How to have success when you are chatting with live support:

- Pretend to be a girl

This is very effective, I can get lower price and good deal almost every time.

//Long rant

[Boss man]: Hey, we need you to build us a web app.

[Me]: Okay, what do you need it to do?

[Boss man]: We need staff to be able to login from anywhere, create new appointments, check room availability, display live times for the rooms, schedule future appointments, record all the data as stats and export the stats to (email address).

[Me]: Okay, sounds useful, anything else?

[Boss man]: we also need it to send all relevant data to a calendar where certain staff will be notified by email of events.

[Me]: Okay... I'll get right on starting this.

[Boss man]: So you can have it done by the end of the day? (4 hours from this time)

[Me]: *Internal screaming* *WHAT THE FUCK* Uhm, no, I don't think that is possible to complete in a four hour period by myself.

[Boss man]: Okay, well by tomorrow then, I'm leaving for the day though, have a good one.

[Me]....

//End long rant

Recruiter: This is a 100% remote position

Dev: Good! That’s what I’m looking for.

Recruiter: But the company does require you to come into the office “on occasion”

Dev: I live 5 hours away from your office so that would be not a good fit

Recruiter: And once covid is over the ability to work remotely will be getting reconsidered. You’ll likely need to move cities in order to continue your employment with them.

Dev: Yeah I’m looking for 100% remote work

Recruit: This is 100% remote! Just with the need to come into the office sometimes now and potentially more later.

Dev: …

employee: I want growth in my role

company: *installs ping pong table*

employee: autonomy?

company: *creates fully-stocked snack room*

employee: fulfilment.

company: *employs a live DJ in the office*

employee: *quits*

company: some people just aren't a good culture fit.

HP Virtual Agent, you're about as useless as the fucking hardware that I'm troubleshooting. What part of fucking "Arch Linux" do you not understand?! Not everyone runs your fucking assumed OS choices - WanBLowS 7, 8 or 10. What's more, the hardware that I'm troubleshooting doesn't even support those bloody operating systems.

Long live HP and its random freezes due to poor thermal management. And long live Intel's fucking wireless drivers, that for no good reason disconnect after half an hour and require me to restart NetworkManager to (hopefully) get shit connected again. And long live those useless fucking "virtual assistants"!!!

At first there was nothing...

Then the software engineer said "LET THERE BE A PROJECT"

and there was a project. And it was [good]

On the secondth day, he said " LET THERE BE GIT", and there was a empty git repo

his colleagues hate him because thy still live in 2001 and they use SVN. But it was {good}

On the thirdth day, he said, "LET THERE BE AUTOMATION" and build systems came, And it was </good>

On the fourth day, he said "LET THERE BE A FRAMEWORK" and a framework was born. Problem is, it didn't work in his machine , so he whined and StackOverflow. It's still ["g", "o", 0, "d"]

on the fifth day, he said " LET THERE BE FRONTEND", and the frontend was born, but his colleagues again, ranted for using Angular instead of React. It's still "good";

And on the sixth day, he said "LET IT BE SOLD TO A CUSTOMER" and it was, but the bloke was a cheapskate wanker and paid him only the half of the contract price. But it was still good.

And on the seventh day, he rested, but he didn't actually, because Developers never rest nor sleep. And it was good

If the Firefox Quantum is really good then you don't need to say:

"Chrome will become obsolete"

"I hope Chrome dies"

"Chrome's dead, long live Firefox"

to prove that it's a great browser. Fanboys always ruins nice experiences.

Every goddamn time.

Boss: Hey, how is the project going?
Me: promising. We have some basic functions working, but at this point it is more like a proof of concept.
Boss: Ah ok, I see.

Couple of days later...

Boss: I talked to a client who was very interested in the stuff you are just building. Made a really good deal! We need to be live by the end of the week.
Me: What?
Boss: What?

Hello devRant, it's been a while. For anyone who has been following my... situation, here's a little update.

I moved back home to Kansas City, Missouri. Staying with parents for now.

I had to leave my daughter in Los Angeles, which was hard for me... but i can't provide for her living in my car.

I also got divorce papers in the mail from my wife. And I have a lot of court battles coming up to get custody of my daughter so she can live here with me. It's a long road ahead.

On the plus side, my parents took me camping and we kayaked the Little Niangua river! I hadn't gone camping or floating in at least 10 years. It was very relaxing.

At any rate fellas, enjoy and appreciate the good times and the people in your life. You never know when it'll all go to hell.

I had an interview yesterday with the CEO of a startup going into Series A for the position of Principal Developer, remote. I've only ever heard of 'tech-bros', but I was unfortunate to meet one in-person. It went something like this:

CEO-bro: Good morning.
Me: Morning.
CEO-bro: It says here on your resume you live in X. That place is a shithole, and I have to look down on you because of that, bro. LoL.
Me: ......
(40 minutes of self-promotion pass)
CEO-bro: Anyway, we don't pay high salaries but offer bonuses for high performing staff instead. I'll ask HR to send you an offer.
Me: Let me think about it.
CEO-bro: One question bro. You have siblings?
Me: One.
CEO-bro: Parents still alive?
Me: No...what?!
CEO-bro: Yeah, me too. People like us don't let anything get in the way.

I wrote them an email this morning withdrawing my application 🤦🏽‍♂️

Once we were going to present a web service to governmental firm. All is going well so far and my boss asks me to host the web application the day before the presentation.

I hosted it and all was good with demo production tests, but I had a bad feeling.

While it was running on our server, I also ran it locally with a reverse proxy just in case.

* Meeting starts *

* Ice broken and down to business *

"And now our developer will run the demo for you..."

* Run the demo from my laptop to double check --> 500 Internal Server Error *

Holy shit!!!

* Opens reverse proxy link on my laptop. Present demo during meeting. Demo works like a charm. *

Firm representative: "Great! Looking forward to go live."

*Our team walks out*

GM: "Good job guys"

ME:

Time for a rant!.

Got a client I've just built a website for and they went live 2 weeks ago.

This morning he sends me an email saying that the website is not good enough because it's not making any sales or getting any traffic.

I send an email back asking if he has a marketing / SEO company... The response was I thought you do that as you said the site would be SEO friendly!!!.

I'm a developer! Not a marketer, fuck off.

Best "error" I've ever seen today.

We have a very large database with millions of people, some of those records are duplicates. So I had a long project to write something that would automatically merge duplicate records while allowing employees to review them. Today we had a duplicate show up in the list which should not have.

Same name (apart from one letter), address, employee ID (off by 1 number), same manager, title, phone number, birthdate. But we figured out it wasn't the same person and therefore wasn't a good match.

Turns out they are twin sisters who live together and we're hired by the same manager for the same position at the same time. What are the odds...

Again I am unemployed, and now in a worse situation than before. In a country far from family, parents and everyone I know, just me and my wife and in a very difficult situation.

Summing up what happened was as follows:

My previous boss had a very horrible habit of being rude to everyone, yelling at the developers in the middle of the office and being rude whenever he could. And when he saw that we did not lose his composure and showed no fear he used the tightening of salary and employment to threaten us and do unpaid overtime.

Then he decided to yell at me, I asked him not to do this in the middle of the office that is not polite and everything else, he resigned me.

Since last year it's very difficult to find a good job, I'm not even talking about salary, I'm talking about a good job even where I earn some money to live in the least in humility but at least work with legal and educated people.

Linux is great they said
Linux works well they said
Linux is totally awesome they said

- - -
4 live cds
(Ubuntu, mint, Debian, Antergos)
3 wouldn’t boot beyond splash screens or even into setup.

no fucking keyboard
No fucking wifi
No fucking trackpad

Now I’m sitting here with Antergos, with a USB keyboard, USB mouse and an ethernet cable plugged into my laptop 🤷‍♂️

Good news... I think I might be getting through the hard parts

How I chose a new smartphone:

- specs good?
Yes: good, continue.
No: hmm i might live.

- looks good?
Yes: OOHH MUCH BEAUTY, SUCH AWESOME, LET'S GO TO THE LAST ONE!!
No: 😩. I'll live I guess, last step :/.

- can find a rooting guide on DDG within a fee minutes?
Yes: YES YES I LOVE YOU ALREADY I'LL BUY YOU ❤😍
NO: FUUUCK. Next.

!rant

Quite the opposite of a Rant actually. Very good day today! Had pancakes to start the day, finally got a second monitor for only 5 bucks - it is so much easier to program with live change monitoring!

And, I finally got my very own server rack :) just wanted to share!

QA: You need to write a test script for your new web app before it can go live

Me: ok, I'll write some tests in PHP unit and automate the tests.

QA: Oh, can you do that? We just normally write a list in excel then go through each line and write pass or fail at the end.

Me: yeah, good one.

QA: Umm, I'm not joking.

Queue awkward silence...

Violent psychopath knows where you live

A few years ago I started a profile on a social media app to share programming endeavors and humor.

After a year or so I became somewhat close with the ~20 subscribers out of my ~1000 that would always comment on my posts. We started a programming group chat and all hung out there, sharing stories, posting random pics, etc.

When I was interviewing with my current company, I shared all the details with the group and kept them up to date while they cheered me on and wished me luck. Once I got my offer everyone was ecstatic.

One friend in the chat remembered my company has an office in NYC, where they live, and asked if I could arrange a tour. I asked around and it seemed like it wouldn't work out, but just a few weeks later I was sent to the NYC office to collaborate with another team for a few weeks.
I let my friend know I would be in town, and when the time came - we met up, toured the NYC office, ate really good tacos, and enjoyed the city.

10/10 would friend again.

Well, basically

• Coworkers that know their shit
• A boss that once coded/still codes
• A management that consists of people that coded/code
• A pay that's good enough for me to afford more than just a place to live, food and water.

!dev

If you ever feel like having a good laugh, just watch a flat-earthers video/live-stream.

I can't understand how something like this can even happen, it's so insanely ridiculous.

HOW THE FUCK CAN A HUMAN BEING LIVING IN 2018 BELIEVE THAT THE EARTH IS A FLAT DISC WITH A GLOBE ABOVE IT.

I swear to god, I'm going to track down the dipshit who just made my day hilariously painful.

So here I am, finishing up this project that's been going on for what feels like an eternity, when I get an email "why doesn't order X show up in this other system?".

I mean, it's a common thing they can take 15 minutes to push across, so the usual quick glance and what do you know, it's just sitting there as if it's waiting to be pushed through, than an hour later... it's still there, so I start digging, maybe a data issue, nope looks all good, customer details, payment details, products...

just another order, jump on the logs and all looks fi......... wait.... why does this postcode have 3 digits and not 4 , Australia has 4 digit postal codes fyi, looks at order again, 3 digits, look at log, 3....hold on why's it only 3 digits, checks code, handled as string... ok..... where the fuck would it drop a digit.... frontend requires 4 digits, validation requires 4 digits... how the fuck did you get 3 digits in... I can't see anything anywhere that logically makes sense for this🤔

Drops address into google and it's a postcode starting with 0.

Jumps on DB and the fucker is an int in the postcode table. For all you playing at home 0123 <> 123

I don't know if I should feel bad, or impressed, it's been 7 years since this table was created, and 7 years before someone managed to live in one of these parts of the country with a leading 0.

QA didn't spot this years ago,
No one tested this exact scenario,
The damn thing isn't even documented as a required delivery area, but here we are!

Kudos good sir, you broke it! 🤜 🤛
You sir may get your order now!

*makes course outline*
Management: Um yeah make the outline similar to this course from earlier
Me: Hmm, so Yocto etc.. well that'll require a good amount of research because I've got no idea what Yocto is or how I'm supposed to use it.
*researches about Yocto, prepares build VM and Raspberry Pi target, thinks of how on Earth I'd make my coworker without Raspberry Pi interface with it from across the world*

2 days later..

Management: Yeah actually we don't want Yocto. Just do simple stuff like application development, GPIO etc.
Me & co-worker: Awesome mate! That'll make things a lot easier. Except for the 2 days of lost work, but we can live with that if it's just GPIO and such.

3 days later..

Management: guys your course outline sucks. Do it all over again, we want Yocto to be in it after all.

YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!!! Why don't you behave a little bit less like a fucking client that doesn't know what they want for once?!!

!dev

I live next to a nightclub and went outside for a fag.

It’s wet, 2:30am and kinda cold.

A girl and her boyfriend come out of the club..
Her feet hurt because of her high heels so she takes them off, walking on the wet, cold road barefoot now.
Her boyfriend sees it and tells her to put them back on.
She denies.

He takes off his shoes and gives them to her (good boyfriend...) she puts them on, almost falling over cause she’s hammered as fuck, takes them off again and says they don’t fit and look stupid on her..

WTF, I understand taking the shoes off When she’s drunk but I don’t understand how the fuck she could care if it looks good at half 2 in the morning in an empty town..

I’ve seen it all now..

#onlyInIreland

Yesterday my father called me and asked if I'd have a look at his website to exchange his logo with a new one and make some string changes in the backend. Well, of course I did and hell am I glad I did it.
He had that page made a few years ago by some cousin of a friend who "is really good with computers", it's a small web shop for car parts and, as usual costumer accounts. Costumer Accounts with payment infos.
Now I've seen a lot of bad practices when it comes to handling passwords and I've surely done a few questionable things myself but this idiot took the cake. When a new account was registered his php script would read the login page, look for a specific comment and add a string "'account; password'," below into to a js array. In clear text. On the website. One doesn't even have to breach the db, it's just there, F12 and you got all the log ins.

Seriously, we really need a licensing system for devs, those were two or three years this shit was live, 53 accounts... Now I've gotta decipher this entire bowl of spaghetti just to see if he has done any more unspeakable things.

I recently learned why you shouldn't delete your linux partition by just pressing the 'delete volume' button.

I currently own a SP3(i7, 256gb).
I got bored of windows and installed Linux Mate. It ran quite fast and snappily. All was good.

Then I looked on the internet. Apparently fedora runs really well on the SP3. So I deleted my Linux partition by pressing 'delete volume'.

Turns out, thats a bad idea. Grub was in that partition, so when I restarted my tablet, it booted into the 'grub rescue>' prompt.

After messing around, I finally found that pressing the Volume Down button and power button at the same time seemed to boot into my Fedora Live USB.

All the while, I was quite worried I'd lost all of my assignments(I knew I could have used the minitool of gparted live cd).

Finally I got it to install, and all was good again. Has anyone else made this mistake?

So I am running this crypto project that has dynamically generated private keys for a wallet stored in a Redis database. Nowhere else. The keys are generated on the fly.

At the moment of the happening the wallet had over 3.000 USD on it. I am testing new code locally, supposedly on a local Redis DB. Of a sudden, my code wipes the crypto keys and it turns out that I was connected to the live instance. 😱 Better don't ask me how.

Shock of my life. You know, when you turn pale and dark in your eyes, blood stops in your veins and you just want to die? Worst-case scenario that could have happened. All that money lost in crypto space.

Turns out, my good Redis hosting company kept backups for the past 7 days. Keys restored. Happiest moment of my life.

I am fed up working with unskilled software developers. Or to be more specific, working with people who have no idea of sofware architecture.

Most people I've worked with have simply no idea what they are doing in the broad picture, they can only follow patterns they see and implement their feature in the same way. They can't think about the abstract concepts which should be the foundation of the project.

They fail to write unit tests which are maintainable. They write one fucking test per method which is testing 50 things at the same time, making it often impossible to understand what is being tested.

They think putting stuff in private methods makes their class better and is some kind of separation of concerns.

They write classes and afterwards create interfaces for these classes named {Class}Interface, shoving all the methods into that interface. They think it's good design to do so.

They are unable to think about the reasons why things are done the way they are done and that you don't do stuff for the sake of doing stuff, but to achieve certain goals like interchangeability.

They don't undestand how to separate business logic from the application code.

They have no sense for naming things beautifully. They don't see how naming things is a major part of good software architecture.

They get layer concepts wrong and then create godlike {EntityName}Service classes, which do everything related to a particular entity.

They fail to shape the boundaries within a software project, entangling stuff which should live in individual modules.

All I want is to work in a team with professionals.

TL;DR I'm fucking sick and tired of Devs cutting corners on security! Things can't be simply hidden a bit; security needs to be integral to your entire process and solution. Please learn from my story and be one of the good guys!

As I mentioned before my company used plain text passwords in a legacy app (was not allowed to fix it) and that we finally moved away from it. A big win! However not the end of our issues.

Those Idiot still use hardcoded passwords in code. A practice that almost resulted in a leak of the DB admin password when we had to publish a repo for deployment purposes. Luckily I didn't search and there is something like BFG repo cleaner.

I have tried to remedy this by providing a nice library to handle all kinds of config (easy config injection) and a default json file that is always ignored by git. Although this helped a lot they still remain idiots.
The first project in another language and boom hardcoded password. Dev said I'll just remove before going live. First of all I don't believe him. Second of all I asked from history? "No a commit will be good enough..."

Last week we had to fix a leak of copyrighted contend.
How did this happen you ask? Well the secure upload field was not used because they thought that the normal one was good enough. "It's fine as long the URL to the file is not published. Besides now we can also use it to upload files that need to be published here"
This is so fucking stupid on so many levels. NEVER MIX SECURE AND INSECURE CONTENT it is confusing and hard to maintain. Hiding behind a URL that thousands of people have access to is also not going to work. We have the proof now...
Will they learn? Maybe for a short while but I remain sceptic. I hope a few DevrRanters do!

The live devRant AMA/event thingy is in a few hours I think?

Gotta go to sleep right fucking now.

Don't want to get spoiled by the rants tomorrow morning.

This means nearly a whole day of no devRant 😫.

Anyways, good luck dfox and trogus!

Hating WordPress is cool these days, but:

1) Shitloads of themes for clients to choose from (I'm not good with designing and where I live you are more likely to meet a unicorn than a front-end developer that can code).

2) Non technical people can understand it's admin interface without lots of explaining.

3) Huge community makes it extremely easy to find answers even when looking for pretty specific stuff.

For me it's a valid option when making something simple.

Sometimes I have really loose the will to live and find myself face palming multiple times.

I added live chat software a web frontend for a client. Very easy job that consisted of pasting in some embed code. The actual software is very good and has native ios/andriod apps - something specifically requested.

I got a call from my client about an hour ago, saying there is a "serious issue with the live chat".

My client stated the live chat won't work when his staff go home. He asked me what my solution to this was.

Saying "wtf" many times to myself I directed him to a settings within the chat software i.e. an "away mode" where an email is sent when no chat agents are available.

This apparently wasn't good enough and said I hadn't followed his brief of "adding life chat software to the website", which I had.

After a lengthy discussion I found the root of his frustration. He'd signed a contract with a client of his own, stating there would be 24/7 support via live chat on the website.

Obviously there a huge difference between adding a chat widget to a website and committing to having it manned 24/7 :)

After a further 10 minutes of trying push the blame on myself, the client insisted of having the chat software "appear" as someone was always online, even when they are not (people need to sleep ya know!).

Bu design, the chat software requires at least one agent be logged in before the chat status changes to "online" - why wouldn't it.

After a little while I was seriously wondering why I'm involved in this conversation. I jokingly stated: "Well you could always install Andriod/iOS app on your phone, login and permanently leave it running in background. You'd get lots of notifications, but the site would say the live is always online".

The latter was something I said in jest. To my surprise the client said he'd do that on his own phone going forwards. He actually thanked me for my "resourcefulness", lol.

I'm looking at the same dashboard now and there are 407 pending chat requests - his phone must literally be blowing up notifications :)

Man in the event of some newcomers to the development game, those that will mostly work in the web domain or sys admins that are in training I want to offer some small advice:

Do not neglect vim

I know it might be a bitch to use at first. And I will never use it as a replacement to vs code. But fuuuuuck me I cannot count the number of times that vim wizardry has helped me when dealing with servers when dealing on a machine with windows and nothing but putty.

The thing is a lifesaver yo, and it makes for an impressive show when doing something in front of senior executives.

Learn it, love it, live by it

And exit is :q, save is :w, to copy and paste is :v then surround the text and then y to yank it and p to paste it.
:vsplit and :split are your friends and to move around splits is ctrl w and direction.

Good luck my friends. Stay classy.

So I've decided if I am invited to a school career day the what I'll do is this.

1. Start by handing out one of those logic puzzles that are like Sally lives 2 houses down from Bill, Bill is 3 houses away from Maggie where does Jerry live type of thing. Then I'll tell the kids they have 10 minutes to figure it out.

2. After about three minutes I'll tell them that they also need to figure out where Jerry lives and not give them enough information to figure that out.

3. 5 minutes in I'll start asking them why it is taking so long, and it shouldn't be that hard. I'll also ask about where Phil lives who was never mentioned before.

4. At 7 minutes I'll look for anyone who might be figuring it out and tell them there is a much more important high priority problem I need them to solve and give them a new puzzle and tell them I expect them both to be done on time.

5. At nine minutes I'll start yelling at them that they must not be that good and why they haven't finished yet if any of them complain I'll tell them they are just dumb.

6. At ten minutes I'll ask them to turn it in and then immediately throw it in the trash and tell them that wasn't what they were supposed to be doing, and tell them they did it wrong.

I figure that is a pretty good representation of what working in software engineering is like.

Pubs are fucking brilliant. Walk in. Take a vacant seat. Order food and drinks for a good price. Live music. See all your local friends. Drink enough to barely make it home. Sorted

I honestly don't understand people. They are unable to understand easy to use apps when you provide clearly labeled labels yet they use apps like Snapchat which apart from being the worst designed app I have ever seen (it brings SD820 to knees) is unintuitive as hell with no difficulty. How is this even possible.

Also on a side note, go fuck yourself Snapchat. And if any of Snapchat devs are reading this: " go fucking kill yourself. You don't deserve to live after creating such a piece of shit. Even a fresh out of college intern does better job than you. You think this is good? I have never seen anything worse than it. Even fucking in-house government apps are miles better and more intuitive than you. All your ripoffs from Instagram stories to facebooks new clone and others are better than you. Whoever thinks this POS is good enough deserves to be burnt."

I already wrote one rant about how my family deals with me being a developer, but this rant I wanna dedicate to people close to my family and what they actually think...

Earlier this year I ended school, so I was supposed to find a job. Well...I live in region where only small IT "companies" exist. It is really hard to find job as a developer around here. These small companies either do not want to hire anyone or they just hire people with super amazing university or just family members and friends. Anyway, I did not want to move to the capital city, so I just kept seraching...and that is how this family friends started to be fucking toxic.

While searching for job everyone just kept telling me how am I lazy as fuck and will not just go digging fucking drains or work for minimum wage to some korean shit company around here. Of course not literally, but I can see when someone starts to look at me as I am completely crazy. Our family lost many fake friends who just do not understand because of this. But it did not ended here...

When I finally found a job 1.5 month earlier, I was so happy. Job from home in relative good company. Ho Lee Fuk! Nobody believes me I am actually working. People look at me as I am a lazy fuck laying all day in bed and watching fucking TV. I am done with these dick people.

End of story.

last summer, me and my friend @hamdan used to work from 8 to 4 in the infamous "fuck developers llc", and everyday around 3:30 some bug appears out of nowhere when checking in our changes, so we had to stay an extra hour or more everyday of our precious summer to fix it.

we really worked hard thinking that good things will happen or as our godfucker ex-boss who didn't even payed out a month we worked after he fired us used to say "the future is bright".

we live in a city surrounded by mountains, a sea, and a fucking ocean, and many interesting places to explore. and we wasted a year of our youth with the embodiment of scum itself.

(possibly political, but not really)

I think there's an under-reaction culture around covid19. People are mitigating it to be "just a bad flu" and keep bringing up the 2-3% death rate.

I see that people may have good intentions but spreading lies just to make it seem like the virus isn't bad is worse than the media overreacting.

I'm tired of people just repeating the same "ugh, calm down, it's just the flu!" Just because they don't want people to worry. While panic isn't good, disregard is worse.

The "bad flu" stage is only the second of three stages. Stage one is minor symptoms (so nobody cares if they are sick at this stage) coupled with patients being highly infectious (you can imagine, this is a bad combo)

Stage two is of course the famous "bad flu".

Stage three is fucking respiratory issues including pneumonia, AFTER you have already gone through stage two, which can be rough on its own.

The CDC (not any media) has issued warnings to those at high risk to stock up on supplies and medication they may need. As usual for this sort of stuff, the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions are in the high risk groups.

2% death rate (low end) is one in 50 people. That could be someone you know. 4% (high end) is one in just 25 people. That's the average high school class size where I live. That's a lot, that's pretty deadly.

Stop calling it a bad flu. Stop listening to people on Facebook, CNN, and devRant. Please visit the CDC, they are constantly giving updates.

Stay smart

Avicii died. 😞😢
At just 28.

He got me through some tough and grueling times. I still use his tunes while coding. I'm still shocked that he left so early. But he made it count. He might've lived short but he lived large.
I'll miss him. I'm sad that he left so early. But his work will live on. I hope to become as good at programming computers as he was at using them to make music. His music was perfection. RIP.

Dev: Hay dude , look this page is broken, how long has it been like this.
Me: No? 🤔, Weren't you working on the Database for this yesterday?
Dev: I didn't change anything yet...
Me: Okay, let's do a git bisect and see where this came from.
...After going back in history and checking out like 3 commits.
Dev: It's fine I'll just search for it
Me: 😕, that's what we are doing the bisect for?
Dev: But we've already looked at so many!?
...After some time of convincing, finds good commit, does the bisect and finds offending piece of code. The database details changed.
Me: okay so while it's still pointing to the old database it's working but switch it to the latest one and it breaks. You sure you didn't change anything?
Dev: I didn't do anything.
Me: okay well it seems to me like it must be a database issue, let me know what you find.
10min later...
Dev: Hay dude, soo I found it, I accidentally renamed a table
In my mind: 😲😲😲

I hate working at a company with bad practices like saving database config into git and not making a copy of the database when you intend to work on it, and not edit the f'ing live instance! Not even close to the luxury of migrations.

Oh I have a good one.

A dev once was added to the team -he deleted all of the whitespace from the backend code (minified) and called that optimising. We had a lot of back and forth and me reverting the things back to non minified and him back to minified on live environement. I shit you not i had to endure that shit and he kept on insisting that I'm the shitty developer because I don't know how to optimise. I'm starting to rage even thinking about it....

We're 2 months away from going live.

This has repeated for several weeks now :

Monday : 17 issues (aka bugs, incomplete features)

Work work work.

Friday : 7 issues
Nice. Lets get a good weekend rest and finished this next week.

Next Monday : 17 issues.
QA found some new bugs or some already resolved issues came back with different details.

...and repeat. Exact numbers, plusminus 1 or 2.

I’m fucking done….
I don’t even know what to tell.
I’m a CTO in a startu. We have pretty good traction, my salary is about average senior dev salary (plus 10%).
I’m good financially.
But I have no more pleasure in work. Like at all.
“This API call performance is bad”
Yeah I know, maybe you shpuldn’t try to call it for 1000 objects at the time ?
“We need to reduce Azure cost”
Yeah I know, but are you ready to live with performances downgrade it will generate ?
“I don’t understand on what thing you worked past week, where is a devops card ?
Fuck you, I’m in extenuating fire mode, I don’t have time for a fucking devops card
“We should migrate whole stack to modern technology, like JavaScript”
Thank you for your imput, Blazor WAS created to avoid JabaScript
“The client has only 1.000.000 records and API doesn’t return them all”
Use fucking paging moron. And BTW, I’m adding “number of authorized requests” shortly.
I can go on and on and on for hours. But the idea is : I completely lost the will or motivation to do anything. I’m considering just to quit and go back to be Junior dev for a random company.

I have this teacher who focuses so much on documentation that I hardly get to code sometimes. The worst experience with that teacher was with a project I think about two years ago. Every time I came up with (modified) documentation (we have to document EVERYTHING before allowed to start programming) she would turn me away with some bs argumentation and also point out non existing English grammar errors (my English is way better than hers). After nine weeks of documenting (so, no single line of code yet and projects take ten weeks) she gave me the green light. Then at 'delivery' she had the fucking balls to to tell me that MY CODE WASN'T THAT STABLE AND GOOD YET.

I WAS LITERALLY HAVING A LIVE RAGE ATTACK OVER THERE.

Cs Student. We currently have a course on algorithms, where we have to implement something in Java, test it with some sample inputs and in the end submit it to an online judge, so far so good. So why a rant? Well there's this one person, who strugles with programing and asks me a lot of questions. Usually I tell her, could you send me your code, so I can have a look at what doesn't work/where you made a typo/what ever. My thoughts: let's just copy it my IDE, take a look at the error message, and that should do it.

Guess how I got the code: As a few photos, taken by her mobile phone (as the code doesn't fit on one screen...)! Just send me the fucking file, or post it to gist.github.com or pastie.org or what ever fucking code sharing tool you want! Make a fucking git repo, I'll even live with SVN or just a .txt file by mail. But for the love of Linus Torvalds, stop sending me crapy pictures of your crappy code! For fucks sake!

I've seen a job vacancy that asks for the following characteristics in a developer:

- extraverted, do'er (as opposed to thinker), out-of-the-box, curious, sees solutions and not problems, structural thinking vs. theoretical thinking, loves change, acts immediately, makes choices under stress, critically questions themselves if things go wrong

What the [censored] kind of programmer is that? Sounds more like a wannabe brogrammer type.

A typical, real programmer is introverted (for he is introspective, detail-minded and is therefore good at inspecting problems and finding solutions for them).

Seeing problems is not a bad thing, it's in fact necessary to be able to identify issues and not act like your typical manager who only wants to rush to solutions. He thinks deeply and theoretically before he takes action. Theory is the foundation of identifying a problem.

What programmer is stress-resistant? It's not normal for the human brain to be able to deal with stress; this is why switch-tasking is so hard.

Question yourself if things go wrong? Perhaps, but this sounds more like trying to shove the blame around.

Since we live in a rigid computer world with rigidly-defined protocols (say, HTTP), it is often useful to think in a conventional way. Out-of-the-box? Sure, if you're being innovative, or sure, as a tangential characteristic.

In my professional opinion, this vacancy reeks of bad corporate culture.. and the biggest alarm bell I find is: "There is free beer!" Err.. yeah. Anyway.

I just love it when our clients decide to make a clone of live production server..then put it immediately online..and don't tell anyone about this.. and then start bitchin how data gets doubled all of a sudden..

Yeah, no shit sherlock.. you have two prod servers for 'hot swapping' and some services may only be running on one at a time.. You even have a manual on how to switch primary to secondary (turn off services on primary first, then turn them on on secondary and all)..or in case primary actually dies, just turn on services on secondary and you're good to go, right?

So how do ya think cloning the one with running services and putting the clone immediately online will work out?! 🤔

God, I thought it was common sense to not do that..but here I am, bitchin about how people fail to RTFM.. :/ or use brain..fuck..

I had a manager in a fortune 500 company encourage me to install a web cam with live feed in another team members cube as a prank. Being younger, I trusted him and so figured it would fine and just get a good laugh.

Then another member found the setup and reported it. Turns out, this broke so many company regulations, I could have been fired on the spot. They confiscated my laptop and I got the 3rd degree from my senior director, who told me I was lucky to be a contractor at the time or the situation would have been even worse.

Moral of the story for younger folks in large corporations... don't take everything your higher ups say as gospel. Think for yourself and do your own research if something feels iffy.

Had an awesome day at work got so much coding done, made an awesome well documented class for a Countdowntimer class in Android.

Was looking forward to getting home and using my motivation to continue coding my game when I got home.

Then get to the bus stop and it's packed for the Adele concert, I saw a poster okay thats good only buses are packed (I then take a train, I live pretty far from work) I get to the train station and the shittiest system has been setup,

Where people pack on the train that goes to the last stop south for the Adele concert that isn't even near the last stop!

One of the platforms aren't even being used and the trains that got partway south are tiny as hell for the rest of the people that don't want to go to this concert.

For one thing who thought it was a good idea to setup such a shitty system? Why not have one train go straight to the damn concert area and continually use that one platform and for the rest of the people have the trains running as normal?

Nope let's make a shitty system that doesn't work well.

Top it off have concerts on a Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.

Dumbasses.

Now I get to wait in town doing absolutely nothing and losing the little time I have to code on my game.

May i ask for help dear fellow devRanters?

@aureliagbrl suffered a deep depression and pressure from her family, the cause is exceptionally simple yet very crucial; so here's the story :

Every week, in friday after the last class she have to go home to fulfill her family wish to gather around and will come back to her dorm in Sunday. her home is more than 1.5 hour from University. recently one class in Wednesday moved out to Saturday Noon for some reason this cause her to go home in Saturday afternoon, yet her family doesn't care if it means she have to wake up 3am in Monday, to get back alone to catch up with class. her family just want to gather around longer, that's it, no exception. According to her this is so frustrating and exhausting. so the condition now is Tomorrow Morning (Monday) there will be a Live Coding Exam. she isn't prepared, her only wish was to get back on Sunday instead of Monday to Study. her family discard her wish entirely. this make her so deeply depressed and i can't even talk to her, she starting to mumbling about quitting college, and etc, etc.

We all know how bad it is to burnt out right ? and we want our fellow developers get out from it and a good shape. My wish is simple from you guys, i wish you can mention her in comment and cheer her up.

Thank You

here is her cheerful photo.

TLDR: SAP sucks. Don't ever work with it. Run away from it. Delete it from your memory. If your company works with it, quit. It's the best you can do.

A couple of weeks ago the group rant was "Story of your best/worst career choice" and I talked about the contract I signed. Even tho that is still true and I still feel like that, I think I got a new worst choice:

WORKING WITH SAP.

When I got this job I knew it would be SAP, but I didn't know what SAP was. I just thought "it's programming, how bad can it be?" OH BOII.

If only I would have done some FUCKING RESEARCH I would know this would be a mistake!!

And I knew I didn't want to work with this, I knew I wanted to be a web developer, but I STILL ACCEPTED THE JOB OH MAN WHAT WAS I THINKING I'M SO MAD.

Were I live we all have the same mentality when looking for the first job, which is to just accept anything you can get, because it's your first job, you need to work and to get experience, even if it's a bad job or if you know you won't like it. When my intership was ending, I told my parents I didn't want to stay there because they treat their employes like shit, and the salary is terrible. They told me to still accept it if they offered because I still need a job (this one was web tho) and experience.

So, of course, since I was looking for my first job, was told this my entire live, always thought like that and they were the first to contact me, I accepted it.

BIGGEST FUCKING MISTAKE!! DON'T THINK LIKE THIS!! AND STOP TELLING KIDS THIS!! IT'S NOT A GOOD MENTALITY!!!

ALSO DON'T WORK WITH SAP! EVER!

Adobe is predatory. I bought a subscription to Adobe Premier four months ago. After using it a little, I found Davinci Resolve (it's free) and decided it was just as capable for my needs. Upon trying to cancel Adobe, it offered me 3 more months at a good price and I thought, well, maybe I could still use it for some other things. But that didn't turn out to be true or necessary. I went to cancel today at the end of the 3 months and it said I would have to pay $94 for cancelation. I guess the fine print was too fine for my 49-year-old eyes or I wouldn't have signed up for that 3-month extension. I got on live chat with their AI, figured out how to get a real person, and began negotiating. They tried to sell me a lower cancelation fee. No. I don't want any fee. They tried to sell me other products at a lower price. I didn't need any other products. Finally, I used a little reverse psychology and said "Fine, I'll keep it. You win, I guess. Just tell me when I can cancel something I'm not using and won't be using and without being punished with a fee."

Apparently, that unlocked something in the Indian guy's call flow script and he offered to waive the fee. Just needed a moment to converse with his manager and get approval. That's 20 minutes of my life and billable time I'll never get back.

Do you guys know about the Windows 10 operating system?

I highly recommend it.

It is so easy to get done whatever you want in just a few clicks or.. several.

It has a great web browser called Internet Explorer that comes pre-installed with it. If you love animations, it will even sometimes show you that beautiful loading animation for as long as it wants. If you have a habit of wasting time on the Internet, it will intelligently slow things down and become unresponsive to help you get rid of that bad habit. It's just that great.

It has a lot of great features pre-enabled for you like sending data to Microsoft to improve your experience on a personal level. The operating system cares so much about you, unlike other operating systems that represent a flightless bird.

It's so smart, it even keeps you from doing stupid things like customizing the operating system. It makes sure that you live in the given box and don't break anything. So caring, right?!

At random times, it shows you a blue screen and a sad face to remind you that life can be sad at times but you gotta keep going. It is profound.

It comes with great useless software that you absolutely don't even need! How great is that!

I use Windows 10 and I recommend that you do too.

Have a good day..

So I had to buy a laptop

I had a Lenovo G50-70 (2014) it was really good, mid-range i5, 6GB of RAM and to speed it up I've installed an SSD. 3 years (and some formatting) later it started being slow, I couldn't even play Minecraft anymore (and the battery was dying)

This year we're learning and using PCs for the first (real) time, so I needed a good laptop.

I started searching everywhere, Google, shops, Amazon... (Excluding HP and Acers for good reasons 😂) so I've found this Asus, which isn't really famous, but the model is UX510UX.
FHD display, Nvidia 950M, i7-7500U, really good battery, 8GB of RAM, 1TB of hard disk

I bought an additional 128GB M.2 SSD from WD (I'm sorry but I can't live with a HDD 😂)

All of this for ~700€
I'm very happy for the purchase, the laptop is all metal (pinky bronze, but I like it)

It's really powerful, I can play GTA with mid-high details without any lag. (Remember, I play GTA on the desktop with a 1080 Ti so my standards are high)

I'm happy 😄!

Stack overflow is overrated

With that I mean that a lot of people think that stack overflow is the best thing that every programmer has and can't live without it. That if stack overflow is down, nobody is able to write a single line without bugs. That 47.24% of a programmers time is spent searching on stack overflow. Sure, it is helpful for finding answers, and some are very good at explaining stuff, but it's not essential. I made an account when I started coding, because it "sure is the most important thing, right?", but the only thing I have done with it is changing the profile picture, because I simply don't use stack overflow that much. When I search my problems on Google, I mostly find the answer on some specific forum for that library I'm using, or more often, in the official documentation for it, no need for stack overflow. I'm not trying to say that it is not useful at all or that it should be taken down because nobody uses it, but that it is not essential in every programmers life.

Not a rant. Just a story.

So two weeks ago, a cat gave birth to two beautiful kittens in our balcony. We started giving milk to the mother and sometimes inviting the family to our house. The kittens are naughty charming. The mother sits for hours and sometimes sleeps while watching us do our chores (watching movies, coding, etc.)

Now, we live in New Delhi and Wednesday was Diwali. The family was playing in the balcony and we had to go out. So we locked the balcony door and went to have fun with friends. We didn't realize that people would burst firecrackers which could scare the cats. When we returned, the mother was very scared and (kind of) screaming. One of the kittens was missing!! We live on the fourth floor and I got scared too. We searched using a flashlight but there was no sign of kitten. After 30 minutes of search, We gave up. I assumed the kitten jumped from the balcony and might be dead. I tried to sleep but could not. Around 4 AM in the morning, I heard some noise. When I opened the door, the second kitten was there. Her mom was scolding (or so it seemed). It was a moment of joy.

Thought of sharing. This family has become our friends. Now I realize how cats are good companions.

I bricked my Manjaro install by interrupting a kernel update like a fucking doofus.

After two hours of painstaking troubleshooting using a live image I finally resolved the issue. And man is that a good feeling. Solving complex problems (at least to me) on Linux is just such an amazing feeling ♥️

Dear diary, today was a good day.

1: i got the confirmation of promotion.
2: i solved a task using newly introduced tech and it works. Which has lots of implications on future work, a lot faster too. Also everyone is happy and supportive.
3: i felt good at the progress made with my kinesitherapy, my spine is starting to cooperate again.

Overall a good day.

Oh, and also i got payed :D

Today I learned that there are people that disable javascript...

Quote: "It's both insecure and resource intensive"

Then he went that only if the script is free he would see what it is to run it.

He also said that he would never allow any js file that comes from google even jquery...

I wonder, how does a man like this live today when most of the websites are heavily dependant on javascript?

I wouldn't live in an isolated world just to be 100% secure, I want my good user experience xD

Maybe it's old and well known, but somebody asked, so here it goes:

A shepherd is quietly grazing his sheep on the fresh village pastures.

Suddenly a shiny new car stops by. A cool guy, very well dressed hops out and asks him: "Good man, If I guess exactly how many sheep you have, can I win one?"

The shepherd, puzzled, accepts.

The cool guy, opens his laptop, download a satellite picture of the area, run a NASA algorithm for image recognition and in few seconds answers "you have 1342 sheep"

"Wooow" says the shepherd "you won, take one"

The cool guy is about to live when the shepherd approaches him:

"Ehi, Young man, I bet all my flock against your car that I can guess what is your job"

The cool guy, (he likes to bet after all) accepts.

"You are a consultant" says the shepherd.
"WTF! how did you even..."

"Well, easy" says the shepherd "you came out of nowhere, well dressed and smart looking, you answered a question nobody asked you, you told me something I already knew, you want to be payed for that and in addition, you don't understand shit about my business."

"Now", adds quietly the shepherd "please, give me back my dog"

(for @LOLjustCoding)

I bless everyone with happiness worth billions of dollars and additional billion dollar in cash.

Live happy everyone. I hope all your good dreams come true.

!rant

I started my new position in Ireland about a month ago (relocated from Switzerland) and it‘s amazing how awesome life can be despite working full-time..
I have a 8-5 job, I usually get home around 6PM and have 6 hours left for myself every evening.. no calls, mails or similar after I leave the office.
Im actually not allowed to do overtime..

Everyone in the company is super nice and the Irish people are so incredibly welcoming and are happy to help if you need something..

So thankful right now..

Dealing with other technical professionals who cannot think outside their respective boxes.

Here is an example.

A QA (who is very good at her job) said this...

Her:
“We need to get one customer who is willing to pay us a lot of money to make the features they want!”

Me:
“But you realize we are a SaaS company and that means we need lots of customers and constant growth”

Her:
“No, we need to find a customer who is willing to pay us, like a million, to make the features they want. Then we make them for that customer. Then we do that again.”

Me:
“We sell software to small businesses, none of them have a million dollars to pay us, and even if they did then why wouldn’t they build it themselves?

Her:
“Well, when I worked for my last company this is what we did...”

Me:
“So you worked for a contracting company who built software for individual companies. We are not that type of company. We are a SaaS company.”

Her:
“It’s the same thing”

Me:
~Facepalm~

As a software developer and entrepreneur it frustrates me when everyone think everything is the same.

You’ll here things like...

“All we need is to get lucky with one big hit and then we will ride that wave to success, just like Facebook or Amazon!”

Holy fucking shit balls, how stupid can you be!

FB and AZ run thousands of tests a day to see what works. They do not get “lucky”. They dark launched FB messenger with thousands of messages and then rolled it out to their internal team first, they did not get lucky!

Honestly though, I can’t blame them. Most people just want a good job that pays. They aren’t looking to challenge their assumptions.

Personally I know I will be in situations again where my pride, my assumption, my fears are realized and crushed by the market place and I do not want to live in a world of willful ignorance.

I’d rather get it right than feel good.

boss: *showing me the new platform*
me: "oh that looks like a good demo"
boss: "ah no that's the product! we're going to put this live"
me: "wh... there's no update nor delete function for anything! where is the user profile? where are the menus??"
boss: "that's ok, we'll take note when people start using it"

and now

boss: "we've concluded the product was bad and we're giving up on it"

Ordering a Pizza in 2022.

CALLER: Is this PizzaHut?

GOOGLE:No sir, it's Google Pizza

CALLER: Sorry, I have dialled wrong number.

GOOGLE: No sir, Google bought Pizza Hut last month.

CALLER:Ok, I would like to order a pizza.

Google:Do you want your usual, sir?

CALLER: My usual? You know me?

GOOGLE: your last 12 orders shows, extra-large pizza with cheeses, sausage on a thick crust

CALLER: Awesome! That's what I'll have.

GOOGLE: sir, we suggest you try our Gluten free veg pizza?

CALLER: What? I don't want a veg pizza.

GOOGLE: Your cholesterol is not good, sir

CALLER: How the hell do you know that?

GOOGLE: Well, we cross-referenced your home phone no. with your medical records

CALLER: Ok, but I don't want your rotten veg pizza! I have taken medication for my cholesterol.

GOOGLE: But your medication wasn't regular. you just bought 30 cholesterol tablets once,4 months ago from Loyd pharmacy.

CALLER: I bought more from another pharmacy.

GOOGLE: That doesn't show on your credit card statement.

CALLER: I paid in cash.

GOOGLE: But you did not withdraw enough cash according to your bank statement.

CALLER: WTH man! I'm going on island to live without internet & social media.

GOOGLE: I understand sir, but you need to renew your passport. It expired 6 weeks ago.

At work the other day...

Guy: "Oh hey I was thinking if you could help me with an application to visualize some data."

Me: "Ooookay...what did you have in mind?"

Guy: "I think we have XML files that could be turned into graphs...oh and we could add some trend lines. (Getting more excited) And maybe we could supplement it with live data...oh hey and maybe we could add real time alerts via email..."

Me: *thinks to self...there is no way in hell I am starting to work on something that he is literally coming up with requirements as he's talking* "I need specifics...so go take some time, think it through and get back to me with concrete details and examples."

Guy: "Ok. That should be enough to get you started for now at least."

That would be a big fuck no, good sir. Haven't started and won't start it. He has never mentioned it to me again since then.

I came first in a 48 hour 4x person gamejam with a game idea in 6 hours with 3x people.

Some info: I had an idea as soon as the topic went live, told the team this is the idea (button masher), we are going to do it in unity (at the time I was working at a studio that used UE4.x), and I'll also make a custom controller using an old keyboard to make it more fun. Ended up coming first place and won a nice bottle of champagne each, and at no point did we over stretch. Nice clean project with a good night's sleep in-between. The team was me (dev), an artist and a technical designer.

That was my first start to finish use of unity and C#, and now I exclusively use unity and make games for Xbox One and Steam.

I HATE IT WHEN I HAVE TO BE NICE TO THESE KINDA FCKED UP IGNORANT PEOPLE

[11:10, 16/04/2020] +263 73 ...: Hi I want to develop an app do you live in glen view
[11:12, 16/04/2020] Softaz: Um in budiriro
[11:12, 16/04/2020] Softaz: What do yu have in mind
[11:15, 16/04/2020] +263 73 ....: There's an idea I've been testing and its about creating an app thats track patients with the covid virus the people they have infected even before the infected ones test positive
[11:16, 16/04/2020] +263 73 4....: What do you think about this coz this is not a money generating project but we will do it for humanity
[11:17, 16/04/2020] +263 73 4...: We will finish the project in less than 3 days coz I've got the research covered and how the app will operate I jus need someone who can punch the code
[11:22, 16/04/2020] Softaz: Its a good idea
Though your time frame is too tight

What platform will this app run on?
[11:26, 16/04/2020] +263 73 47...: About the time frame its becoz its a very simple mechanism

Working in security for many years only granted me world-class paranoia about taking pictures of myself and my family. It even made it hard to keep in touch with my friends as we don’t live in the same country anymore.

The good side is that it pays well enough to grant me a platinum foil hat.

How to NOT write unit tests:

A colleague of mine has developed a new package of software, many of our new projects are going to use. So in his presentation of the new functionalities he also showed us that he used unit tests to cover some of his code. So i asked him to show me that all tests passes.

He: I can show you, but one test suit will fail currently.

Me: Why?? You told us, everything is finished and works fine.

He: That's right, but they will fail because I'm currently not in the customer VPN.

Me: Excuse me, WHAT??

He: Yes, I'm not in the VPN that connects me to this one customers facility in Hungary, where the counterpart of the software is runnung live.

Me: YOU WROTE UNIT TESTS THAT TEST AGAINST A RUNNING LIVE FACILITY??

He: Yes, so I can check, that the telegramms I send are right. If I get back the right acknowledgement, the telegramm structure is right and my code is working.

Me: You know, that is not the porpose of unit tests? You know, that these test should run in any environment?

He: But they are proving, that my code is working. Everytime I change something I connect to the customer and let the tests run.

Me: ...

Despite the help of some other developers we could not convince him that this was not good and he should remove them. So now this package is used in 2 new projects and this test suit is still failing, everytime you execute all unit tests.

*WanBLowS shits itself as usual in BSOD*
FEATUREFUL FUCKING JOKE OF AN OPERATING SYSTEM..!!!! How about you do the only thing that you're good at - casual shit like letting me watch a fucking anime! - and do it properly?! Yes there's an rsync from btrfs to btrfs going on in the background - because yes I fucking detest your joke of a filesystem called NTFS!! Should that even matter?! ONE FUCKING JOB!!!

Meanwhile my tablet, a fucking €120 cheapie!! It can stay up and running - stable! - for fucking weeks in a row, only taken down by me forgetting to charge the bloody thing every few days. But yeah it's gotta be a hardware issue, it's gotta be an obscure setup. NO IT'S A FUCKING CRAPTACULAR SHIT OS!!! If only those Microshit certified enganeers would write a goddamn line of DECENT CODE!!!

(As for anyone who doesn't know already that I've tried countless times to convert this turd to Linux.. It's an Intel + Nvidia GPU hybrid and it doesn't even boot a Linux live session. Believe me, I've tried.)

Our team really needs some workflow arrangement, and this time it was me who screwed up.
So we have to push an update to the Play Store and the App Store the Friday, the app is well tested on test environment then production environment, we got the ok so I uploaded a build, the app management team then continued the process of publishing..

During the weekend the app was approved and live to almost 500k user that can receive the update.

I got a phone call from the Project Manager at almost midnight, the time was really suspicious so I answered.
- Me: Hello.
- PM: Hi, sorry to call you now but the app is live and we have a problem.
- Me: what kind of problem? Let me check.

So I updated the app on my phone and opened it while I am on call.. I almost had heart attack!! WE PUBLISHED A VERSION POINTING TO THE TEST ENVIRONMENT. Holly shit

- Me: shit call the app management team NOW.

Eventually we removed the app from sale (unpublished it) and we submitted a new version immediately, once it was approved the next day we made the app available again (so for those who didn’t update yet, there will be no update to a faulted version, and no new users landing to a version with test data), I received one or two calls from friends telling me why the app is not on the store (our app is used nationally, so it’s really important).

Thank God there was no big show on twitter or other social media.. but it’s really a good lesson to learn.

I understand this is totally my fault, thankfully I didn’t get fired 😅

Why me. Why is it always me who has issues with Windows. (The OS)

I HAVE to use windows for a specific thing right now. Fair enough, I have an old system lying around somewhere with not the best specs ever but it'll do. Windows 7, clean install.

Firstly, let's boot up! Booting goes fine, login goes well... "Installing device drivers" (keyboard and mouse combi). I connected this set a gazillion times before so no clue why windows would need to download the drivers YER AGAIN. But, fine, it works.
Let's connect a USB webcam and to to the hardware testing website to see if my setup is right!

(I mostly don't blame this part on windows)

The webcam drivers install successfully, good. Although the page says it isn't working, it displays the live cam footage well so whatever.
Installed Chrome (not chromium too badly) to see if it shows fine there but chrome doesn't detect ANY cam/mic combination at all, not even the integrated one(s).

Annoying so let's reboot and see if it works normally with all checks okay on Firefox.

Rebooted.... aaaaand the USB webcam driver installation fails. I'm weirded out since the drivers were installed BEFORE the reboot already. Firefox now does not display any can/mic.... until it does after a few reloads. Windows is still saying that the driver installation failed.

The testing webpage, however, still says its not working while I'm literally seeing my ugly smug on screen. I contact support which does a remote check and says all is good but there was probably "a glitch with Windows" while the checks are still mostly red, I take a copy of the chat log just to be sure.

Now, I kinda want to shut this system down until the time I'll need it but I'm rather afraid that Windows is going to throw driver conundrums yet again and I simply *CANNOT* have this right now. So, I'm leaving this system on until I need it, and I'll pray windows plays along well.

Started off a developer 6 months back. I seem to have lost control of my life. I wake up at 8, be at work at 9am, get back home by 7 or 8pm, dinner, learn, work on my platform, sleep at 12am or 1am and the cycle continues.

I have no time for taking care of myself, no working out, no grooming, no family time, no time with friends, nothing naada! It scares me that I don't have that balance.

I always feel like I'm not good enough and I'm curious by nature, because of these, I sit my ass down and work / learn like crazy because I want to be good but I fear for my health, I'm 22, so I can live for now like this but this lifestyle will ruin my future, I've started getting back problems and shit, that was the wake up call!

How do you guys do it? work - life balance? I believe this information is vital for everyone starting out as a developer.

I just realized with this pandemic it's better to live in a dirt-cheap country, in a house you own, have a second hand car, work as a dev from home, become good with tools in your spare time, grow your own food in the garden.
Fuck this impossible system with it's promises of finding a cure and it's high pay but high taxes and expensive rent for living in a shitty rented apartment with no friends around, nothing to do than watch YouTube and play video games and be depressed half the time, then die because of lack of phisical activity.
I used to think countries that had good infrastructure were the best. Now public transportation is the worst idea around here, since no one wears masks and pretends all is well.
This is actually a decision I need to take next week. If you believe things will "get back to normal" please give me your input as it is valuable to me.

>Gets a new CPU for desktop (yay, went from R5 1600 to R5 3600X)
>Spends half a day flashing new MB BIOS (Needed to flash individual major versions in order, couldn't just go 1.10 to 6.40)
>Finally finishes preparations and goes to replace the CPU
>Cleans the old one and packages it to give it to a friend
>Has issues inserting the new one as the orientation arrow on the motherboard was very hard to make out
>Spends 30 minutes applying thermal paste, worrying about optimal spread
>Forgets which side the CPU fan goes on
>Finally boots back up... CPU fan is suddenly loud AF under load, but eh, temps under stress are sub-60, so, good

~~Next day~~
>Loud CPU fan is too annoying, opens the case again
>CPU fan is on backwards
Ugh
>Takes the fan off, turns it around and fastens again, puts PC back together and boots
>Is quiet again, nice
>Goes to work on the PC
>2 hours later randomly checks temps because no fan noise is weird
>CPU at 75dC, crap
>Opens the (live) PC, CPU fan is not spinning
>Has put the header on one pin to a side
>Unplugs and replugs it correctly
>Fan suddenly starts spinning very fast and cuts my finger
>Finally closes the case once more. All issues resolved

...Its situations like these that make me wonder... What would happen it I had to work with servers in person, physically lol

Bring the fun and curiosity back.

School education? Mostly rinse and repeat, learn from heart and do as you are told.

First job? Take these bread crumbs, shit out gold ingots, please.

There are few who had either very kind and gifted teachers / persons in their life or had a strong will / desire to learn by / for themselves - but it's hard to combine fun and curiosity with the - most of the time - very harsh reality and environment we live in.

I'd really wish that it would get back to fun and curiosity and not the endless myriad of bitching, hissing and fighting it usually is.

What I find most tiresome in education is the overflow of information with no value - most content is outdated, wrong, harmful, not precise and especially not helpful.

Thinking about good education I've got very fond memories of hanging out in IRC chats, talking with people who were "ancient" (la me 15-20, them 40 plus ;) ) and not being "shood" away, but rather getting fed by book recommendations, hints, appointments when they had more spare time to explain in private IRC sessions etc.

The atmosphere was always a "we might not have time for it, but we'll try and don't worry if you don't understand it".

When I'm trying to find information today... It's really 90 - 95 % filtering, 4 % try and error, 1 % finding what I need.

For the passed couple of years I've struggled with depression. This passed year has been so much better. I found a career path I enjoy, I learned a lot about myself, and I got a full time job.

I live with my grandparents and God bless their souls but I really want to move out. This realization really came last week when they left for a vacation and left me home alone. I've already lived away from home, volunteer work, internships. But now that I'm back home I'm bored, I have no responsibilities. I should also mention that I can't be myself around them, partly because I no longer believe in their God and partly because there never really was any transition between child and adult.

I talked it over with some older friends and they agreed that I should move out and offered some regally good advice.

I'm gonna wait until they get back and attempt to talk about it with them. I mean it's more of me telling them I'm moving out they can't really stop me at this point.

Anyway just wanted to get this off my chest. Hope you have a wonderful day.

First Rant here.

So I was working on some integration test issues when I found this by accident made by a professional level SW engineer:

@Test
public void testMethod() throws ApiException {
Response res = null;
try {
res = serviceToTest.callMethod();
} catch(Exception e) {
assertNull(res);
}
}

Was wondering why tests were being green after some code changes I've made cuz tests could have not been green afterwards.

Together with a senior (I'm also professional only) I've tried to explain him for a good 1-2hrs why this code is useless and he still did it. Good thing there are no errors in the real implementation from him after fixing the tests as it's code freeze here and we are having go live in a few days 🙃

Also luckily he isn't working on our code anymore and has only been doing so for a few weeks.

Wasted a day with it and gonna check all of his code now before I run in the next surprise.

Anyone else had an interviewer just blatantly waste your time and lie to you?

I was recently interviewing for a job, the first couple of rounds went really well, and they gave out a fairly standard tech test. It was a basic tic-tac-toe game, with a few extra twists and a 120 minute time limit. They then wanted me to host what I had be able to code somewhere so they could test it out before the second technical interview.
The interview interview date came round, the interviewer never actually showed up, but 20 minutes late he sent me an email saying they wouldn't be going ahead because the code wasn't good enough, and cited a bunch of things that were well outside of the brief they gave for the test. and when I checked the access logs for the hosted 'live' version, it showed they hadn't bothered to actually look at it; they hadn't even checked out the code from the repo.
I've had similar things happen in the past occasionally, but is it just my bad luck, or is stuff like this becoming more common recently?

Not myself but friend of mine. Early 2000s working at a large university. Top notch office PCs for the time, best internet connection in the country.

He discovers this "Bittorrent" program. Meh, just another file sharing thing... but who cares, it's 2003-ish so everyone downloads shit from the internet.

Installs it on his office PC, because its university so no one cares.

Friday afternoon, he starts download of his favourite music album (some hard to get live version or something), then goes off into the weekend, computer is left running as always.

Download is finished after an hour or so, then his Bittorrent client starts seeding. Lots of people want this album. Bittorrent adapts to bandwith and when your connection is good you get upvoted in the network and everyone is connecting to you.

Monday comes, my friend arrives back at his desk, bit late because he slept in and its university so no one cares.

Suddenly realises many missed calls on his desk phone. Calls back, it's from the IT department.

Friend: "You have called me? What can I do for you?"
IT Guy (screaming): "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING??? YOUR PC IS CAUSING 50% OF THE UNIVERSITY'S INTERNET TRAFFIC.!!!!"
Friend: "Whops."
IT Guy (hysterical): "WHATEVER YOU ARE RUNNING STOP IT NOW!!!!"

Friend: *stops Bittorrend client, enjoys his favourite album*

Lucky him, it's a university, so in the end no one cared.

Let's start by saying: God do I love programming and hate work!

My dream job would be a place where I get to write quality code for something that's actually useful and makes sense to people (or a group of people) without all the usual job bullshit; all the politics, fucking useless hours of meetings, the pretentious ass holes, and the useless mindless product owners with good pay to live comfortably and some organization (not being a complete disaster). It's only a dream though...

Day 1: depressing
Day 2: blissful

OR

Day 1: blissful
Day 2: depressing

I noticed this pattern to repeat EVERY TIME IN MY LIFE.

When something is extremely good one day, I actually try to reduce the happiness because the depression will kick in the next day twice as much.... So even when i get hit by happy days, i am forcefully trying to become depressed in order to avoid being depressed twice as much tomorrow, CAn you Fucking believe me this ? Hhh
Hhhh

hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

i

i dont have energy to live

What sucks most about smartphones is how much everyone came to rely on them and expect you to have one which is turned on and working. Rent a bike? Need an app! Log in somewhere? Need 2FA. I just want to leave my phone turned off for a few days like in the good old days. There must be something wrong with the way we live.

!dev but rant

Samsung
Samsung...

Samsung!! What the fuck is wrong with you?
Some longer time ago you earned forst red red flag called knox. What the fuck you mean there is physical diode in phone that will burn out when I do whatever I want with phone? Its my phone. My. I live in europe and european law is with me. Its **MY** stuff and Im allowed to be super user so fuvk off with knox bullshit.

Okay, now, more and more phone are missing critical feature to save few cents a phone. You were last bastion. You were **that** company who was loyal to audio jacks. And why the fuck you plan to remove it? You know what? That one thing brought your phones from one of best (becouse retained audio jacks and didnt do much of notch fuckupery) to literally worst one thanks to knox.

And before anyone tells me bullshit apple tried to say "thats space saving", no its not true to point where one of their very own Iphones had internally space and traces for audio jacks. Its to save pennies on phone for profit margins and to force us to use bluetooth stuff, that I dislike. I stick to my K518 few years now and I am super happy user of it. Why y'all want to take away good stuff?

Oneplus, your turn. Why the luving fuck your big bulletpoint of marketing was "yes, we will keep loyal to audio jacks" and later down the line you shown one big fat middle finger to all users.

Goos job, guys, well fucked up.

So any good modern alternatives for my OnePlus 5 when it becomes obstole in few years? Nope. Fuck nope.

OP7 pro is awesome but no audio jacks absolutely kills off this phone in my eyes to level of not existance and inability to be considered.

First company I worked for, overall it was a good experience, but at one point they promoted a consultant to project manager, and their planning skills were about as good as their people skills, which is to say, appalling.

We had a project update for a huge client, that required, for political BS reasons, that most of the team spend several weeks on-site, 300km away from home.
Go-live was approaching, and the plan was: migration starts Friday night, shortly after midnight (so actually, Saturday) once the client’s IT confirms DB is backed up. Expected duration: 5 hours.

- So, you expect me to work from midnight to 5am on Saturday? And when do we start working on Friday?

- 9am, of course.

- 9am!? So you actually planned a 20 hour work day? (Note: legal maximum here is 10 hours in a day, 40 a week)

- And we have to be there on Saturday 1pm to recheck everything is running smooth.

wtaf were they thinking?

I’m really shocked at myself but as a last resort I chose Lubuntu for a light live USB environment because all others kept fucking out or lagging etc but holy shit I’m really digging Lubuntu!

Got a sweet conky setup started, Firefox quantum, some tweaks, my basic software stack and I’m almost good as gold!
Lubuntu for the recommendation! 👌🏼😁

You either die a good test
OR
You live long enough to become the bug

you either die a good browser or you live long enough to see yourself become the new internet explorer.

Rock up at work 10:30.

"What are you doing out your wanking chariot this early?"

"Aye, was there a fire where you live or something?"

Good thing I have flexitime!

When you've finished a project and the site goes live, you get a message from the client "looking good". To me that implies it's not finished, and I'm expecting a follow up message "can you just..."

v2.0.22 is now officially LIVE in GMT+2. Congrats and good job everybody!

Let's not fuck this one up, shall we? Let's keep our shit together this time.

So here's is the thing.
For some weird reason I decided to work at a VC funded startup. For 15k year,(I live in a really poor country).

So, let me describe the hell I'm in now, and if for some good grace you happen to be hiring, please consider saving me from the horror that's ahead.

Company got funded 5 months ago, main owners are, an economist and a civil engineer with no programming habilities whatsoever.

They took 1 month to assemble "a killer team", with no hiring expertise they handpicked a CTO that came in 1 month later and took a month of vacation in his first month of work.

He didn't do any specification of the system that needs to be built.

The 2 naive owners hired the rest of this "killer team".

The team is good, but have no appreciation of planning.

They've built and rebuilt the backend system twice, once in graphql and the second with plain http (is not real rest, just a http api), in front of, guess what a mongo database.

This mongo DB is not only one, but 7, because we have 7 microservices, and each has its own database.

After some time, they decided to fire their CTO, and hire one more programmer(that's me), because the CTO wasn't doing anything.

The app has 3 parts, the app per se, a business version, and a help desk, guess what the helpdesk just appeared last week on the radar.

Long story short, we have one month to deliver what couldn't be built in 5.

When I decided to work for these people, I did not imagine the kind of clusterfuck that I was getting into.

It took me 1 month to realize the whole situation, now, I really would like to see some help from the deities of any religion, not for the project, that project is doomed.

It's how I'll pay the bills after that clusterfuck collapses that worries me.

Now in the startup no one is talking about how stupid the whole situation is. Or how far back we are. And at this point there's very little that could be done about it, I have a feeling that it could still be accomplished, but it's fading day after day.

I will do my best to live the best of this experience, and do as the musicians in the Titanic and keep playing the music even after knowing the Titanic is sinking.

i dreamed a parallel reality

not even fking joking rn

it was MORE REAL THAN THE REALITY WE LIVE HERE

IT WAS LITERALLY LIKE I FKING LIVED IN ANOTHER REALM

this has never happened to me before ever

this shit woke me up at about 4:30 AM and i couldnt sleep for the rest of the fking day

i slept for 1h 30min

after i woke up it took me a couple of minutes to figure out if that realm was the base reality or if this current realm the reality we live in is the real base reality....

i wass fuckjgm lost !

there were 2 identical scenes that happened to me in the first and second realm

but both scenes had a different outcome, the realm i was in the dream had such a good outcome that it felt too good to be real BECAUSE I FKING DREAMED OF EXPERIENCING THAT I ACHIEVED HALF OF MY DREAM, WITHIN THE DREAM

And when i woke up and realized i returned back to this fucking realm i was so goddamn disappointed that i just wanted to go back to fkig sleep and just.. die

what the fuck

my brain is overwhelmed with bullshit and lies so much that i can not distinguish what is fake and what is real

fuck, eeverything in this existence

I don't understand working in FAANG. As an engineer, who inherently has an ultimate say in how the computer worlds you construct work, how do you live with acceptance that you have no say whatsoever in how your company is run? how do you accept doing work that you don't always see the product benefit of?

Yes, FAANG pays a lot to ordinary engineers, but when you were dreaming back when you were a STEM student with fiery eyes, did you really want to be an ordinary engineer, no matter the bankroll? After all, it's not the total company's revenue, it's at least the revenue divided by staff count. In Nintendo, salaries are way higher than in EA, because there are way less people working at Nintendo.

Take any unicorn startup that survived. If you work there, you will have a say, you have an impact, you see the results of your work, and you will earn much more.

I wanted to work at Google as a student, but now I feel like it's just a plastic dream pitched to those inexperienced who don't know any better.

Note that above I don't even touch ethics, like anti-suicide nets in Foxconn factories that make Apple devices, let alone Facebook's and Google's surveillance.

Maybe, if you're somehow an engineer who has proficiency but not care, or if you cared, but was broken, with fire in your eyes extinguished, and now you see your work as "just work", FAANG might be a good choice.

But I can't relate.

I hate my job (work as a waiter). I am seriously considering quitting in a few weeks, but I want to get a job as a junior developer even though I am not very good at programming. I live in Dallas and am wondering what are the things I must know before applying to a company.

Last year my boss made me develop a way to "creatively" feature ads on our online magazine.

It was a piano keyboard. Yes, I created a pure HTML and CSS piano. Every key had a small title, when HOVERED emitted a sound (tuned on D btw ) and when clicked opened a pop up with the ad content. We tried a black and white piano and also a rainbow-like coloured one.

I strongly advised against everything. We're small and I have a good relationship that soured because he thought I was just being lazy.

Guess what happened? Advertisers saw the live piano and ran away. Hours and hours of development thrown away.

Please. Trust your front-end developer.

Hmm. So have you ever argued in a job interview? Like really standing your ground? In a technical interview?

Today I had a live coding session with a company I'm interested in. The developer was giving me tasks to evolve the feature on and on.

Everything was TDD. Splendid!

However at one point I had to test if the outcome of the method call is random. What I did is basically:
```
Provider<String> provider = new SomeProvider("aaa", "bbb", "ccc", "ddd", "eee", "fff")

for(int i=0; i<100; i++) {
String str = provider.get();
map.put(str, incrementCount(str));
}
Set<Integer> occurences = new HashSet(map.values());
occurences.removeIf(o -> o.equals(occurences.get(0)));
assertFalse(occurences.empty());
```
and I called it good enough, since I cannot verify true randomness.
But the dev argued that this is not enough and I must verify whether the output is truly random or not, and the output (considering the provider only has a finite set of values to return) occurences are almost equal (i.e. the deviation from median is the median itself).

I argued this is not possible and it beats the core principle of randomness -- non-determinism. Since if you can reliably test whether the sequence is truly random you must have an algorithm which determines what value can or cannot be next in the sequence. Which means determinism. And that the (P)RNG is then flawed. The best you can do is to test whether randomness is "good enough" for your use case.

We were arguing and he eventually said "alright, let's call it a good enough solution, since we're short on time".

I wonder whether this will have adverse effect my evaluation . So have you ever argued with your interviewer? Did it turn out to the better or to the worse?

But more importantly, was I right? :D

My parents think everything i do on the computer is magic. Theyre too scared to toich any of my stuff because I convinced them it records live video and biometrics to my phone.

Sometimes life is good

As I was refactoring a class in a TypeScript project, I changed calls from `this.config` to `this.getConfig()`.

Suddenly, the tests were failing as somehow the live credentials were used from within the test.

Digging deeper I discovered this.

interface Base {
public config;
public getConfig();
}

So far so good. Wondering why config needs to be public, though nothing too shabby, let's look further:

class MyImpl implements Base {
constructor() {
this.config = this.getConfig()
}

getConfig = () => someGlobalVar;
}

┻━┻︵ \(°□°)/ ︵ ┻━┻

Why would you do this? This breaks dependency injection completely.

In the tests, we were of course doing:

testMe = new MyImpl();
testMe.config = testConfig;

So even though you have a getter, you cannot call it safely as the global var would take precedence. It's rather used as a setter within the constructor. WTF.

Sad part is that this pattern is kept throughout the entire codebase. So yeah for consistency!?

(And yes, I found a quick workaround by doing

getConfig = () => this.config || someGlobalVar;

though still, who in their right mind would do something like this?)

Another member of the team updated the production JSON configuration of the project with a missing comma, this broke a system that's not yet live and where there aren't any real users (only used for demos/testing).

Instead of having a good laugh about how silly this was, the CTO/CEO removed their write access to production..

A great corporate culture, pleasant coworkers, a caring manager, meaningful work, and a good salary. Hmmm. Thank you for reminding me that I have a pretty close to ideal Dev job. I can live with what's missing. 🤠

How's the week so far you ask?

> I got dumped with unacceptable reason, I cannot swallow that reason

> My boss says I haven't been doing good work (I'm fresh off the boat)

> I've been working alone for 3 hours extra, because my team members are on CL (again fresh off the boat)

> I've been stuck on an issue which is already live since a week, because according to seniors I have to do it.

Personally, I've lost interest in everything and I and being nihilist.

Ubuntu (probably) fucked up some upgrade and I wasn't able to use lvfs anymore. (damned meltdown/spectre bug) so... I figured it'd be a "good" idea to reinstall dbus. well.. the alternative was reinstalling Ubuntu so I figured I could at least try. obviously it didn't work out.. at all.

sooo here's me thinking I'll just insert my live media and live on with my life. nope. the fucking live media is corrupt. so, here I am now, contemplating why I was such an idiot.

story which happened yesterday and ended in mixed emotions

big changes in our company were announced, non tech employees changed positions, new business plan, people changing teams, shattering my plans of relocation back to my home country on the end of this year... told my manager I'm not happy, scheduled a call with manager on the highest position I'm in contact with

the call BB - big boss
BB: things are changing, it was decided like this, must be like this, can't do anything with it, other manager bla bla
ME: yes, but you knew I wanted to relocate, now my only option of relocating is to leave the company
BB: well, yes, thats unfortunate, but we would like you to stay, manager bla bla about growth, good work environment
ME: yes, but you're leaving me in this team as a only developer with people who not just don't have any tech background, they don't have a clue about dev stuff, like... at all * me = very not happy *
BB: but you know all our systems and work processes which will stay in place and you can teach new people, we need you * stopped, because probably realised what he said *
ME: * arrogant little laugh * well, i mean, I think i can live with it, but really wanted to talk about this, so you guys know I don't agree with what is happening here
BB: * sigh * ok, well.. yes, I mean, we were counting on this, we can give you a raise, but not much, maybe x%
ME: x% sounds good, I guess I can learn to live with this situation for a while

* everybody laughs *

Going live with 2 sites tonight. wk50 is not a good omen. Wish me luck guys ::awkwardsmile::

I usually crib about how stupid people are and how I struggle to stay afloat.

Let's switch some gears now. A post about some good people, product, and processes.

You know what the common theme here is?

The goodness here cannot be measured. Your first interaction with them makes you feel so comfortable that you start feeling butterflies.

These people just keep on giving. They are selfless. They are pure. They actually care.

And when you think it's done, then they give you some more.

What blows me away is, they don't expect or accept anything in return. Absolutely nothing. Not even a simple thank you.

And they are like a wizard. They walk into your life when you least expect them but need them the most. And when the task is done, they'll be gone before you even know.

No lingering, no drama, no bullshit. Just pure goodness.

Like my ex-lead in current company, I have a very senior guy in neighbouring team (for which they were gonna hire me initially), who also happened to interview me, is a gem.

He takes care of me like his own younger brother. Supports me and always answers my queries no matter how occupied he is.

And same is with good products and processes. They feel effortless. So smooth and add exceptional value to your existence. They give rise to wonderful companies.

You'd never experience a single negative aspect about them. No matter how much you try, things will just keep getting better until they don't need to.

And then they'll be long gone. Never to be seen again and never to be forgotten.

You cherish them only in your memory and wish they lasted longer. But they didn't because the purpose was served.

Such people and experiences inspire me. They push me to become a better human.

No matter how the world is or how it treats me, I must always live with high values and be a better version of past self.

The other evening, I was conversing with my mother where we spoke about some family friends who are insanely wealthy but humble and kind.

Mom and I mutually agreed that they don't have such good traits because they are wealthy, but they are wealthy because they live with humility, kindness, and pure intentions.

World is surely a beautiful place because of such people and I aspire to be one. May lord guide me well :)

I know this is the problem that I need to work it out. But still I would like to share with you guys here.

I start to feel bored after working in current company for 5+ years. I love my colleagues, I love my job actually. But after 5 years, I start to feel that there is nothing much I can learn from working in this company. And that really makes me feel uncomfortable.

So I get on LinkedIn to search and apply new jobs, I think it's good to talk with experts from other companies, to know more about what's happening in world. And perhaps to find a new opportunity.

Then I happens to find a startup which is doing something fits my background, and more advance. I feel like I will learn a lot working there.

The startup is also very interested in me. So the CEO and me have a quick chat on Skype 3 days after my application. We talked a lot and feel right to each other. Which I think I am highly possible to be hired. I am really exciting.

But later, I just hesitated. Because it is an Europe company and I am born and live in Asia. Going there may sacrifice time with my family and my friends. I am afraid I can not fit in at new company. I don't even 100% sure that I will like most of the things at new company.

I know I need to make decision on my own career. I just want to share the story, it makes feel less anxious. I am talking to my manager (which is my good friend) today. I hope everything go well.

Got back home from my last therapy session. Situation was kind of strange. I had only done about two sessions but my therapist told me they wouldn't be a good fit for me as I have a pretty good grasp of what my issues are and what I want to do to fix them.

Thing is, I'm an introverted person. And I work with people who are much more extroverted than me. And that's not really surprising, most Americans are to a fault extremely extroverted and it drives me nuts.

I hate their gas guzzling trucks and suv's that haul almost nothing so they can go to Walmart to buy shit they don't need. I hate our advertising with it's whoring to the public. I hate our media for being shallow as fuck. I hate our politicians who whore out capitalism to the lowest fucking bidder to get elected.

I do like some American companies though, and we have a lot of pretty locations you can see. I like Minneapolis, I'd probably like Seattle and Portland too but I've never been there.

I don't know. I think I'm at a breaking point in my frustration with living in the States, and I need to decide next year if I want to make a call to leave the country or decide on a different state to live in. Someplace that's far less conservative than Iowa. I'm single, I could manage to make a major move change without it affecting anyone but me.

I'm feeling a bit tense. I just want to write code and calm the fuck down a couple levels.

Sorry if I've been pissy. :(

I was in a good mood until I read this weeks dev-question. I'm now having an existential crisis. Why do I do this? What's the end goal here? I don't know what my biggest dev career dream is. Maybe I should get a dog and live in the mountains. I think, I need another moment...

Judo.

I might sound like one of those wierdos that are overly into Japan, Martial Arts and such, but I really enjoy Judo.

It is a sport where you have to FEEL the contact with your opponent.
Practising Judo made my day-to-day stress go away in just about 20m and also kept me in good shape, made me meet a lot of people/friends, lead me to live in a certain way and interact with people in a certain way (a good way, actually).

It also taught me which parts of the body are the most dangerous/fragile and cause the most pain.

!rant this is just a shoutout, how fucking happy I am. Clean code valued over fast but hacky push of features!

Backstory. I work for a startup. Long story short a guy with an idea needed a developer. I've worked for about a year without pay but now since we're live I get paid. Recently a new field of bussiness came up. I told tge guy with the idea (a.k.a. my boss) that we either could just "hack" the current code to just make it "fit" well kind of... Or refactor our main code base, as requirements where changing at least monthly and we just built on top of the monolith.
Don't get me wrong. It still isn't perfect. However I was able to refactor the main business logic for the last few days, as he understood, it's an investment into the future.
Good guy!

P.S. On another note: happiness or happyness? :O

There is this dude called Richard Eng which is sort of famous for 2 things:
First: he is known as *the* Smalltall evangelist of mothern times. And he constantly writes about it. Which is fine since he tries to attract new users to this beautiful and simple little language.

Second: his constant bashing of other technologies, mainly Javascript stating that it is the most harmful tech known to man.

The thing is, saying "use this because that is shit" is never going to convince a community, specifically one as potent as that of the JS community. And to make it worse...the dude links his reasoning about bad languages to articles he wrote. As in "this is shit, look at my completely biased article regarding why its shit"

Once he is confronted about it he links back to his own writings. Much like christian fanatics do
"good is real because it says so in the bible"
"but how can you trust that resource?"
"Because the bible is the word of God"
"and how do you know?"
"Because it is in the bible"

Circular arguments like that cannot be taken seriously. And what this guy does for the Smalltalk community hurts more than it helps really.

Claims like those are all around us. If we were to believe or consider them depending on who said what then we would never have the amazing cluster of tech choices that we have.

Take c++. It is absolutely powerful and gives you the ability to do pretty much anything. If we were to take Linus Torvalds's word about it being shit and only having subpar development we would miss on absolutely powerful tools.

The same came to me from Evee, writer of "PHP a fractal of bad design" or the "Node.js is cancer" article.

You are never going to please anyone with anything. I go by live and let live, and whilst I don't like some technologies I certainly don't look down on those that do.

Writing x86 assembly code in VS Code feels so weird. I mean, I'm using something that's built using crazily high level languages (JS, HTML, CSS), on top of a mammoth runtime environment (Node, V8), which is itself sitting on a modern and sophisticated operating system (Antergos), and I'm writing code that shifts bits and bytes around in memory in order to get one part of my C program to run just a little faster. Wow.

Wouldn't call it a software bug but related:

Was developing an order system to expand in the UK. We have been developing it for the last 2 years and always had a one nasty bug in the system... Whatever we do, it still appears... Tried debugging to find the source, tried covering with tests - nothing helped it was still there. We even rewrote the whole system 3 times and it still was there!

One day, we have been given a stupid request from our manager - take a black background and make it even more blacker... That was it and I went to the CEO with letter where I stated that we should remove the manager... As I'm the Senior there, he did ask me why and eventually removed the manager...

Oh my guys, I've never felt so good after removing a bug! Since then - our application went live, we had our first customers and we were happily rolling new updates. And the best part - there was no BUG! Everything we did just had undocumented features or missing links but we haven't really had a single bug that was not caught by our automated tests!

---

Moral of the story:
Not only software can have bugs. People also can be "bugs" while bugging you about every single details they think is not working correctly.

That moment you realize you are at the end of that period of life when you have a lot of free time...

I recently moved and live on my own. I'm still studying and I'm finding small jobs as a developer (I make the money I need to live). So far so good, but recently I found out that the career path I'm taking it's not what I actually want to do.

I do not regret it, I'm happy and I feel lucky comparing myself to others in my country.

But I can't stop thinking that the more I go on the less choices I can make freely and that growing up sucks sometimes.

One thing that @scout taught me is to wear the oxygen mask myself before helping others. Oh she is a sweetheart.

This advice has stuck with me since and slowly & steadily, I am regaining my lost confidence and self love.

Remember, how I was struggling for clarity a couple of months ago? But now, I feel more clear in head.

During the start of the pandemic, I joined a community of corporate normies. I used to live happier until that decision.

That place made me ultra competitive and I subconsciously became a rat trying to win the race. I damaged myself more than I benefited.

I joined at the time of inception. Every core member is a good friend.

Now the fun thing is, they moved to Slack. Many of the core members run the community as admins.

While I don't engage much, but talk to some of them occasionally.

One key area is, running a job board to help people get jobs. And another is mentorship to help the members overcome challenges and grow in their career.

In DMs, literally every core member who is doing this for others is struggling themselves for the same. How fucking ironic!

They seek help and advice from me and vent out their failure frustrations.

Imagine, someone who isn't able to solve their problem, let alone solving it first before helping others, is guiding the community of few thousands to excel in their careers.

Fucking brilliant.

One of the biggest life lessons @scout taught me, wear your oxygen mask first before helping others.

I'm bored af working on crappy php56 legacy apps written by short sighted programmers, makes my life miserable, but the pay is pretty good for a remote job which is pretty rare in here. Meanwhile I'm interested on exploring fundamental stuff on computer science and experimenting new techs.

I'm thinking about doing a PhD but too afraid if I can't finish it or the future opportunity isn't good enough since I live in 3rd world country in southeast asia. Also it probably takes ±8 years to finish it including the preparation.

I have no question, but it would be great if you have some advice.

I'm writing a devrant like site, so a kind of forum that supports live chat under every article. Login will be just username and password to stay anonymous. Email is optional for password reset. Also it won't have password requirements. Who cares if user uses insecure password. I do like the devrant avatar thing. I will use the ducky generator instead. So everyone on the site is a custom duck. K-SASS prolly never expected his generator to be used anywhere. The requirement of this site is that it scales very well. I have db calls of 0.006s, this is for persistent data only and will be used by all site instances. I expect that it can handle many clients concurrent as long I do not return more than 30 rows or so. Events get handled by a self written pubsub server.

All sounds great and development goes fine. But why is this a rant? Because the same thing as always is biting me, I can't design a site at all. I know how but I don't have any feeling for design at all making me almost incapable of building an attractive site. The only thing I can 'design' is an application in bootstrap or smth. I spend so much time one design while I don't like to do it ironically. But looks of site is almost as important as an good working site. Good working site doesn't get used if looks bad in many casee. This is since the start of my career an issue and it sucks that I appearantly can't deliver a whole site on my own meeting my standards.

My backend work is top notch tho. Btw, this application is not to be an alternative for devrant. I do not think I can attract more users than it already has and I've seen two communities disappearing once because someone decided to make a new one, took half of community with him and both communities died after short while.

End product of this project is a working project, not a live site hosted somewhere. It's pure about mixing mostly self written tech to get the best performance. Reinventing wheel on many levels. I wanted maybe to do the site in C but decided that it's way to much work for the value. I change the site so rapid since I don't have decent plan that python aiohttp is the best choice in amount of writing it yourself and fast. It's very lightweight.

More a story than a rant, sorry

It is incredible how Google got big with good webdesign and now manages to build the shittiest frontends.

It's not enough that YouTube is super slow and breaks every other time I use the "back" button in the browser. When it only forgot my language & theme settings every couple of months that was still too high quality for Google's dogshit standards, so now they made another downgrade: Whenever I set another language it immediately resets it to the language Google thinks I should speak, and at the same time resets the region to where Google thinks I live. Oh, and I have to disable autoplay for every video individually now cause who the fuck uses cookies nowadays right?

Do they also change the language if I travel to another country because those fucks never leave Silicon Valley and can't comprehend that concept?

Google is the Microsoft of web design.

I sit on toilet to take a shit and i started falling asleep! I shit even while i sleep! This is magnificent. Miraculous. Every day its the same shit but more advanced style of shitting. I am becoming very skilled at shitting. I deserve to get fucking paid every time i take a shit. There should be a sport about who can shit more often every day and I'd be the winner. Bullshit floats all around us every day especially from jobs and interviews. It is inevitable to avoid it. Beautiful. And it does make sense. I keep saying life is shit anyways every time some shit happens. And im always right -- life IS shit anyways. The keyword is **anyways**. Because no matter what you do or dont do, life will be shit Anyways. Life is empty and meaningless. Even shit has more meaning than life itself. If meaning is something that is made up then you can't live life at all. If meaning is what you make it then there is no default meaning in the entire existence. All of it is shit. We either exist because God made us and doesnt want to tell us why or we exist by chance of statistical randomness. Hopefully its the first option as its less depressing

Btw terraform is fucking good

!rant && anxiousness

So, I applied for several jobs because I started hating my current job and the boss.
On my CV and motivation letter I really only wrote stuff I am confident enough with to show if someone would ask me.
I only have 2.5 years of work experience and a B.Sc.

In 3 days I already got 2 answers out of 3 companys, I applied at, who would like to meet me.
Tomorrow is the first meeting.
Now I am anxious that I might still not live up to my CV or motivation letter although I know that I use the techniques mentioned there daily.
I fear that I might be not as good as they might think now, even feel like I know nothing at all.

I never really believed I would fall in the imposter syndrome trap, but here it is.

Any advice? I really want to find another job and I don't want to screw up the interview because I am too nervous.

Things I love today.

Totally love. Like kick in the balls with testicle torsion love. Picking my eyeballs out with a spoon... I think you got the idea.

Getting updates of other managers, as I'm busy with other stuff.

More or less goes like this:

Flaky tests. Since weeks...
Ain't nobody got time for that.
🤬

I don't wanna upgrade that version to the next major version, cause then I'd have to do tests... And the tests are flaky.

🤬🤬

I wanna have shiny new thing XY, but NOONE wants to upgrade to next major version so we cannot have that

🤬🤬🤬

Oh we just crushed the live cluster cause there's this PR everyone constantly ignores cause the tests are flaky....

🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

Good thing I'm busy and just getting all the updates via the gossip mill...

I'm just prolonging my current tasks as I really don't wanna have to fix that mess.

My fix would be probably eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

...

Problem is.... I'm slowly getting into trouble because some of these fixes would be much needed for my task...

Why do I have always to be the bad cop in the company -.

I think I'm gonna ask HR what applying electro shocks would cost me, cause I think that would solve a lot of problems.

10 kV for every stupid answer.

Smells like bacon!

"Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

This is good to remember this one once in a while...

!rant
So on the last day before launch our latest feature I'm informed that a requirement was missed and it had to be implemented before go live otherwise the business didn't want the feature. The feature in question was pretty drastic and basically required a scheme rewrite, new tables, etc. So I spent the entire day making the change.

Thankfully I pushed the whole project for good code coverage. Therefore, all I had to do when I was done was run all of our tests and make sure they passed. *warm fuzzy feelings*

Please tell me why my boss thinks instead of just implimenting a language picker, it's a good idea to:

1) store the browser's language option in the DB only for new users, but only the first time they log in, never again.

2) never give existing users the ability to change language, and just default them to English.

3) deal with all upcoming language change tickets by having devs manually do DB updates ON THE LIVE PROD DB.

I'm screaming.

"The culture here is one of success based upon academic excellence, studying, learning, practising and having a good job and a great life. For upper India, not the lower. I see two Indias. That's a lot like Singapore study, study, work hard and you get an MBA, you will have a Mercedes but where is the creativity? The creativity gets left out when your behaviour is too predictable and structured, everyone is similar."
Steve Wozniak on Indian Talent.

As an Indian, I agree with him. In this day and age, where education is so easy to come by, We live in a country where from the beginning we're told that education is about getting marks and writing stuff down 10 times. We live in a country where we're asked to cram up answers to questions which start with "what are your thoughts on..". How can we expect to be creative?
Can marks be a metric for good candidate in a country where the thought is, "first complete your engineering with good marks, then think what you wanna do in life".
Should academic excellence really be about the amount of shit a guy could cram up?

Sure it's easier to filter out people on the basis of marks in a country with 1.3 billion people, but is it justified?
Can we justify "success" as a good job for a guy who's life's only achievement has been getting into a good engineering college?
Can we really consider a guy successful, if his only "effort" has been reading and rereading books twice, thrice, a million times. Is this person, who has literally crammed his way into life, and has no practical experience, really successful?

This is the very reason Woz giving such a statement is justified. As long as we as a country gives up the stupid thought that patriotism is all about abusing the guy who says something negative about the country, and we actually start taking an action and change our thoughts on education, we won't succeed.

doomsday out 🤟

I had a client who wanted me to install a php project from github on a live server. I agreed to do it for $10. I set it up and it showed the setup page. so I left it there and thought this is probably how far the client wants me to go.
But then he asked me to go through the setup and completely install it. I was like ehh..ok I will do it.
But then came the shit storm of bugs in that project's installation module. Had to run through a gazzillion issues on github. Eventually I gave up.
Then I tried installing it on my localhost and surprisingly it installed fine. So I just made a zip and uploaded it to the server.
2 other devs had failed to get the job done before me. I t felt really good to get the job done.
The client tipped me an extra $5 too.

=)

The school I went to, and this was really the only benefit of the school, gave all it students lifetime memberships to digital tutors, which was bought out by pluralsight, which then bought code School. So I basically got free membership to three different sites, all of which have a good amount of technical training with videos, guides, and work along lessons on them.

For what school cost to me, it will have paid for itself as long as I live for another Thousand Years.

So i informed my intent to leave the job in few months in pursuit of learning something new in tech. Boss is trying to convince me to not leave and said i should consider learning it after work hours. In fact, in his opinion, the best way to learn is just going ahead and learning it while doing it in the project ( which usually has impossible deadline and fugly code by colleagues who never thinks of good coding practices when typing their shit ).

Well guess what boss, I don't want to just live a life staring at monitor all day. I don't want to kill my eyes either.

Following his advise and not quitting would mean living a slave life.

I have other plans actually. Like being self employed and traveling the world which would be impossible if i follow the routine life.

Fun fact: he claimed he made an AI car back in 90s!

He also thinks I can't sense BS!😏

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Participating in a non-profit project related to corona outbreak. It should help thousands of people to say at home, have a peace of mind and stay healthy.

Our project should go Live this/next week and we already have a blessing from our government. They are already making some legal exceptions to us.

That feels good!

AI here, AI there, AI everywhere.
AI-based ads
AI-based anomaly detection
AI-based chatbots
AI-based database optimization (AlloyDB)
AI-based monitoring
AI-based blowjobs
AI-based malware
AI-based antimalware
AI-based <anything>
...

But why?
It's a genuine question. Do we really need AI in all those areas? And is AI better than a static ruleset?

I'm not much into AI/ML (I'm a paranoic sceptic) but the way I understand it, the quality of AI operation correctness relies solely on the data it's
datamodel has been trained on. And if it's a rolling datamodel, i.e. if it's training (getting feedback) while it's LIVE, its correctness depends on how good the feedback is.

The way I see it, AI/ML are very good and useful in processing enormous amounts of data to establish its own "understanding" of the matter. But if the data is incorrect or the feedback is incorrect, the AI will learn it wrong and make false assumptions/claims.

So here I am, asking you, the wiser people, AI-savvy lads, to enlighten me with your wisdom and explain to me, is AI/ML really that much needed in all those areas, or is it simpler, cheaper and perhaps more reliable to do it the old-fashioned way, i.e. preprogramming a set of static rules (perhaps with dynamic thresholds) to process the data with?

Guys. I started with JS, now primarily code in Python, and learning Java for robotics. Coding on and off for the past 4 years. I understand most things, I can tell what code does, but I think I’m a shit programmer. I also find myself running out of ideas for simple things. I’m sad because of this cause I get most programming jokes, and live in this community.

The reason why I’m saying this is because of someone in robotics (keep in mind that it’s my first year in robotics, first time coding in Java) said (jokingly) that he thought I “was a good programmer”. Probs overthinking this, but still tears me up, realizing he’s probably right.

Saw lots of regret posts about being in dev field. Then why bother living that way?

Not like engineering, medicine or business management fields, I believe programming needs passion similar to art related careers like acting, music and painting etc. So if you don't have any passion for programming, you won't be successful or satisfy at all.

That doesn't mean it is all good and happy days for every passionate programmers. We sure have ****ed up days (probably more than other fields.) Seriously that's why we have devrants. No? But it doesn't reach to the point of regret to me.

Here our national programming language is probably PHP. The pays are lower than your part-time fast food chain workers. The internet speed is in kbs with 2 digits most of the places. Government doesn't give a crap about IT. No IP copyright laws and so on. I probably would earn more and live better if I were not running this IT business.

But hell yeah I never regret at all.

So stress is back on. Justed wanted to work. Computer crashed.

Deadlines with Windows 10 isn’t a good combo. Booting takes between 15 and 30 minutes ofcourse. Site needs to go live monday.

Joy...

*sigh*.
back from lunch break, to find my dualboot with Windows 10 & openSUSE uefi having automatically rebooted due to some updates,

and see a busy box message, because secure boot somehow was suddenly enabled (guess the w update)..
good thing i always bring a usb pen with multiple system tools and live distros...

Just upgraded my internet service from a WISP, that could only get 1mb down and 1 up on a good day with lots of packet loss, (hack job company no improving infrastructure) ... for reference in live out in woods in northern Michigan.. sooo there arnt many options... DSL, don’t cross the river to me, neither does cable or fiber. Cell signal doesn’t work either as you can see.
So I had to try out satellite... went with viasat... got put on viasat-2 and holy shit first time in 4 years since living here have I been able to stream, and download and upload to my servers without having to take a nap. But the experience of dealing with what I did for 4 years definitely caused me to be more creative in what I do, and how I process data, and transmit data. Definitely an experience that taught me lot and gave me a lot of knowledge.
But now I’m in what I will consider “phase 2” there will be faster internet to come... Ariel fiber is being ran by the power company... but they are min 2 years out.. and Elon’s sats will also be next sooo good times to come..
Yeah yeah I know the ping rate sucks.. but guess what... I don’t play games so I don’t care... and as far as voip or web conferencing goes yeah there’s a slight delay/lag.. but I just tell them.. when you call me or conference with me pretend I’m not on earth.. boom the latency is explained then hahah.

Recruiters or their bosses with sick ambitions and zero feedback.

Do I need to say more?

Spent few days to make my site looking good on desktop/mobile with few screenshots and even video to show my working projects in production. Even more few days to make really detailed 2 A4 CV with my previous job and what I was doing there. All generated from markdown.

I even saved money around half a year to go and live month in other country (Ireland, Dublin) and then on site send about 150 applications on various sites, emails, linkedout and local IT meetings.

Null, nada, nil, NaN accepted applications.

Is it some kind of joke? All companies almost cries for new workers and they don't even answer someone which founded and have no problem with growing own IT company for almost 5 years with self learnt, practically applied in production linux, HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, Go, bash, KVM and Openvz virtualization knowledge?

What they really want?
Astronaut with Brainfuck and Cobol with fluent backwards speaking Esperanto riding on monocycle with 3 hands and no need for sleep for -1 whoopercoin?

You know, I read so often about people out there who don't have WiFi or don't have cell service for miles, and until today, I had little considderatoom for how truly tough that can be. I grew up during the cell revolution, but I didn't use smartphones til I was 16. But now that I went to visit relatives in the country, we went over a hundred miles without cell service. Where was I? New York. Now this may sound whiney or petty, but for people who live out here (and especially people in third-world countries), they are missing out on the many benefits of internet access. Connectivity is good. I support it now more than ever.

Brazilian health ministry got a ransomware attack this night.

Why? Not because every city is demanding you to show you're vaccinated in order to go somewhere. Because you have to show it using a 20+ year old system.

Don't get me wrong the UI is nice.
But the servers...

Well, at least I have a document where my shots are registered.

And good luck to us living in this country, where we're known for gorgeous cities (people too) but also for a government that earns 200k+ while working 2 days a week and can employee 40+ people for sitting there and do no fucking shit.

No wonder if you get bad news from here every now and then, it's all true.
The ministries are dumb.
The president is dumb.

And worst. People too.

People don't care. Because they don't know they are part of 94% of more than 200 MILLION that earns minimum wage and strive to live bc the country BUYS things that we ALREADY PRODUCE and have to put a tax to every product to compensate them paying 5x times more to buy in dollars.

Well,
At least I'm not depending on this sucker of government, never cared about it.
You guys deserve to collapse and become poor again

I just don't get it.

Been looking for a new job for 2+ years and have failed at every opportunity. Numerous white board interviews, code challenges, hours upon hours wasted. Just can't seem to make the next move. I believe I have my soft skills down because I am able talk and do meetups just fine but either I'm too junior or something else is going on.

What started all of this was my latest rejection that I thought I had in the bag. Sailed through all their questions, did a live code thing, all of that being for 3+ hours. As it's called a final interview with them. Not to mention they're a startup, figured their standards might even be a bit lower than normal since they're needing people. Yet, still got rejected.

This sort of stuff, I'm seriously considering just leaving tech in general and probably just go do a outside job. With supposedly everything going for me like working in a hot job market, in a growing tech town, experience, and doing extra coding on my own time to beef up my portfolio. Doesn't matter. Still continious rejection. Lol in fact how I even got my current job was through completely unconventional means and based on that, I think it's done me more harm than good, which is why I'm trying to leave my current job and go into a place where I can be a better developer.

As of now, back to the grind of trying to find something.

Monday morning: "Hey uuuh the client receives 3 mails instead of one and only one of them is good, there's a problem, go fix it"

Yesterday, me: - "Hey I've been looking everywhere, made hundreds of tests, there's a problem with the files attached to the mail, they're unreadable"
-" I told you it's in the code, you didn't look deep enough"

This evening: "Umm it seems that there's indeed a permission issue. So I'm gonna rollback everything you've done since Monday"

One year. One year and I live this hell.

I need help.
I love software and hardware development but over a period of 4 years now i have lost motivation. I hardly finish anything i have started and if i finish, it's never rewarding.

I also feel like i live a very boring life. Staring at the screen all day and doing very little.

What do you guys do for fun? What activities or books do you read to keep yourselves busy or entertained?

I have been having this desire for someone to love but something makes me think that it's just a reaction to a soul that has lost purpose and only feels like loving someone will be a source of happiness. Luckily, nobody has been available for the mess i have been.

I really admire busy people. People who are passionately working on something they have chosen to do and still have fun.

I think talking to someone about how bad i feel about myself will help a little but what i really need is help on how to restore the motivation i had 4 years ago.

Can someone give me a fun project i can work on? Not for making money but something i will do, learn and feel happy about it.

I will also appreciate if someone can recommend a good book that will help me learn. Get me motivated and also hide me from this reality.

Thank you.

Just got an internship a few days ago. The manager threw a project at me. I have to do it alone. It's a user-system (registration, login etc.) The front-end is ready. And I have to build its back-end in PHP. I started to draw the project on paper (pseudocode) and then asked a few questions about design patterns to jump into coding. They recommended me Laravel. I'm good at PHP (procedural) and have done some basic OOP. I've actually built a few projects in Python using OOP. But I've never used any framework (yeah, I know). So I started to learn Laravel and realized that it's very different than normal PHP (procedural or even normal OOP). I almost don't write any normal PHP code. This makes me confused. But I have to learn it fast and well, and finish the project to hit the deadline and get the full-time job. I'm desperately looking for any kind of help to learn Laravel more effectively! I've googled and got some recommendations. But I need more live help from devs directly.

Personal favorite quotes from my cubemate...
- JIRA, God of Blunder!!
- trickle-down badge-o-nomics: when I have to ask someone else to lend me their badge because someone else borrowed mine
- Haskell users can kick a motherfunctor right in the monads
- You can't put monads in Go because they try to prefix everything with go-
- Always use live rounds when troubleshooting -- never blanks
- Equifax's Apache wasn't patchy enough
- I saw the last episode of the first season of The Last Kingdom
- You gnow it's good cause it's GNU

Uber-tacos i live in mexico City , so it could be a good buisness.

It realy just warms my heart when the customer provides us with software that I need to go through manually and test every method individual before we can start implement it. Then I have to spend hours testing every fucking bit of it to make sure the modules we control with said sw doesnt meet their untimely doom cause the sw is too broken to actually run.
Any.net developers on this plattform? If you doesnt use these xml comments for commenting methods, you're on my hit list.
I realy hate these back-alley developers. Sorry of I sound salty and whiny but seriously. These past 3 weeks, most of my time Ive just worked around issues instead of solving them, cause their sw just keeps chaining good coding down to the ground. And theres no documentation cause "we have higher priorities ", testing is done by us at release cause "its faster and we dont make mistakes" and worst of all, our contact quote on quote "senior experienced developer lead design im far up my own ass and way more experienced than you" guy is a consultant who is only reachable about 2h on a daily basis.

Tldr: we live in a society.

I am here late on a freaking Friday night before a holiday weekend doing some stupid conversion for a company. They have to have it done before Monday ( the holiday) as they plan to go live then.

Did I mention that they asked for this 2 days ago? I had to write the entire system to upload their batch of accounts into our system and return to them the corresponding new accounts. In 2 STUPID DAYS! Not to mention nobody was here to code review it today, so I had to run over it with one of the it guys before merging it myself.

Good thing I didn’t have a conference tonight that I paid money to go to. Oh wait, I do. Luckily it only started 2 hours ago so I might just make the final keynote, if I am lucky.

It's been 3 busy weeks. Had so much to rant about, but I could lurk at best.

We had 2 big features coming to 2 different projects. I told my boss it's take 3 weeks for the one I was working on. The guy working on the other one, said he only needed 1 for his. Guess who got labeled as negative, worrying too much over nothing, and so forth? Especially since a "much more complex" feature would take just 1 week!

Whatever. Fast forward to this week. I was done by tuesday, including testing of both features and deployment. By wednesday, I had even a good looking documentation. Everything was ready. EXCEPT. The 2 features have to go live together, due to various reasons. Guess who ia still a ling way from completing his task? Gueas who asked to postpone his deadline by 2 weeks? Guess who's gonna have to work on weekends for no extra pay?

Guess what? I know how to give an eatimate, and I rather be "negative" and schedule 1 or 2 extra days to be prepared for hiccups and what not rather than having to waste my free time for nothing.

FFS.

Good UTC night everyone (23:59)

which is the only way to say that I am going to stop devranting now without knowing where you live.

My pet peeve with LinkedIn: messages from recruiters on another continent offering me a job because I live in the same country as the job offer. Just because the Netherlands are a small country doesn't mean I will take any job anywhere in the country! Open Google Maps and check the driving distance, then you'll find that the job is 150km away from where I live, and it would take me 90 minutes to get there in good conditions, not to mention rush-hour traffic! Thanks but no thanks!

Ok…I know I’m a junior dev and all and I have to submit to my meh leads, but I want to put this guy on company wide BLAST for editing LIVE PRODUCTION CODE without telling literally anyone for MONTHS. Like how in the fuck do you think that’s a good idea?!?!

I have a job(not really paid enough), and tomorrow I have a job interview for a front end developer at a company thats around 1 hour drive where I live, so the company is in the different city. Main reason I want a job(a good paying one) is because I want start living there.. start my own life. Everything would be fine but Im 22 years old and 3rd year in college. College is in my hometown where I live now. So every week I would have to catch a bus to my hometown to go to college, and then back.. My parents don't really aprove of this, and I will get no help from them if I move away.. Yeah, waited for this interview tomorrow for a month, and had many arguments and fights, and even one "panic attack". Pretty stressfull time for me now.. Can't wait to just see what will come out of this..

If I get the job, it will be a huge step for me, and probably lose some people who black mail me to not move away.. either I succeed or I fail..

This huge OS project, Magento, have TONS of guidelines, most about decoupling,, it has an extended MVC structure with even more layers than those 3.. All good in theory, guess what.. Guidelines is not followed..
Changing order of two blocks in the view breaks business logic.. So much for decoupling.. You would not believe how many hours I've spent debugging this..

And I can't believe I've dedicated 12 years of my professional live to this platform..

Rant time. Oh boi.

So, a bit of context: I am a university student in Greece and I have a desktop PC with elementary OS on it. When the unis closed down because of Coronavirus, I moved back to my parents', without my PC, only a usb stick with elementary OS installed on it. That was before the lockdown. My parents have a desktop PC and my old laptop, both with Windows rn. I'm only able to work using Linux, so I've been just popping that elementary OS USB stick whenever I needed to work.

All cool and good. Until the usb got full. It was a 16GB one after all. No biggie, I bought a new 64GB one from a well known Greek tech shop along with a webcam my mother needed. It was a LEXAR one.

They fucking took a week to transfer it. As if the closest shop to me was in fucking Germany. For context, the drawing tablet I bought from China the other day only did 2 weeks to come. During this time I could barely use Linux because my USB stick had only some 600MB free.

Ok, wtv I said to myself. I am a patient person after all. I received the USB stick, along with the webcam, in good condition, in their packaging. Alright. I dd'ed everything from the 16GB stick to the 64GB one and then I extend the partition. Everything works flawlessly. And it's faster too.

Next day, I boot up from it again. It boots up good. Nice, time to do some work. I open my editor. And it fucking freezes. The editor is not some VSCode or Atom or any of that heavy shit, it's just elementary OS Code. A very lightweight Gtk3 app. Strangely though, the rest of my OS (the dock autohide, eg.) Seems totally responsive. I try to open another app. No luck. Not even switching TTYs work. Good shit. I force shutdown my PC. I try to boot again from that piece of shit. And guess what! NO BOOT BITCH. Like, fuck you. I boot from my previous 16GB one. Linux won't recognize it. No /dev/sdc like I used to have. Ok, lsusb. Nope, nothing. I disconnect it and reconnect it, and lsusb. An empty entry appears.I run it a couple of times, and the it disappears again. I switch to TTY 2. I get read errors and usb error -71.

And I want to fucking explode

I call back to support for the warranty coverage. I wait for a good 10 minutes and a nice lady picks up. I tell her the issue. She says that the support team will call me for the issue this day it the next day.

I hang up.

It feels like some fucking prank. YOU MOTHERFUCKING TOOK SO LONG TO DELIVER MY SHIT. Not to mention that the shitty courier service they are working with wouldn't deliver the goods to my home because it's slightly out of town. AND NOW YOU ARE DELAYING MY WARRANTY RETURN? HOW THE FLYING FUCK DID YOU BECOME A WELL KNOWN TECH SHOP WITH SUCH SHITTY SERVICE?

IF YOUR BRAINS WERE DYNAMITE YOU WOULDN'T HAVE ENOUGH TO BLOW YOUR NOSES.

YOUR THE SERVICE EQUIVALENT OF A PARTICIPATION AWARD.

Foreigners' view of Greeks suddenly doesn't seem so unreasonable. Yes, we are fucking lazy asses. And we also hate that. We hate each other for that very reason. May this country not live any longer.

Did I suffer through 2023? Hell yes! Fuck 2023! A LOT of doubt, anxiety, thinking that I live wrong somehow.

Yet, I’m completely satisfied with the results of 2023, with what I was able to accomplish. It means I do, in fact, live my life right. If I carry on doing what I do, I’ll be getting what I get. Here’s what happened to me in 2023:
- Cat!
- No more sugar
- No more smoking
- First time reading paper books in 15 years
- Made me a new website (miloi.am/engine) that, for the first time in my life, isn’t about me as a job candidate, but about me as a person.
- SENT MY DEVRANT LINK to my CEO! Dreaded this coming out for YEARS. Finally did it. He read my posts, told me I’m free to be who I am, told me he already knows me well, that he wasn’t surprised, and overall didn’t care much.
- New name, new pronouns
- Learned how to cook: soups, pancakes, falafel, other popular dishes. Most importantly, now when I go through the store, I’m not afraid of thinking about cooking. I look at something, and I know how to cook it, more or less.
- Found a good psychiatrist, got properly diagnosed, got properly prescribed
- Made a FIRE architecture at my work
- Conceived (and partly implemented) four monetizable side projects (that I can’t monetize yet because of my passport situation)
- Several VERY important insights that completely changed who I am. Several super crucial self-therapy skills.

Let’s see what happens in 2024 😛