Today teaching the product managers what the channel in "selected for development" in Jira means.

Guess what? IT MEANS THE FEATURE IS READY TO BE DEVELOPED ON, NOT SOME HALF-BAKED CROCK POT IDEA WITH A TWO-SENTENCE DESCRIPTION DESCRIBING ABSOLUTELY FUCK ALL!!!

Was reading something about delusional disorder, and it got a bit scary cuz it made me question myself. Now, I tell you why.

I have a bad memory when it comes to trivial stuff. And I am, by occupation and therefore on a daily basis, creative and imaginative. Having pretty strong imagination means that I often have to ask myself "did that really happen or did I imagine it?" Which, given anxiety, I imagine all types of scenarios before they happen. (Parallel universes got nothing on me 😎)

So, now I'm wondering, where is the line between imagination and delusion, and how can you say what's real and what's not, be it offline (distorted memory) or online (schizophrenia).

One idea could be that video recording could help confirm, but we read emotions and vibe in real-time, and often those can't be recorded.

... Idk. Maybe I'm overthinking it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thank you for reading my half-baked thoughts!

So here's a random idea: DDoS defence swarm.

Install the daemon on your server, and every time your server gets DDoS'd, all members of the swarm will mobilise to defend you, but the catch is that your server will have to help other members of the swarm too.

The defensive technique in question can be one of many:

1. Automated IP blocking/reporting with a blacklist in distributed form.
2. Other swarm members counterattack and cooperatively DDoS the offending addresses.
3. Flood the ISP with automated emails to force them to pay attention to the problem.

...or a combination of all of the above.

The only issue I can see with this is abuse potential. A clever person can trick the swarm into DDoSing innocents.

When freelancing, do you charge for estimations?

Situation is that I'm a sole android developer (4 years experience) and each time I encounter some agency or a client I feel like I'm between a rock and hard place.

Some of the clients come with ready with list of requirements and ready backend/design sketch and they want me to give them a rough estimate.

It's as if they expect me to take only 2-3 hours for estimation and that's it. But actually this was the second time where I had to spend around 10 hours investigating everything so I would be able to give a half decent estimation at least.

This particular client's project turned out to be a mess and I had to spend 10+ hours to estimate only 70% of his project. I asked him if he would be able to pay under a reduced tarrif and the client was shocked, started doubting my competence level and so on.

In the end I gave him a rough 400 hours estimate and he started complaining that others estimated only 200 hours for his project. So in the end I just wasted my time.

Now it's my bad that I voluntarely invested too much time in this estimate without notifying client prior that I might ask to pay for estimation, next time I will try to do this ahead of time.

It feels like only big agencies who have free resources have a competetive edge against sole freelancers, it really sucks wasting so much time to estimate half baked requirements and assets. Also most of these clients and agencies are purely lazy and most of the time they don't even plan signing, all they need is someone to estimate their work for them.

I'm thinking of starting to charge for estimations and communications in a form of consultations. Is that a good idea?

Why the fuck would Google promote Jetpack Compose as a stable toolset when it doesn't even support a basic feature such as a scrollbar.
A. Fucking. Scrollbar.
LazyColumn can't even come close to being as powerful as Recyclerview.

Here's an idea, before launching something and touting it as something usable, and encouraging people to drop the old, battle tested tool for the new shiny one, how about you make sure the new doesn't lack features present in the old one?
Seems logical, right?

Methinks somebody was just looking for a promotion because, clearly, Jetpack Compose is a half-baked product.
Now, developers will have to suffer because project managers will read about the new framework and ask devs to use it, then wonder why the app is suffering.