looking for an internship. I mailed my cv to a bunch of local companies and got quite a few responses. Two of the companies invited me for an interview.

The first one was a somewhat big company and they would have had me working on some angular web app. The other one on the other hand was a small team of 6 people, 2 of which were the bosses.

It was one of the nicest interviews I could have ever imagined. We just sat down and talked about what kind of programming experience I already had and what I wanted to learn.

They hired me right away. The internship was just 6 weeks and after that my studies in computer science were gonna start. They offered me a part time position with flexible hours and I gladly agreed.

I've been working at that company for over a year now and it couldn't be going better.

When I discovered Clean Code, design patterns, TDD and BDD. It just clicked. Ever since everything build so easy and obviously. I no longer have most of the code problems folks rant here about.

That's when it came to me: it's not enough to know how to write code. To climb off those amateur shoes I must adopt those methodologies, so that the code would be decoupled from me, from my style, and I've got to let tests drive my code rather than vice versa to have a flexible and reliable codebase that is cheap and easy to maintain/extend.

Flexible office working hours is a blessing!

Not specifically dev related other than being hired as a dev, more a corporate thing.

I have medical issues that mean I can be a bit variable in my starting time. Company was aware and floated flexible hours as a possible solution, but never said it *was* a solution, and just left it there really breezy.

Nailed this down with my line manager a couple weeks later after HR lost their shit, apologised and thought nothing of it.

Few days later I read a blog post about IP clauses in contracts that reminded me I intended to ask, as mine didn’t have one.

Asked HR, no response for like an hour, then “we’ll get back to you on that”

Following week, pulled into a sudden meeting. “Sorry for short notice of meeting, but we’re terminating your employment effective immediately for ‘lack of commitment’”.

Utter. Bullshit.

The day before, the company literally had a company day where they banged on about their values and how they wanted to support their employees and foster an environment for good health and good mental health.

No disciplinary proceedings. My line manager found out 5 minutes before I did.

I emailed a few colleagues afterwards and apologised, and they were stunned it had gone down the way it did.

I was so blindsided and angry in the meeting, especially after I believed I’d found a company that was actually different and cared.

And I did my work, I stayed late quite often, even produced a couple internal devops tools in my time there.

The kicker is that it was within the probation period, so I have literally no recourse for any action against them.

What’s the most bullshit corporate clusterfuck you’ve been through devRant?

my job offer reply rant from today >>>>

Hi,
thanks for the offer but reading from job description your solutions look obsolete, old and complete mess to me.
I am mainly focused on modern open source, flexible technology stack and this job would not be a challenge I am looking for.

Good luck
Kind regards

<<<< end of story

Seriously, wtf is with the new "make-everything-in-javascript" thing?

JavaScript is a terrible language. The type safety, or rather lack of it, gives me nightmares about debugging. The standards are always different. It's way too flexible. Ugh.

I'm tired of all the awesome services that I'd love to use being centralized over Node and JS. I don't want to use your stupid fucking language. Who does?

Also what happened to that dart thing that was supposed to replace JS?

New HOE came. He “streamlined” the processes and “standardised” the policies. And in turn.. fucked up the whole startup feel of my company.

I saw it happening right in front of my eyes in a matter of only few months.

Earlier, things were flexible, work was fun, people were even ready to put in more hours because we were all having fun. Now, work feels like work, fun is gone, frustration has become normal, and the most frustrating part is that.. WFH is now a “privilege”.

Fuck this shit man! That fucker exhausted the whole company in just a few months. Given enough time, he will be the end of this company.

Internship Rant #2

I can't believe I'm hating my job right now. It sucks because I have never coded in javascript and they expect me to code in javascript. I don't even know what I am doing, but I'm trying my best. I kinda have something already, but the worst part of it is that my boss comes in once in a while and sits beside me looking at my screen and of course, he expects me to tell him what I have been doing and what progress I have done. It's stressful cause I specifically told him that I have never coded in JavaScript and he still thinks I can get things done in a few days.

Perks of new job:
- I can take a bath there whenever I want
- gr8 bathroom 11/10
- gr8 heater, no need to have my hands shaking all the time
- workspace is nice and everyone has an extension so my phone and laptop are always on full charge
- flexible work schedule
- easy access to company files hehehe including credentials

Anyways, so I have to deal with this for three months.

I need to make a confession about my terribly unprofessional project I made. Around two years ago I got thrown for the first time into back end development - I had to work on the project alone. As a very smart man I basically exposed our SMTP server as a nice and very flexible API.

Fortunately it was, by the design, a very short-lived project, taken down from the web completely and for good after around 2 months. I'm still happy I had more luck than brains and nobody used our server as a spam sending service in our name and I have learned a valuable and relatively cheap lesson in security this way.

Writing a, for me, quite big system and had about everything ready to go, the earliest version about works.

But, it's written for one (broad) specific use case and guess what: in the past few weeks, a few other use cases have presented themselves. The 'principle' is the same so I could integrate them into the current system, but; then I'd have to rewrite the entire thing to be more flexible.

I think I'm going to do that but damn I've been debating this for hours now 😬

Let junior dev design module.

Make code review.

What junior dev says: "It is a totally flexible concept!"

What junior dev means: "It is extremely shitty to use for the one use case it was meant to do, but it will be equally shitty to use for all the use cases we will never have."

Back to square one.

Am I the only one hating the idea of flexible desk policy?

Got a job offer. Pays more than my current job (~13% increase) and allows me to commute. However, less freedoms. This is weird to me - the job is for a small firm (20 employees), and my current is huge (~25-30k). Now I can work from home when I need it, and flexible hours (aka, get in whenever I feel like it). New job had in contract "No remote working" and "Work hours are 0800-1600".

Think I'm gonna turn em down.. Fuck being locked down like that, honestly.

Flexible working hours, Home Office, fair compensation, working on a greenfield product 🥰.

I was in a bad spot two years ago jobwise and I don't regret jumping the ship for a second.

I would never have guessed that flexible hours and WFH would be so beneficial to my mental health!

Not everything is perfect all the time, but it gets pretty damn close all things considered.

I can actually write my own, simple code, I'm not very flexible but I actually get JS now.

Best tool:
Your hands!
- incredibly flexible
- express a lot of commands trough very little code (just raise the middle finger and tell me if you are not expressing something VERY strong with VERY little complexity)
- reusable
- interfaces
- smells of good soap

Worst tool:
Your brain
- highly power consuming
- wrinkly, ehw!
- overthinks a lot
- imposter syndrome
- hooked on sugar like it was cocaine
- hooked on cocaine like it was sugar
- refuses to comprehend chthulu

So I started in a new job a week ago for a two weeks probation period, im getting payed double than my last job but it's so professionally frustrating.

They use a full php stack with a framework called tinymvc that I never heard of and the last commit is from 2009.

Beside this they implement some sort of "flexible" MVC where a great amount of the logic are inside the views. They have one model for each entity (in theory) but in reality one model have methods for a lot of tables.

Beside this the i18n is done by querying the database for all the translation strings and copying it in every user session, so every session file it's about 400kb where around 380 are duplicated translations.

The views folder is empty because they decided to modify the framework to look for the views in another folder called resource's and the development must be done connected directly to the production database

Above all this shit all the many-to-many relations in the database (MySQL) are handled creating a comma separated field on one of the tables, completely breaking the reference integrity.

So, after a week of work I can't stop thinking who the fuck developed this? In which world this shit is okay? How can I work around this big lake of shit?

Hey, it's 2023.

If your component isn't written in TypeScript, I'm not using it :)

"TypeScript is overly complicated!!!" why, because it pointed out everything wrong in your JS code?

"TypeScript is not flexible!!!" why, because it makes you not rely on fragile "only possible in javascript" patterns?

"TypeScript isn't needed!!!" why, because you've never worked on a project with more than 100 lines of code where dependency management and clean code policies were implemented?

god just stop with the JavaScript purist BS, you aren't going to win this battle, and it's even worse because not only are you injuring everyone in the software community, you're injuring your own productivity and skillset

actually, you know what, fine. just use pure JS and HTML implementations. see you in 10 years when i'm retired and you are still running around in circles wondering why the world has left you behind

Finally got a job I see myself staying in more than 2 years :) A boss that give us time to write / read blog posts.
Flexible work life.
Working with all the new stuff like dotnet core, docker :)

This is the craziest shit... MY FUCKING SERVER JUST SET ON FIRE!!!

Like seriously its hot news (can't resist the puns), it's actually really bad news and I'm just in shock (it's not everyday you find out your running the hottest stack in the country :-P)... I thought it slow as fuck this morning but the office internet was also on the fritz so I carried on with my life until EVERYTHING went down (completely down - poof gone) and within 2 minutes I had a technician from the data centre telling me that something to do with fans had failed and they caught fire, melted and have become one with the hardware. WTF? The last time I went to the data centre it was so cold I pissed sitting down for 2 days because my dick vanished.

I'm just so fucking torn right now because initially I was absolutely fucking ecstatic - 1 week ago after a year of doomsday bitching about having a single point of failure and me not being a sysadmin only to have them look at me like I'm some kind of techie flat earther I finally got approval to spend around 5x more per month and migrate all our software to containerized micro services.

I'll admit this is a bit worse than I expected but thanks to last week at least I have recent off site images of the drives - because big surprise I have to set this monolithic beast back up (No small feat - its gonna be a long night) on a fresh VPS, I also have to do it on premises or the data will only finish uploading sometime next week.

Pro Tip: If your also pleading for more resources/better production environment only to be stone walled the second you mention there's a cost attached be like me - I gave them an ultimatum, either I deploy the software on a stack that's manageable or they man the fuck up and pay a sys admin (This idea got them really amped up until they checked how much decent sys admins cost).

Now I have very flexible pockets because even if I go rambo the max server costs would only be 15-20% of a sys admins paycheck even though that is 13 x more than our current costs.

! exactly dev

I'd ditched Windows and spent a while exploring the Linux ecosystem for content creation. And I have to say, it was not a nice experience.

As much as I respect the Linux mantra of "free as in freedom" and "you need to roll up your sleeves and figure out stuff on your own", it just isn't good enough for non-dev work. Sorry guys, but I need software that gets out of my way and at least does what it's supposed to do. I can't stand a horrible UI or delays and random crashes, which is exactly what happens with most things under Linux.

To replace my Windows workflow I used the following:
1. Windows -> elementaryOS (because Debian/Ubuntu repositories seem to have the best software support, and elementaryOS is the least horrible looking thing that supports that) and then Arch, because, well, Arch.
2. Blender + Maya -> Blender + Maya on Linux.
3. Reaper + FL Studio -> Ardour + LMMS.
4. Photoshop -> GIMP + Krita + Inkscape.
5. ZBrush -> nothing :(

As you can see, my use cases are pretty much all over the spectrum.

Firstly, installing and configuring stuff. A pleasure on Windows, an absolute pain on Linux. Everything just worked on Windows, I had to wrestle with library versions and patches and unstable audio layers (Linux audio just sucks, except for JACK) on Linux.

Out of these, Blender and Maya were the best experience. But even then, both would suffer from random crashes that just didn't happen on Windows.
Ardour is actually really nice when it works. Its use of JACK for routing makes it really really flexible, but it just isn't stable enough to depend on. LMMS is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I just hate the UI. Can't stand it.
GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape can't beat Photoshop, even when you consider them together. Adobe software workflow is just so much better and more intuitive.
Blender 3D sculpting is not bad, but it's nowhere as good as ZBrush.

Also, if you're a C++ dev like me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2017. Nothing. That IDE just blows everything else out of the water. Even VSCode. And it's not slow at all, it handled a fairly large project (PBRTv3) just fine on my Windows development VM. Yes, a VM.

So...I ditched Linux and went back to Windows, but I keep Linux as a VM for when I actually want to mess with Blender or Ardour. Or some dev stuff which Windows sucks at (which is becoming less frequent because of WSL).

Out of all the above, the only one I'd consider ready for production use would be Blender. Developers of open source software, please learn from Blender. Kickass UI and user friendly operation is extremely important, you can't make a random window with GTK buttons and text boxes and arcane config files and expect people to use it for serious work.

Also, Windows beats Linux hands down as an everyday OS. It's always been rock solid, if you take care of it properly (and that goes for any OS). Updates hardly take any time because I run it on a SSD. As for all the advertising and marketing bullshit, you can block a large amount of stuff. And for what can't be blocked, well, I just have to live with it, because the alternative is compromising on my creative output, which is too much for me.

I still run Linux on my server, though. And on my embedded devices (Pi, BeagleBone, etc.). It absolutely rocks there.

I realize that Linux software is not going to improve unless we do something about it, so I'll be contributing fixes and code (the joys of being a C++ dev, yay). Still, I feel that the platform and software as a whole is just not mature enough.

Spent a lot of time designing a proper HTTP (dare I even say RESTful) API for our - what is until now a closed system, using a little-known/badly-supported message-over-websocket protocol to do RPC-style communications - supposedly enterprise-grade product.

I make the API spec go through several rounds of review with the rest of the dev team and customers/partners alike. After a few iterations, everybody agrees that the spec will meet the necessary requirements.

I start implementing according to spec. Because this is the first time we're actually building proper HTTP handling into the product, but we of course have to make it work at least somewhat with the RPC-style codebase, it's mostly foundational work. But still, I manage to get some initial endpoints fully implemented and working as per the spec we agreed. The first PR is created, reviews are positive, the direction is clear and what's there already works.

At this point in time, I leave on my honeymoon for two weeks. Naturally, I assume that the remaining endpoints will be completed following the outlines/example of the endpoints which I built. When I come back, the team mentions that the implementation is completed and I believe all is well.

The feature is deployed selectively to some alpha customers to start validation testing before the big rollout. It's been like that for a good month, until a few days ago when I get a question related to a PoC integration which they can't seem to get to work.

I start investigating and notice that the API hasn't been implemented according to the previously agreed upon spec at all. Not only did the team manage to implement the missing functionality in strange and some even broken ways, they also managed to refactor my previously working endpoints into being non-compliant.

Now, I'm a flexible guy. It's not because something isn't done exactly as I've imagined it that it's automatically bad. However, I know from experience that designing a good/clear/future-proof API is a tricky exercise. I've put a lot of time and effort into deliberate design decisions that made up the spec that we all reviewed repeatedly and agreed upon. The current implementation might also be fine, but I now have to go over each endpoint again and reason about whether the implementation still fulfills the requirements (both soft and hard) that we set out to meet.

I'm met with resistance, pushback and disbelief from product management and dev co-workers alike when I raise the concern that the API might actually not be production-ready (while I'm frantically rewriting my integration tests and figuring out how the actual implementation works in comparison to what was spec'ed).

Oh, and did I mention that product management wants to release this by end-of-week?!

The Cloud Of Bullshit

Every day I wake, and I think of my one true mission in life. To mock and ridicule paint huffing idiots. Something recently that drew my ire, like the hemorrhoids on my ass is this idea of 'the cloud', THE CLOUD and the buzzword lingo-bingo bullshit that providers use to hype and sell it.

For example, airtable is an amazing service. I love that I can insert just about anything into a row, create any of my own row datatypes, that it's flexible as all hell.

I love it.

And I hate that I'm essentially locked in to the cloud.
I fucking hate how if my internet goes down (thanks you pie eating inbred dipshits at comcast) I have no access.
If the company is bought, they'll shut down like all the rest , to be "relaunched at a later time" (or never).
I hate that if the company doesn't make enough money, or it's investors change their mind, woopsie, service is shut down.
I hate that the cloud is synonymous with massive data leaks and IOT-levels of stupidity in security practices.

Every time someone says "but its in the cloud! Isn't it amazing!"

I always think 1. YEAH IF IM AN INVESTOR I GET TO MILK LOW BROW FINGER PAINTING FUCKWITS EVERY MONTH like Adobe sucking the blood from infants who are still in college.

2. Why? So I can get locked into their platform, have them segment off previously free features (fucking youtube and the 'subscribe so you can continue playing audio with your screen off' bullshit), and then have fees increase month over month?

3. Why, so every four years during the presidential selection, if I piss off some fuckstick braindead lemming literally sucking his girlfriends BFs cock, they can potentially shut me out from my own data completely?

The Cloud is built on shit-colored hype sold to knob gobbling idiots, controlling idiots, profiting at the expense of idiots, and later fucking them for buyout payola. The Cloud is a Cloud of Bullshit shat out by huckster messiahs straight into the lapping mouths of fanatics worshiping slavishly like toilet drinking scum at the porcelain alter of a neon god, invisible, untouchable, and like a spigot, easily shut off without anyone noticing. And when it happens, I'll be there, shouting "WHERE IS YOUR CLOUD NOW?"

Native any day. 100% native or I don't fucking want it
None of this node.js-gone-native bullshit either with notetaking apps taking up hundreds of megabytes of ram, where everything is bootstrap or react, in a browser, in a window container, because people are so fucking incompetent we have to hold their hand WHILE they give themselves a reach around.

Native or nothing.

For my favorite notetaking app, I use Microsoft OneNote. "OH god, a heathen, quick, stick his body up on a stake!"

But hear me out. I'll be the first one in a crowd to kick bill gates in the nuts (not because I particularly hate microsoft, just because I think hes kind of a cunt).

So when I say onenote is good, I really fucking mean it. Sure they did some cunty things like 'dumbed down' the interface, and cut out some options. But you know what they can't do?
Shut down the damn service (short of a system update completely removing the whole app, which, frankly, wouldn't surprise me).

It's so god damn good it waxed my balls, cured my cancer, fixed my relationship with my father, found my long lost brother, and replaced ALL my irl notebooks.

It's so good that if it was cocaine I'd be hospitalized for overusing it.

So god damn good it didn't just replace all my notebooks, it even replaced and sped up my mockup process three to five times. Want layers?

Built in. Just drag an image on to the notebook to import instantly.

Want to rearrange layers? Right click select "send forward/back/bring to front/send to back".

Everything snaps to grid by default and is easily resizeable.

I had all the elements for a UI sliced and diced. Wanted to try a bunch of layouts. Was gonna take me two damn days.

Did it in three hours with the notebook features of onenote.

After I started using onenote, me and my bodypillow finally conceived even.

Sweet marries mammaries I just fucking jizzed. Thank you onenote.

P.s. It really did speed up my UI design, allows annotated images, highlighted text. Shit, it can even do kanban.

And all I can think is "good job microsoft making an awesome product for free, being dumb as fuck for not charging for it, and then not marketing it at ALL."

It was sheer fucking luck that I discovered it while was I was looking for vendor STD bloatware to blast off my new install.

OneNote: Worth a try even for the kick-gates-in-the-nuts fan club.

The cloud can suck my balls.

2018 dev goal #1: ✔️

This week I learned Python 3, as in most of the syntax. Not yet any development, but that will come tomorrow onwards.

Oh, and I hate the funky type system, which is almost non existent and so flexible that I don't know if it's just bad or I simply don't see why I should want it this way.

Please enlighten me why you think Python is great or just plain snake crap.

Did I mention snake case being common practice? And that Python doesn't know real private properties, methods, etc.? How does that work?

Well, this’ll get me a downrant and probably a pile of abusive and hateful comments, but I chose WordPress as my dev specialty. It’s in that sweet spot between my own uselessness as a full stack and front-end coder and my clients’ inability to comprehend how to click an “Update plugin” button. So they pay me to do that, plus the occasional “design”, and are seemingly happy to do so.

I think I won something. Not sure what. But my stress levels in my career are consistently at an all-time low. I have lots of flexible time in my day to do work, go outside, get exercise, work on hobbies, network with other people, and be with family. I guess being a WordPress “expert” isn’t all that bad.

This is a story about the shitty client who managed to ruin everyone's day, consistently....

So this client, its our biggest revenue source (about 33% of total) and our boss is total wuss when talking to them because of that... Each meeting he has with them he ends up bending over nd just takes it all...

So after each meeting with those shit heads, it's always the same...

It's our fault for going over budget (them changing their mind like 10 times during a project over key issues has of course nothing to do with it, because hey, we're a flexible company and all we do is modular and extendable right?)

Its our fault for not meeting the deadline, because of course our boss keeps accepting last minute projects like there we're otherwise sitting on our thumbs

And than their fucking contact person... Biggest ass ever, always involving us in his own office politics... I'd throw him through the window

Another day, another job description

# Benefits
- Flexible work hours
: You'll be coding to midnight
- Ability to work from home some days
: But watch out for those other days..
- Our office space provides free coffee, beer and soft drinks as well as an amazing modern workspace
: Our tax expense will get you gee'd up and tipsy til you loose track of time. (Future diabetes health insurance not included).
- Growth and future progression opportunity
: Pinky promise!
- Receive valuable company equity
: Plus a set of steak knives for four easy payments
- Latest MacBook Pro
: We own this. We own the thoughts you have while looking at this. Plese think many thoughts.

This was a comment I made on another ranter's post.

* Tailor your resume (and cover letter if needed) according to the job. No generic resume.
* Research about the company and make sure you have the same interests as the company. Clearly let them know why they should hire you. One question you can expect is: Why should we hire you?
* Show them that you're passionate about the job.
* Be curious. Ask questions. That's how they'll know you're interested.
* Be open to opportunities. Let's say you're applying for Full Stack developer role. Be open to take up Front End or Back End developer role. You don't have to accept everything but at least roles tangent to your job (provided they match your interest).
* Be flexible but focused.
* You don't have to know every listed requirement but make sure to know the majority.
* Don't lie. "Fake it till you make it" doesn't work with dev roles.
* Be confident in telling them "you don't know" if you don't know. Also make sure to tell you're willing to learn that.

I’ve come to the conclusion that developers who like react have never used it for anything even remotely complicated.

Because here’s reacts dirty little secret; it doesn’t scale. Not even a little. It’s flexible, but that leads to every developer writing their code in a different way.

It’s simple and easy for simple side projects, but as soon as you have to pass state to a child component, you’re fucked. And god help you if you’re modifying the state in said child component. You can try using redux, but that’s a bandaid solution to the real issue.

There are better alternatives, namely Vue. There’s no need to write unintelligible code that’s a mutated hybrid of html css and js. We as web developers realized mixing these technologies was a bad idea a long time ago.

React simply doesn’t scale. It’s flexibility, complexity, and the awful code quality it leads to makes it a nightmare for large projects with multiple developers

Some of its concepts are interesting and useful though. It’s functional concepts allow for easy code reuse, among the other benefits associated with functional programming

I sincerely hope that the hype around react dies out, and a new framework emerges that takes the best from react and fixes the glaring issues it currently has

Dear Tailwindcss,

Fuck you.

Fuck you and your messy as fuck html files.

Fuck your shitty pseudo 90s 'Let's dump all our shit in a single html file'.

Fuck your claims of being responsive, most of your widths and heights are done in FUCKING PIXELS.

Fuck your claims of being flexible, adding a 10% width class took 20 minutes of scrolling through your shitty docs.

And the worst part is, the poor devs 4 years from now are gonna be stuck maintaining this goddamn shit because shitty enterprise companies desperately trying to stay relevant are treating this shit like the Holy God of Frontend styling, the solution to CSS once and for all

FUCKING IDIOTS CSS ISN'T BROKEN, THIS GARBAGE IS!!!! WE DON'T NEED A SHITTY SOLUTION TO A PROBLEM THAT DOESN'T EXIST

Tailwind can go fuck itself with it's 200 character html lines

ARGH the next person to tell me how X is the best toolchain is getting their fucking head cut off! Holy fucking shit, this is even more annoying than the whole IDE debate. At least with IDEs everyone has a favourite one and they hate others accordingly, with build toolchains there's always a huge group of fucktards sucking each other's dick by adding new features, and they're always too busy wanking their sparkling features for small projects to realise how fucking inefficient their polished dings and dongs are for any bigger job.

For the millionth time, no, we're not switching to this popular toolchain just because it gave you a blowjob with your pet project (although that would indeed be a tempting offer), so stop talking how fast and flexible it is. Until you can show how it compiles a 500 MB project faster than our current setup, I don't give a shit how many people jerk on that nookie.

I really like this book on the basis of the philosophy overall, no this doesn’t solve all problems but it’s a good baseline of “guidelines/rules” to program by. Good metrics or goals to architect and design software projects high and low level projects.

Fight Software Rot
Avoid duplicate code
Write Flexible, dynamic, adaptable code
Not cargo cult programming and programming by coincidence.
Make robust code, contracts/asserts/exceptions
Test, Test, and TEST again and Continue testing.. this is a big one.. not so much meaning TDD.. but just testing in general never stop trying to break your software.. FIND the bugs.. you should want to find your bugs. Even after releasing code the field continue testing.

So...Just got moved from salaried to hourly for an already extremely overworked, underpaid position. Lost our flexible hours and our platform is moving to drop and drag...Watch them say no overtime now. Beyond pissed!😡

I rarely tell this story because it's hard to believe and would show me in a bad light if people don't believe its details. I know there have been foolish moves from my part, and more stuff should have been agreed to in writing, and I did step into a legal grey area. However I am pleased with what I did and how it all turned out, and this is as close to the truth as possible without needing to explain too many details.

I was once a team lead in an outsourcing company. We had a flexible payment plan depending on results. That helped me motivate myself and my team. Things worked great.

But then the boss started acting like shit:
1. Flexible payment means minimum, right?
2. Promises are made to be broken, as long as your employees have hope and work overtime for a whole month just to finish an important project before schedule, right?
3. Who needs a good, comfortable, SAFE work environment when you can save 30$ on not buying a new crappy chair in place of the old broken crappy chair, if it can be maintained standing by just a bit of duct tape and careful balancing on it? It's not like that developer who earns 30$ per hour has anything else to think about than balancing on a broken chair, right?

I'm a very calm person at work. I never ever raised my voice at anyone for 10 years of my career. Except this situation. I pulled the boss out of the office so his secretary wouldn't hear what I had to say. I threw this everything into his face.
A guy from sales got out of the office to go to the bathroom, and when he heard me, he carefully snuck back into the office (I didn't see him. He told me this over a beer after he left).

Of course I quit on the spot, convinced most of my team members to leave (wasn't hard, I just had to offer a secure plan, which I did), and helped my team members to get good positions elsewhere, and assisted others in starting their own business, by stealing customers from this company (the asshole did not foresee this when he prepared the labour contracts), after he accused me of plagiarism (that I stole code from somewhere else) and used that excuse to not pay me what we agreed upon.

I didn't want litigation. I just used karma, while remaining in the legal realm.

Within a month after this, more than half of his company was gone, and he was left with only a fraction of the revenue he was making before, since the only ones left were people that did not produce value (sales that had nothing to sell, accounting that had nothing to account, etc.), and just one person maintaining one remaining contract that was bringing barely enough money to sustain half of these people.

Now I want to congratulate you for actually finishing reading this :)

I'm halfway in on a six-month disaster contract where I'm converting a massive site written over 7~8 years to a new system. Manager has had us restart about 4 times and there are other departments who want to take over. The deadline is so tight that I've stuck with the original plan and kept my code flexible to be changed if the manager wants to go with the other teams' ideas. ("Okay, manager: here's a clone, tell the other team to prove that works") The lead dev, to my horror, didn't write any code and was let go in November.

Manager hired a new dev part-time whose commitment is on something entirely separate that is required in order for the deadline to be pushed to Summer. (new thing for old thing)

New dev has an attitude, basically wants to start over, and is already acting like I'm his subordinate, very patronizing, very dodgy when asked to explain a strong opinion (THIS IS A SECURITY PROBLEM!!!1). I really have no idea what my manager promised to him. Also found out that manager hired an agency to create a roadmap of the project (WHY?!!! WHY NOW?!). I've been burned once already with the previous lead, and I'm not wild about working with yet another person who wants to burn the whole thing to the ground and start completely over, especially not someone who wants to engage in a dick-measuring contest.

Do you guys have any advice? I mean, other than quitting? I'm going to see this through, but I'm burned out.

My first job seems nice enough to stay.

Teammates are nice, work schedule is flexible, and free meals.

I think I am super lucky.

Start-up I'm working for as a front-end dev is pretty nice. I have good hardware, free coffee and my coworkers are all decent people. My boss is chill, and I have flexible work hours.

There is this one policy for writing code, however. And I simply cannot understand it, nor can I ignore it because of code reviews: no comments in production code.

I mean, what? Why? Comments are nice, and they make life easier for the future maintainers. At least let me put a small two-liner explaining why I did stuff this or that way. But no, I only get to explain it verbally (once) to the person reviewing my PR. Why, man?

So when I joined the company 2 months ago I was told they offered flexible working, today I received this email. (I can't help but think it is aimed at me given I often arrive between 9 and 10....I'm always the last to go home)

Oh and yes they have named some of the team DevOps and others just Developers, they haven't quite grasped the concept!
-----------------------------------------------------

Morning All,

I have been noticing the start time for all the team members. Some like to start early while some likes the late start. So before Senior management raises any questions below is the shift pattern I would like everyone to stick to it.

I have assigned name against each of the shift which I am aware of. If you would like to change it please let me know. We need at least one Developer between 08:00- 17:30 and at least one Devops between 07:00 – 17:30.

If we have any emergency issues and takes longer to fix it , I would appreciate if you guys can work after your shift. We can adjust this overtime by leaving early next day or whenever possible.

7:00 – 15:30 - @Michael Smith
7:30 – 16:00 - @Sarah Twist @Jim Bob
8:00 – 16:30 - @Lesley Matthews
8:30 – 17:00 - @Bill Best
9:00 – 17:30- @Jennifer Rowe @me!
9:30 – 18:00

So I'm at that age of arranged marriage process. It's kinda like dating but even more complicated with more if conditions on religion, caste, region, age and impressions of a third person who may be a mutual relative or acquaintance. And yeah, you have to engage or marry before any kind of intimacy.

Finding a girl of same religion, caste and region is hard enough, ( not a matter for me personally, but it's a factor for families to go along ). I was lucky enough to find this pretty nice girl that seems be the best match I have received in the matrimony site so far.

She's also a programmer which is awesome and together we could also explore the earth as a Digital Nomad if she's also into that.

Here's the deal though, my father is not very keen on next steps in making this partnership ( guys parent calling girls family to know things better ) because apparently she did higher education abroad and works abroad, and I'm not that qualified in terms of education. And on top of that, he worries I'll move abroad leaving everything back at home.

I suppose that's his insecurity showing up.

He doesn't realize working in IT is the most flexible job as proved in 2020 and it's only going to get better in the coming years. We could work from anywhere with the right remote company.

Anyhow, the girl's family found out my number and reached out to me directly. I'm pretty impressed honestly.

I had left little traces on the internet for potential families to find more info about me if they choose to look me up! This was in a way a little filter of my own. Thanks to Google Analytics and Seach Console for helping me to track them XD

I just hope this works out and my father won't mess up my chance for me to get to know this girl better and potentially be with the life partner I dreamed of.

If this won't work out, I'm just gonna live alone rest of my life. The criterias and conditions set by boomers for arranged marriage are very disgusting for my modern mindset.

Central team: No, your team must be doing something wrong. Our pipeline is super-configurable and works for any situation! You just have to read the docs!

Me: Where are the docs?

Central team: Uhh, well, umm... we'll hook you up with a CI/CD coach!

Me: Okay, cool. In the mean time, can you point me at the repo where all the base scripts are?

Central team: Sure, it's here.

Me, some weeks later: Yeah, uhh, the coach can't seem to figure out how to make our Prod deployment work either.

Central team: That's impossible! It's so easy and completely configurable!

Me: Well, okay... but, here's the thing: your pipeline IS pretty "configurable", in the sense that you look for A LOT of variables...

Central team: See! We told you!

Me: ...none of which are actually documented, so they're just about useless to me...

Central team: But, but the coach...

Me: ...couldn't make heads or taisl of it either despite him literally being ON YOUR TEAM...

Central team: Then your project must just be architected wrong!

Me: Well, we're not perfect, so could be...

Central team: Right!

Me: ...but I think it's far more likely that the scripts... you know, the ACTUAL Python scripts the pipeline executes... while it took me DAYS to get through all your levels of abstraction and indirection and, well, BULLSHIT... it turns out they are incredibly NOT flexible. They do one thing, all the time, basically disregarding any flexibility in the pipeline. So, yeah, I'm thinking this is probably one of this "it's you, not me" deals.

Central team: Waaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!!!

#forexposure, for experience, flexible hours (especially when coupled with work from home, it makes your workplace too accessible and management can guilt trip you into working at ungodly hours way too easily), and such I'd really avoid.. not that I have much experience with these things though. Oh and also, startups. They're small so very intimate in a way but too unstable.

Honestly though, I have difficulty in working for any employer, especially when that employer isn't a very technical one. Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to go self-employed... 🤔

(Sorry for repost, forgot wk144 tag)

I love javascript, but sometimes it's just an incredibly stupid language, such as when undefined variables get interpreted as string literal "undefined" when concatenating strings. I like it better how, for example, PHP handles undefined values, that nulls just turn into "". Better still: typed languages, where most stupid mistakes are caught already at compilation, instead of having to spend hours to track down where that mysterious "undefined" comes from. As I said, I love javascript - because it is easy to code, flexible and forgiving in many ways. But I hate it for the exact same reason, for being such a sloppy fluffy...thing, and a bugger to debug. If javascript would be an animal, it would be a cute and cuddly cat that you instantly find adorable, but it's actually quite fat and lazy, plus its fur is littered with ticks and other bugs.

Im gonna commit a cardinal sin here, but i like windows. It's maybe not as flexible as linux, but dammit i do not have the time to meddle with my os all day.

This is definitely a total first world problem but I am so frustrated.

I am stuck in a team that embodies the Japanese proverb "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down".

The management are there because it is convenient and flexible and have no interest in managing or keeping up with tech.
The lead developers are extremely anti-social and are not approachable and the this stems down to the devs (not all but really most) - all there just to do the bare minimum and spend most of their energies in trying to avoid work or having learn something.

Unfortunately I am passionate about what I do and want to build high-quality products and this has put me at odds with the way things work.

I could fill up alot of time talking about how I was ordered to "cut" images/icons out of PDFs rather just getting them from the branding team, or how I was scolded for having set up logging, detected a problem caused by another developer and fixed it before it cost a big client a massive amount of money... But really the point is that I have never worked somewhere with such an awful attitude to enthusiasm and quite frankly it boggles my mind trying to understand how they rationalise these things but the answer is always laziness.

Obviously there are worse problems in the world than working in a job where you are encouraged to do nothing... But it actually really depresses me and causes anxiety that I am working with people who don't care about testing or monitoring or learning new things or even collaboration.

...sigh...

Hopefully the job market will start opening again soon

ripgrep is AMAZING!

It's a CLI tool to search your code quickly, and here's the kicker: it uses your . gitignore to only index your source.

It is fast, powerful, and highly flexible and I'm MARRYING IT

`brew install ripgrep`
`rg 'your new bicycle' -g '!*.yml' `

Management: Our internal app must be 100% rigid so that we users follow predefined process flows exactly so no mistakes are made while also being 100% flexible so that users are free to go about their business in whatever way they feel is appropriate for their own unique needs. These are the requirements!

Dev: …

My friend has a saying that helps me keep focused and reality checked:

"Move Forward, Stay Flexible, Expect Resistance."

Say it to yourself often.

To all the devs out there fighting the fight, keep this in mind and push forward. One of the things I love about our industry is the wealth of information we share and the support we get from our mentors and each other.

Some of the jokes aren’t bad either.

What would you choose:

- 35% raise + professional growth

- flexible hours with occasional home office but no professional growth

?

VS Code for sure. Same experience on win/*nix systems, built in debuggers, terminals, flexible configuration. I am so deep in love and can't recommend it more

Me: I think our customer should have to specify this thing.

Someone else: Let's do what we can to be really flexible for them.

Me Later: Yeah well our super flexibility now makes these queries they want impossible .....

Am i whiny or is resilience so glorified in this field?

I am a junior developer. I was assigned with two projects together with a friend and a senior. My friend and I finished our assigned tasks way before the deadline. Fast forward, my senior got reassigned to a different project since we are lacking with manpower. Naturally, his transactions were assigned to me and my friend. And my goodness, his existing codes are a piece of shit! It's all over the place. His variable naming is shit, his codes are all around the place, his codes doesn't even follow our company's coding standards, no try catch, a lot of unsafe practices. In short, cleaning his code is a pain in the ass and my friend and I got really busy with cleaning his mess. The testing of our system is really near but I just thought that maybe he's really busy with the other project that's why the quality of his codes deteriorated.

He's not. One day, I saw his in discord that he's playing during work hours lol. And the worse part is that he is playing with our boss! YES. DURING WORK HOURS. I got mad but I couldn't say anything because he is really tight with the boss.

Later on that day, we had our meeting. I was surprised when my boss told me that she's expecting that the excel part of our system is already finished. A little background here, my boss asked me to study Excel VB. However, I didnt get to study that much because I was so busy fixing bugs and after that came the cleaning of our senior's shit codes.

So I tried to say these things to my boss but I was cut out by the same senior shouting "You can do it!" over and over again. No one listened to what I was trying to say! And to make it even worse, the boss had a very proud look on her face and she even had the audacity to tell me that I'm lucky I have such a good support system. I dont.

Now, the company is planning to put me in a very demanding project. I havent finished cleaning up my senior's codes, I havent started anything with the excel and the deadline is next week!

The boss told me that even if I enter the other project, that I will still be responsible for the Excel part of our system. So fucking shoot me in the face.They were telling me that I should have a good time management system, that I should be flexible, that I should adapt easily, yada yada yada. She just makes you feel bad about yourself if you're not as 'flexible' as her.

The thing is, even if I have the best time management techniques in the world, if you bombard me with a shitload of tasks, then I won't be able to do it properly! I don't even take breaks anymore! I work literally 8 hours a day, even more than that. And I dont understand, why the hell is she overworking me when her friend (the senior dev) is just playing during work hours?

Another funniest thing is that she told us that when we encounter technical problems, we should ask our senior dev. Oh boy, if only she knows how shitty his codes are.

Why is it that virtually all new languages in the last 25 years or so have a C-like syntax?

- Java wanted to sort-of knock off C++.
- C# wanted to be Java but on Microsoft's proprietary stack instead of SUN's (now Oracle's).
- Several other languages such as Vala, Scala, Swift, etc. do only careful evolution, seemingly so as to not alienate the devs used to previous C-like languages.
- Not to speak of everyone's favourite enemy, JavaScript…
- Then there is ReasonML which is basically an alternate, more C-like, syntax for OCaml, and is then compiled to JavaScript.

Now we're slowly arriving at the meat of this rant: back when I started university, the first semester programming lecture used Scheme, and provided a fine introduction to (functional) programming. Scheme, like other variants of Lisp, is a fine language, very flexible, code is data, data is code, but you get somewhat lost in a sea of parentheses, probably worse than the C-like languages' salad of curly braces. But it was a refreshing change from the likes of C, C++, and Java in terms of approach.

But the real enlightenment came when I read through Okasaki's paper on purely functional data structures. The author uses Standard ML in the paper, and after the initial shock (because it's different than most everything else I had seen), and getting used to the notation, I loved the crisp clarity it brings with almost no ceremony at all!

After looking around a bit, I found that nobody seems to use SML anymore, but there are viable alternatives, depending on your taste:

- Pragmatic programmers can use OCaml, which has immutability by default, and tries to guide the programmer to a functional programming mindset, but can accommodate imperative constructs easily when necessary.
- F# was born as OCaml on .NET but has now evolved into its own great thing with many upsides and very few downsides; I recommend every C# developer should give it a try.
- Somewhat more extreme is Haskell, with its ideology of pure functions and lazy evaluation that makes introducing side effects, I/O, and other imperative constructs rather a pain in the arse, and not quite my piece of cake, but learning it can still help you be a better programmer in whatever language you use on a day-to-day basis.

Anyway, the point is that after working with several of these languages developed out of the original Meta Language, it baffles me how anyone can be happy being a curly-braces-language developer without craving something more succinct and to-the-point. Especially when it comes to JavaScript: all the above mentioned ML-like languages can be compiled to JavaScript, so developing directly in JavaScript should hardly be a necessity.

Obviously these curly-braces languages will still be needed for a long time coming, legacy systems and all—just look at COBOL—, but my point stands.

Flexible schedule, remote options, good pay, great team, building something useful to humans

The moment when you have crafted a beautiful, flexible and well structured package.
Everything including the automated tests are flawless..

but you cant help but feel like something, somewhere is horrible wrong... :D

senior IC role, 4 days/week, 5 hours/day, 6 weeks PTO, 99% remote, flexible hours, pays ~75% (full time) market rate

I am very grateful to have a boss that is enabling this.

I'm a big fan of super-modular and flexible code, but my colleagues are huge fans of Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V.

CORRECT ME IF I'M WRONG.

Didn't server industry and technology get a little.. stale?

I mean, just look at similar industries
For example - mobile phones, they are everywhere now and each year we get new technology, the new big thing and whatnot.

Other example - gaming, VR came up moderately recently to a usable state, we got a great influx of flexible languages like C#, Java etc.
New engines to build games on top of, new graphical apis like Vulkan and whatnot.

..and Servers? It feels like the last big thing (and makes me feel like the only one) was Cloud Storage.

wdyt?

First dev job is my current one.

I'm a software engineer in test, writing automated UI tests for web and mobile apps.

Its pretty great. I work from home with flexible hours. I have a boss but he doesnt manage my dev team, he just checks in to make sure I'm getting support, training and have all my questions answered. My dev team is myself and 2 other people, both of which are cool, and all the work is dev-driven.

Might just stay here until retirement, that sounds easy.

Inside Microsoft Palo Alto, the office where only women work: a surgery! The kidney is a frag grenade.
Left to right: white coat, black coat holds kidney (frag), a girl in “sleep” T-shirt, a girl that holds a gun. Meanwhile, my gun’s barrel was made from that fridge flexible magnet material. I fixed it using rainworms as glue.

Now we’re entering my uni teacher’s brain, trying to make her give me a passing grade, all while she sings.
It’s just two of us here. Inside her, we fuse into one. Now we sing too:
🎵 We are Scottish — 🎵
🎵 A batshit crazy thing to be, 🎵
🎵 Trying to be normal 🎵

Xiaomi made a torture device for home that was quite popular in Kazakhstan.

Spending all day sitting in a chair takes its toll on my back. Lumbar and intra-scapular areas are ssssoooooo sore that I can't even stretch them out properly any more (I'm quite a flexible person).

Thanks to my closest shopping centre for this double foam-ball. It's the best investment I've made in years and it only cost me 4€.

Whenever I lay and roll on it slowly I usually drift into sleep out of pleasure.

It's not an ad or anything, just a recommendation to my fellow IT guys and gals suffering back pains from sitting all day long.

Job offer be like:

"You will be working from home with mostly flexible hours although you will need to attend the team meeting which is at approximately 8:30am GMT and to work for 3 hours after this time for team collaboration"

The longer I work on front-end the more controversial my opinions become:

- Styling a button with display:flex is dumb.
- The DOM is not hard, unlike what the React team wants to have you believe.
- Specifying a <form> action matters, even if it's empty
- ES5 was the real JS revolution, ES6 mostly sugar-coated marketing
- Disciplined BEM (S)CSS is simple and flexible enough for most needs (vs CSS-in-JS, CSS modules)
- If editor support for Jsdoc were as advanced as Typescript, you wouldn't need the latter.
- There are cases where using floats and inline-block displays is better than the flex CSS box model

Pseudo-flexible working hours suck. I get the "choice" to start work between 7:30-9:30 AM. I'm a night owl so waking up at 6AM is not an option. Why can't they just allow to start at 10AM and finish at 6:30PM? Between 7:30 & 9:30 is peak rush hour and I'm bound to lose 1h30 in traffic for 30km (normally it would take half an hour) and start my workday pissed off.

Companies try to find young devs, less experienced but more openminded and flexible.. do you think we will still find some cool sobs when we're > 40 || > 50 years old, even if we keep up with new technologies and stuff?

Never thought about it until now..

Why isn't the Lua scripting language widely used in the industry? It's flexible, modular and it's packages aren't bad; seems like a great fit.

Dont blame me for making Minecraft plugins, but holy shit i really hate stairs right now.

Im modifying some old code of mine to add extra features, and i just need to be able to rotate stairs 90, 180 and 270 degrees, then im past this bump.

Stairs get their direction based on a byte value that makes no fucking sense to me.

North = 3
West = 1
East = 0
South = 2

Ive been drawingto see if that made me go "oh like that", checking if the bits of each value had a system, and now im here.

Titshit.
I dont know who made it like this, but i really dont want to make some static switch or if/else statement to process this directional trash. I want it flexible.

If you spotted a system to the numbers, please mail me a rock, and then tell me how i fix this.

I need to buy a laptop to replace my 5 year old one. My work is mostly in data science. My budget is really flexible. Any suggestions?

The default USB voltage hould have been specified to 6 instead of 5 volts.

Six (6) volts would allow for longer cables than five (5) volts do, since the spare voltage compensates for the resistance of cables. This is even more crucial for USB hubs. USB hubs are highly dependable upon these days due to laptop vendors dropping the number of USB ports down to two or even one. I am looking at you, Medion.

If several devices are connected to a USB hub, the voltage can quickly drop below 4.5 volts due to the resistance between the USB hub ports and the computer's USB port, causing some devices to restart themselves even if the computer's USB port is not over capacity. If it were over capacity, it would just regulate down its output voltage to prevent overcurrent.

Lithium-ion batteries need at least 4.3 volts arriving at the battery terminals to fully charge, and mobile devices are typically not equipped with a boost converter. Even if they were, they are rather inefficient, meaning they would produce significant heat and waste a power bank's energy. Other USB devices such as flash drives and peripherals might power off below 4.5 volts. However, 6 volts have solid 1.7 volts of margin to 4.3 volts, more than twice the margin of 0.7 volts that 5 volts have. On the way from the power supply to the end device, the voltage has to pass several barriers which weaken it, including the cable, connector endings, and the end device's internals such as the charging controller.

Sure, there are quick charging standards such as by Qualcomm and MediaTek which support elevating voltages to nine (9), twelve (12), and even twenty (20) volts. However, they require support by both the charger and mobile device. If six (6) volts were the default USB voltage, all devices would have been designed to accept this voltage, and longer cables could have been used anywhere. Obviously, all USB devices should be able to run on five volts as well.

Six volts would have been more stable, flexible, and reliable.

One thing JS does great is that everything from the server to the gui to the (extremely flexible) build system is 100% platform independent with very few platform specific bugs. And that's a big deal when a basic setup is 1200 packages from 650+ semi-coordinated people.

Ordered some fucking computer glasses (which filter out the blue light). Been having red eyes and excessive fatigue these last months, plus sneaky headaches.

We're in 2018, and fucking delivery companies still think that people are at home waiting for their parcel. They came yesterday, fucking saw I wasn't there, they left a fucking delivery notice when my parcel does not require a signature!! I mean, what's the use of a P.O box if it's only there to host spiders in summer?

Plus on that stupid delivery note they've put a QR code - "please use the given code or scan this QR code to change your delivery options" - which is unreadable, AND they didn't give me the fucking code.

Be flexible for fuck's sake, and evolve with your time. I hate Slowtzerland for that - conservative, late, immuable. Especially in "social" services. 99% of the population is away from home from 6 to 18, time to fucking print that in your brain and get on with it.

Now I might wait until Saturday so I can get them glasses...

+30C in the sunlight, +24 in the shade. As soon as I step out of sunlight, it feels like standing in -7 for 5 minutes...Naked. Light-headed af and limbs feel more flexible than gummy worms in a microwave. Even if I've consumed like 2 liters before noon.

Seems like I've managed to fuck up my hipothalamus.. Shit... No more coding for this lizard today

stay safe, kids. Keep your bodies properly cooled.

// Stupid JSON
// Tale of back-end ember api from hell
// Background: I'm an android dev attempting to integrate // with an emberjs / rails back-end

slack conversation:
me 3:51pm: @backend-dev: Is there something of in the documentation for the update call on model x? I formed the payload per the docs like so
{
"valueA": true,
"valueB": false
}
and the call returns success 200 but the data isn't being updated when fetching again.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:00pm: the model doesn't look updated for the user are you sure you made the call?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
me 4:01pm: Pretty sure here's my payload and a screen grab of the successful request in postman <screenshot attached>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:05pm: well i just created a new user on the website and it worked perfectly your code must be wrong
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
me 4:07pm: i can test some more to see if i get any different responses
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:15pm: ahhhhhh... I think it's expecting the string "true", not true
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
me 4:16: but the fetch call returns the json value as a boolean true/false
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:18pm: thats a feature, the flexible type system allows us to handle all sorts of data transformations. android must be limited and wonky.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
me 4:19pm: java is a statically typed language....
// crickets for ten minutes
me 4:30pm: i'll just write a transform on the model when i send an update call to perform toString() on the boolean values
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
backend-dev 4:35: great! told you it wasn't my documentation!

// face palm forever

I learned coding the best way: While getting paid. I was an Excel junkie (still consider myself as one) and a colleague taught me PHP. This gave me the skills to apply for real programming jobs. Eventually I was hired at a company as a PHP developer who would need to be flexible enough to transition into a C# developer within the next 6 months. It wasn't easy, but after about 8 months and a 1-week course later I was programming in C# .NET with grace. Not looking back at PHP now at all. Naturally, today I can apply for a whole bunch of different jobs that I definitely could not three years ago.

I have the dearth of good programmers to thank for this of course and I am grateful every moment when I understand how lucky I've been.

I don’t recall why but a project was in need of an all-nighter and I was the only programmer available to do it. I even brought a sleeping bag and, about 2 hours before people started arriving for work the next morning, I slept in a gap between my cubicle and a wall. I brought a shaving kit and everything. For some reason I didn’t want people to know I had pulled the all-nighter so I had to make sure to get up and look presentable before the first person got there.

When my kids get the mistaken notion that they’ll be able to be like me right out of school and be able to make the money I make and have the flexible schedule I have and work from home and choose projects I like, I tell them my war stories about how I had to work 23 years of some hellish stuff to gain that privilege.

Spent years ranting about being a contractor and freelancing. Finally got a job at a big company. Now I'm hating it and missing my old flexible work life. Hello dev rant, I'm back!

I have 2 juniors working under me that i need to assist with work. I dont mind helping at all because i was in the same boat. The problem is.. 1 of the developers asks questionsnon the last minute (a few hours before demo of weeks sprint) telling me she doesnt understand and i spend all week asking her, if shes okay, does she understand, does she need help, is the work too much, should we take a few hours to rerun through things and even while explaining things after planning, she just says "yes" and "i understand" and has the body language of "i want to get away here" ans doesnt even let me finish my sentances before interrupting mentonsau "yes" or something in that line to end the conversation. I dont know what to do because its going to start affecting my work and the ammount of work i can take for the week because i have to help her do the work on the last day and finish it just so she can look like the sprint was successful.

Any suggestions to help me help her? I really want to see her succeed but i can tell she isnt taking it as serious as she should or putting in as much as she likes because our company is very flexible woth everything and i don't want to get a project manager vibe around her

Been working with NodeJS a lot lately. Finding it really convenient and flexible. As someone who spent a lot of time using C, it's like going from eating fruit to candy bars. Seems pretty amazing just npm installing whatever you need and working with those packages... Until you dare to look at the list of ingredients.

I was asked to make proof of concept small frontend app with some simplified requirements, they asked me because it should be written in the stack I done most of my career work with. I do it in 3 days instead of 5, using those 2 days to optimise the app and explore different approaches. I noted down my findings, what to avoid and reasons and also what is good to use and reasons and shared with everyone.

We waited for the project to start, I started working on another project in the meantime and there was a big rush to make project go live etc., so I was consumed 100% on that new project.

So they put in charge backend php developer to do frontend js work. I said ok, do you need help in starting out? Nah, my proof of concept repo is enough.

4 days before that small project goes live they asked me to do code review. All things I noted down to avoid are in the codebase, few bad practices but everything is over-engineered (in a very bad way), some parts should be more flexible as current setup is very rigid, having almost all kinds of CSS, I saw SASS, CSS variables, 2 different CSS-in-JS tools with some additional libraries that is used to toggle classes.

I don't know how to approach this as I am not asshole as a person and I don't want to say to my colleague that his codebase is completely trash, but it is.

The worst parts: They called me to help finish the app and budget is almost spent!

I would rewrite the whole app as the state of the current app is unusable and everything is glued with bad Chinese ducktape that barely holds.

Additional points because it won't bundle as everything is f**ked.

I am seriously thinking of duplicating master branch and refactor the whole fricking app but won't do that as I am burning midnight oil on other two projects. Don't worry overtimes are paid.

I hate those shitty situations, this project was supposed to be tiny, sweet and example of decent project in this company but it is instead big fat franken-app that will be example how smart it is to avoid putting backend dev to do frontend work (I also agree for vice versa)!

Restarting regular expression parser from scratch has been good. I am somehow both much farther to completion and farther away from completion than I was in the earlier implementation.

Further in the sense that this implementation is going to be way more flexible to changes in the language

Farther in that I haven’t even got all of the regex parts added to the first stage yet.

But I’m feeing good about it.

Even if I did refactor it so my constants are in all caps and now feel like my core is yelling at me.

I always find reading small configuration files way more difficult than reading a big codebase.
I accept config files do really help in writing a better flexible code and separating the logic and settings but always offer a stiff learning curve.
And often, people make changes in config either unintentionally or with half knowledge which works in local but later blows up the entire system.
Wondering how config files can be presented in a way that the learning curve is minimal and the understandability of its impact is more visible.
I do really like annotations or decorators which provides a closer visibility between config and code.

ColdFusion and all ColdFusion devs should be executed. Its a god-awful software from the 90's and if you still use it you're either braindead or ignorant.

Shut up about legacy CF code too! No one cares whether or not your embeddable calendar would be hard to make in JS; fucking figure it out.

I realise that CF may make things easier in the short run, but in the long run you'll have introduced so much technical debt that you'll run crying back to JS anyways; CF is so hard to refactor and even to make flexible that you would spend less total time over an application lifecycle learning JS.

Recruiter: What are your expectations?
Me: I am flexible with the number. You must have allocated a budget for the role. We can discuss that number.
Recruiter: I have all the budget. Give me your number.
Me: 12.
Recruiter: That’s around 100% hike.

DIDN’T YOU JUST FUCKING SAID YOU HAVE ALL THE BUDGET?!

Best part of being a dev is flexible working hours

!!!rant

I LOVE flexible working hours (a.k.a. flextime). I don't know how you feel about it but not being forced to be somewhere at a specific time relaxes and improves my day hugely.

!dev

So last week I sort of unfriended a friend from college that i guess is more like a "chat buddy". After college we've never hung out. Part of it maybe because I'm deaf so there's a communication barrier, I lost most college "friends" after that... but then are they really friends?

The reason was though, he talks to me every night (usually 1-2 hrs online chatting on and off), we do have some laughs but recently he's been complaining about his year end bonus, how it's not enough. And also about how he deserves to match with better girls than the ones he's getting now. He's on those online dating sites and went out with a few. And he's been on a few dates but with my looks and health issues, online dating is pretty much useless. He was the only reason I even tried

He makes twice as much as me already but "he comes from a poor background" so he needs more. Honestly I make enough, but the job isn''t great (not really learning anything new, lot's of things that could be better... obviously) but it's very flexible and near where I now live... should I even choose to go into the office (I sort of work remotely from the rest of the team).

I probably haven't spoken too him for a week now and I don't feel problems, frees up more time but wondering if I sort of withdrawing/unanchored from reality and ignoring problems, settling for less.

Nowadays it really feels like, when I'm in my own apartment or just alone, I'm in my own world, I can do whatever I want... thought most of the time is spent with my devices... so I'm not sure though if that's good or not... Am I a Bachelor or a hermit?

Now i've been rambling for the last 1hr and have no idea what I wanted to say.... guess I just needed to rant...

Ah I remember now sorta... Is this relationship worth keeping or should I find new friends that are more similar to me?

Maybe I've been moving in the wrong direction in life... I shouldn't do things the normal way... Think about what's actually important to me/people like me... not what what everyone normally does...

So I just ditched Windows, but then realized that my music production stuff (mostly REAPER and a few free VSTs) are all Windows/Mac only.
Audio on Linux is fun (as in, pain). JACK seems to be really flexible but is a pain to set up correctly.

Any of you use Linux for music production? Any advice?

I'm using Elementary. Essentially, I need:
1. A good DAW for recording, minimal MIDI.
2. A good sampler.
3. Standard plugin suite - reverb, eq, filters, compressors, delays, etc. I'm not too choosy.
4. Basic synths (I'll be happy with a simple saw/square wave generator, but the more the merrier).

How's Ardour? Compiling it from source right now.

REAPER on Wine doesn't run well for me, so that's out. And they don't have a native Linux version yet.

(no Bitwig, please, I'm not ready to pay $300 or whatever right now)

Internet-based open source platform for democracy. That is, a package of code that you can use as a website that would basically encapsulate all the functions of incorporating the voice of the people into governmental decision-making -- like voting, initiatives/referendums/recalls, contacting representatives or other officials, etc.
This would also be something that could be used to run a private organization or public company as well. Hopefully super flexible.

For reasons I won't disclose, I am just switching off reality in a pretty hardcore way.

Hours, and I mean almost half the fucking day, spent soloing my own TTRPG. It's actually the most fun I've had in years, I think I'm becoming slightly addicted. Dude, I have an abyss of grimdark lore, it's fucking crazy. I'm just bending the space-time continuum with my sorcerous ways, turns out the piece of shit $2 mechanics I designed are so flexible the game simply takes no effort to enjoy.

Anyway, I don't feel bad for this specifically. I do my daily work hours so I'm at peace, and allow myself to just do what I want to do.

Everything else is what gets me down. Fucking shit, man. I'd be ashamed of complaning, as I have it very good. I like my job and I like my game too. No problems there.

But the fact that I cannot go anywhere beyond those two things does raise little bit of an alarm, buried somewhere deep beneath the hundred tomes of forbidden spells I'm collecting on the alcove, down by my quarters on the cursed tower.

Tomorrow night, I'm going on more mystical adventures together with my vampire homegirl. She's a total boss. I was at 1 HP with both my fucking legs broken and no mana, just sitting on the sidelines trying not to die, while she fended off an inquisitor two times her level, all by herself. I know she's a fictional character but I said thank you for real a couple times, just to be nice, as she totally saved my arcane ass.

Now, you get me, right? It's escapism, and I'm great at it, a little bit too much. Honestly, once I'm done with my responsibilities for the day, I just don't feel like doing much of anything else, and I'm not crazy enough (yet) to not notice the downside, that being, no fucking life outside of working and locking myself up inside dark fantasy wonderland.

I suppose this is my roundabout way to say this better than sex, but I don't know if you would understand the sentiment.

Anyway, shutting off reality again in twelve or so hours, can't fucking wait.

Got a high paying job, with great benefits, and a big name, straight out of college. I was hired as a software engineer. Comfy, relaxed, and flexible.

The problem comes where it was not the job I was expecting. It has been almost a year and the only programming I've done has been 1 small copy pasta project. I am worried because I am bored and feeling my coding skills fade away. I'm still a novice programmer and feel like this impacts future career opportunities not learning useful skills for outside of this company. I'm going to grad school to do what I really want but still have the 2 years.

Do I stay or do I make the stressful change again? Other fun thing is I just relocated a distance to an area with not a lot of opportunities so would likely involve relocating again.

WFH vs Office, what will be your preference in a post covid world?

I'm sure after the covid saga ends, there will be a plethora of remote and WFH opportunities since businesses are now ready for it. Most big companies in our place (Like Microsoft, Google, Amazon) have extended WFH till June/July, and Microsoft even said it's gonna be way more flexible in letting ppl WFH

I would like to play Pokemon emerald because I'm building a game based on it's graphics and I need a source for my pixel art.

Can any of you fine folks drop suggestions on where to play the full game? I'm looking for Linux and windows solutions, would prefer some website rather than downloading emulators (Just for the ease of it) but am open to emulators if they are trustworthy.

I also would like to play other Pokemon games in the future so bonus points if the solution is flexible to that.

Thanks much 😘

*new message on LinkedIn from recruiter

Recruiter: would you be interested in a position on .Net ?

Me: I'm only interested in positions that offer flexible schedule (so I can continue my studies)

Recruiter: *proceeds to send me a long description of the job and company

Me: *read it. There is no information regarding the schedule anywhere. Search on Google the company and find out they have a fixed schedule 9-16. F**K!!, Why would you waste my time and yours, you don't even read my message or what ??

Huh... Seems like my company is going to implement flexible office/home hours even after lockdown is lifted.

Not sure whether they're trying to rip us off, because we're going to use office space less and they will pay less accordingly, or whether it is really a an improvement because allegedly many people here responded that they would like to have such a flexible option rather than being glued to the office space.

The Coding Apocalypse: A Dev's Rant

June 14, 2024

Okay, gather ’round, fellow code warriors, because it’s time for a good ol' developer rant. If you're reading this, chances are you’ve already faced the dragon that is modern software development, and you’re somehow still using "Agile" as a life preserver while the ship is sinking. So let's dive into the chaos that our world has become.

Here’s the thing: We’re living in a paradox where every other day there's a shiny new framework promising to be the “ultimate solution” while ignoring that it's just recoil from the last big mess. I mean, can we talk about JavaScript for a second? I’m pretty sure if you stand still long enough, a new JavaScript framework will spontaneously generate from the void. Do we really need another one?

And don’t get me started on Sprint Planning. It’s like playing Tetris with stones while blindfolded, hoping that all the blocks land perfectly. Spoiler: They don’t. The product manager’s eyes glaze over as they nod approvingly to your estimates, secretly extending deadlines in their minds. The 'flexible' deadlines then become rigid, unattainable goals, and who gets the heat? The devs, of course.

Also, can we address the insanity of microservices? Sure, splitting a monolith into microservices sounds fun—until you’re drowning in API calls and Docker containers. Debugging a distributed system is like trying to untangle a pair of headphones made of spaghetti.

Oh, and if one more person asks if we’re "leveraging AI" and "blockchain technology" for our simple CRUD app, I might lose it. Sometimes, folks, the wheel doesn’t need reinventing. It just needs a little grease.

Finally, remote work. Blessing and curse. Sure, I enjoy the freedom of working in my PJs, but the endless Zoom calls are killing my soul. Breakout rooms? More like breakdown rooms. The Slack notifications? Let’s just say my sound settings have a hair trigger on mute these days.

So here’s to us, the devs. The ones who stare into the abyss of JIRA tickets and laugh in the face of mounting tech debt. May your coffee be strong, your code refactored, and your deployments ever in your favor.

End rant. Back to the trenches. 🚀💻

!Rant
Help/ideas needed

I need ideas of projects to develop in my free time, I'm tired of the old technology and ugly projects from work, I want to develop something new, fun, to feel the excitement of coding again ;)

The field does not matter i'm willing to learn.

And , no , I can get another job, that is not an option because of the special benefits it's offering that I can not find in another company(very flexible schedule, I'm a student and need it).

Been working for almost a year, really hard, on a serious attempt to make GUI development on Python fun, easy, flexible, with a full array of widgets and do it in a way that complete beginners can understand and the professionals will enjoy because it's so easy. My solution is called PySimpleGUI.
My 'rant' is the downvoting and slandering happening on places like Reddit is done by people that haven't tried to use it and most haven't installed it. Yet, they're experts in how sh*tty it is.... even though nothing stated as being a problem is truthful. When asked for more direct feedback on what's wrong, how it can be improved, the active rant threads go silent.
I've never been on devRant, so I hope I'm doing the right thing here! I'm just blowing off steam, not trying to start some holy war.

Yesterday I was doing amazing coding, making big things happen, today I'm explaining how the internet works so a customer who doesn't care this job is so bipolar.

<"Perfect is enemy of good"
>"Excellent! I keep my enemies very close"

I do believe it possible that one can find at least one perfect counter to every stupid folk saying that startup-for-brains suit bags love to parrot.

2)
<"We must fail fast"
>"I already did it!"

3)
<"We must have a long tail of offerings"
>"Can we offer focus on our core strengths?"

-3)
<"We must focus on our core strengths"
>"Isn't our core strength 'having a long tail of offerings'?"

4)
<"We must use agile methods"
>"An agile habit does not make an agile monk."

5)
<"We must be flexible and adapt"
>"Is it a law or more of a rule of thumb?"

6)
<"We must avoid bureaucracy"
>"Can I have that in writing?"

Okay, this is quite hard to explain properly, but I'm actually scared of my personal future.

In about a year, I finish school and I don't have a straight plan of what to do next. I want to work independently, preferably as a game dev, but I imagine that to be a hard task. I have thought of doing a bachelor's degree in game development, but the university I prefer to go to costs 20k€, which is a huge sum and I don't even know whether it would be actually worth it. The university states that 20% of all their graduated students work independently afterwards and they even offer you a flexible "loan" (not sure if it's the right term) you can pay off while you start working, but I fear I won't be able to pay it back, I cannot imagine making this much money any time soon after I start working independently as game dev. Additionally I fear I won't be able to keep my motivation up, since I struggle doing so already, on the other hand my lack of motivation could be caused by this toxic environment I live in.

I've also considered doing freelancing, but when I'm scrolling through the requests made, I never find something I am experienced in, I don't know what request is best to get started with freelancing.

I just don't know what to do in the future and I'm scared and considering to go to this university is probably pretty stupid already and I consider it as me ranting myself, because of my nonexisting self-esteem. So I don't know what to expect from this post, I just needed to share.

It all began with an advanture.

i was travelling through codeland and met all sort of nice creatures. C++ and Java were among my first encounters. C++ was geary (full of gears) and java was objected (sorry made up of objects). nice folks. was still wandering when a halous (great, a halo around) person appeared. it was the nice python.

he likes to take his meeters (people who meet him) on a fairic (fairy-like) ride, passing countless of flexible alleys, open (source?) spaces as well as honey falls (waterfall-like streams).

but something was odd, really odd, .... travelling. you could not walk in here you had to fly. fly fly fly. no foot touched the land. no android they said.

or they said you have to put on a pair of shoes called kivy. the shoes fit according to no fixed rule. sometimes they worked, sometimes no. another pair of shoes called sls4. it was nice but unfortunately was only half a shoe long on each feet.

python android is still a dream, a nice binding kept ridiculously in the egg. it is yet to hatch.

Fuck you Python! "It's global, unless you modify it. Then you have to use a keyword first." "It is passing reference by value." Asshole language that tries to be too flexible!

I'll never use code hacked by another dev for work.

I got code that only solves one single fucking use case but there are way more to consider ...

The way the problem is solved ... not dev friendly to use, clean code is non existend and did I mention that it doesn't solve many other important use cases?

All has to be refactored and rethinked and everybody complains about why it takes so much time and the code should not be a technical masterpiece.

I'm sick of these bullshit devs, not taking their role as professionals serious.
Devs should not only learn how to code but also to work as a professional. Soft skills shouldn't be optional and the way how IT is seen has to be reshaped.

There are reasons why in these days the developed software has a lot of bugs and is not flexible. Everything has to be done now, changes come so often that they conflict with previous ideas and nobody knows the complete customer specification so the conflict shows in dev phase up.

Most devs work like they are in a hackerspace. Stop doing this.
You can do this in your freetime but stop doing this when you work in a professional environment.

Getting real tired of your shit, JavaScript. I sincerely love and hate the language, its so flexible at the same time that flexibility will give you nightmares, I swear to god I'll never recommend Node.js for any big projects, right now the same flexibility is killing our project.

Oh lord, have mercy.

Do you have a routine? I work from home everyday since quarantine and I don't think we are going back to the office.

I would like to be more productive, not in the sense of forcing myself to do more job and add more stress, no one is complaining about the time it takes me to finish tasks.

I'm looking for a way to scatter my working hours so I have chunks of focus and chunks of breaks in which I go out for a walk or something instead of a big chunk of focus mixed with distraction. I'm behaving as if it were a "9-5 job" when it is actually "8 hours per day" with flexible schedule.

I'm 22 years old and 1.5 years into my first Startup Job. (and second Dev job)
I feel kind of uncomfortable now and I would like to ask your opinions.
I'll start with the work related description of my situation and later add a bit of my life situation.

I develop as hobby since I can think. I'm pretty engaged and love to do things right. So I quickly found myself in the position of the de-facto lead fullstack Developer.
Although, to be clear, were only a few devs - which are now replaced by not so many other devs. I feel often like the only person able to design and decide and implement in a way that won't kill us later (and I spend half of my time fixing technical debt).

I mostly like what I do , because it's a challenge and I feel needed. I learn new things and I am pretty flexible in work time. (but I also often work till late in the night, sacrificing friendship time)
But there are so many things I would love to do and used to do, but now I have no motivation to develop outside of my job.
I don't really feel that what my company is doing is something I find valuable. (Image rights management)

I earn pretty well - in comparison to what I'm used to: 20€/hour, Brutto 2.800 / month for 32 hours a week. In Berlin. (Minus tax and stuff it's 1.800€). It's more than enough for what I need.
But when I see what others in similar positions earn (~4.000), I feel weird. I got promised a raise since nearly a year now. I don't feel I could demand it. I also got the hint that I could get virtual shares. But nothing happened.

Now what further complicates the situation is that I will go to Portugal in April for at least half a year, for joining a social project I love. My plan used to be that I work from there for a few hours a week - but I'm starting to hesitate as I fear that I will actually work more and it will keep me from fully being there.

So, I kind of feel emotionally attached - I like (some of) the people, I know (or at least believe) that the company will have a big problem without me. (I hold a lot of the knowledge for legacy applications) .
But I also feel like I'm putting too much of myself into the company and it is not really giving me back. And it's also not so much worth it... Or is it?

Should I stick to the company and keep my pretty secure position and be financially supported during my time in Portugal, while possibly sacrificing my time there?
Should I ask for a raise (possibly even retroactively) and then still quit later? (they will probably try to get my 1 month of cancelation period upped to 3).

Also, is this a risk for my "career"?

TL;DR - an entire emulation of a closed source CMS to develop a theme

The longer version:

We are using a cms that is closed source, and we only have access to frontend files alongside twig files. The CMS is custom built but many aspects are in a very rudimentary state, for example it is nearly impossible to develop locally, we have to use an integrated text editor to code stuff.

So out of frustration, and for my development needs, I decided I would make an emulation based on Symfony 4. Also because my PM was pressing me to optimise our site. I wrote some custom JS to handle everything smoothly, a semi-sass framework and well-structured twig files.

I was also supposed to work with our graphic designer, but she didn't get any alloted time from our pm to work on it...

Now PM asks me to write a specifications document in order to make another company build the new version

I mean wtf, I'm so bored, I can actually enjoy my day by coding, and no, I'm just there to write the specs.

When I told PM I am currently building the new version, she's like "but we didn't validate anything", when she explicitly said I had a green Go to code it a few months back

Instead I have to make prezies and convert them back to PowerPoint because we have computer-illiterate people in the company who aren't flexible to understand simple tools.

Let's hope it won't get useless by Friday (I have a presentation to give, alongside my estimates and project management presentation)

**random rant**

So next week I have a technical interview with TripleByte and I'm supposed to spent the next 2 days sorta preparing. Just woke up and had this thought tho:

What's the point? Yes I think I could try to get a better job but been trying for years (banking tech area) but now it feels like I'm at a "local optimum" sort of a sweet spot. Team/company could be smarter/more efficient but...

I've got my own place in a city that's also near NYC. It takes me 20 minutes to get to my current office, fairly flexible with the 9-5 work day, I can work remotely. I get enough money.

And then finding a new job === technical interviews about stuff you will rarely use and usually with no feedback like a pass-fail test where they only tell you if you pass or fail (and for me it always feels skewed towards fail the moment i walk since I'm deaf).

But at this point, I feel more like "you need to convince me to work for you". In my head, the plan is mostly to just have a nice chat and wing the technical questions just to see how good i am without any prep (i.e. poring thru Cracking the Coding Interview or Big O concepts, sorting...).

"It has to be automatic AND flexible"

I signed a contract with a company that promised flexible working hours, homeoffice (100%) and no traveling. A month after starting traveling begun. Never had a day homeoffice (even though I only asked for it ONE time. And flexible hours my ass. Should I leave? I mean the payment is ok, not awesome but ok. Plus how those guys work there is a hell of a clusterfuck... Kind of depressed because of this situation :/

Ekhem.... da money? Sure I can go on about how it changed my approach to real life problems or how it keeps my mind flexible and always learning more BUT the truth is - those are just nice things on top of being able to buy food and pay rent

There are some who view software as a social construct (like Pieter Hientjes), and I think it's a valuable perspective. So if we know about the intrinsic brokenness of software, can we deduce sth about the brokenness of human interactions? Did social API's evolve to similar clusterfucks of dead entropy we have to shovel in our brains to get along?

I think the answer is an emphatic yes. And you know what's even making it worse? Software. Y'know there are all these whining about the millenials, and I too have had my experiences with stuff of that category. Like back when we searched a new roommate for our flat, we needed three rounds because people who had said yes suddenly reconsidered. Similarly now when we tried to sell our couch: people tried to push the price. Said they were interested, never showed up at the appointed time. It's like they have been spoiled by Amazon: expecting to buy with one click, for the cheapest price and send back if they don't like. And that is not a generation thing. Those old blokes ranting on the young are just as bad. They are just as lost in antisocial media as anybody else. It's a general erosion of not sticking to civility and courtesy, to the yes or no once said, coz everything is now as flexible and fluid as the digital projections of ourselves transmitted round the globe, changing in realtime.

I fucking hate it. - I'm out like this stupid Tom Cruise character in Oblivion.

I built a view engine that relied on V8 for expression evaluation and flow. Not very stable of course, since it used RegEx, but it worked fine for what it was designed for.
The crown feature was the ability to pass in lazy-evaluated huge objects to that view model, so that the view model decided what was going to be used in order to display the view. Made it really flexible, while not sacrificing speed.

I was brainstorming for 2 days about the lazy loading part, and the gymnastics that had to be implemented for this to work.

After I wrote my final line of code and thought that this is it, I launched it, and it FUCKING WORKED! First try!
I was hyperventilating, walking around the apartment like crazy, doing random push-ups just to try to utilize some energy that I felt was fighting to burst out like a xenomorph out of the chest.

... 2 weeks later I found bugs. Had to re-learn how I did it. It's true what they say: if it was hard to write, it's even harder to debug. Fixed it eventually, but that part's not that exciting.

ffs there needs to be a tool to find that one non-flexible container which keeps your website from being responsive..

Are you content with your job or always searching for greener pastures?

I'm split inbetween. Current pay is very decent and working conditions are flexible. However, the work itself is not always that great. I find it to be comedically true how "hard workers" don't get promoted or bonuses, they get more work. There has recently been a heavy influx of what I'd like to classify as "shit tickets" since a guy who was the main "shit ticket doer" left the company after being burnt out.

I work with a small-ish digital agency as a BE dev, so I'm mostly dealing with small to medium scale projects built with WordPress/WooCommerce, with often custom API/ERP integrations on top. I'm not a big fan of the stack as a developer but as a contractor I can understand the business reasons why it is used. Part of me wants to find something else, part of me thinks I'm looking for a perfect company that doesn't exist and I should lower my expectations -- I might find better work for sure, but with the same pay and conditions? It seems unlikely at the moment. The company was recently acquired, so I'm hopeful for the future.

"Most memorable bug you fixed?"

A recent instance happened in one of my Scratch projects, and the bug involved "Infinities."

I had an opportunity to teach kids programming, and it involved Scratch. So, to have something to show those kids at least, I decided to make a small game.
In that game, I had an object that takes some time before appearing after being cloned (i.e., instantiated.) The duration was calculated by dividing a constant with a variable:
[Wait for ((3) / (variable)) seconds]
The bug is that I forgot about the case where 'variable' can be 0, which is classic and insignificant.

Well, the thing is that I learned two things the hard way:
1: Scratch is very flexible about integers and floats (e.g., at one second, it looks like an integer, but one operation later, it's a float.)
2: Scratch does not provide any 'runtime errors' that can crash the project.

In other languages, similar "wait" methods take "milliseconds" in an integer, so it would have barfed out a "DivideByZeroException" or something. But Scratch was so robust against project-crashing behavior that it literally waited for f*<king "infinity seconds," effectively hanging that clone without warning or runtime errors. This masked my bug. It took way too long to debug that s#!+.

Don't blanket-mask any errors.

so, I am trying to implement a caching solution for my CI/CD (because, you know, BitBucket CI caching sucks ass big time). This time I was writing a module in Python. I spent 2 evenings in the evening building it, debugging and testing, implementing several features making it a flexible solution.

So, yesterday I had a pretty much well working version. Before pushing changes I wanted to drop the cache and give it another round of testing, just to be sure I was pushing a truly working code. I rm-rf the cache directory, restart the engine and I'm greeted with an error message saying the module I was working on cannot be found.

wtf..?

Out of a sudden the IDE stopped showing all the project files as well.

wtf happened....?

oh, of course.. I rm-rf'ed my project directory, not the cache directory. Deleting EVERYTHING I had.

fuck.

I should not be working half-asleep

Hey guys. I am in a situation where I need to decide wether to take on a new project or not. And if not, how to turn down that client so that I would not burn any bridges. So I need your opinions on this matter in order to make the final decision.

To make things clear heres some background info. 10 months ago I quitted my fulltime position in another EU country and went back to my own home country. 10 months forward till today and I have my own ltd company which currently has 5 projects. Its doing pretty well money wise. All projects combined, I already earn more then I ever did and I need to work max 10 hours a week since all projects are remote projects so I dont waste time on useless meetings and etc. However I dont feel fulfilled or challenged anymore because surprise surprise doing well paid projects doesnt guarante your sense of fulfillment.

So I noticed that I have lots of spare time which I spend diving into rabbitholes with hobby projects. I decided that its time to scale my company and take on more projects and maybe even hire more people.

So I started searching for other projects I could work on (prefferibly remote projects or flexible ones where I could come in 2-3 days a week in office and work remotely rest of the week). Reason being that I am already out of sync with fulltime position lifestyle and I am totally result oriented, not punch in my hours and go home oriented.

For exampleIf i get my weekly tasks I prefer to do them in 1-2 days (even if it requires doing double shifts which rarely but happens) but then I want to have rest of the week off. Thats how my brain works and thats how Im wired. I cant stand fulltime positions especially in enterprise bigger companies where I come in and do maybe 2 hours of actual work everyday because of all useless meetings and blockers from backend/etc. Its soul crushing to me.

So I posted linkedin ads and started searching for new clients/projects. One month ago I went to an interview for an android project in a startup.

The project looked interesting enough. Main task was to rewrite their android app from java to kotlin. Apparently their current current app was built by a backend developer who wants to focus solely on backend.

So during the interview they showed me their app which was quite simple frontend wise but not so simple backend wise from what I was able to figure out.

Their project lead (also a backed guy) asked me my estimation of price and completion of task. I told them maybe 2-3 months to do everything properly.

Project lead was basically shocked because all other candidates told him they can rewrite the app from java to kotlin in 2-3 weeks. I told him that everything is possible but his app quality will suffer and for a better estimation he would we would need to sign an NDA so I could evaluate the costs. So we ended the interview.

After that we kept in touch for one month (it took them one month to google a generic NDA and sign it digitally with me).

So heres the redflags I noticed:

1. They dont respect my time. Wasted 1 month of my time and after signing NDA gave me 2days to estimate their project and go to a meeting and give them detailed info about what I can offer. I thats not a brain rape then I dont know what it is

2. They are changing initial conditions we talked about. We agreed on rewriting the codebase and be done with it. Now they prefer a fulltime worker who would be responsible for android app as his own product. So basically project lead was not able to find a fulltime dev so now hes trying to convert me (a company owner) to his fulltime worker.

3. Lack of respect. During the interview he started speaking in his own native language to me with some expression (he seemed pissed off at that moment when he switched languages).

4. Bad culture fit. As I said Im used to relaxed clients and projects where I dont need to be chained to a desk a monitored and be micromanaged. I mean lets sign a contract give me access to your codebase and tell me what to do, I will produce results and lets be done with it.

5. Project lead is a backend guy who doesnt understand how complicated android apps can be. No architecture and no unit tests are in his frontend app. He doesnt care about writing proper app since he ships it in his own device so he doesnt need to worry about supporting custom devices or different api levels of android and etc. But not having any architecture? Cmon.

So basically I am confused. Project lead needs a fulltime dev but hes in contact with me in hopes that I would sign a fulltime contract. But how I can work fulltime if all what I can see are redflags?

Basicaly I thinkthis was a misundersanding. Im searching for fulltime remote projects and hes offering fulltime inhouse projects. Project lead never outsourced so hes confused as well.

As you can see decision is already basically made to turn him down, I just need to know how to tell him to fck off in the most polite manner and thats it.

React, it's declarative way of doing things, and the functional programming methodology it prefers.

Realized how much I've moved on from for-loops and class/object instance to maps, filters and immutability/observers when I worked on a Laravel project after so long and found myself forced to do things in the, erm, "PHP" way, despite spending my initial year and a half of programming working exclusively in PHP.

Sure, there's Class Components and imperative techniques in React but I had blissfully settled into using the flexible nature of doing things enabled by both native JS and React, with hooks, Lodash/Ramda and (almost fanatically) pure functions

I'm on a remote contract (has no centraloffice at our company) and was hired to work remote.

New PM wants to reenergize culture. Everyone has to come in and no more flexible hours. Lack of space means no more dual monitors. Lack of desks means we push desks together to form a "conference table." More people working means slower internet. Three people have separate meetings? Someone can stay, someone can sit in reception, and someone is in the hall.

But hey... we can see each other now and we're all available to one another.

Looking for some opinions here. Chatbot from scratch or use an existing service?

I have to work with a messenger chatbot. The company has been using chatfuel, so I'm trying to work with it but it's kinda buggy in some parts. Have any of you created a messenger bot from scratch? I flipped through the documentation and it seems like a pain in the ass, but it's obviously more flexible than using a third party service.

So yeah, I'm trying to weigh the convenience of the third party vs its limitations compared to coding my own. What's your take on it?

If you publish a package over Composer - or in fact any package manager that allows optional dependencies - please don't make dependencies that aren't **absolutely necessary** required.

Is it a theme for your nice app? Don't make it required, some are not going to want to use this theme and don't want to deploy extra Megabytes to their servers every single time.

In fact, someone may even want to replace that dependency with a fork, like a customized version of that theme because it is not flexible enough! Forcing that dependency means it can only be replaced with hacks.

I am looking at you, `oxid-esales/oxideshop-metapackage-ce`, with your extra themes and demoshop data that makes the Deployer tool push and copy around half a Gigabyte of unused assets on a website every single deployment!!

Changing instances to arrays. So we've all had this issue:

Option 1 was the most flexible and abstract option where a lot of functionality could be built on this.

Option 2 was the fastest solution, that would solve only specific problems.

The whole Agile philosophy points to option 2. The problem is that clients will always want to add that functionality in option 1, and changing requirements makes us lose time, the precious resource that managers supposedly cherish, yet they always want us to choose the fast option.

We're at that point where the client wants to add functionalities, but since we already built with the previous requirements in mind. Ugh.

Changing instances to arrays.

To my boss who thinks is ok to message somebody:

- On his/her day off
- On Saturday
- On a Sunday morning

Of course all was related to business as usual stuff no real emergency stuff nor that would have impacted anyone waiting till Monday morning.

Of course no overtime nor on call here and been blamed due my ‘flexible’ schedule (read arriving at 09:15 rather say 09:00) but of course out of office hours work or having to deal with hot projects no one was able to deliver does not count...

Talking of true leadership

I right now work as a Remote Front end dev and I must admit is pretty sweet and flexible, however, I think my ideal job would be in a foreign country (Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong) with the same remote flexibility but with a Visa sponsorship, Working on modern web projects, progressive web apps etc. learning from others and improving my code. please let me know of any opportunity haha.

Just finished high-school and we had a lot of coding classes. I have a good foundation of programming concepts and i'm a quick learner. What should i try to do during college in order to make some money on the side? I need something flexible and part-time programming jobs aren't really a thing here.
Game design, web development, maybe something else?What would you all recomend?

TLDR: I don't feel the need to be working at top product companies anymore.
Brief:
The craze to be a developer in top product companies has literally worn off for me in the past few months since I am working from home.
Like if I have to continue this WFH lifestyle it literally won't matter if I am working for a top product company or a startup...
The priority has shifted towards
1. A good team
2. A well-natured and polite manager
3. A flexible working culture which is better suited for remote work
4. And obviously a good salary🤑

Drop or be more flexible with the Math requirements. I took every programming course my High School offered including AP CompSci and passed with high grades. I wasn't able to pursue a degree because I wasn't "allowed" to take CS classes without first meeting the Calc 2 prerequisite. I am terrible with Math but programming makes sense to me, I'm good at it, and I enjoy it. I think it's horrible to stop someone from pursuing a degree because of a prerequisite. I understand the Math/CS relationship but being good at math doesn't make you a good developer. Just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Hey guys, first time writing here.
Around 8 months ago I joined a local company, developing enterprise web apps. First time for me working in a "real" programming job: I've been making a living from little freelance projects, personal apps and private programming lessons for the past 10 years, while on the side I chased the indie game dev dream, with little success. Then, one day, realized I needed to confront myself with the reality of 'standard' business, where the majority of people work, or risk growing too old to find a stable job.
I was kinda excited at first, looking forward to learning from experienced professionals in a long-standing company that has been around for decades. In the past years I coded almost 100% solo, so I really wanted to learn some solid team practices, refine my automated testing skills, and so on. Also, good pay, flexible hours and team is cool.

Then... I actually went there.

At first, I thought it was me. I thought I couldn't understand the code because I was used reading only mine.
I thought that it was me, not knowing well enough the quirks of web development to understand how things worked.
I though I was too lazy - it was shocking to see how hard those guys worked: I saw one guy once who was basically coding with one hand, answering a mail with another, all while doing some technical assistance on the phone.

Then I started to realize.

All projects are a disorganized mess, not only the legacy ones - actually the "green" products are quite worse.
Dependency injection hell: it seems like half of the code has been written by a DI fanatic and the other half by an assembly nostalgic who doesn't really like this new hippy thing called "functions".
Architecture is so messed up there are methods several THOUSANDS of lines long, and for the love of god most people on the team don't really even know WHAT those methods are for, but they're so intertwined with the rest of the codebase no one ever dares to touch them.
No automated test whatsoever, and because of the aforementioned DI hell, it's freaking hard to configure a testing environment (I've been trying for two days during my days off, with almost no success).
Of course documentation is completely absent, specifications are spread around hundreds of mails and opaquely named files thrown around personal shared folders, remote archives, etc.

So I rolled my sleeves up and started crunching as the rest of the team. I tried to follow the boy-scout rule, when the time and scope allowed. But god, it's hard. I'm tired as fuck, I miss working on my projects, or at least something that's not a complete madness. And it's unbearable to manually validate everything (hundreds of edge cases) by hand.

And the rest of the team acts like it's all normal. They look so at ease in this mess. It's like seeing someone quietly sitting inside a house on fire doing their stuff like nothing special is going on.

Please tell me it's not this way everywhere. I want out of this. I also feel like I'm "spoiled", and I should just do like the others and accept the depressing reality of working with all of this. But inside me I don't want to. I developed a taste for clean, easy maintainable code and I don't want to give it up.

When they expect a lot from the app yet the API is not that flexible enough to meet those demands

Can people help me please,
Which one is better Android development (Android studio) or IOS development (Xcode)

I learned a bit of both(still a beginner) and here is what i think so far
Pros:
-Android is more wide spread and is more flexible also i have an Android device (testing)
-IOS development is really fun and intuitive and more money is paid to developers because not everyone has a mac in my country.

Con:
-Android studio is messy and java is really dull imo
-IOS requires a developer account which is really expensive in my country.

Any help is much appreciated even if it is a personal opinion

A very long rant.. but I'm looking to share some experiences, maybe a different perspective.. huge changes at the company.

So my company is starting our microservices journey (we have a 359 retail websites at this moment)

First question was: What to build first?

The first thing we had to do was to decide what we wanted to build as our first microservice. We went looking for a microservice that can be used read only, consumers could easily implement without overhauling production software and is isolated from other processes.

We’ve ended up with building a catalog service as our first microservice. That catalog service provides consumers of the microservice information of our catalog and its most essential information about items in the catalog.

By starting with building the catalog service the team could focus on building the microservice without any time pressure. The initial functionalities of the catalog service were being created to replace existing functionality which were working fine.

Because we choose such an isolated functionality we were able to introduce the new catalog service into production step by step. Instead of replacing the search functionality of the webshops using a big-bang approach, we choose A/B split testing to measure our changes and gradually increase the load of the microservice.

Next step: Choosing a datastore

The search engine that was in production when we started this project was making user of Solr. Due to the use of Lucene it was performing very well as a search engine, but from engineering perspective it lacked some functionalities. It came short if you wanted to run it in a cluster environment, configuring it was hard and not user friendly and last but not least, development of Solr seemed to be grinded to a halt.

Elasticsearch started entering the scene as a competitor for Solr and brought interesting features. Still using Lucene, which we were happy with, it was build with clustering in mind and being provided out of the box. Managing Elasticsearch was easy since there are REST APIs for configuration and as a fallback there are YAML configurations available.

We decided to use Elasticsearch since it provides us the strengths and capabilities of Lucene with the added joy of easy configuration, clustering and a lively community driving the project.

Even bigger challenge? Which programming language will we use

The team responsible for developing this first microservice consists out of a group web developers. So when looking for a programming language for the microservice, we went searching for a language close to their hearts and expertise. At that time a typical web developer at least had knowledge of PHP and Javascript.

What we’ve noticed during researching various languages is that almost all actions done by the catalog service will boil down to the following paradigm:

- Execute a HTTP call to fetch some JSON

- Transform JSON to a desired output

- Respond with the transformed JSON

Actions that easily can be done in a parallel and asynchronous manner and mainly consists out of transforming JSON from the source to a desired output. The programming language used for the catalog service should hold strong qualifications for those kind of actions.

Another thing to notice is that some functionalities that will be built using the catalog service will result into a high level of concurrent requests. For example the type-ahead functionality will trigger several requests to the catalog service per usage of a user.

To us, PHP and .NET at that time weren’t sufficient enough to us for building the catalog service based on the requirements we’ve set. Eventually we’ve decided to use Node.js which is better suited for the things we are looking for as described earlier. Node.js provides a non-blocking I/O model and being event driven helps us developing a high performance microservice.

The leap to start programming Node.js is relatively small since it basically is Javascript. A language that is familiar for the developers around that time. While Node.js is displaying some new concepts it is relatively easy for a developer to start using it.

The beauty of microservices and the isolation it provides, is that you can choose the best tool for that particular microservice. Not all microservices will be developed using Node.js and Elasticsearch. All kinds of combinations might arise and this is what makes the microservices architecture so flexible.

Even when Node.js or Elasticsearch turns out to be a bad choice for the catalog service it is relatively easy to switch that choice for magic ‘X’ or component ‘Z’. By focussing on creating a solid API the components that are driving that API don’t matter that much. It should do what you ask of it and when it is lacking you just replace it.

Many more headaches to come later this year ;)

What's better for finding candidates for a development role: having the candidate solve a complex whiteboard problem or have the candidate refactor some code (maybe a couple of small modules) while explaining as he/she goes through each step?

I personally feel both are good, but I think refactoring is a very much needed skill when you're dealing with the complexity of millions and millions lines of code, so being able to change your inital design to make it more readable and flexible later on is crucial. And refactoring usually goes hand and hand with having tests in place.

An interesting exercise would be to give the candidate a test suite with the corresponding code that's tested in a working state and let the candidate decide how much refactoring needs to be done. In the process the candidate would need to break and fix tests of course while changing things... it'll give a good measure of their ability to take code and change it to a "better" state of design and flexiblity.

On the other hand I do think there is a place for cliche white boarding problems because it really shows one willingness to tackle complex problems which do arise in most development jobs. Asking the questions and being persistent goes along way and can really help when you're collaborating with other developers to solve an issue at hand.

Overall I think there should be a white board problem, but I don't think that should be the deciding factor. Rather couple it with other very practical skills you should have as a developer already; among those being refactoring.

Flexible working conditions e.g. office/remote/freelance/consulting