The first time I realized I wasn't as good as I thought I was when I met the smartest dev I've ever known (to this day).

I was hired to manage his team but was just immediately floored by the sheer knowledge and skills this guy displayed.

I started to wonder why they hired outside of the team instead of promoting him when I found that he just didn't mesh well with others.

He was very blunt about everything he says. Especially when it comes to code reviews. Man, he did /not/ mince words. And, of course, everyone took this as him just being an asshole.

But being an expert asshole myself, I could tell he wasn't really trying to be one and he was just quirky. He was really good and I really liked hanging out with him. I learned A LOT of things.

Can you imagine coming into a lead position, with years of experience in the role backing your confidence and then be told that your code is bad and then, systematically, very precisely, and very clearly be told why? That shit is humbling.

But it was the good kind of humbling, you know? I really liked that I had someone who could actually teach me new things.

So we hung out a lot and later on I got to meet his daughter and wife who told me that he had slight autism which is why he talked the way he did. He simply doesn't know how to talk any other way.

I explained it to the rest of the team (after getting permission) and once they understood that they started to take his criticism more seriously. He also started to learn to be less harsh with his words.

We developed some really nice friendships and our team was becoming a little family.

Year and a half later I had to leave the company for personal reasons. But before I did I convinced our boss to get him to replace me. The team was behind him now and he easily handled it like a pro.

That was 5 years ago. I moved out of the city, moved back, and got a job at another company.

Four months ago, he called me up and said he had three reasons for us to meet up.

1. He was making me god father of his new baby boy
2. That they created a new position for him at the company; VP of Engineering
and
3. He wanted to hang out

So we did and turns out he had a 4th reason; He had a nice job offer for me.

I'm telling this story now because I wanted to remind everyone of the lesson that every mainstream anime tells us:

Never underestimate the power of friendship.

hackerDoggo
vvv good boy !

HR people working in tech companies, let's talk about them...

*phone rings and I pick up*
HR Lady: Hi, this is [name] from [company]. I'm calling you regarding your application you submitted [some date 2 months ago!].

Me: *realizing that I've applied 2 freaking months ago* Hmmm OK....

HR Lady: Yes, well, we asked for your GitHub account, but you seem to have forgotten to provide it.

Me: *open up the email and see that I've sent them my GitLab account* Well, I have the email right here and I did send you a git account. I mean, it's not GitHub specifically but it's a GitLab account, pretty much the same thing, you should be good with that.

HR Lady: OK, let me put you on hold for a minute.

*2-3 minutes passes*

HR Lady: Hi sir, I've asked my colleague [which I suppose is another HR] and he told me that they're not the same thing, we cannot proceed until you give us the right link, you need to send us a link to your GitHub account.

Me: I mean, they aren't the SAME EXACT thing, but both companies provide essentially the same service, it's like Messenger and WhatsApp. Look, I'm pretty sure that if you give this to another programmer they'll be fine.

HR Lady: No, Messenger and WhatsApp aren't the same thing. Sir, please stay polite. We need a GitHub account not a GitLab account.

Me: *mumbling* Oh boy.... M'am, it's OK, I don't need the job anyway, I've found something. Two months is a long time and I needed something quickly. Thank you, have a good day.

So from hearing all those horrible recruiter stories on here, I am still kinda anxious to contact them/apply to jobs but fuck it, gotta find something.

So this morning, I was browsing jobs and saw one that seemed interesting. Applied through the app and didn't give it a second thought (they usually contact me after a week or so).

Then, 5 minutes later I suddenly got called by a number I don't know so picked up and:

Me: Hello, this is linuxxx (not gonna use my real name :P).
R: Hello, I am {r.name}, from {r.company}. I saw you are interested in {job.name}!
Me: Holy fuck (yeah i about literally said that), I did NOT expect to get a call within 5 minutes! *suddenly realizes I have to act professional, fuck me*.
R: That's alright haha! So may I ask you a few questions?
Me: *okay so that went better than expected* Yeah sure!:

- He asked me about many things but specifically about how I got into Linux and how my interest etc for it started AND where I learned it. He was very surprised to hear that I've learned everything myself :).

So, instead of getting an ass on the line, we talked, laughed and talked job oppertunities for half an hour :D.

I am not that afraid of recruiters anymore.

Oh boy!

Time to apply for dev jobs!

Good thing HR is fair and just!

*submits résume*

"I'm sorry but you're not qualified. The programming language we use is listed last on your resume."

Welcome to HR Hell ladies and gentleman.

I just feel that I have to get this of my chest, because this have really me and my family really negative.
It have destroyed my will to be happy, sort of.

Well, my father have some kind of control behaviour. My whole life he has been angry on stuff that does not really matter
and I have always been the one that get all the shit - because I am the oldest. I was never allowed (maybee 3-4 times between age 8-15) to have any friends
over or stay with friends over night or after school. Because they "where bad and I would become like them".

I am happy that I meet my wife 6 years ago and moved away from home when I was 20, I kinda fled the situation from home to start my own life.
My father has always hated when boy/men had long hair and alot of beard - but that is something I always wanted to have. So when I moved from home
I start to let everything grow.

Two years ago, things got really fucked up when I did not shave all my beard of and cut down my hair because my mom had birthday. I did it the week after
because my brother graduated from school and we where going to visit, we did not want a repeat the situation from a couple of weeks before. After that I got
another job as a Linux sysadmin and started to grow the hair and beard again.

Last monday, my dad called and said that I am not welcome to visit them anymore. I am a "bad example" for my sibling
and he also said "you brother and sister does not feel so good (my sister fainted a couple of days before, which I did not know) so I have no time to care about you and your family"
I was stunned, I really wish that this was a joke but it is'nt.

I have always been bashed because of the choices I make in my life and for my own family (wife, and two kids + one more kid any day now)

When I choose to work with something that I love, they said that I am stupid because they basically think "that the PC is full of SATAN".
When they realized that I make more money than my parents combined they went silent.

I just wanted to write this shit of my chest, it is really fucked up and I am starting to loose the ability to have feelings - if you know what I mean.

Thank you devrant, for being one of the fun things I do, when I read all the rage, fucked up stories, hate, and so on. I do not feel alone :)

PS: I promise you, that you guys/gals will be the first one to know when my new kiddo arrives

When you are getting ready to share your source code with a potential employer

I honestly have no energy to even type this out because this is so draining, but here goes.

I am usually very calm and can keep my composure well, but boy do you push my limits. Do you think my work is so easy that it’s just “a bunch of queries and simple logic”? Well, fine. YOU FUCKING DO IT.. right before I grab you by your fucking neck and shove your face repeatedly into the keyboard. You even have the audacity to give us a project and come the very next fucking day and repeatedly keep asking us “iS iT FiNisHeD yEt?” so much and annoy even the calmest in our team even when we clearly stated that it was going to take us 30 work days to fucking finish it. Do you not know what a working day is? 30 work days is not the same as 30 days you dumbfuck. You have no idea how any of these work and yet you preach your bullshit and waste our fucking time when we could have used that time better to finish our work. THIS IS WHY EVERY SINGLE EMPLOYEE KEEPS LEAVING AND WHY THIS COMPANY HAS A VERY LOW EMPLOYEE RETENTION RATE. You won’t even let me finish my fucking lunch in peace. We have 45 minutes for lunch and since I’ve been eating out for almost the past year (I live alone and don’t usually have time to make food at home because of my hour and a half long commute), a close friend of mine’s mom reached out to and said “Hey, since you’ve been usually getting food from outside, why not join us for lunch?”, so I did and it was the most amazing food ever. Mind you, this was the first time I’ve ever left work myself to have lunch since I joined. I did get 10 minutes late because lunchtime tends to fall around the time where the schools close for the day (no shit) and school traffic is usually insane, and you unsurprisingly decided to make an issue out of a non-issue especially since I’M THE ONLY FUCKING PERSON WORKING IN THE COMPANY and also dock my pay for that. Let me also include the time where our one of the others in the management gave us a quick project that was to be quickly finished while we working on an existing project so we put aside a day just to complete and ship the app and the features and as usual, you decided to make an issue out of a non-issue and decided to shame us publicly and even made (my now former) colleague cry. You’re just a spoiled, selfish, ignorant nit-witted fucking imbecile who has no idea how to even properly run a business. Get fucked in the arse with a cactus. I'm done. I've held on for so long but this is the last straw. I'll be handing my letter of resignation soon. Good luck with running a company without any employees.

Navy story continued.
And continuing from the arp poisoning and boredom, I started scanning the network...
So I found plenty of WinXP computers, even some Win2k servers (I shit you not, the year was 201X) I decided to play around with merasploit a bit. I mean, this had to be a secure net, right?
Like hell it was.
Among the select douchebags I arp poisoned was a senior officer that had a VERY high idea for himself, and also believed he was tech-savvy. Now that, is a combination that is the red cloth for assholes like me. But I had to be more careful, as news of the network outage leaked, and rumours of "that guy" went amok, but because the whole sysadmin thing was on the shoulders of one guy, none could track it to me in explicit way. Not that i cared, actually, when I am pissed I act with all the subtleness of an atom bomb on steroids.
So, after some scanning and arp poisoning (changing the source MAC address this time) I said...
"Let's try this common exploit, it supposedly shouldn't work, there have been notifications about it, I've read them." Oh boy, was I in for a treat. 12 meterpreter sessions. FUCKING 12. The academy's online printer had no authentication, so I took the liberty of printing a few pages of ASCII jolly rogers (cute stuff, I know, but I was still in ITSec puberty) and decided to fuck around with the other PCs. One thing I found out is that some professors' PCs had the extreme password of 1234. Serious security, that was. Had I known earlier, I could have skipped a TON of pointless memorising...
Anyway, I was running amok the entire network, the sysad never had a chance on that, and he seemed preoccupied with EVERYTHING ELSE besides monitoring the net, like fixing (replacing) the keyboard for the commander's secretary, so...
BTW, most PCs had antivirus, but SO out of date that I didn't even need to encode the payload or do any other trick. An LDAP server was open, and the hashed admin password was the name of his wife. Go figure.
I looked at a WinXP laptop with a weird name, and fired my trusty ms08_067 on it. Passowrd: "aaw". I seriously thought that Ophcrack was broken, but I confirmed it. WTF? I started looking into the files... nothing too suspicious... wait a min, this guy is supposed to work, why his browser is showing porn?
Looking at the ""Deleted"" files (hah!) I fount a TON of documents with "SECRET" in them. Curious...
Decided to download everything, like the asshole I am, and restart his PC, AND to leave him with another desktop wallpaper and a text message. Thinking that he took the hint, I told the sysadmin about the vulnerable PCs and went to class...
In the middle of the class (I think it was anti-air warfare or anti-submarine warfare) the sysad burst through the door shouting "Stop it, that's the second-in-command's PC!".
Stunned silence. Even the professor (who was an officer). God, that was awkward. So, to make things MORE awkward (like the asshole I am) I burned every document to a DVD and the next day I took the sysad and went to the second-in-command of the academy.
Surprisingly he took the whole thing in quite the easygoing fashion. I half-expected court martial or at least a good yelling, but no. Anyway, after our conversation I cornered the sysad and barraged him with some tons of security holes, needed upgrades and settings etc. I still don't know if he managed to patch everything (I left him a detailed report) because, as I've written before, budget constraints in the military are the stuff of nightmares. Still, after that, oddly, most people wouldn't even talk to me.
God, that was a nice period of my life, not having to pretend to be interested about sports and TV shows. It would be almost like a story from highschool (if our highschool had such things as a network back then - yes, I am old).
Your stories?

A couple of months back I got an interview for a junior android devel position. I do not consider myself a junior devel, bt fuck it they paid 78k a year plus benefits and this is for south texas where it ain't thaaat expensive. So i kept my mouth shut and went with it.
The company was glorious, one of those hipsert marketing companies with cool couches and shit and people doing fuckign whatever all over the place and cool tools and desks.

So the initial interview with the hr dept went amazing, real cool guys and very down to earth. Next was the senior android dev.

This dude.

It was to be a phone interview, with a lil coding test. Fine whatevs. But the moment he called i knew shit was going down hill. Dude sounded dead af. Like he could not stand being himself that day. Asked asshole questions that every developer in Android should know that were frankly quite insulting ("what company develops the Android os" kind of deal) but kept my mouth shut and answered as needed.

Then the coding portion. Given a string, find the first position of the first repeated char, so if I had , fuck i dunno "tetas" then t was the first (and only) char repeated and it should have given out 2.
Legit finished it up in less than 6 mins and only because he was making me explain my entire thought process.

He got angry for some reason. Mind you I speak like a hippie, with a melow town and calm voice all the damned time, got that Texas swag going on as well as any good ol' boy from Texas should right?
Well this dude was not having none of that shit that day.

Dude was all like "ok now....why exactly did you do it this way?"

With a VERY condescending tone. And i explained that at first I normally think about solutions in pseudocode, so I wrote that as well...1 min or less. In python. This is after I still had the Java solution on screen with perfectly clean and working Java. I saif that since Python was as close to pseudocode as it gets that I figured i would just write the "pseudocode" in python and then map it to Java with all the required modifications.

"Welk i did not ask you to write it in java, so i dunno why you would even do that to begin with"

That is one of many asshole remarks. The first when I mentioned that I found React Native good for prototyping complex ideas for FUCKING FUN. Passion motherfucker. Shit so fly I do it for fun. "We don't deal with that here so I am not interested in what you can do with that or how would it help me"

Mofocka plz.

Well going back to the python shit. I explain (calmly) that it was just a way that I had to figure details, to think of different implementations. He continues by saying that it takes valuable company time.

Then he proceeds to tell me that he believes that i cheated since i fi ished the java "problem" too fast.
I told him that simple stuff like that should take even less for any senior java dev and that we could run another example if he wanted.
Bring it puto.
But no.

He then said that he still did not understand the need for Python in my solution. I lost it.

"Look man, getting real tired of your tone, i explained already, it is just a mental process, i do this when comming up with solutions, thinking in theory, not languages, helps me bridge the gap between problem and implementation, the solution works, it is efficient and fast and i can do it in 5 diff ways if you wanted, i offered and you said no. Don't really know what else you want"

"All i am saying, i am not going to hire you if you are going to be writing Python for Android, that is useless to me"

Lost it more.

I do sound different when pissed. So I basically told him that he asked for my reasoning behind and it was given, that not getting it was a you problem.

Sooooo did not get the job. Was relieved really. Can't imagine having a twat like that as a lead devel.

Wow this one deserves a rant. Where should I even begin? I got a new job for over half a year now doing work in an agency. We're building websites and online shops with Typo3 and Shopware (not my dream, but hey). All fine you might think BUT...

1) I have been working on the BIGGEST project we have all by myself since I started working at this company. No help, nobody cares.

2) If something goes wrong all the shit falls back to me like "wHy DiDnT yoU WoRk MoRE?". Seriously? How should one dev cover a project that's meant for at least two or three.

3) The project was planned four years ago (YES that's a big fat FOUR) and sat there for 3,5 years - nobody gave a fuck. I got into the company and immediately got the sucky shit project to work on.

4) I was promised some time to get familiar with the projects and tech we use and "pick something I like most to get started". Well that never happened.

5) I was also promised not to talk directly to our customers. Well, each week I was bombarded with insults, a shitload of work and nonsense by our customers because (you guessed it) I was obligated to attend meetings.

6) The scheduled time for a meeting was 30 minutes, sometimes they just went on for over two hours. Fml.

7) Project management. It does not exist. The company is just out to get more and more clients, hires more god damn managers and shit and completely neglects that we might need more devs to get all this crap finished. Nope, they don't care. By the way: this is not like a 200 employee company, it's more like 15 which makes it even sadder to have 4 managers and 3 devs.

8) We don't use trello (or anything to keep track of our "progress"), nobody knows the exact scope of the project, because it was planned FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.

9) They planned to use 3 months on this project to get it finished (by the way it's not just an online shop, it has a really sophisticated product configurator with like 20 dependencies). Well, we're double over that time period and it is still not finished.

10) FUCK YOU SHOPWARE

11) The clients are super unsatisfied with our service (who would have guessed). They never received official documents from us (that's why nobody knows the scope), nor did they receive the actual screen design of the shop so we just have to make it up on the go. Of course I mean "I" by "we", because appearently it is my job to develop, design and manage this shit show.

12) My boss regularly throws me in front of the bus by randomly joining meetings with my client telling them the complete opposite of things that we discussed internally (he doesn't know anything about this stupid project)

13) FUCK YOU COLLEAGUES, FUCK YOU COMPANY, FUCK YOU SHOPWARE AND FUCK YOU STUPID CUSTOMERS.

14) Oh btw. the salary sucks ass, it's barely a couple of bucks above minimum wage. Don't ask me why I accepted the offer. I guess it was better than nothing in the meantime.

Boy that feels good. I needed that rant. But hey don't get me wrong. I get that dev jobs can be hard and sucky, but this is beyond stupidity that I can bear. I therefore applied for a dev job in research at a university in my dream country. Nice colleagues, interesting projects, good project management. They accepted me, gave me a good offer and I can happily say that in 6-7 weeks my current company can go fuck themselves (nobody knows the 10.000+ lines of code but me). Just light it up and watch it burn!

Currently on an internship, PHP mostly, little bit of Python and the usual web stuff, and I just had the BEST FUCKING DAY EVER.

Wake up and find out I'm out of coffee, oh boy here we go.

Bus leaves 10 minutes late, great gonna miss my train.

Trains just don't wanna ride today, back in a bus I go, what's normally a 10 minute train travel is now a 90 minute bus ride.

Arrive at internship, coffee machine is broke, non problem, I'll just lose it slowly.

NOW HERE COMES THE FUCKING GOOD PART!!

Alright, so I'm working on a CMS that can be used just about on any device you want, mobile or desktop, it's huge, billion's of rows of scientific data. Very specific requirements and low error margins. Now, yesterday I was really enjoying myself here until today, Project manager walks in, comes to my desk and hands me a Samsung Gear S3, an Apple watch and some cheap knockoff. He tells me that before the Friday deploy, THE ENTIRE CMS SHOULD WORK ON THOSE WATCHES!

I mean, don't get me wrong, I like a challenge but it's just not right, I mean, I'm still not sure what the right way to handle tables on phones is, but smart watches, just no. Besides that, I've never worked with any Apple devices, let alone WatchOs, nor have I worked with Android Wear.

Also, Project Manager is a total dickhead, he's the kinda guy that prefers a light theme, doesn't clean up his code, writes 0 documentation for an API, 1 space = tab, pure horror.

So after almost flipping my desk, I just called my school coach to announce I'm leaving this internship. After a brief explanation he decides to come over, and guess what, according to the Project Manager I wasn't supposed to do that, I was supposed to test if it would be possible.

FUCKING ASSFUCKFACE

I really hate this company.

The code is a disaster. Every single other employee is a salesperson. Nobody has any bloody clue what I do or how difficult it is. They don't care about stability (unless things are crashing), maintenance (until crashing), code quality (until it delays features), or anything apart from shiny new features they can sell. The boss (the king salesman, if ever there was one) doesn't know how to manage, but tries to by acting like his "nice asshole" self -- he's an asshole that gives you passes, makes sure it's bloody obvious that he's doing it begrudgingly, yet everything is still absolutely your fault. If he arbitrarily decides it's too much your fault, he stops being "nice" and flips out on you in front of everyone. That's a "nice asshole": an asshole who can barely even pretend to be nice.

Fuck him.

And you know what? I really hate having to work next to these fucking birds, too.

Today was our weekly conference call, and I was both late and unprepared. I was too focused on my work, and got a ping 4 minutes into the meeting, so I obv didn't have time to prepare. Boss was also pissy today, and I didn't have much to show for my week, thanks to lots of little "OMG NEED ASAP" shit projects that all took too long, pushing back what I was actually supposed to work on. Which didn't get finished, of course, and today that project was "the most important" -- I suspect simply because it wasn't finished. AGADJFSKL. Cue the birds fucking screaming and never fucking shutting up no matter what I did. Blanket? No effect. Spray bottle? SCREAM MORE! Boss was yelling at me, the birds were screaming, and I couldn't think. Goddamn fucking disaster.

and yes, we have a macaw. A macaw and over 20 cockatiels. Said macaw decided today was a lovely day to just fucking SCREAM non-stop, and the tiels were doing their best to keep up. Thinking clearly during this cacophony? Not gonna happen.

Wait, "go elsewhere," you say? Somewhere quieter? Where is this "elsewhere?" We live in a fucking tiny house, and during the call it was (and still is) filled with sleeping people, and surrounded by a fucking desert. Who the fuck thought living in the desert was a good idea, anyway? Like, seriously. What brainless moron thought "You know what? This is a great place! Let's settle down right here," while trudging through the scorching sand and dust, looking at the basically lifeless horizon filled with large, hot, dry, dusty, barren rocks (aka "mountains"), and fucking dying from thirst? Probably someone so delirious from heatstroke they never actually recovered, and continued raving that it's a goddamn paradise to their heat-addled imbecile followers. I really hope they hallucinated a la-z-boy in place of a hedge of teddybear cholla and died an excruciating and prickly death. Fuck that guy/girl, too.

But I digress.

I seriously need an office that isn't a 30 min drive into gang-central. I'd work outside, but I live in the middle of the bloody fucking desert, and get heat exhaustion within about half an hour. Everywhere else in the house people bother me almost incessantly.

just. FUCKING FJASKLDFJGAG.
I HATE THIS PLACE SO SO SO MUCH.

'I've had such Zen lately,' Alex said. Maybe then, but lately? I've just been too exhausted and burned out from putting up with all this shit to get angry. Days like today? I could pour kerosene over everything and laugh as it all just burned to ash.

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.

Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.

Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.

I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.

We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.

Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.

These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?

Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON

Today is a sad day.
A sad day indeed.
I used to live with my parents for pretty much my whole life until the beginning of this year, when I decided to move and starter living with a friend, in his apartment.
By far, one of the things that I've missed most from my parents' house was the dogs. Boy, I love those four pretty little creatures.
Being a fulltime developer in an area that I honestly don't like that much, I really appreciate my after-work hours. Specially because of the time I could spend with the dogs.
So, the first months away were quite hard. Even though I was living with a friend, I couldn't help but feel alone and really depressed at times.
But then, my friend and my girlfriend decided that it was a nice idea to give me something to grow with again. And Jolyne, my beautiful, smart and messy little dog came to the apartment.
Boy oh boy, my bright days were back.
Getting home and seeing those four small legs and a shaking tail running on my direction was everything I could ask for. I was happy again.

Fast-forward to today.
I finally finished the code for a project I was working on. Everything was working fine. A good day indeed, good sir. Have one on me. - then my friend called me, which is weird considering we almost only talk through Telegram during the day.
All he had to say, with a sad voice and painful tone, was "man... I don't know how to tell you this... But Jolyne is dead".

And that was it. Every good feeling I had was now dead. And a part of me as well.
I stood there, speechless. I mean, I just couldn't believe what I've just heard. She was happy by the morning. We were playing before I left for work. Everything was fine.
Then, four hours later, it wasn't. She was gone.
I came home to a friend that didn't have any more tears to shed. And no dog came running to me like usual.
My fluffy little friend was laying on her bed, like she was sleeping normally. Like nothing had happened at all. She was just sleeping and have not noticed me... At least that was what I wanted to believe.
Three hours had passed then... And I just can't fathom the fact that my dog won't be here anymore. That I won't be able to play with her again like I do every night. That I won't listen to her running around with her toys. That I won't be able to hug her anymore.

I still don't know what to do. I mean, she will be buried. I've already arranged everything.
But I don't know what to do about myself. I don't know how to deal with this pain I'm feeling.
But I will try to move on... I just don't know how.

I'm deeply sorry for bringing you this story. For just writing it down here, like you guys need to share my pain...
But I needed to write this down somewhere. And this place is pretty much the only one where I feel comfortable and welcome enough to do this.
Thank you for your time, my friends.
Thank you.

Actual rant time. And oh boy, is it pissy.

If you've read my posts, you've caught glimpses of this struggle. And it's come to quite a head.

First off, let it be known that WINDOWS Boot Manager ate GRUB, not the other way around. Windows was the instigator here. And when I reinstalled GRUB, Windows threw a tantrum and won't boot anymore. I went through every obvious fix, everything tech support would ever think of, before I called them. I just got this laptop this week, so it must be in warranty, right? Wrong. The reseller only accepts it unopened, and the manufacturer only covers hardware issues. I found this after screaming past a pretty idiotic 'customer representative' ("Thank you for answering basic questions. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for repeating obvious information I didn't catch the first three times you said it. Thank you for letting me follow my script." For real. Are you tech support, or emotional support? You sound like a middle school counselor.) to an xkcd-shibboleth type 'advanced support'. All of this only to be told, "No, you can't fix it yourself, because we won't give you the license key YOU already bought with the computer." And we already know there's no way Microsoft is going to swoop in and save the day. It's their product that's so faulty in the first place. (Debian is perfectly fine.)

So I found a hidden partition with a single file called 'Image' and I'm currently researching how to reverse-engineer WIM and SWM files to basically replicate Dell's manufacturing process because they won't take it back even to do a simple factory reset and send it right back.

What the fuck, Dell.

As for you, Microsoft, you're going to make it so difficult to use your shit product that I have to choose between an arduous, dangerous, and likely illegal process to reclaim what I ALREADY BOUGHT, or just _not use_ a license key? (Which, there's no penalty for that.) Why am I going so far out of my way to legitimize myself to you, when you're probably selling backdoors and private data of mine anyway? Why do I owe you anything?

Oh, right. Because I couldn't get Fallout 3 to run in Wine. Because the game industry follows money, not common sense. Because you marketed upon idiocy and cheapness and won a global share.

Fuck you. Fuck everything. Gah.

VS Code is pretty good, though.

I've been away... for too long. But today I have an announcement.
I've finally resigned from the Navy.
Little backstory: I have been thinking to resign since my last year as an Ensign, and I finally gained enough skill (and confidence) to make a CV and send it to a few companies. And lo and behold, a company actually was interested.
To be stupidly honest, maybe other factors certainly have played a part, but hey, I actually got a position in the sector I am interested and somewhat good: networks, sysadmin and security.
The CO and XO at my ship were mostly like "meh, he will retract his resignation, why would he want to leave, he is not serious". Until a few days ago, when they realised that I do not operate that way. And now panic has spread among them. I have designed and deployed quite some systems on the ship, both hardware and software, and now... history repeats again. This had happened to EVERY ship I've served before, but now, it will be permanent. And, oh boy, their faces and behaviour when the facts finally sank in... to quote a big mind of YouTube, "Not enough popcorn on Earth".
So, no more new Navy tech stories, but at least I am gaining my sanity back. I've even halved my cigarette and coffee consumption. I'll try to keep in touch with DevRant, but things are quite chaotic now (for them, anyway). But, for now, all I can think of is...

Trying to compress 1Tb of data,
Will take 40 hours... I expected worse. Good boy Winrar, I will buy you this year promise..

Some days I feel like I work in a different universe.

Last night our alerting system sent out a dept. wide email regarding a high number of errors coming from the web site.

Email shows the number of errors and a summary of the error messages.

Ex. 60 errors
59 Object reference not set to an instance of an object
1 The remote server returned an unexpected response: (413) Request Entity Too Large

Web team responds to the email..

"Order processing team's service is returning a 413 error. I'll fill out a corrective action ticket in the morning to address that error in their service. "

Those tickets are taken pretty seriously by upper mgmt, so I thought someone on the order processing team would point out the 1 error vs. 59 (coming from the web team's code).

Two hours go by, nobody responds, so I decide to jump into something that was none of my business.

"Am I missing something? Can everyone see the 59 null reference exceptions? The 413 exception only occurred once. It was the null reference exceptions that triggered the alert. Looking back at the logs, the site has been bleeding null reference exceptions for hours. Not enough for an alert, but there appears to be a bug that needs to be looked into."

After a dept. managers meeting this morning:

MyBoss: "Whoa..you kicked the hornets nest with your response last night."
Me: "Good. What happened?"
<Dan dept VP, Jake web dept mgr>
MyBoss: "Dan asked Jake if they were going to fix the null reference exceptions and Jake got pissed. Said the null reference errors were caused by the 413 error."
Me: "How does he know that? They don't log any stack traces. I don't think those two systems don't even talk to one another."
<boss laughs>
MyBoss:"That's what Dan asked!..oh..then Jake started in on the alert thresholds were too low, and we need to look into fixing your alerting code."
Me: "What!? Good Lord, tell me you chimed in."
MyBoss: "Didn't have to. Dan starting laughing and said there better be a ticket submitted on their service within the next hour. Then Jake walked out of the meeting. Oh boy, he was pissed."
Me: "I don't understand how they operate over there. It's a different universe.
MyBoss: "Since the alert was for their system, nobody looked at the details. I know I didn't. If you didn't respond pointing out the real problem, they would have passed the buck to the other team and wasted hours chasing a non-existent problem. Now they have to take resources away from their main project and answer to the VP for the delay. I'm sure they are prefixing your name right now with 'that asshole'"
Me: "Not the first, won't be the last."

Good fucking God non-technical iPhone owners are such a fucking cancerous group

"You're just mad because you're broke"

"Lol broke boy."

"That potato ass camera though"

"Shut up before I take your battery out."

Like fucking Christ what an autistic buncha fucking brainless monkeys. We should have a Holocaust for ignorant cunts like them.

Worst experience with cs profs? Oh boy....

Databases lab: "You'll need to work of this snippet, if your IDE tells you it's deprecated you don't need to care about it"
If you want to imagine the quality of the code base we were expected to work upon just think about that attached xkcd comic, basically an undecipherable black box.

The instructions where at the same time micro managing everything (he gave us frickin variable names to use, and no good ones, no the database connection had to be called datbc, yeah very descriptive) and yet so obfuscated that I'm not completely sure he didn't resurrect Kant himself to ghostwrite for him.

He also didn't like us to use any Java feature that was to 'modern', for example for each loops since "they offer no benefit over normal for loops".

Further, everything we wrote had to be documented with a relationship diagram and a uml. So far no problem if he hadn't invented his own flavor of both (which can be read about in his book).
Oh, and he almost failed me because I used a lambda expression in his 'code on paper' exam and this "arrows are a C command" I "must have been confused"... which is glorious coming from the guy who can't get operators and commands straight.

Hey Root. Here’s a new ticket for you. It involves lots of things you’ve never seen before, and the only person you can ask is out this week.

Hey Root. Why haven’t you been making good progress every day? Why didn’t you reach out to the guy on FTO? Clearly you can’t communicate. Give me detailed status updates twice a day at specific times, covering <exhaustive list of topics> so I know you’re working. What do you mean “no”!?

Hey Root. Stop working on that ticket, and work on this other ticket. It’s the same thing, but different. High-priority!

Hey Root. You asking questions about that ticket pissed off a legendary golden boy principal dev, and he said it’s a bad idea and that we should have assigned it to a different team, too — you know, the team who usually works on these areas. But we might still have you do it. Please work on the previous ticket that’s in the exact same area until we decide.

Hey Root. Why haven’t you gotten anything done?

You know how it is when all your friends know you as the "computer guy".

Friend: Yo, I need this small script for school, can you do it for me?

Me: I don't really...

Friend: Come on, pretty please.

Me: See I...

Friend: I'll pay you good for this.

Me: Oh... What language does it have to be in, Python? JavaScript? Ruby? Perl? I don't know it but it shouldn't be too hard, I can learn it. Bash? Not a fan but it's quite easy. So what is it?

...

Friend: Visual Basic

Me: oh...

This was last week. 2017. A couple of days before 2018. Some schools still teach VB. Not even VB .NET.

(He had about 200 good reasons so I did it anyway. But boy, has that been a chore)

Prologue
My dad has an acquaintance - let's call him Tom. Tom is an gynecologist, one of the best in Poznań, where I live. He's a great guy but absolutely can not into tech of any kind besides his iPhone and basic PC usage. For about a year now I've been doing small jobs for him - build a new PC for his office, fix printer, fix wifi, etc. He has made a big mistake few years ago by trusting a guy, let's call him Shitface, with crating him software for work. It's supposed to be pretty simple piece of code in which you can create and modify patient file, create prescription from drugs database and such things. This program is probably one of the worst pierces of code I've ever seen and Shitface should burn for that. Worse, this guy is pretentious asshole lacking even basic IT knowledge. His code is garbage and it's taking him few months to make small changes like text wrapping. But wait, there's more. Everything is hardcoded so every PC using this software must have installed user controls for which he doesn't have license and static IP address on network card.
Part 1
Tom asked me to build him a new PC that will be acting like a server for Shitface's program. He needs it in Kalisz (around 150 km from my place). I Agred (pun intended) and after Tom brought me his old computer I've bought parts and built a new one. I have also copied everything of value and everything took me around three hours.
Part 2
Everything was ready but Shitface's program. I didn't know much about it's configuration so when I've noticed that it's not working even on the old PC I got a bit worried. Nevertheless I started breaking everything I know about it and after next three hours I've got it somewhat working. Seeing that there's still some problems with database connection (from Windows' Event Viewer) I wrote quick SMS to Shitface asking what can be wrong. He replied that he won't be able to help me any way until Monday (day after deadline). I got pissed and very courteously asked him for source code because some of libraries used in this project has license that requires either purchase of commercial license or making code open source. He replied within few minutes that he'll be able to connect remotely within next 10 minutes. He was trying to make it work for the next hour but he succeeded. It was night before deadline so I wrapped everything up and went to bed thinking that it won't take me more than an hour to get this new PC up and running in the office. Boy was I wrong.
Also, curious about his code, I've checked source and he is using beautiful ponglish (mixed Polish and English) with mistakes he couldn't even bother to fix. For people from Poland, here's an example:
TerminarzeController.DeleteTerminarzShematyDlaLekarza
Part 3
So I drove to Kalisz and started working on making everything work. Almost everything was ready so after half an hour I was done. But I wanted to check twice if it's all good because driving so far second time would be a pain. So I started up Shitface's program, logged in, tried to open ANYTHING and... KABUM. UNHANDLED EXCEPTION. WTF. I checked trace and for fuck sake something was missing. Keep in mind that then I didn't know he's using some third party control for Windows Forms that needs to be installed on client PC. After next fifteen minutes of googling I've found a solution. I just had to install this third party software and everything will work. But... It had to be exactly this version and it was old. Very old. So old that producent already removed all traces of its existence from their web page and I couldn't find it anywhere. I tried installing never version and copying files from old PC but it didn't work. After few hours of searching for a solution I called Mr Shitface asking him for this control installation file. He told me that he has it but will be able to send it my way in the evening. Resigned I asked for this new PC to be left turned on and drove home. When he sent me necessary files I remotely installed them and everything started working correctly.
So, to sum it up. Searching for parts and building new PC, installing OS and all necessary software, updating everything and configuring it for Tom taste took me around what, 1/3 of time I spent on installing Mr Shitface's stupid program which Tom is not even happy with. Gotta say it was one of worst experiences I had in recent months. Hope I won't have to see this shit again.
Epilogue
Fortunately everything seems to work correctly. Tom hasn't called me yet with any problems. Mission accomplished. I wanna kill very specific someone. With. A. Spoon.

It's enough. I have to quit my job.

December last year I've started working for a company doing finance. Since it was a serious-sounding field, I tought I'd be better off than with my previous employer. Which was kinda the family-agency where you can do pretty much anything you want without any real concequences, nor structures. I liked it, but the professionalism was missing.

Turns out, they do operate more professionally, but the intern mood and commitment is awful. They all pretty much bash on eachother. And the root cause of this and why it will stay like this is simply the Project Lead.

The plan was that I was positioned as glue between Design/UX and Backend to then make the best Frontend for the situation. Since that is somewhat new and has the most potential to get better. Beside, this is what the customer sees everyday.

After just two months, an retrospective and a hell lot of communication with co-workers, I've decided that there is no other way other than to leave.

I had a weekly productivity of 60h+ (work and private, sometimes up to 80h). I had no problems with that, I was happy to work, but since working in this company, my weekly productivity dropped to 25~30h. Not only can I not work for a whole proper work-week, this time still includes private projects. So in hindsight, I efficiently work less than 20h for my actual job.

The Product lead just wants feature on top of feature, our customers don't want to pay concepts, but also won't give us exact specifications on what they want.
Refactoring is forbidden since we get to many issues/bugs on a daily basis so we won't get time.
An re-design is forbidden because that would mean that all Screens have to be re-designed.
The product should be responsive, but none of the components feel finished on Desktop - don't talk about mobile, it doesn't exist.
The Designer next to me has to make 200+ Screens for Desktop and Mobile JUST so we can change the primary colors for an potential new customer, nothing more. Remember that we don't have responsiveness? Guess what, that should be purposely included on the Designs (and it looks awful).
I may hate PHP, but I can still work with it. But not here, this is worse then any ecommerce. I have to fix legacy backend code that has no test coverage. But I haven't touched php for 4 years, letalone wrote sql (I hate it). There should be no reason whatsoever to let me do this kind of work, as FRONTEND ARCHITECT.

After an (short) analysis of the Frontend, I conclude that it is required to be rewritten to 90%. There have been no performance checks for the Client/UI, therefor not only the components behave badly, but the whole system is slow as FUCK! Back in my days I wrote jQuery, but even that shit was faster than the architecuture of this React Multi-instance app. Nothing is shared, most of the AppState correlate to other instances.

The Backend. Oh boy. Not only do we use an shitty outated open-source project with tons of XSS possibillities as base, no we clone that shit and COPY OUR SOURCES ON TOP. But since these people also don't want to write SQL, they tought using Symfony as base on top of the base would be an good idea.
Generally speaking (and done right), this is true. but not then there will be no time and not properly checked. As I said I'm working on Legacy code. And the more I look into it, the more Bugs I find. Nothing too bad, but it's still a bad sign why the webservices are buggy in general. And therefor, the buggyness has to travel into the frontend.

And now the last goodies:
- Composer itself is commited to the repo (the fucking .phar!)
- Deployments never work and every release is done manually
- We commit an "_TRASH" folder
- There is an secret ongoing refactoring in the root of the Project called "_REFACTORING" (right, no branches)
- I cannot test locally, nor have just the Frontend locally connected to the Staging webservices
- I am required to upload my sources I write to an in-house server that get's shared with the other coworkers
- This is the only Linux server here and all of the permissions are fucked up
- We don't have versions, nor builds, we use the current Date as build number, but nothing simple to read, nonono. It's has to be an german Date, with only numbers and has always to end with "00"
- They take security "super serious" but disable the abillity to unlock your device with your fingerprint sensor ON PURPOSE

My brain hurts, maybe I'll post more on this shit fucking cuntfuck company. Sorry to be rude, but this triggers me sooo much!

Hello everyone, this is my first time here so hi! I want to tell you all a story about my current situation.

At 18 while in the military I was able to get my first computer, it was a small hp pavilion laptop with windows 7. The system would crash constantly, even though I would only use it for googling stuff and using fb to talk to people. 5 months after I got it and continuously hated it decided to find out why and who could I blame (other than myself) for the system making me do the ctrl alt del dance all the time....

Found out that there are people called computer programmers that made software. Decided to give it a go since I had some free time most days. Started out with c++ because it was being recommended in some websites. Had many "oh deeeeer lord" moments. After not getting much traction I decided to move to Java which seemed like an easier step than C++. Had fun, but after some verbosity I decided to move into more dynamic lands. Tried JS and since at the time there was no Node and I was not very into the idea of building websites I decided to move into Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl and had a really great time using and learning all of them. I decided to get good in theoretical aspects of computer programming and since I had a knack for math I decided to get started with basic computer science concepts.

I absolutely frigging loved it. And not only that, but learning new things became an obsession, the kind that would make me go to bed at 02:40 am just to wake up at 04:00 or 06:00 because the military is like that. I really wanted to absorb as much as I could since I wanted to go to college for it and wanted to be prepared since I did not wanted to be a complete newb. Took Harvard CS50, Standford Programming 101 with Java, Rice's Python course and MIT's Python programming class. I had so much fun I don't regret it one bit.
By the time I got to college I had already made the jump to Linux and was an adept Arch user, Its not that it was superior or anything, but it really forced me to learn about Linux and working around a terminal and the internals of the system to get what I want. Now a days I settle for Fedora or Debian based systems since they are easier and time is money.

Uni was a breeze, math was fun and the programming classes seemed like glorified "Hello World" courses. I had fun, but not that much fun, most of my time was spent getting better at actual coding. I am no genius, nor my grades were super amazing(I did graduate with honors though) but I had fun, which never really happened in school before that.

While in school I took my first programming gig! It was in ASP.NET MVC, we were using C#, I got the job through a customer that I met at work, I was working in retail during the time and absolutely hated it. I remember being so excited with the gig, I got to meet other developers! Where I am from there aren't that many and most of them are very specialized, so they only get concerned with certain aspects of coding (e.g VBA developers.....) and that is until I met the lead dev. He was by far one of the biggest assholes I had ever met in my life. Absolutely nothing that I would do or say made hem not be a dick. My code was steady, but I would find bugs of incomplete stuff that he would do, whenever I would fix it he would belittle me and constantly remind me of my position as a "junior dev" in the company saying things as "if you have an issue with my code or standards tell me, but do not touch the code" which was funny considering that I would not be able to advance without those fixes. I quit not even 3 months latter because I could not stand the dick, neither 2 of the other developers since the immediately resigned after they got their own courage.

A year latter I was able to find myself another gig. I was hesitant for a moment since it was another remote position in which I had already had a crappy experience. Boy this one was bad. To be fair, this was on me since I had to get good with Lumen after only having some exposure to Laravel. Which I did mentioned repeatedly even though he did offer to train me in order to help him. Same thing, after a couple of weeks of being told how much I did not know I decided to get out.

That is 2 strikes.

So I waited a little while and took a position inside another company that was using vanilla PHP to build their services. Their system was solid though, the lead engineer remains a friend and I did learn a lot from him. I got contracted because they were looking for a Java developer. The salary was good. But when I got there they mentioned that they wanted a developer in Java...to build Android. At the time I was using Java with Spring so I though "well how hard can this be! I already use Android so the love for the system is there, lets do this!" And it was an intense, fun and really amazing experience.

-- To be continued.

When a Coursera course is way better than the one offered by your university…
A university student's rant...

I study Electrical and Computer Engineering and during the first semester of the second year I selected an optional course: Web Programming. It was believed among students that the course would be really easy, and it was. All the student had to do was build a very simple website using HTML, CSS and a few line of JS. A website containing three or four pages all of which had to be validated using a markup validation service.

Yeah, sure, I passed the course just like everyone else who bothered enough to spend an hour or two working on the project. Oh, I almost forgot! We had an one-hour workshop on Dreamweaver!
So, by that point, everybody was a front-end developer, right?!

That happened over three years ago, and because of that course web-development didn’t impress me…

Thankfully, the last few months I’ve became interested in Web Development, and I’ve been reading some articles, spending time on smashing magazine, making some progress on FreeCodeCamp and taking relevant courses on Coursera!
In fact, a few days ago I completed the Coursera course “HTML, CSS and Javascript for Web Developers”.
Oh boy, the things I didn’t know that I didn’t know…

<sarcasm>Did you know there was a term called “responsive design” and that there are frameworks like bootstrap?</sarcasm>
Well, I d i d n ’ t k n o w ! ! ! (even though I had taken the university’s course).

I understand that bootstrap was introduced in 2011 and I took the university course in late 2012, but by that time, bootstrap was quite popular and also there were other frameworks available before bootstrap that could have been included in the course! (even today, there is no reference in responsive design in the university’s course).
In just five weeks the coursera course managed to teach me more, in a more organized and meaningful way than my university’s course in a whole semester!

When I started the coursera course I shared it with a friend of mine. His response: “yeah, sure, but web development is pretty easy… I didn’t spend much time to complete that project three years ago!”

That course three years ago gave birth to misconceptions in students' minds that web development is easy! Yeah, sure, it can be easy to built a simple, non responsive, non interactive website! But that's not how the world works nowadays , right?!

A few months ago, in the early days of August, I attended Flock, the Fedora community conference. During a break I spent some time speaking with a Red Hat employee about student internships. He told me, and I paraphrase: “We know that students don’t have a solid background and that they haven’t learned in the university what we need them to!”

Currently I’m planning to apply for a front-end developer internship position here in Greece.
Yesterday I wrote my CV, added university courses relevant to that position and listed coursera courses under independent coursework… While writing those I made these thoughts…

What if that course 3 years ago was as good as the coursera course… all the things I’d know by now…

The story of my webshop with this fuckin' asshole continues! I decided to stop with the webshop as my partner didn't do anything, so I handed over my shares to my business partner. This was done formally at the notary. Immediately after, we agreed that I would hand over everything that same week. 1 day later I cannot access any accounts. He said that a hand over was not necessary and that he took appropriate measures. Now, 4 months later, I got a letter from a collection agency telling me to hand over the tradename. Uhm what? Tradename? I don't own it so I replied that there's nothing to hand over. A day later again a letter that he will sue me if I don't hand over the tradename. Mr. Prick Lawyer, I understand that you mean the DOMAINname, but why the fuck do you keep referring to the tradename?! You too stupid to understand the difference? So, to get rid of this crap I made an offer to sell him the domainname, which he accepted. But mr. Asshole moved the shop to a different hostingprovider thinking that the dns would be magocally updated. Of course not asshole. So I offered (to be cooperative) to update dns so his site will work again. I did. A day later again a letter that site still not reachable and he'd sue me for all damages etc.

What a muppet show! You think ypu can sue me because YOU made a config mistake? He's a funny guy! I told the lawyer to not send me any 'issues' caused by mr. Asshole's unprofessional acting and if he does, I'll charge him for every second spent.

Today mr. Asshole's webshop says 'Apache is functioning normally' and that's it. Well done, asshole! See how eaay my job is and how little knowledge it requires? You proved ypu can do it yourself Big boy! Good luck selling shit on your website. Good luck with your seo rankings. And good luck fucking yourself in the ass!

Now I'm going to sue you because of copyrights violations. You use my software and you don't have a license. Either pay or remove it or I'll make you pay!

Hello again, everyone. I've been busy with all the paperwork at my ship (will make a post about it later) but for now, I'll bore you with another story (not navy one, fortunately) to justify my slacking off.
And this story... is the story on how I got into ITSec. And it is pretty damn embarrassing. It all began when I was 16. I was hooked on battleknight.gameforge.com, a browser game. My father had just had ADSL installed at our home, and the new opportunities before me were endless. Well...
After I've had my fill with the porn torrents and them opportunities dwindled to just a few dozens, I began searching for free games, and I stumbled on that game. I played a lot, but as a free-to-play game, it was also pay-to-win. I didn't have a credit card, so I paid for a few gems with SMS messages. Fast forward a couple of years, I got into the Naval Academy. A guy came in to advertise something (I think it was an encyclopaedia or something - yes, wikipedia wasn't a thing back then) and to pay for it, we could apply for a credit card. So I applied. And I resisted the temptation for a year.
Note: prepaid wasn't that known where I live, so using credit cards was the only way for online transactions.
So I made 1 transaction. Just one. After a couple of months my monthly report from the bank came, showing a 2.5$ (I think) transaction on Paypal. I paid no mind, thinking that it was some hidden fee. Oh boy, I shit you not, I was THAT much of an idiot. Six months later, BOOM!
600$ transaction to ebay via paypal. You can imagine all those nice things that came to my mind. In any case, the bank accepted my protest that I filed at their central offices and cancelled the transaction. I promptly cancelled my card, destroyed it right there for good measure, and got to thinking... what the fuck just happened?
As many people here, I am afflicted with a deadly virus, called curiosity. I started researching the matter, trying to figure out how. And, because I didn't like black boxes and "it is just like it is" explanations, I tumbled down the rabbit hole of ITSec. I soon found out that, not only it was possible, but also it was sometimes EXTREMELY easy to steal credit card info. There are sites, to this very day, that store user info (along with credit cards info) IN FUCKING CLEARTEXT. Sometimes your personal, financial and even medical info are just an SQLi away.
So, I got very disillusioned on many things. But I never regretted it. It may cause me to age prematurely and will kill me of stroke or heart attack one day, but as I still tumble down the ITSec rabbit hole, I can say with confidence that
I REGRET NOTHING
Plus, my 600$ were returned, so look on the bright side :)

Boy, sure wish I knew about this before putting all of my passwords into lastpass. This looks way more secure. Handwriting in English is pretty much as good as encryption.

Let’s be real here for a second.

All I really want in my life is this virtual doggo!

A real virtual good boy!

Dear Product owners / Company Owners / Whoever requesting a feature:

Devs like to know they are adding value to whatever product they are working on. Every time you request a stupid no value added request, you kick the dev's soul.

After several hits the developer will stop caring about the software and eventually will get the job done, but oh boy, the amount of tech debt/trash code the dev is gonna leave behind will be horrendous.

Then the next developer, not only takes the hit from another stupid request, he/she will see the crappy code the past sad developer left and will take a double hit. Of course all of them start proactive and try to fix previous blood trails but sadness will catch them eventually.

If you want you're apps/products/reports to be good in a long run don't make stupid requests.

BAs, Stop being Expensive Email Forwarders and challenge a request, understand the process and then hand it to the developer.

Us developers are sensible cute ponies. Treat us well or expect poor quality projects

Indian web dev companies suck ( for developers )

when I finished 3 year grad program in computer application here in my country (India), I thought life's gonna be fun working as a developer. Oh boy, I was so wrong.

I started out working for a small service based IT company, followed by 2 more. I realized really quickly that they're nothing short of a scam. If your company's only agenda to somehow survive in the market and showing no signs of growth in 8 fucking years, then I'm sorry you're working for scamsters.

Now I'm not saying that all of them are alike. But most of them sorta are.

They don't give a shit about quality, not one bit. Quality means no money in the short run. And they haven't been able to develop any strategy to deal with that. Hence, no growth.

They promise 100 things on their website but only provide shitty services in 10.

There is no pair programming, no code review, no code quality check, no architect, no database designer. They won't give you extra time to write test cases. They use git as a storage device.

They don't put their developers (especially the ones who are learning) under any sort of managed development framework to ensure smooth work.

At the end of the day, their main objective is to somehow NOT deliver a project but finish a milestone and make money out of it.

After cashing out for a milestone, they want you to put your current project on hold and start working on a new project until you have like 10-15 projects in the pipeline and you're severely overwhelmed and you just wanna fucking QUIT.

They would say YES to literally every fucking thing, only to disappoint the client later.

I can't believe someone in the US, or UK thought it'd be a good idea to approach these companies
for their brand new app ideas. They're so fucked.

They're rarely finishing any project.

I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings. I had to get it out of my system.

Watching some Talent-Show with my family. There is this 16-years old pretty good singing boy. My father looks at me and you can read from his face: "Why can't you do sth. like this ?"
The next day I show him some really good webapps and games I made and he just says "Well, I don't care until you make money with this."
...
...

Your entire time with the company, be polite and cordial, don't say risky things, basically be a good boy. But importantly, stay social. Just politely social.

After several months of this, enough time that your fellow employees and management are well aware of your personality, go to the PM in private. Threaten them that if they don't leave you alone you're going to break into their house at night, sedate them, dislocate their jaw and take a shit down their throat.

The beauty of this is that they can't reasonably go to anyone over this, as it's totally unbelievable and out of character. And will be so horrified of what they just heard that they will leave you alone.

!dev at all

Was chilling with my t mobile rep trying to get some issues resolved regarding what Verizon's bitchass was trying to do after i left their shitty company.

While i was there and my dude was working his magic i noticed this smoking chick walking around the store waiting for someone to help her out. So being that everyone was busy and sorta scared of talking to her( i can sense that shit) i told my boy to go and pick her as his customer, to be flirty and cool and shit.

My poor dude was all like "nah man I dunno how to talk to girls...."

I was telling him "bro, you ain't bad looking, just go, introduce yo ass and tell her that you'll take care of her in a min!"

"But i get all anxious and shit"

"Nah man, just talk to her like you did to me when we first met, she is just a customer, i aint telling you to ask her out on a date, just i dunno practice talking to girls! No harm with that! Specially this one b look at them leeeeeeegs!"

Now, why did I care? The reason is that he mentioned to me after seeing my wife (total babe) that he pictures me as a player. Which I was but that is beyond the point. And he said that he had always had trouble talking to girls.

So i told him what to do, said to be calm and confident. Ninja is an alpha salesman, and great with t mobile services, so he has that confidence, told him to exude that shit as if he was talking to a guy.

Homeboy got ballsy, drank 5 gallons of man the fuck up and went and did what I did. Then she went ahead and stand next to us, and i put on the good words for my dude "ah you got the best rep right here! G boy is bomb with everything!!" She was laughing saying that she hopes that he can help her with her phone.

"Don't worry, i got you, its just a small thing and if you want i'll show you what to do for future occasions"

"Oh so you don't want me to come back if it happens?"

"Haha you can come back any time as long as I am the one helping you out"

DAAAAAAAAAAAMN son!!

"Ok, but only if its you"

Daaaaaaaaaamn

Went better than expected. The dude needs more confidence, he aint bad looking at all and don't want him missing out on some of the babes we got walking around town.

Lord knows I had my fun with them.

LONELINESS IS REAL
I am a freshman in a university ( about to complete my first year ) with a girl to boy ratio of around 1:10. During my first semester I was spending a lot of time with friends, chatting up with people and making connections. Due to this my productivity as a dev, if I am even capable of being called that decreased ( I was not a developer before joining , but I had an aim of being one , esp at least the best in my batch ) after 1st year. In retrospect I did nothing productive till 3 months out of 4 in my first sem and the guilt hit me hard . During the last month I had to catch up with my much neglected studies and all I had done was a little bit of html and css, and barely scratched the surface of js( please don't judge me for this :) , I had to start somewhere < although I learned a little bit of C++ > ). BUT I WAS A HAPPY CUNT, and had no sign of lonelines. Now during this sem , I had made progress ( learn js with es6 syntax and still learning, did c++ and extended my knowledge ) . Currently I am working on my Vue full stack app ( along with express and some websocket library , TBD ) < yeh I learnt some backend too > , and increasing my knowledge of dsa using clrs. Although my productivity has increased manifolds but I know feel the need of closure. I am kinda happy with the fact that I know a lot of people around here ( thanks to my extroverted 1st semester ) but sometimes it hits me hard at night when I don't have a monitor to drown my eyes and thoughts in. I have increased my academic performance too but I need someone to share and express my feelings with. I could have made a girlfriend earlier but now most of them are taken and I have lost touch. But believe me, all I want is a companion to spend these lonely days and night ( not talking about as a friend ). Staying away from home isnt easy you know...m :(

KUDOS TO DEVRANT FOR DEVELOPING A COMMUNITY WHERE PEOPLE LIKE ME CAN FEEL SAFE IN OUR NATURAL HABITAT. I COULDN'T HAVE EXPRESSED MY FEELINGS ANYWHERE ELSE EXCEPT IN A PERSONAL BLOG ( where no one would have read it )

PS1: I apologise if I sounded arrogant about any of my skill, I didn't mean that way. I ain't even that good, just kinda proud of myself a little for achieving something I couldn't have thought.

PS2: Any type of suggestions and help is much appreciated ( considering I am a college student who went into some serious development 4 months ago , I am pretty impressionable ;) )

PS3: Please don't confuse this with depression. I am HAPPY BUT LONELY

PS4: Is there a way so that I can change my username?

Programming Languages are Like Cars:

Assembler: A formula I race car. Very fast but difficult to drive and maintain.

FORTRAN II: A Model T Ford. Once it was the king of the road.

FORTRAN IV: A Model A Ford.

FORTRAN 77: a six-cylinder Ford Fairlane with standard transmission and no seat belts.

COBOL: A delivery van. It's bulky and ugly but it does the work.

BASIC: A second-hand Rambler with a rebuilt engine and patched upholstery. Your dad bought it for you to learn to drive. You'll ditch it as soon as you can afford a new one.

PL/I: A Cadillac convertible with automatic transmission, a two-tone paint job, white-wall tires, chrome exhaust pipes, and fuzzy dice hanging in the windshield.

C++: A black Firebird, the all macho car. Comes with optional seatbelt (lint) and optional fuzz buster (escape to assembler).

ALGOL 60: An Austin Mini. Boy that's a small car.

ALGOL 68: An Aston Martin. An impressive car but not just anyone can drive it.

Pascal: A Volkswagon Beetle. It's small but sturdy. Was once popular with intellectual types.

liSP: An electric car. It's simple but slow. Seat belts are not available.

PROLOG/LUCID: Prototype concept cars.

FORTH: A go-cart.

LOGO: A kiddie's replica of a Rolls Royce. Comes with a real engine and a working horn.

APL: A double-decker bus. It takes rows and columns of passengers to the same place all at the same time but it drives only in reverse and is instrumented in Greek.
Ada: An army-green Mercedes-Benz staff car. Power steering, power brakes, and automatic transmission are standard. No other colors or options are available. If it's good enough for generals, it's good enough for you.

Java: All-terrain very slow vehicle.

So... I was using my laptop one day and randomly my mouse started spazzing out, I thought maybe it's broken or something so I paused the video I was watching and waited for a couple of seconds, soon after I played the video, my mouse started moving around again, closing windows and opening up different things. I got so scared I shut my laptop down before it could open anything else.

A few minutes later I turn it back on and everything looks fine, I thought whatever that was all about is probably gone, had to double check my security settings etc. and let it be for now.

A few days later I found out that it was actually my dad, in the next room trying to hook up his Bluetooth mouse to his iMac which for some reason got connected to my laptop instead. He was moving it around trying to see whether or not it's working, thus the spazzing out of it on my screen...lmao boy I felt so relieved after that 😂

~not really a hack however it gave me a good laugh

Maybe this is my retribution for participating in yesterday's rant about public transportation.

Saturday morning, I had an 🥚and 🍌. I was happy.
I went out to meet with my GF.
I got a window seat on bus.
The seat on my left was empty for few stops.
A mudafucka big kid came and sit beside me.
I was like, cool, heyyo kid. Not some greasy old dudes or ready to slap chicks.
Oh boy can I be wronger?
The mudafucka big kid started with right butt scratch using right hand.
Then followed up by left butt scratch with left hand.
And then did a wiggly body scratching using his seat like an alien snake.
I got itchy looking at him.
Also I said big two times because he spread his big thighs so wide it took 1/3 of my seat.
And now playing loud ass games on his phone.

Not a good sign for my Saturday.

Enjoying the college life to the fullest was the mindset of the confident boy, who now burns the midnight oil to cope up with world and give himself a proud future.

Is this a story of some successful person, who has achieved a lot in his life?

No, it is the story of the guy who lost all his hopes of future after spending the very first month in his college.

The first month was enough to perceive the reality of the domain I got myself let into. It was enough for someone, who didn’t even knew what programming languages are, to realize how left behind is he from the people around him.

Being from a private college which hardly anyone recognizes, expecting them to prepare me to stand out lone would be foolishness. I took my first step and started learning my very first programming language , Python.

I met some people with similar interest .We discussed, we exchanged resources, we used to talk to seniors to guide us. And yes, we were guided.

There were many bad days. Days which made me regret about starting late. Many a times I myself confirmed me as useless and some other time people did. The good thing is I never stopped , and improved myself with each day.

And now, after spending more than a year in the same college, I look at the things I have learnt. Today I can develop decent websites, can train neural networks, can make me stand in good position in coding platforms.

All you need is to take a step.I may not be the best, but I am definitely better than what I was yesterday.

If you have started something, then concentrate on finishing it.

In the Ruhr area (Germany) we have some very old, very strange words with strange meanings. One of those words is ‚Prutscher‘.
A Prutscher refers to a person who does things but never gets a good result, due to lack of knowledge or simple carelessness. Most of the time, Prutschers are people who are interested in certain subjects and often work in the related jobs, but who lack the motivation to properly train themselves, learn what there is to learn and to always keep up with their technologies .
Here are a few examples I've stumbled upon so far in my career:

- Developers in their 60's who read a book about PHP 25 years ago and decided to become a software developer. Since then haven't read anything about it. Who then now build huge spaghetti monoliths for large companies, in which they prefix every function, every variable and constant with their initials and, of course, use Hungarian notation.

- People who read half a fucking tutorial about <insert any fancy js framework here> and start blogging/tweeting about it

- Senior web developers who need to be told what the fuck CORS is and who can't even recognize CORS related errors in their browser console.

- People who have done nothing else for 18 years than building websites for companies on Wordpress 1.x and writing few lines of PHP and Javascript from time to time. Those who are now applying as a frontend dev due to the difficult economic situation and are surprised that they are not accepted due to a lack of experience.

- Developers who are the only ones working on Windows in the team and ask their Linux colleagues for help when Windows starts bitchin.

- People who have been coding for 30 years, have worked with ~42 languages ​​and don't know the difference between compiled and interpreted languages ​​in the job interview.

- Chief developers at a large newsletter-publisher who think it's a good idea to build your own CMS (due to a lack of good existing ones, of course).

- Developers who have been writing PHP applications for multinational corporations for 25 years and cannot explain how PHP is executed. They don't even know what the fucking OPcache is, let alone fpm. FML

- People who call themselves professional developers but never ever heard of DRY, KISS, boy-scout rule, 12-Factor App, SOLID, Clean Code, Design Patterns, ...

- Senior developers wondering why the bash script won't run on their fucking Windows machine.

- Developers who consider Typescript to be a hindrance and see no value in it.

- Developers using ftp for deployments in 2022

- Senior Javascript Developer applying for a job and for whom Integer is a primitive data type in JS.

- Developers who prefer to code without frameworks and libraries because they are only an unnecessary burden/overhead and you can quickly code everything up yourself.

- Developers who think configuring their server(s) manually is a good idea.

You fucking Prutscher. What you have already cost me in terms of work and nerves. I can't even put it into words how deeply I despise you. I have more respect for the chewing gum that has been stuck in my damn trash can for the past 3 years than I do for you guys. You are the disgrace of our profession. I will haunt you in your dreams and prefix every fucking synapse of your brain with MY initials.

As a well-known german band once sang in a very fitting song: I wouldn't even piss on you if you were on fire.

If you recognized yourself in one of the examples here: FUCK YOU!

back to devrant, yay!

closed my account when i entered a really nice company, but after a year it was taken over by another one that was not-so-good at all, started working for another startup and, BOY, i really didn't miss ranting about work, but now i NEED a place to let this all up, little by little, somewhere, before my brain melts

current startup is one of those founded by rich dudes who had an "amazing" idea that, as time passed, turned into a monster that not only eroded the team from inside, but also made us see how spoiled the bosses are

Boy do I love when Snapchat sends me a snap telling me happy father's day.
I don't even know who my father is but thanks for the reminder assholes.
I wonder what dipshit thought that sending everyone on Snapchat messages during all sorts of holidays that not everyone celebrates was a good idea.

Forgot to post a book yesterday, so maybe I’ll post two books today...

Anyway, this book, I found it recently never seen it before. But boy is it great.

It’s similar to the programming pearls book as far as what it’s about. Think of the refactoring book, clean code, programming pearls, and the mythical man month books, thrown in a blender, added some new spice and some new things, and filtered down into 100 or so page book, simple quick and enjoyable actually.

This book the references staple books by Sedgwick, knuth, Brooks, Myers, and so many others. It’s funny how things come full circle.

My favorite quote from the book. I’ve been essentially saying this for years, but to see it on a book, it’s lovely... more people need to realize it too.

“Understanding how things work at a low level becomes a base for making good decisions at the high level”

Followed up with if you’ve never built a computer from scratch your missing out... get yourself a breadboard and some TTL logic.. and build a 4 bit CPU, once you know how to program in assembly the next step is building your own computer ... if your university didn’t teach a class that did this they ripped you off....

Don’t bitch at me.. the book said that.. and I agree! 100% because it’s true, you can’t debate that.

Oh and btw this is another book written by a female developer.. kudos to her for nailing so many topics in such a short book!

Just now I realized that for some reason I can't mount SMB shares to E: and H: anymore.. why, you might ask? I have no idea. And troubleshooting Windows.. oh boy, if only it was as simple as it is on Linux!!

So, bimonthly reinstall I guess? Because long live good quality software that lasts. In a post-meritocracy age, I guess that software quality is a thing of the past. At least there's an option to reset now, so that I don't have to keep a USB stick around to store an installation image for this crap.

And yes Windows fanbois, I fucking know that you don't have this issue and that therefore it doesn't exist as far as you're concerned. Obviously it's user error and crappy hardware, like it always is.

And yes Linux fanbois, I know that I should install Linux on it. If it's that important to you, go ahead and install it! I'll give you network access to the machine and you can do whatever you want to make it run Linux. But you can take my word on this - I've tried everything I could (including every other distro, custom kernels, customized installer images, ..), and it doesn't want to boot any Linux distribution, no matter what. And no I'm not disposing of or selling this machine either.

Bottom line I guess is this: the OS is made for a user that's just got a C: drive, doesn't rely on stuff on network drives, has one display rather than 2 (proper HDMI monitor recognition? What's that?), and God forbid that they have more than 26 drives. I mean sure in the age of DOS and its predecessor CP/M, sure nobody would use more than 26 drives. Network shares weren't even a thing back then. And yes it's possible to do volume mounts, but it's unwieldy. So one monitor, 1 or 2 local drives, and let's make them just use Facebook a little bit and have them power off the machine every time they're done using it. Because keeping the machine stable for more than a few days? Why on Earth would you possibly want to do that?!!

Microsoft Windows. The OS built for average users but God forbid you depart from the standard road of average user usage. Do anything advanced, either you can't do it at all, you can do it but it's extremely unintuitive and good luck finding manuals for it, or you can do it but Windows will behave weirdly. Because why not!!!

Oh boy, Adobe. I really miss the good old Macromedia times.

Just did my first JobIntentService on Android. Hoo, boy.

The problem: I need to send a network request.

The issue: Android.

Of course, you can't do network on the main thread. That's silly in any application. Android really does try to punish you, though. The Android lifecycle can really fuck you over here. Imagine a long-running network operation, like 15 seconds. Plenty of time for the user to do something silly, like rotate the screen.

If you opened up a good old new Thread from Java, you'd get a crash because of a screen rotation. Same thing with Android's AsyncTask, which is the top answer on StackOverflow. AsyncTask is made for things that will take no longer than a few seconds (less than 5!). Network, especially cell network, can take longer.

So the solution? Create a JobIntentService class. It's a service, it will run in the background. You need to register it in your Android Manifest and ask for a new permission (wake lock). You need to implement another class for the receiver, and then you need to go to your activity and implement the receiver interface you just wrote.

Just. For. A. Network. Request!

And as far as I'm aware, this isn't even that bad considering the rest of Android's bullshit.

What a headache!

Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.

I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.

With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.

I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.

They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.

But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.

So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.

Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...

And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.

I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.

My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.

Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...

This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.

Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.

He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.

That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.

I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.

On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.

My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.

I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.

So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.

I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.

We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.

That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.

They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.

They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.

We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.

The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!

Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...

Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.

On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.

Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.

Then said yes!

The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.

I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.

Final thought: middle managers are taints.

After a few weeks of being insanely busy, I decided to log onto Steam and maybe relax with a few people and play some games. I enjoy playing a few sandbox games and do freelance development for those games (Anywhere from a simple script to a full on server setup) on the side. It just so happened that I had an 'urgent' request from one of my old staff member from an old community I use to own. This staff member decided to run his own community after I sold mine off since I didn't have the passion anymore to deal with the community on a daily basis.

O: Owner (Former staff member/friend)
D: Other Dev

O: Hey, I need urgent help man! Got a few things developed for my server, and now the server won't stay stable and crashes randomly. I really need help, my developer can't figure it out.
Me: Uhm, sure. Just remember, if it's small I'll do it for free since you're an old friend, but if it's a bigger issue or needs a full recode or whatever, you're gonna have to pay. Another option is, I tell you what's wrong and you can have your developer fix it.
O: Sounds good, I'll give you owner access to everything so you can check it out.
Me: Sounds good

*An hour passes by*

O: Sorry it took so long, had to deal with some crap. *Insert credentials, etc*
Me: Ok, give me a few minutes to do some basic tests. What was that new feature or whatever you added?
O: *Explains long feature, and where it's located*
Me: *Begins to review the files* *Internal rage wondering what fucking developer could code such trash* *Tests a few methods, and watches CPU/RAM and an internal graph for usage*
Me: Who coded this module?
O: My developer.
Me: *Calm tone, with a mix of some anger* So, you know what, I'm just gonna do some simple math for ya. You're running 33 ticks a second for the server, with an average of about 40ish players. 33x60 = 1980 cycles a minute, now lets times that by the 40 players on average, you have 79,200 cycles per minute or nearly 4.8 fucking cycles an hour (If you maxed the server at 64 players, it's going to run an amazing fucking 7.6 million cycles an hour, like holy fuck). You're also running a MySQLite query every cycle while transferring useless data to the server, you're clusterfucking the server and overloading it for no fucking reason and that's why you're crashing it. Another question, who the fuck wrote the security of this? I can literally send commands to the server with this insecure method and delete all of your files... If you actually want your fucking server stable and secure, I'm gonna have to recode this entire module to reduce your developer's clusterfuck of 4.8 million cycles to about 400 every hour... it's gonna be $50.
D: *Angered* You're wrong, this is the best way to do it, I did stress testing! *Insert other defensive comments* You're just a shitty developer (This one got me)
Me: *Calm* You're calling me a shitty developer? You're the person that doesn't understand a timer, I get that you're new to this world, but reading the wiki or even using the game's forums would've ripped this code to shreds and you to shreds. You're not even a developer, cause most of this is so disorganized it looks like you copy and pasted it. *Get's angered here and starts some light screaming* You're wasting CPU usage, the game can't use more than 1 physical core, and after a quick test, you're stupid 'amazing' module is using about 40% of the CPU. You need to fucking realize the 40ish average players, use less than this... THEY SHOULD BE MORE INTENSIVE THAN YOUR CODE, NOT THE OPPOSITE.
O: Hey don't be rude to Venom, he's an amazing coder. You're still new, you don't know as much as him. Ok, I'll pay you the money to get it recoded.
Me: Sounds good. *Angered tone* Also you developer boy, learn to listen to feedback and maybe learn to improve your shitty code. Cause you'll never go anywhere if you don't even understand who bad this garbage is, and that you can't even use the fucking wiki for this game. The only fucking way you're gonna improve is to use some of my suggestions.
D: *Leaves call without saying anything*

TL;DR: Shitty developer ran some shitty XP system code for a game nearly 4.8 million times an hour (average) or just above 7.6 million times an hour (if maxed), plus running MySQLite when it could've been done within about like 400 an hour at max. Tried calling me a shitty developer, and got sorta yelled at while I was trying to keep calm.

Still pissed he tried calling me a shitty developer...

Oh boy, kotlin and its world of statics and lambdas are glorious 💗💗💗

I just finished this attendence counter app i have been working on for last 4 days.its quite simple so i tried to add as much constraints as possible:
-Good practices and minimal warningy
-Room database
-Viewmodel and livedata
-constraint layout
-everything in kotlin

Although i already have worked with room and livedata previously but i dont even have a hello world experience in kotlin . However it doesn't felt that bad tho for a newbie

Every code here is so small . Synthetic binding? Love at first sight.Although at some places its irritating , not having ?: Operator or its ugly 'when' logic, but overall its Awesome!!

This is my first rant here, so I hope everyone has a good time reading it.

So, the company I am working for got me going on the task to do a rewrite of a firmware that was extended for about 20 years now. Which is fine, since all new machines will be on a new platform anyways. (The old firmware was written for an 8051 initially. That thing has 256 byte of ram. Just imagine the usage of unions and bitfields...)

So, me and a few colleagues go ahead and start from scratch.
In the meantime however, the client has hired one single lonely developer. Keep in mind that nobody there understands code!
And oh boy did he go nuts on the old code, only for having it used on the very last machine of the old platform, ever! Everything after that one will have our firmware!

There are other machines in that series, using the original extended firmware. Nothing is compatible, bootloaders do not match, memory layouts do not match, code is a horrible mess now, the client is writing the specification RIGHT NOW (mind, the machine is already sold to customers), there are no tests, and for the grand finale, the guy canceled his job and went to a different company. Did I mention the bugs it has and the features it lacks?

Guess who's got to maintain that single abomination of a firmware now?

"Graphics don't matter."

I ranted a while back about gamedev being hard to get into for me, and, today, user @DOSnotCompute posted a similar experience.

I had a couple more thoughts, so thought should post them here (FUCK! It ended up being too fucking long! sorry!)

So I was watching the making of mortal kombat 3 on yt, which was pretty amazing btw because I got to see the actors of the sprites in game which were engraved in my and thousands of others kids minds.

Anyhow, the creators of the series, John Tobias and Ed Boon, were interviewed and what not. And it hit me that while both were the designers, John was the main artist and Ed was the programmer (at least for MK1). Another game that comes to mind Super Meat Boy, and I bet hundreds of others did the same.

And it got me thinking, maybe that's my problem, I just need an artist.

And I think the reason why I never thought of that is because of this idea that graphics don't matter.

"you don't need an artist. You don't need graphics. The most important thing is the gameplay."

What a load of shit.
A lot of people believe that because they got tired of polished AAA games with automatic and predictible gameplay.

People started parrotting this knee jerk of a conclusion since then.

It's dumb. Imagine if Infiminer, one of the games Minecraft was based on, which btw looks terrible, had all the same features Minecraft had.
I would still not touch that shit with a pole.

Graphics ARE important. Games are on the VISUAL medium.
That doesn't mean you're sucking Sony's dick on every AAA release or that every game should be made with UnreUnityCocksReloadedEngine.

Some level of visual craft is required for a game ro be considered such.

(btw, I think most of you guys here get this, not trying to pander, just that I want to make it clear that I'm not accusing this community of being guilty of this)

If a game looks bad (given, bad can be subjective), if it gives the impression that it wasn't seriously made, then you kinda lower your expectations.

People get hyped on games that look good, because it means that the game could be good. Games that look unoriginal or terrible won't get played, wether they're good or not. And I think it's a reasonable reaction.

How many times did I hear things like "Look at x video game from the 90s, the graphics are terrible but it's fun as hell".

That is an absurd statement. The level of production some NES games went through is insane. We're talking millions of dollars for games that today might look primitive.

The graphics weren't shit back then, and even today you could say that they are simpler but also of excellent craftsmanship.

I'm not into creating art, I hate it in fact because you can't quantify the success of produced art.

So, duh, find an