Wholesome anti-rant.

There’s this Indian chick at work that I really, really do not get along with. Fortunately she’s on a different team so we have practically zero interactions. Her code was always decent, maybe upper junior level? but I went away fuming almost every time we talked.

However, I did a release security review today (I’m down from five/six per month to one) and read through quite a bit of her code. It was clean and easy to read with good separation, clear naming and intentions, nothing was confusing, etc. It was almost beautiful. Had I any emotions I might have shed a tear. I sent her a message and let her know :) I actually learned a better way of doing a couple of things from it.

She has grown so much as a dev.

toxic workplace; leaving

I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.

I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.

------

On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)

Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).

I'm just.
so, so done.

I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)

Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.

But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.

So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)

I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)

With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.

Got a 0 for a question in the midterm of a microprocessor course(x86). I Went to the lecturer fuming with rage and explained to her my work and its 100% correct, therefore I should get full marks for it. She agreed but only gave me half the marks because I did not follow the solution that was in the text book. In my head: "Bitch I don't even have the textbook nor do I want to argue with your kind". I was so enraged I just stood up and left her office. Needless to say, I didn't get the A I deserved. FML

"You guys are taking to long. can't you just copy and paste some code and complete the website?"

Literally fuming right now.

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCKING FUCK MICROSOFT?!!
I go to log into my laptop:
me: *enter the pin*
Windows: Error
me: Ok let's try the password...
Win: WRONG PASSWORD!
me: *checking my password manager* Nope, pretty sure that's correct... Ok, whatever let's try to reset it.
me: *generates new password and resets the password for the account*
Windows: You can now log in
me: *enters the new password*
Windows: WRONG PASSWORD!
me: that's weird... let's try that again
Windows: WRONG PASSWORD!
me: Ok... reset once more *I enter the same password I generated before*
Windows: ThAt Is An OlD pAsSwOrD
me: *getting really pissed* FINE, GODDAMIT, HERE, NEW PASSWORD
Windows: You can now log in
me: *enters the new new password*
Windows: wRoNg PaSsWoRd!

jdjsjcjj+3+@!o(€;#@!(&(1!!#((#(€_"jsjeucjcjfdjosdifhshabxnfnxjsosoguwqlqqlall#7@+1(
aaaaaáaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK
YOU FUCKING INCOMPETENT CUNTS AT MICROSOFT!!!!!1!!!!!!!

I'M GONNA FUCKING TEAR YOU INTO THOUSAND PIECES AND THEN RUN YOU THROUGH A SHREDDER!!

YOU MOTHERFUCKING IDIOTIC CUNTS
FREAKING DEGENERATES

What the fuck is wrong with the designers? We have had meetings with the client, a proposal drawn up, a project spec written, budget agreed, witeframes drawn up exactly to spec. Designer involved in all stages for input and ideas. Now the designers have the wireframes, they are supposed to create based on these. No they make up what goes on the pages that bare no resemblance to the wireframes in terms of requirements. I am fucking fuming. I have sent the designs back with a note. Please provide designs based on the wireframes.

Met colleague at work

Him: You programmers don't like sleeping at all. You should try to sleep and look fresh like me ... Blah blah blah... (You get the picture)

Me: *just smiles and watch him go*

(But what I really wanted to say)

Me: 'Well you know what, most programmers don't sleep much not because sleep deprivation is fun or we're in some kind of cult where it's some daily ritual. But when they need to send in an update; usually on a feature to make YOUR life easier OR just can't seem get their code to run right, and they keep telling themselves; "5 more minutes", "I have a good feeling about this modification" the minutes add up and before you realize it morning! And that's why some of us look like s*** in the morning'

(And then turn around to leave only to come back really quick like I just remembered something)

Me (again): "And don't think that we enjoy it. At least the ones I know don't. It's simply a fr****** work hazard!"

I am fuming!!! I have never before in my entire life been more pissed.

When you are working you are a** off on a weekend to finish a project in half the time and have a sh**ty, unstable third party API you have to integrate with return responses like this. I present to you the world's most horrific API.

Feel like punching through the monitor screen. What the f**k is this! 200 and ERROR?

As I write this rant I have Grammarly correcting my grammar. Thanks, Grammarly!!!! I am having an amazing weekend. -_- Cheers my fellow devs!

I'm honestly so pissed at my product manager right now. He made me stay in the office till 10PM because his stupid manager demanded a hotfix in one of the worst web applications you'll ever see. Fuming. Tried my best to bring some sense into him but to no avail.

After a few weeks of fixing other people’s issues, I’ve gone from fuming mad to uncontrollable maniacal laughter. 😂😂😂 It’s so bad now that I just laugh hysterically when I find another issue. I can’t even! 🤣

Anyone else ever reach the maniacal laugher phase of debugging?

Last Monday I bought an iPhone as a little music player, and just to see how iOS works or doesn't work.. which arguments against Apple are valid, which aren't etc. And at a price point of €60 for a secondhand SE I figured, why not. And needless to say I've jailbroken it shortly after.

Initially setting up the iPhone when coming from fairly unrestricted Android ended up being quite a chore. I just wanted to use this thing as a music player, so how would you do it..?

Well you first have to set up the phone, iCloud account and whatnot, yada yada... Asks for an email address and flat out rejects your email address if it's got "apple" in it, catch-all email servers be damned I guess. So I chose ishit at my domain instead, much better. Address information for billing.. just bullshit that, give it some nulls. Phone number.. well I guess I could just give it a secondary SIM card's number.

So now the phone has been set up, more or less. To get music on it was quite a maze solving experience in its own right. There's some stuff about it on the Debian and Arch Wikis but it's fairly outdated. From the iPhone itself you can install VLC and use its app directory, which I'll get back to later. Then from e.g. Safari, download any music file.. which it downloads to iCloud.. Think Different I guess. Go to your iCloud and pull it into the iPhone for real this time. Now you can share the file to your VLC app, at which point it initializes a database for that particular app.

The databases / app storage can be considered equivalent to the /data directories for applications in Android, minus /sdcard. There is little to no shared storage between apps, most stuff works through sharing from one app to another.

Now you can connect the iPhone to your computer and see a mount point for your pictures, and one for your documents. In that documents mount point, there are directories for each app, which you can just drag files into. For some reason the AFC protocol just hangs up when you try to delete files from your computer however... Think Different?

Anyway, the music has been put on it. Such features, what a nugget! It's less bad than I thought, but still pretty fucked up.

At that point I was fairly dejected and that didn't get better with an update from iOS 14.1 to iOS 14.3. Turns out that Apple in its nannying galore now turns down the volume to 50% every half an hour or so, "for hearing safety" and "EU regulations" that don't exist. Saying that I was fuming and wanting to smack this piece of shit into the wall would be an understatement. And even among the iSheep, I found very few people that thought this is fine. Though despite all that, there were still some. I have no idea what it would take to make those people finally reconsider.. maybe Tim Cook himself shoving an iPhone up their ass, or maybe they'd be honored that Tim Cook noticed them even then... But I digress.

And then, then it really started to take off because I finally ended up jailbreaking the thing. Many people think that it's only third-party apps, but that is far from true. It is equivalent to rooting, and you do get access to a Unix root account by doing it. The way you do it is usually a bootkit, which in a desktop's ring model would be a negative ring. The access level is extremely high.

So you can root it, great. What use is that in a locked down system where there's nothing available..? Aha, that's where the next thing comes in, 2 actually. Cydia has an OpenSSH server in it, and it just binds to port 22 and supports all of OpenSSH's known goodness. All of it, I'm using ed25519 keys and a CA to log into my phone! Fuck yea boi, what a nugget! This is better than Android even! And it doesn't end there.. there's a second thing it has up its sleeve. This thing has an apt package manager in it, which is easily equivalent to what Termux offers, at the system level! You can install not just common CLI applications, but even graphical apps from Cydia over the network!

Without a jailbreak, I would say that iOS is pretty fucking terrible and if you care about modding, you shouldn't use it. But jailbroken, fufu.. this thing trades many blows with Android in the modding scene. I've said it before, but what a nugget!

When you're at the till ordering a plain coffee and the barista SIGHS and ROLLS THEIR EYES at you. ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS? That's you're damn job, don't fucking do that. That's the only reason you're here!!!

Once in corporate stuffy devland a major monopoly-in-their-field client was raging at our tiny company and trying to scrutinize everything we did for whatever reason

The client's head huncho, some department head below the execs or something, insisted he have a code review meeting with the lead developer, which was me, and scrutinize my code in a 2 hour impromptu meeting one random Tuesday. Up until this point I was not allowed to even be introduced to the client so I'm a little ticked my company is throwing me under the bus like this.

So I get into this call, share my screen, guy is raging and asking questions left and right about every line I had written, firing, fuming, shouting... But it's clear he doesn't know how code works. So then I start teaching him how variable assignments work and function calls... He got so bored he left the meeting in 30 minutes and it was never spoken of again lmao

Story Time!

Tittle: About Larry.

Fun Game: Tell me if / when in this story you know the plot twist.

Setting: Years ago, non coding job.

I work with Larry a lot, Larry works remote. In technical terms Larry is senior to me and I escalate some technical issues that get assigned to Larry. I've never met Larry in person.

Larry can be hard to work with, but he's plenty good at his job and I don't mind his prickly side. Sometimes it takes telling Larry something a few times before it sinks it, but that's not a big deal. Sometimes it seems like Larry doesn't remember his cases entirely, but he has a lot of cases. Also Larry has good reason for how he works considering the land of scubs who usually escalate to him without any thought / effort.

Larry's escalation team is short staffed and they're trying to hire folks, but that's been like that forever.

So one day I get an email that Larry is going to be out of the office for a few weeks. Nothing unusual there.

My current case that I share with Larry sort of floats in limbo for a while. The customer is kinda slow to respond anyhow and there's nothing that I need Larry for.

Finally I get automated notice that my case has had a new escalation engineer. Laura. Laura is much more positive and happy compared to Larry. Understandably Laura isn't up to date on the case so we go back and forth with some emails and notes in the case.

The case is moving along just fine, we're making progress, but it's slow because of the customer's testing procedures. Then we hit a point where this customer's management pushes on sales for a solution (this customer's management is known for doing this rando like for no reason).

Down the management chain it goes and everyone wants a big conference call to get everyone up to date / discuss next steps (no big deal).

Now I really don't want to do this with Laura and throw her into the deep end with this customer, she doesn't have the background and I'd rather do this call with Larry & Me & Laura. Also according to the original email Larry is due back soon.

I start writing an email to Laura about "Let's try to schedule this for when Larry gets back."

Then I stop ... I don't really know why I stop but when it is a "political case" I want some buy in on next steps from management so I go talk to my manager.

-Plot Twist Incoming-

Long story short, my manager says:

"Laura IS Larry..."

O

M

G

I had no idea. Nobody told me, nobody told ANYBODY, (except a couple managers).

Back up a few months Larry apparently went to his managers and told them he was going to transition, surgery and all, in a few months.

Managers wondering how to address this went to HR and some new hire very young to be a manager HR manager drone logiced out in her bonkers head that "Well it shouldn't matter so don't tell anyone."

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!??

Thank god I didn't send that email...

I did send an email to Laura explaining that I had no idea and hoped I didn't say anything stupid. She was very nice about it and said it was all good.

After that incident made the management rounds (management was already fuming about being told not to tell anyone) things came to another critical point.

Laura was going to visit the company HQ. Laura had been there before, as Larry, everyone knew her as Larry... nobody (outside some managers) knew Laura was Larry either. With nobody knowing shit Laura was going to walk in and meet everyone ...

One manager at HQ finally rebelled and held a meeting to tell his people. He didn't want Laura walking in and someone confused, thinking it was a joke or something horrible happening.

HR found out and went ballistic. They were on a rampage about this other manager, they wanted to interview me about how I found out. I told HR to schedule their meeting through my manager (I knew they didn't want my manager to know they were sniffing around).

Finally the VP in our department called up the HR head and asked WTF was going on / kind of idiots they had over there (word has it legal and the CEO were on the call too).

HR had a change in leadership and then a couple weeks later there were department wide meetings on how to handle such situations and etc.

In my previous work, my boss my horrendous. He didn't know anything about programming, databases or scripts. He often had ridiculous requests that we (two developers trainee) had to refrain.
But he wasn't the one who pissed me off the most.
My colleague, who was supposed to have had the same cursus as me, was as skilled as someone without any knowledge. He spent one year to make a database for a new site, with one table per product type and sub-type, per company and per slider. Today there are 93 tables in a database made for a presentation website. When I proposed to see his work, he refused, saying he knew what he was doing.

Now he's still there, I switched job, but I know he'll get the same diploma as me for this shitty pile of fuming crap, and it pisses me off beyond imagination.

I really need to vent. Devrant to the rescue! This is about being undervalued and mind-numbingly stupid tasks.

The story starts about a year ago. We inherited a project from another company. For some months it was "my" project. As our company was small, most projects had a "team" of one person. And while I missed having teammates - I love bouncing ideas around and doing and receiving code reviews! - all was good. Good project, good work, good customer. I'm not a junior anymore, I was managing just fine.
After those months the company hired a new senior software engineer, I guess in his forties. Nice and knowledgeable guy. Boss put him on "my" project and declared him the lead dev. Because seniority and because I was moved to a different project soon afterwards. Stupid office politics, I was actually a bad fit there, but details don't matter. What matters is I finally returned after about 3/4 of a year.

Only to find senior guy calling all the shots. Sure, I was gone, but still... Call with the customer? He does it. Discussion with our boss? Only him. Architecture, design, requirements engineering, any sort of intellectually challenging tasks? He doesn't even ask if we might share the work. We discuss *nothing* and while he agreed to code reviews, we're doing zero. I'm completely out of the loop and he doesn't even seem to consider getting me in.

But what really upsets me are the tasks he prepared for me. As he first described them they sounded somewhat interesting from a technical perspective. However, I found he had described them in such detail that a beginner student would be bored.
A description of the desired behaviour, so far so good. But also how to implement it, down to which classes to create. He even added a list of existing classes to get inspiration or copy code from. Basically no thinking required, only typing.

Well not quite, I did find something I needed to ask. Predictably he was busy. I was able to answer my question myself. He was, as it turns out, designing and implementing something actually interesting. Which he never had talked about with me. Out of the loop. Fuck.

Man, I'm fuming. I realize he's probably just ignorant. But I feel treated like his typing slave. Like he's not interested in my brain, only in my hands. I am *so* fucking close to assigning him the tasks back, and telling him since I wasn't involved in the thinking part, he can have his shitty typing part for himself, too. Fuck, what am I gonna do? I'd prefer some "malicious compliance" move but not coming up with ideas right now.

A woman gets on a bus with her baby. The bus driver says: “Ugh, that’s the ugliest baby I’ve ever seen!” The woman walks to the rear of the bus and sits down, fuming. She says to a man next to her: “The driver just insulted me!” The man says: “You go up there and tell him off. Go on, I’ll hold your monkey for you.”

Not weird but f*cking annoying co-worker. Everything that sets people off he did. Also he never learn stuff like personal hygiene and stuff. One time my boss had to tell him to go home and not return to work until he took a shower. Also had didn't seem to have any work ethic at all and that got me fuming angry at him as he refused to do any work at all. When I was working in his apartment and got stuff to do he normally did and had way more experience in than me his coworkers were astounished how "fast" I worked when in realitiy I was taking it really easy. And this dickhead managed to make his stuff and then use the other time to play games ore whatever. In the end no one in the IT apartment wanted him to work there anymore. And he even managed to offend and insult our boss so much that he had to call him Mr. instead of his name. My co-workers even collected money for him to come to work looking like a human being and taking care of himself. I'm so glad I am no longer required to talk to or even work with this moron ever again

Thank God for devrant. I am literarily fuming right now. Just removed some redundant (or so it seems ) code last week and already suffering the consequencies. Crazy commenting screwed me up really bad.

oh my goodness if I dhsfjhsjfhj
i can barely type right now im so frusterated

I've told my manager multiple times that I don't feel comfortable with the task hes trying to give me because it feels way too large (its designing/programming/testing/documenting an entire prototype cloud file sync application and server backend service on my own, replacing one we have had for several years) and he still just ignores me and persists that I should be thankful for the opportunity and challenge.

It pisses me off so much when people say dumb shit like, 'its a great opportunity to learn' at work. No it isn't. Your boss is going to be on your fucking case for taking too long or not delivering enough, and thats exactly what happened. He got upset and said he was expecting more things to have been written down by now, like design notes. I was just fuming. Design notes? I'm not even a freaking designer, I've never designed any type of big software ever, what the fuck do you want from me.

On top of that, I don't know where the hell he expects me to get time for this. I'm apparently also devops so I get yoinked off of anything im doing if some stupid thing breaks in some other environment about something I really don't even care about. Any other random ass task just gets dumped on me too. I'm supposed to be a 'junior developer', and get paid as such (i've wanted to go to the intermediate level but get told the title doesn't actually matter and no pay raise for you) but I get the responsibilties of a whole fucking team dumped on me and its just

do I just quit now? I'm just, for fuck sakes man

Currently fuming at the sight of a store bought WordPress template that has social links that go nowhere, gibberish under CTA's and broken links galore.

I have contacted the poor bastard that has this website made and the soon to be poor bastard that made it.

Take some pride in your work, it's honestly insulting to be in the same industry as people like this!

I'm absolutely fuming why on earth would someone try to apply exactly all rules of a theoretical concept. I hate those so called "scrum masters". We can't apply all rules of agile we're not machines. There's real life and theory.

I have a small NUC-like machine in my home with an old external hdd connected to it. I use it to run my local gitlab, nextcloud and to test a few websites I build for the lolz.
If you too have a homelab, whether it's a single raspberry or an entire room full or racks, you know damn well that everything you have running locally as a web service keeps going until it doesn't, for whatever fucking reason. This time, it was the turn of my nextcloud.
The machine has arch linux running, I chose it since I already use it on my coding laptop and being a rolling release means I don't have to manually upgrade to a newer version, risking various fuck-ups and consequent screaming of profanity.
The downside is that arch is a bleeding-edge distro, so, despite being pretty good for what concerns security, as updates are pushed out some packages may still require legacy software to work as intended, since obviously not all developers for all packages can release simultaneously.
The problem was that php reached 8.2.x but nextcloud couldn't use anything beyond 8.1, so the highlighted solution was to download php-legacy, a package with a set of utilities which the cloud could use instead of mainline php.

Pretty easy, right? fuck my life, here we go.

I edited apache-httpd's configurations to link the new libraries, updated every reference in every virtual host that could possibly screw up the web server.

Done.

Then I went on and disabled the php-fpm mainline, creating a new systemd unit that would instead run the legacy executable and afterwards I edited nextcloud's additional configs so they use that instead.

Done, getting a bit dizzy, but I reboot everything and breathe.

At this point the migration should be complete, but wait, the server returns an error saying that the application is still trying to use php 8.2+...wait, what in the sysadmin Christ?

Back to nextcloud config, everything is set, everything else in every other fucking php-legacy and web server is fine, the old fpm service is disabled, I am confused, and why in the FUCKING FUCK is the new php-fpm unit failing to start at boot with "error 78/config - directory not found"? Hello? Am I being trolled by a shitty dual-core amazon fake NUC?
Maybe yes, cause it turns out that the unit was referencing a directory in the external hdd, which gets mounted at boot time after the unit itself starts, so nothing much, just a matter of tinkering with cron jobs, a reboot and at least this one is off my balls.

But why still isn't the server responding correctly? why? WHY?

After slamming my cock on the keyboard here and there scrolling back through all the config files I think to myself, hmmm, my gitlab is working flawlessly, well yeah, I didn't need to install the whole web stack, everything was nice and easy wrapped in a docker container...so why am I even here, why the fuck am I bothering with all this layered web-app bullshit, why don't I just run the up-to-date docker image that someone else has already set up for me, back up all the data and reupload them on the application?

Oh joy, you can't imagine, after 3...almost 4 hours of pure computer-touching the relief I had from seeing the blue web page with the "welcome to nextcloud" title.

Right now it's copying back all the files, and the external hdd is now linked to include the data folder.
Like really, everything was solved in two lines of bash.

I am still fuming, but at least I learned a valuable lesson, if you want a service up for yourself, implement it and deploy it as fucking easy straight-forward as you can, giving MAXIMUM priority to already fully-working options that are out there just waiting to be downloaded and used. I swing my scrotal sack on web-apps elegance as long as it's MY homelab in MY place.

Eat a fat dick php.

sudo pacman -Rns nextcloud
sudo systemctl disable --now php-fpm-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns php-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns $(sudo pacman -Qdtq)

Programmers logic:

Wife says to her husband to grab a loaf of bread, if they have eggs then grab half a dozen.

Husband goes out and comes back with half a dozen loaves of bread. The wife is fuming and asked why he'd bought so many. His reply "they had eggs?"