A rare bug appeared. It was my duty to finish it.

SH = Manager

SH: So when do you think you can finish the task?
Me: I still have to analyze the problem. Give me a moment and I'll get back to you.
SH: Alright.

*An hour later*

SH: *Approaches my desk* Have you found the source of the problem?
Me: Not yet. Please give me some more time.
SH: Ok.

*An hour later*

SH: *the approach* You found it yet?
Me: Yes, I've found the the source of the problem, But... *explains the problem and thus concluding that it's a complicated bug*
SH: Can you finish it by tomorrow?
Me: I'll do the best I can but I am not entirely sure if I can finish it by tomorrow.
SH: OK great!

*The next day*

SH: *Le approach* Hey I have a colleague here that may be able to solve the problem, he has skills with XYZ. Ok, I will leave you two at it then. *the leave*
Helper: So can you tell me about the issue here?
Me: *explains the bug and the source of the problem*
Helper: Have you tried solution A?
Me: Yes sir, but it yields a different output... *explains what happened with solution A*
Helper: Well, that won't work. What about solution B?
Me: I've tried that, too. *Another lengthy explanation*
Helper: Welp, ok. I'll get back to you on that.

(...But he never came.)

*A few hours later*

SH: *A.P.P.R.O.A.C.H.* Hey I have this team lead from another department. I think he can help you out on this one. *L.E.A.V.E.*
Helper 2: What seems to be the problem?
Me: *Explains again with all the solutions I tried but failed*
Helper 2: Wow. That really seems to be a complicated problem.
~~
Me (In my head): -_-
~~
Helper 2: Listen, I need to get back to my team. I'll keep you posted if I happen to find a solution for your problem alright?
Me: Alright thanks.

*Towards the end of the day*

SH: *APPROACHHHH* Have you resolved the bug yet?
~~
Me (In my head): You made me spend half the FUCKING day explaining to these people who didn't even give a piece of FUCKING SHIT to contribute to the problem and you are asking me if I am done with this FUCKING BUG? FUCK YOU, YOU SON OF A -
~~
Me: No, it is not finished yet..
SH: You have to finish this because we don't have tomorrow.
~~
Me (In my head): SHDIFHWISGSIFGSISBAUDBEIQBDIWGFIEBWIDHWIQBDOSBCISBDOSHDIAGSUSVDIFBDKDJWIQKDBDIDGSUWVDIABDIXBSIDBDIDBWUWGUSVDUWVDJQBDUDVWISHDUWVFG
~~

I went home for the day.

I’m a senior dev at a small company that does some consulting. This past October, some really heavy personal situation came up and my job suffered for it. I raised the flag and was very open with my boss about it and both him and my team of 3 understood and were pretty cool with me taking on a smaller load of work while I moved on with some stuff in my life. For a week.

    Right after that, I got sent to a client. “One month only, we just want some presence there since it’s such a big client” alright, I guess I can do that. “You’ll be in charge of a team of a few people and help them technically.” Sounds good, I like leading!

    So I get here. Let’s talk technical first: from being in a small but interesting project using Xamarin, I’m now looking at Visual Basic code, using Visual Studio 2010. Windows fucking Forms.

    The project was made by a single dev for this huge company. She did what she could but as the requirements grew this thing became a behemoth of spaghetti code and User Controls. The other two guys working on the project have been here for a few months and they have very basic experience at the job anyways. The woman that worked on the project for 5 years is now leaving because she can’t take it anymore.

    And that’s not the worse of it. It took from October to December for me to get a machine. I literally spent two months reading on my cellphone and just going over my shitty personal situation for 8 hours a day. I complained to everyone I could and nothing really worked.

    Then I got a PC! But wait… no domain user. Queue an extra month in which I could see the Windows 7 (yep) log in screen and nothing else. Then, finally! A domain user! I can log in! Just wait 2 extra weeks for us to give your user access to the subversion rep and you’re good to go!

    While all of this went on, I didn’t get an access card until a week ago. Every day I had to walk to the reception desk, show my ID and request they call my boss so he could grant me access. 5 months of this, both at the start of the day and after lunch. There was one day in particular, between two holidays, in which no one that could grant me access was at the office. I literally stood there until 11am in which I called my company and told them I was going home.

    Now I’ve been actually working for a while, mostly fixing stuff that works like crap and trying to implement functions that should have been finished but aren’t even started. Did I mention this App is in production and being used by the people here? Because it is. Imagine if you will the amount of problems that an application that’s connecting to the production DB can create when it doesn’t even validate if the field should receive numeric values only. Did I mention the DB itself is also a complete mess? Because it is. There’s an “INDEXES” tables in which, I shit you not, the IDs of every other table is stored. There are no Identity fields anywhere, and instead every insert has to go to this INDEXES table, check the last ID of the table we’re working on, then create a new registry in order to give you your new ID. It’s insane.

   

    And, to boot, the new order from above is: We want to split this app in two. You guys will stick with the maintenance of half of it, some other dudes with the other. Still both targeting the same DB and using the same starting point, but each only working on the module that we want them to work in. PostmodernJerk, it’s your job now to prepare the app so that this can work. How? We dunno. Why? Fuck if we care. Kill you? You don’t deserve the swift release of death.

    Also I’m starting to get a bit tired of comments that go  ‘THIS DOESN’T WORK and ‘I DON’T KNOW WHY WE DO THIS BUT IT HELPS and my personal favorite  ‘??????????????????????

CEO "If you make costs to build a home office for covid, please be aware that you can fully declare your bills, and you'll retain ownership over the ordered goods. Please all buy some good desk chairs and keyboards, so you can work ergonomically"

6 months later, CFO: "Bittersweet, why did you try to declare €35000? What are these invoices even? Concrete rebar?"

Me: "CEO told us to build a home office. I got permits from the town to dig a souterrain layer under my house. This is just for the foundation, the bills for drainage pumps, sheetpiling, geothermal heat exchangers, insulation, flooring, electricity and of course desk & chair will follow later"

CFO: 😳

(To be fair, I really did make those costs, but was just trolling by uploading all the material bills)

6pm - arrive home from work, log into my computer and start working on side projects.

4am - Finally go to sleep after staying up all night setting up arch in a vm.

7am - Start drive to work in the snow and ice.

7:20am - car runs out of wiper fluid.

7:30am - round corner so that I’m driving towards the sun, windshield is covered in mud and I have 2% visibility.

7:35am - take off ramp towards gas station so I can buy fluid and wash window.

7:36am - Car mysteriously parked in center of off ramp, nearly smash it but have a narrow miss.

7:40am - can’t find the freaking pully in new car to pop hood

7:41am - found it.

7:50am - drove the back way to work because it cuts out traffic, but includes many steep hills that I forgot existed, come to a skid at bottom of one and am pushed out into the main road, luckily nobody is coming and I’m able to continue on my merry way.

8:01am - sit down in desk, lead staff person comes over evoking Lumbergh from Office Space and lets me know I need to be on time to work and that the snow doesn’t give me an excuse. I agree and smile and suck up and he leaves.

8:02am - pull out phone to write down notes about personal project that I thought of on drive here, phone dies. I forgot to plug it in last night.

8:04am - found power bank charger thing in desk but it uses a micro-b type usb and I only have usb type c on me.

8:10am - borrow usb from old headset in office surplus.

8:11am - writing notes. Have sudden realization that I didn’t shut down my vm and that when my computer went to sleep and subsequently locked it probably halted virtualbox and everything would be lost for the second time.

8:12am - got on devRant.

I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.

Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.

Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.

Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.

I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.

(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)

Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.

If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.

It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.

I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.

Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!

To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.

They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.

When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.

Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.

In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.

Most awkward moment of my life happened 10 mins ago.

I really enjoy playing a sad trombone sound when someone says something stupid. I even have a widget on my phone's home screen so that I can play it almost instantly.

It's actually very funny when I use it with friends.

So, today I walk in the office during a rather heated argument between my boss and a sales lady who has been in the company forever.

I sit on my desk and pull out my phone to connect it to the charger since it was getting a bit low.

As the boss completes his phrase and there is that half second silence before the other person starts speaking I accidentally pressed the trombone button, playing the sound at full volume for a full 2-3 seconds that, needless to say, felt like an eternity.

Don't think I'm getting fired but God it was awkward.

*deep breath*

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

*deep breath*

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please help,
Sincerely,
My sanity

This isn't really a hacking story but it does remind me of something I did as "revenge."

In middle school, this one fool kept bullying me. Always tried to harm me, always tried to insult me, always tried to make me fall during PE.

I hated him a lot, so instead of trying to kill him as planned, I did a harmless little keylogger prank thing.

I installed a keylogger on the school's laptop before class. (I did it during break, and when class started, I placed it on his desk.)

He took the bait, and instead of doing work, he logged onto his social media accounts. Now I had his passwords and everything.

When I went home, I logged onto his social media. I checked his messages so I can get some dirt on him, didn't find much except for the fact he snuck out a few times, and smoked before.

I changed his profile picture to some cringy anime thing and messaged one of his friends (the one who always copied my test answers in History and would steal my homework) and I said, "tell --- that if he doesn't stop being an asshole, I'll do worse than "hack" his social media."

It freaked them both out a bit, but didn't change their behavior, which is a shame because my threat was empty. It's not like I was able to do anything more than that in middle school. To this day, they still have no idea who did that.

This was about 4 years ago.

TLDR; funny revenge prank from my manager

So yesterday (April 2) I decided to prank my manager about me resigning (I've been working with them for 4 years) I wrote a legit looking resignation letter. (No signature) and at the back page it has a small font "April fools".

I asked my junior to help putting it on my managers desk since I was working from home. When my manager saw it he immediately had a meeting with my technical lead. he didnt notice the april fools at the back so I sent him a short email to look at the back and he laughed.

Come today, I recieved an email from our it team with the subject "POST RESIGNATION PROCEDURES FOR JUNNERS". It has some legit looking contents as well as a hyperlInk for a resignation checklist.

It felt like im having a mini heart attack since I thought it was legit. When I opened the hyperlink I was shocked.

I love my job 😂

My current desk setup.

I have a telephone headset with a "confusing" mute button. Sometimes it works normally, but quite often it will "double-toggle" (toggle twice as though I pressed it twice, which essentially has no effect) - so I'm either left muted or left un-muted, the same as before I pressed the button at all - so I have to press it again, sometimes several times, for it to actuary work.

While I'm at my desk, I have a visual indicator of mute status (a light that turns green for un-muted or red for muted), so I can easily tell if my mic is hot or not. My old headset had a nice audible beep reminder if I was muted, but the new headset? Nope, not-so-much.

I work from home, while my wife works at an office; so each morning she leaves, but I stay in the home office. I almost always see her off one way or another, usually doing or saying something funny as she heads out.

So, one day, I'm on a large conference call with a number of cross-team managers, and my wife is about to head out the door. With the meeting droning on in my headset, I was in the kitchen with her for a while helping finish clean up after breakfast and getting her ready to go.

She needed to pack an ice-pack for some reason, and for the random humor of it, I start screaming something to the effect of "GIMMIE YO ICE PACKS - GIMMIE ALLLL YO ICE PACKS - YEAH! YEAH! IMMA PUT MY BAAAAAAAAALLLLLS ON IT - WHOOOOOOOOO!"

During which time I am jumping around like a crazy person, including actually grabbing one of the ice packs, putting it down the front of my pants and screaming. Loudly.

It was after my own screaming I overheard more than one person yelling on the bridge line "YOU'RE NOT MUTED! YOU'RE NOT MUTED!"

I have seldom felt such raw, unadulterated panic.

I rushed back to my home office - yes, the green light is on my desk - my mic is hot. When I pressed mute at some point earlier in the call, it double-toggled, leaving me un-muted, and I never knew.

Even more embarrassing was the chat session I saw on my computer screen. It was from my manager (one of the managers on the call) - he had pinged me several times while I was in the kitchen.

It read something like:

hey, you there?
is that your phone
I think your phone isn't muted
mute
dude, mute
is that you?
MUTE!
did you just say balls?

I don't even have a desk at home, I just put my laptop anywhere I feel. And sometimes I just want to be by the fire ^^

This is Spork. Spork lives on the desk in my apartment.

My girlfriend bought the plant for her office but he wasn't getting enough light there so now he has a better home on my desk and gets lots of sunlight during the day.

A while back I had a coworker who was just strange. I took a personal day one day, and came back to find my monitor (that I had brought from home) was gone. I was asking the people who worked around me where it went and after no one knew, I found it on someone else's desk. When I explained to him how I had brought it from home he denied he took it from my desk and continued that it was HIS from home! Turns out he had been taking other people's equipment around the office as well. He would rearrange furniture and even take down other people's personal decorations. He was eventually let go...

I think I’m a bit unusual in that my favorite place to code is on the couch, just using my laptop. During the work day I use two monitors, but I find it more comfortable to just use a lap desk and laptop when I get home/on weekends. I’m not sure if it’s from laziness or whatever, but it seems to work.

I've had many, but this is one of my favorite "OK, I'm getting fired for this" moments.

A new team in charge of source control and development standards came up with a 20 page work-instruction document for the new TFS source control structure.
The source control kingpin came from semi-large military contract company where taking a piss was probably outlined somewhere.

Maybe twice, I merged down from a release branch when I should have merged down from a dev branch, which "messed up" the flow of code that one team was working on.
Each time I was 'coached' and reminded on page 13, paragraph 5, sub-section C ... "When merging down from release, you must verify no other teams are working
on branches...blah blah blah..and if they have pending changes, use a shelfset and document the changes using Document A234-B..."

A fellow dev overheard the kingpin and the department manager in the breakroom saying if I messed up TFS one more time, I was gone.

Wasn't two days later I needed to merge up some new files to Main, and 'something' happened in TFS and a couple of files didn't get merged up. No errors, nothing.
Another team was waiting on me, so I simply added the files directly into Main. Unknown to me, the kingpin had a specific alert in TFS to notify him when someone added
files directly into Main, and I get a visit.

KP: "Did you add a couple of files directly into Main?"
Me:"Yes, I don't what happened, but the files never made it from my branch, to dev, to the review shelfset, and then to Main. I never got an error, but since
they were new files and adding a new feature, they never broke a build. Adding the files directly allowed the Web team to finish their project and deploy the
site this morning."
KP: "That is in direct violation of the standard. Didn't you read the documentation?"
Me: "Uh...well...um..yes, but that is an oddly specific case. I didn't think I hurt any.."
KP: "Ha ha...hurt? That's why we have standards. The document clearly states on page 18, paragraph 9, no files may ever be created in Main."
Me: "Really? I don't remember reading that."
<I navigate to the document, page 18, paragraph 9>
Me: "Um...no, it doesn't say that. The document only talks about merging process from a lower branch to Main."
KP: "Exactly. It is forbidden to create files directly in Main."
Me: "No, doesn't say that anywhere."
KP: "That is the spirit of the document. You violated the spirit of what we're trying to accomplish here."
Me: "You gotta be fracking kidding me."

KP grumbles something, goes back to his desk. Maybe a minute later he leaves the IS office, and the department manager leaves his office.

It was after 5:00PM, they never came back, so I headed home worried if I had a job in the morning.

I decided to come in a little early to snoop around, I knew where HR kept their terminated employee documents, and my badge wouldn't let me in the building.

Oh crap.

It was a shift change, so was able to walk in with the warehouse workers in another part of the building (many knew me, so nothing seemed that odd), and to my desk.

I tried to log into my computer...account locked. Oh crap..this was it. I'm done. I fill my computer backpack with as much personal items as I could, and started down the hallway when I meet one of our FS accountants.

L: "Hey, did your card let you in the building this morning? Mine didn't work. I had to walk around to the warehouse entrance and my computer account is locked. None of us can get into the system."

*whew!* is an understatement. Found out later the user account server crashed, which locked out everybody.

Never found out what kingpin and the dev manager left to talk about, but I at least still had a job.

I was thinking today about a certain aspect of running a software startup and then it came to me...

Hank Scorpio, from the Simpsons, was right in his approach.

So many time I have seen people get hired only for the company to get a less-than-optimal performance from them.

But why is this? Of course, it is many factors but one of the major ones is...

Employers seem to lump employees in together and assume that since most developers operate in one way that the new devs should be the same way.

The problem with this seems to be that we are all pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Let's face it, most devs (like most people) are not good, and almost everyone is not living up to their potential because of a lack of understanding of themselves and how they can achieve more.

On top of that, most devs are just employees who will do what you tell them to.

Since those above developers are the norm (Reference Seinfeld "95% of people are undatable") we have to assume that there is a 5% who are exceptional.

The difference between the 5% and the 95% is NOT some built-in superiority but that the 5% has a good idea themselves and an understanding of how to get the most out of them. They set goals and then find the right path to achieve them. They don't coast.

By assuming these developers are the same as the others is REALLY hampering their potential and by doing this the company only hurts itself.

So, that's a lot of talking but what actionable things can be taken away from this?

Hank asks Homer "What is your dream?"

Well, employeers should take the time to identify which of these developers are in the 5%. A problem arises though when the 5% decide it is in their best interest to blend in.

Like when home says his dream is to "Work for you?" Hank shuts him down and wants to get to the truth. He makes Homer comfortable with not only vocalizing but achieving his dreams.

When an employer is looking for their types they should be looking for the following...

1. A real genuine desire to achieve
2. A real plan to get their goals done
3. Critical thinking and self-evaluation

But more importantly, when they identify these types they should be asking questions like...
- How can we help you be more productive?
- Is there anything about our current operating norm that is hindering you?
- How does your productivity workflow look?

3 difficulties arise though…

1. Most hiring managers are incompetent, and quite frankly, everyone thinks they are in the 5% and for those managers who delude themselves into this without putting in the work, they will have an impossible time actually identifying those who are actually good and productive employees.
2. Showing special treatment to these folks may upset the people below.
3. You will hear things you don’t like…

Examples include…

- That new fancy open-office that you got because it was the trendy thing to do, you might hear that this is a huge hinderance.
- These days people seem to treat devs like nomads, “just give him a laptop and a table and he is fine”!. You may hear that this is complete BS. Real achievers may want a dedicated desk with multiple monitors, a desk with drawers etc.
- This WILL cost you money. I know of developers who cannot work without a dedicated whiteboard. Buy them whatever they need.
- They may want BOTH a standing desk and a chair to sit on.
- Etc.

The point is that it seems to me to be a foolish strategy to tailor your entire company to force everyone into the same work habits. Really good employees have the self-awareness to develop their own productive practices and any keeping of them inside a box will NOT help.

This is my first post on devRant!
Story time:
It was on my first job as a developer, learning a lot but getting paid less than 50% of the minimum monthly wage of my country.
It was settled in the interview that as I gained more experience, I could handle more projects and earn more money.
At the time, I was living with my parents and didn't have to pay rent and some stuff, so I was like "Well, I'm gonna learn a lot and, if I put a lot of effort into it, soon I'll be making more money".
We agreed that I'll only develop, but 4 months into the job, I was already going to clients
and started coding there (having the client on my back every minute, not being able to work properly) and fixing some computer/network issues they had,
because my boss said I should do it.
Things at home started to go south, and suddenly I needed more money, so I kept doing the work and getting paid a little bit more
A year goes by, devs came and go beacuse of the work/payment situation, and I was still there.
From my first "paycheck" to the last day I never got paid on time, and that was the same for everybody else
The last month I was there, I had a job offer with a better salary and weekends free, so I wanted to take it (I worked saturdays there).
We were working at our biggest clients place at the time (a hospital, working in the server room, desk and chair were a total crap),
so I wanted to have a good conversation with my boss and tell him whats up, after all, I was really grateful for the job despite all things.
We headed outside and started talking. He basically begged me to stay, said that he will pay me on time and offered me more money (less than the other company was offering me),
and that he needed me to finish the implementation and "minor issues" with the app.
I thought about it for a couple of days, and decided to stay. I politely rejected the job offer, and even recommended someone else.
As the days passed, regret was building fast inside of me, until the day that I was supposed to get paid.
He never showed up to the client, told me in a call that he will be there sometime in the morning, that he had the money for me.
So I stayed until my day ended, and still no sign of him. I had no money on me, needed some for gas so I could go, and I called him 5 times.
He picked up the last time, talks to me like nothing is happening and I started to shout at him like I never shouted to anybody before,
got all the things of my chest, and when I was done, he said that he will send the money to my account right away.
This happened on a Saturday, so I quit the following Monday, and lost the other job offer.

That's my setup. Awesome fact: this desk was build by my dad at least 15 years ago, he made one for me and another for my brother, it probably will still be around if I ever get kids :)

Google Fit working perfectly!

Got out of bed at 4pm, walked to my desk, ordered home delivery. I have walked about 20 steps today.

Things I like about WFH
-save petrol and mileage
-work in underwear
-big TV during lunch
-time saved by no commute
-lie down during meetings

Things I dislike
-feel like my room has been invaded by work/miss the physical separation of work and home
-distractions and temptations
-they moved the stand up to ealier because of WFH
-Everything has to be a meeting. No just popping by someone's desk with a quick question

Sometimes I miss physically seeing my colleagues/getting out of the house but not often

Absolutely hate the awful Machines we have to code on at the office, went through three laptops in the space of a year.

All of the them the exact model and specs probably purchased from some tech museum. They would hang and BSOD several times a day and made me look bad when my bit of code wasn't ready on time for a delivery.

Lol , even running spotify while running a couple of dev tools wasn't possible without causing the music to stutter.

After a year i managed to get my hands onto an old Dell desktop when a colleague left that had better specs that would sort of do the job. Wished i could reformat it but alas we aren't allowed to do anything remotely like that.

Finally got fed up of it all, since i bought myself a little treat, an Intel Skull canyon.

Awesome little piece of kit , pretty damn powerful and looks cool too.
Oh an on quiet afternoons I do get to game a little 🤗
The integrated iris pro gpu is surprisingly powerful, it can handle some of the older AAA titles although I haven't really put it through the test yet.

i leave it in the office
Secured with a kensingon lock and locked in my desk drawers
But I usually take it home over weekends

So 10 months ago i moved from Cambridge (UK) to Guildford (UK), due to moving this distance i started working from home and going into the office once a week.

Now after 10 months i have finally got my home office how i first imagined it. Everything runs from my laptop which is located on the shelving unit away from my desk. Everything plugs into it via 1 USB lead.

Setup:
27" 2560 x 1440 monitor flanked by two 1280 x 1024 monitors.
Asus Laptop (i5-6300HQ, 12GB ram, 512GB SSD + 1TB HDD)
Home PC (i5-7600, 8GB ram, GTX 770)

Accessories:
StarTech USB hub - This allows me to plug my three monitors, keyboards, mouse and everything else into my laptop.
KVM switch - Allows me to swap between my Work PC and Home PC with a click of a button

Accidentally left a test line in an API method - the first line returned a 200 OK response.
It was a notification API for our payment portal, so when they complained our API didn't work our logs always said all was fine...

After an hour of listening to our help desk guys saying "everything in our logs says it's fine", I looked at source for 2 seconds, fixed the problem, went home, had a whiskey and went to bed!

Home office / lockdown story

Last year, when the first lockdown happened, everyone in my office started working from home. Including myself of course.
I decided to use x11vnc for remotely accessing my PC cause it is super convenient.
A few days into the home office and suddenly the remote keyboard acts weird, with random keypresses that I didn't do, and then the letter L was written over and over like it was stuck.
Assuming a bug in x11vnc, I restart it several times, but no luck. Whenever I open a terminal it is full of "L"s within a matter of seconds.
So I restart my PC remotely and reconnect the x11vnc, which is a huge pain in the arse if you have ever done it. And can you believe it... Still the same problem!
So, finally I gave up and went to the office to see what the hell was going on with my PC. I entered my office room and could not believe my eyes.
What had happened? The room cleaner had wet-wiped my desk. To create enough free space for that, she had first cleaned up the mess, putting the scattered paper nicely on the side, but then also *putting the bloody mouse on the bloody keyboard*.

I've uncovered the complot.

I clearly remember buying my first monitor, it was 15 inch, 1024x768. Then I went to a 19 inch 1680x1050 one, then 24 inch 1080p, then 27 inch 1440p...

Now I used two 32 inch 4K screens at work... and I come home, and the three 27 inch screens look a bit smallish, with the old 24 inch one being absolutely tiny on my desk.

It wasn't that tiny when I still owned the 15 inch screen? And my 5.5 inch phone doesn't feel as big as when I bought it either?

So the complot... All monitors slowly shrink over time, and they start shrinking faster when new monitors are brought into the household.

*tries to SSH into my laptop to see how that third kernel compilation attempt went*
… From my Windows box.

Windows: aah nope.

"Oh God maybe the bloody HP thing overheated again"
*takes laptop from beneath the desk indent*
… Logs in perfectly. What the hell... Maybe it's SSH service went down?

$ systemctl status sshd
> active (running)

Well.. okay. Can I log in from my phone?

*fires up Termux*
*logs in just fine*

What the fuck... Literally just now I added the laptop's ECDSA key into the WSL known_hosts by trying to log into it, so it can't be blocked by that shitty firewall (come to think of it, did I disable that featureful piece of junk yet? A NAT router * takes care of that shit just fine Redmond certified mofos).. so what is it again.. yet another one of those fucking WanBLowS features?!!

condor@desktop $ nc -vz 192.168.10.30 22
Connection to 192.168.10.30 22 port [tcp/ssh] succeeded!

ARE YOU FUCKING FOR REAL?!

Fucking Heisen-feature-infested piece of garbage!!! Good for gaming and that's fucking it!

Edit: (*) this assumes that your internal network doesn't have any untrusted hosts. Public networks or home networks from regular users that don't audit their hosts all the time might very well need a firewall to be present on the host itself as well.

A Monday morning poem

I enter the bureau, feeling all relaxed and well,
my colleague looks up:
"Abandon all hope, welcome to hell."

This indeed, he doesn't say,
his face only twists a little in dismay:
"I need that schematic, did you finish it yet?
And there also some tests I'd like to get -
how was your week-end by the way?"
I start my computer, don't remember what I say ...

I grab some coffee, half a day is gone,
the PM pressures: "I want that asap done!"
I am cluttered in tasks and bullshit, too:
"Go fuck you right now - yes, I meant you!"

I don't say what I like to, I mentally punch a wall,
I crank some more code out and git-commit it all.
Some devRant on the lunch-break, some shallow talk,
I leave the building and take a short walk.

My mind rotates, I cannot enjoy the scenery now,
I return to my desk, and figure out what to handle and how.
But my plans are crashed by a colleague dashing in:
"I need you to do a test setup! I need to begin -"

I do the setup, I do some other stuff,
At the end of the day I feel totally rough,
Work is piling up even more -
"Tomorrow", I think and close the door.

At home, I just flop on on my bed -
I should be learning instead ... -
with some pizza and chill.
I think about sleeping, I hope that I will.

...

It is now Friday,
my brain is fried, too.
I am finished with this poem - how about you? :)

I have seen it. They say it doesn't exist; just a story we tell our children so that their innocence does not lead them down into a nightmarish adulthood from which there is no salvation. But the evil lives. So vile that were you to look inside its soul, all you would find is a terrible desperation for suffering. To cause it. To revel in it. To bathe in the tears of those it considers less than human and feed off the emotional detritus.

It was 2009. The financial crisis. I was one of the lucky, having found refuge in a large company right before the jobs dried up. General IT: system administration, documentation, project management, telephony, software training, second level help desk. No software development, but with a two-year-old at home and Ph.D.s lining up outside the local Olive Garden whenever a help wanted sign was posted, I grabbed the health insurance and entered into darkness.

The Thing did not need to hunt it's prey. A manager title with 21 reports brought it new opportunities for fresh meat by the hour. But I was special. I resisted. I needed to know my place.

My first mistake was incomprehension. I did not understand the Thing's lust to be right at all costs. I was reviewing some documentation it had brought forth from its bowels. I mentioned that two spaces were being used between sentences. That proportional type made that unnecessary. It insisted, I was wrong. It insisted that Microsoft itself, the purveyor of all good technical writing, required two spaces. I opened the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications that it demanded its staff use and showed it that the spec was one space. It was livid. I was a problem.

From that point on my work life became exponentially more wretched. I was given three Outlook calendars to maintain: one with my schedule, one with the team's schedule and one with the Thing's schedule. Every time I had an appointment, I was to triple schedule it. If I was going to be away from my desk for more than 15 minutes triple schedule. Triple schedule my lunch, vacations, phone conferences.

Whenever it held a meeting, I and a colleague would be taken off mission critical IT projects to set tables with name tents and to serve as greeters as attendees arrived.

I was called into its crypt to be told never to say anything in a meeting unless I told the Thing beforehand what I was going to say. Naive, I mentioned that I often don't know what I will say as it is often in reply to someone else. Of course the response was that I should not say anything.

I would get emails 10-20 times a day asking about a single project. I would regularly complete work that was needed to be completed ASAP, only to have the Thing rake me over the coals for not completing it a week later. And upon resending the emails proving I notified it of the work being competed, disparaged at length a second time for not sending repeated notifications of the competed work.

I would have to sit in two-hour meetings to watch it type. Literally watch it try to create cogent thoughts. In silence.

I received horrendous annual reviews. At one, it created a development plan that stated a colleague would begin giving me lessons on the proper ways to socially interact with personnel. I pointed out to HR that this violated privacy concerns and would make the business liable in many areas, not least of which would be placing a help desk person in the role of defining proper business practice. HR made the Thing remove this from my review. She started planning to remove me.

I had given a short technical training to a group of personnel months earlier. Called into its tomb I was informed that feedback surveys on my talk were disturbing. One person stated that they did not think I was funny. Another wrote that I made an offensive statement. That person did not say what the offensive statement was. Just that I had said something he or she didn't like.

The Thing interviewed the training attendees. Gathered facts. Held three inquest-like meetings where multiple directors peppered me with questions trying to get me to confess to my offensiveness. In the end the request to fire me was brought to the man who ran the business at the time. The statement on high: "Humor is a subjective thing. Please tell This to be sensitive to that."

The Thing had failed, but would no doubt redouble its efforts. I had to find a new job. I sent hundreds of resumes. Talked to dozens of recruiters. But there were no jobs. And I had a family. And the wolf was at the door.

So I didn't say a word to the creature. For six months. Silence. At one group meeting it shrieked at me "what are you smirking at? If you've got something to say then say it!" I just shrugged. For my salvation was revealed. The Thing could not stand to be ignored. And at the end of my penance I was transferred to another group: Software Development.

I am one with the Force. The Force is with me. I am one with the Force. The Force is with me.

I've been working exclusively from home for over 2 years now. I've been seeing several posts from people talking about adjusting to working from home, so I figured I would compile a list of tips I've learned over the years to help make the adjustment easier for some people.

1) Limit as many distractions as possible. WFH makes it much easier to get distracted. If you have roommates/family members at home, ask them politely to leave you alone while you're working. Make sure the TV is turned off, put your phone on silent, etc.

2) Take regular breaks. I find it easier to accidentally go hours without taking a real break from work. Try working in half hour intervals, and then taking 5-10 minute breaks. Read an article, watch a youtube video, grab some coffee/tea, etc.

3) When you eat lunch, eat it away from your computer. I often find myself eating lunch trying to wrap up fixing a bug, which makes it feel like I never really "took a lunch." Lately I've been trying to step away and do something else completely unrelated to work.

4) Get ready for work like you normally would. It's very easy to wake up, throw on your favorite pair of sweats and sit at the computer with messy hair half awake "ready" to start the day. Instead try doing your normal morning routine before sitting at your computer. It will help your mind and body go into "it's time to work" mode.

5) Keep your work area clean. I find it very difficult to work when my workspace is cluttered. Studies have shown working in a messy place tend to make us less efficient.

6) Keep your work area work related. Try to only have the things you need for work in your workspace. If you're working from your personal computer this can be difficult. I always end up with camera/music equipment left over from the previous night's photo editing/jam sessions. So try to clean off your desk when you're done for the night so it's ready for work in the morning.

7) Prepare for meetings. I have alarms set 10 minutes in advance so I can go from programming mode to meeting mode. During this time I'll go to the bathroom, grab a snack, water, mute all my email notifications, close any non essential programs, get my code ready if I need to present it.

Stuff is hard & stressful right now, but hopefully these tips will make it a bit easier. If anyone else has any good tips please share them.

Office manager sending a mail that all spaces now only have "sustainable vegan leather" furniture, "to carry responsibility for the planet and commit to a greener company image".

You mean you bought uncomfortable plastic chairs.

Vegan leather is just fucking plastic.

Not all plastics are bad, but in this case it's a very toxic plastic, a PVC softened with phtalates and stabilized with cadmium stearate, produced cheaply in a country with no regards for public health or the environment.

It's about as sustainable as munching down a vegan quinoa avocado salad in a private jet on a transatlantic flight.

There are moments where I'm glad that I'm still working from home, because I would have planted that ugly fucking desk chair straight into the equally ridiculous power-slurping hipster "sustainable vertical herb garden" with its 500 watt growlight bulbs.

That awful realisation that your job could so easily be done remotely from your desk at home while wearing nothing but underpants and eating pop tarts.

Working from home. That time you spend commuting is spent on working. That random guy showing up at your desk breaking your concentration doesn't exist. If there's a bullshit meeting you have to go to, you can dial in, put yourself on mute and continue to work while listening and just unmute as needed.

Seriously so much more productive.

So my first job is also my current one. I am a computer science student and for my course we had to do a project for an actual client. The client was a consultancy company and after working my ass off, their software development partner decided to hire me and a classmate.

The company is pretty small (we are now with the 6 of us) and the general attitude is very nice. I've only been working there for a few weeks and I feel very welcome. The work isn't too hard (mainly web development with geographic features/data).
In rough lines the stack always consists of a Java Rest API and an Angular frontend that retrieved the data from the API.
So far I have learned a ton and I am really happy that I have this opportunity. Lunch is provided and we always eat together, we crack jokes, have fun, play games in the break. Coffee machine next to my desk. I'd love to work here all my life :d

Since I'm still in school I can't go to the office every day. Instead I am at the office every Monday and on other days I try to work from school or home.

Paranoid Developers - It's a long one
Backstory: I was a freelance web developer when I managed to land a place on a cyber security program with who I consider to be the world leaders in the field (details deliberately withheld; who's paranoid now?). Other than the basic security practices of web dev, my experience with Cyber was limited to the OU introduction course, so I was wholly unprepared for the level of, occasionally hysterical, paranoia that my fellow cohort seemed to perpetually live in. The following is a collection of stories from several of these people, because if I only wrote about one they would accuse me of providing too much data allowing an attacker to aggregate and steal their identity. They do use devrant so if you're reading this, know that I love you and that something is wrong with you.

That time when...

He wrote a social media network with end-to-end encryption before it was cool.

He wrote custom 64kb encryption for his academic HDD.

He removed the 3 HDD from his desktop and stored them in a safe, whenever he left the house.

He set up a pfsense virtualbox with a firewall policy to block the port the student monitoring software used (effectively rendering it useless and definitely in breach of the IT policy).

He used only hashes of passwords as passwords (which isn't actually good).

He kept a drill on the desk ready to destroy his HDD at a moments notice.

He started developing a device to drill through his HDD when he pushed a button. May or may not have finished it.

He set up a new email account for each individual online service.

He hosted a website from his own home server so he didn't have to host the files elsewhere (which is just awful for home network security).

He unplugged the home router and began scanning his devices and manually searching through the process list when his music stopped playing on the laptop several times (turns out he had a wobbly spacebar and the shaking washing machine provided enough jittering for a button press).

He brought his own privacy screen to work (remember, this is a security place, with like background checks and all sorts).

He gave his C programming coursework (a simple messaging program) 2048 bit encryption, which was not required.

He wrote a custom encryption for his other C programming coursework as well as writing out the enigma encryption because there was no library, again not required.

He bought a burner phone to visit the capital city.

He bought a burner phone whenever he left his hometown come to think of it.

He bought a smartphone online, wiped it and installed new firmware (it was Chinese; I'm not saying anything about the Chinese, you're the one thinking it).

He bought a smartphone and installed Kali Linux NetHunter so he could test WiFi networks he connected to before using them on his personal device.

(You might be noticing it's all he's. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't).

He ate a sim card.

He brought a balaclava to pentesting training (it was pretty meme).

He printed out his source code as a manual read-only method.

He made a rule on his academic email to block incoming mail from the academic body (to be fair this is a good spam policy).

He withdraws money from a different cashpoint everytime to avoid patterns in his behaviour (the irony).

He reported someone for hacking the centre's network when they built their own website for practice using XAMMP.

I'm going to stop there. I could tell you so many more stories about these guys, some about them being paranoid and some about the stupid antics Cyber Security and Information Assurance students get up to. Well done for making it this far. Hope you enjoyed it.

That, my friends, is a Dell Poweredge r610, with 2x e5670 and 48GB of registered ECC memory, mounted underneath my desk at work, using mounts I 3D printed at home.

Roughly £140 all in, and I now have a nice little development server, AND leg heater!

The website for our biggest client went down and the server went haywire. Though for this client we don’t provide any infrastructure, so we called their it partner to start figuring this out.
They started blaming us, asking is if we had upgraded the website or changed any PHP settings, which all were a firm no from us. So they told us they had competent people working on the matter.

TL;DR their people isn’t competent and I ended up fixing the issue.

Hours go by, nothing happens, client calls us and we call the it partner, nothing, they don’t understand anything. Told us they can’t find any logs etc.

So we setup a conference call with our CXO, me, another dev and a few people from the it partner.
At this point I’m just asking them if they’ve looked at this and this, no good answer, I fetch a long ethernet cable from my desk, pull it to the CXO’s office and hook up my laptop to start looking into things myself.

IT partner still can’t find anything wrong. I tail the httpd error log and see thousands upon thousands of warning messages about mysql being loaded twice, but that’s not the issue here.
Check top and see there’s 257 instances of httpd, whereas 256 is spawned by httpd, mysql is using 600% cpu and whenever I try to connect to mysql through cli it throws me a too many connections error.

I heard the IT partner talking about a ddos attack, so I asked them to pull it off the public network and only give us access through our vpn. They do that, reboot server, same problems.

Finally we get the it partner to rollback the vm to earlier last night. Everything works great, 30 min later, it crashes again. At this point I’m getting tired and frustrated, this isn’t my job, I thought they had competent people working on this.

I noticed that the db had a few corrupted tables, and ask the it partner to get a dba to look at it. No prevail.

5’o’clock is here, we decide to give the vm rollback another try, but first we go home, get some dinner and resume at 6pm. I had told them I wanted to be in on this call, and said let me try this time.

They spend ages doing the rollback, and then for some reason they have to reconfigure the network and shit. Once it booted, I told their tech to stop mysqld and httpd immediately and prevent it from start at boot.

I can now look at the logs that is leading to this issue. I noticed our debug flag was on and had generated a 30gb log file. Tail it and see it’s what I’d expect, warmings and warnings, And all other logs for mysql and apache is huge, so the drive is full. Just gotta delete it.

I quietly start apache and mysql, see the website is working fine, shut it down and just take a copy of the var/lib/mysql directory and etc directory just go have backups.

Starting to connect a few dots, but I wasn’t exactly sure if it was right. Had the full drive caused mysql to corrupt itself? Only one way to find out. Start apache and mysql back up, and just wait and see. Meanwhile I fixed that mysql being loaded twice. Some genius had put load mysql.so at the top and bottom of php ini.

While waiting on the server to crash again, I’m talking to the it support guy, who told me they haven’t updated anything on the server except security patches now and then, and they didn’t have anyone familiar with this setup. No shit, it’s running php 5.3 -.-

Website up and running 1.5 later, mission accomplished.

I was working from home and had a long skype meeting. It was boring and I knew I wouldn't need to say anything the whole time. At the same time my girlfriend was in the mood so we did it on my desk with one headphone in my ear in case somebody asked me a question.

Definitely not the worst meeting, but the most memorable for sure.

Shit morning, I work in tech, so I guess it is related haha.

First, I wake up and it is cold. Like -12 degrees Fahrenheit. With wind-chill, feels like -29 according to Google. Then, while getting ready for work, my only belt breaks. Not a little, but literally splits in half! Fucking sucks, as my pants keep partially falling down and my shirt keeps untucking.

I go out in this cold that could kill a polar bear, go to start my car. Can you fucking guess? Dead fucking battery. Fuck! Now I am super late to work.

Make it to work, and guess what? My manager just promised 100% completion by Friday, and we are weeks behind! Fucking sucks... I think my coworker snapped, as he keeps hyperventilating at his desk for no reason. Oh and our best coder just quit...

Waiting to either wreck my car or find out my dog is dead when I get home...

I love my girlfriend, but sometimes she doesn't get dev-work.
Last night, we had a fight over me sticking post-its to the wall in our home office. I find them helpful for keeping an overview of what I'm working on. She finds them ugly and decided to tear them all down without conferring with me. I got pissed. I almost always give in to her quirks and wants in every other aspect of how we live, so I feel like my desk space should at least be under my control. In my anger, I ordered her out of the room. She then proceeded to be sulking/angry with me up till and including this morning "because I overreacted".

Was I wrong? What should I have done differently?

Story of onboarding in the age of Corona!

Monday:
Office is big but almost empty, people are working from home. Guy welcoming me says he is not the one supposed to help me(he is sick I'm told) and the rest of the team is not there. The man I'm talking to is this other guys boss. It's OK I think it will work out.

Turns out this guy helping me is actually the CTO so he does not have that much time on his hands. He shows me were to get my computer and desk and hands me documentation to setup some software.

I spend the time before lunch installing linux, setting up git and some other software. CTO checks up on me once.

Then after lunch nothing...I look for him but he is in some meeting. I find some videos by myself labled "onboarding" on the company website. They are OK. I ask my deskmate if he heard what team I will be in. He doesn't know. I sneak out a little early since I have nothing left to do.

Tuesday:
The CTO is now also sick I see in an email when I arrive at the office. Still don't know what team I am in.

I spend the morning reading coding blogs and websites. After lunch I have a meeting. The only one in my calendar. It's about the product software architecture for all new employees. It's good but still no news about what team. I aimlessly read up on some software architecture untill I go home.

Wednesday:
I arrive at the office first, only the receptionist is there. I listen to podcasts until a few more people show up. I ask another guy if he knows what team I'm supposed to be in. He doesn't but laughs and says it was the same when he started last year.

I send out messages on slack looking for anyone that knows...still no one knows. I guess Im in limbo now. Perhaps i should just start making coffee for people or something...

Came to office and found out my Devrant stress ball is missing from my desk.
Should i go back home?

Weirdest co-worker... We'll not to be judgy, but I think our industry is sort of home of the weirdos, but.. there's a few over-the-top weirdees we've had at work.

First one that comes to mind was a guy that walked liked Mr. Burns, hands behind the back & chest out. He microwaved the same thing every single day for breakfast - crackers, sausage and cheese. 😖This guy would get to his tasks very slowly, wouldn't talk to anyone on our team, and would go missing from his desk a lot, sometimes for extended periods (2+ hours). He really struggled to catch on to easy tasks. He quit after a few months, thank god.

Another weirdo we had was a girl who just couldn't dress to save her soul. She would wear these ugly ass sneakers that had neon colors reminiscent of bowling shoes (neon orange and green) and would wear turtlenecks and floor length skirts that all the colors just clashed. Her outfits were uglier than your great grandma's. Myself, her and 2 other girls dressed up as the Dr. Seuss things for Halloween, but did h1, h2, etc. tags instead and she put like rope from curtains in her hair with like 10 little pony tails. Just like wtf. She would play her gameboy at lunch and not talk to anyone much. She was really bad at our job, a lot of clients complained. She would literally read a book, braid her bangs or nap at her desk. Needless to say, she was fired.

Warning: American perspective of some shit that happens in America that I do not know if it is the same in other places of the world.

I got a notification from my child's school saying that she has been selected for doing <bs activity> between the hours of 1-3 and that parent cooperation is expected. I called the institution and told them that she would not be participating. They asked me WHY, to which I answered that said schedule does not align with my daily schedule. They continue to press as to WHY she would not make it to which I added in a very harsh tone: "because I am fucking working and my wife is fucking working, what age do you think it is? the 1950s in which I can have some meaningless desk job and pay for a house that would be worth half a mil now a days when my wife stays at home all day and just goes with whatever whim y'all have?"

Needless to say, she is no longer in said activity group, but this seems to be very frequent inside of school systems in the U.S, they really ain't evolved much.

No, wait, they have, we have active shooter trainings now, that shit is semi-new.

My home setup.
I love having a huge desk.
I can fit my work setup and I still have space for some mess (and university stuff) 😁

My home desk, hidden in the corner of my living room.

First time having 2 monitors and actual full size desk inside my own apartment. Very liberating and I should take advantage... nothing beats the privacy of your home where you can think uninterrupted!

!dev，

I have a baby. He doesnt like sleeping. He has GERD (reflux).

He rarely sleep more than 2 hours at a time (probably 1 a week).

The best he has ever slept in his 11month of living was 5 hours. That day he was sick and he ended up in hospital.

All good， he is still alive and well.

But he goes down at 7pm and wakes every 2 hours if not less.

Somestimes he is easy to put down and thongs are bearable， but many times it can take up to 30-45 minutes to out him down.

I dev during the day but i am longing to have nights where i can completly concrntrate. But my partner has been survivjng on broken sleep for about a year now.

She lets me have longer stretches but i either stay up late and havr to feed the baby and jiggle him， which breaks concentration and has pbliged me to get an extra desk and screento be put into an uncomfortable place so i could code at home (my orfice is a rent out 10msquare batch in the garden).

Or sometimes i just get up at 3 or 4am so that he can sleep on me 2eme i can jiggle him when he wakes.

I cant deal with being woken every 2 hours. I throw tantrums like im a 7 year old.

Ive rarely had such a sucking life quality as now.

Its a good things babies a cute i tell you that!!!!

"We expect you to be at your desk from at least 10-5 every day. You may work from home 1 day per month with a few days advance notice."

70 minute commute into SF each way, every day, so I can sit at an uncomfortable desk and not interact with anyone except on hipchat.

The company that I currently work for has a strict clean-desk policy. So strict, there's even have a little booklet that they have about 1000 copies of lying around the office everywhere. In the booklet is a playful description (with cartoons!) of what can go wrong when sensitive information is lying around, or shared with outsiders through careless talk, etcetera. Employees are encouraged to take a copy of the booklet home.

Also in the booklet is a description of the importance of having a good password. It mentions the required minimum (x) and maximum (x+1) length of passwords, mandatory character classes, and how often the passwords have to be changed.

When I started my current job 6 years ago I was given a desk phone with a 100mb port. Speed didn't matter at the time as everyone was given laptops for our desks. I changed positions in the company where I'm going to be provisioning servers and whatnot over the network. Started using a desktop that didn't have a Wi-Fi adapter. I requested a new phone with a Gig switch port, if possible, so doing file transfers on the network wouldn't be limited. IT had a couple of questions...

IT-Have you noticed slowness when downloading/uploading?
Me-No, but its a 100mb port...so.
IT-Well I just did a speed test and we're getting 60up/5down. Your phone is over that.
(Working from home? Our fiber was way faster than that I thought.)
Me-That's fine, but this will be for internal network transfers. Not going out to the internet. We have gigabit switches on campus correct?
It-Yes but you shouldn't notice a speed difference.
Me, now lost-If you can't change out the phone that's fine. I'll figure our something.
IT-Now now, lets troubleshoot your issue. Can you plug your phone in?
Me-Yes I have it, but I'm remote today. There is no way for it to reach the call manager.
IT-Let's give it a try.

40 min of provisioning later he gave up and said maybe it is broke. Got a "working" one the next week.

PS first post, and writing on phone. Yay insomnia!

Here’s my home workspace! Office workspace is coming soon ;)

Panda debugging!

Nothing fancy, just an arch and a Mac laptop

So, a few words about this setup :
- I am not Portuguese, my girlfriend got this poster while on a trip
- The second monitor is very old and uses fluorescent tubes. It's shitty and not stylish, but useful at times
- Yes, I use a standalone scanner. Every multifunction printer I've had ended up suiciding itself, and suicided the built in scanner with it. A standalone scanner should be indestructible.
- The case is open because I haven't paid much attention to fans and stuff, so it gets pretty hot when gaming
- Talk about gaming : I dual boot W10/Ubuntu but use the original Gnome DE with Adwaita Dark (I love it). However, W10 is only useful for Lightroom and games. When Steam released proton, I decided to start using Darktable for photo editing in order to ditch Windows once and for all. That will probably happen in the coming months.
- I have not wired my home yet, so I use a router as Wi-Fi receiver.
- The top of the desk is not the original one. It used to be a glass one, but I didn't like the feel and it was too small. So I made a wooden one and painted it with paint my father had left over. However, it ended up looking hideous and sticks to the skin when resting on it for a long time. It has to be changed/fixed.
- The headphones hanger is just a big ass screw, and the headphones jack has been fixed at least a dozen times. I even changed the cable two times.
- The mic is shitty but cost only 8€ on eBay.

Me: *sees everyones desk setup*
Me: *tries to find all the screen in home*
Me: *gets one 5 inch phone and a 15 inch laptop*
*Cries in corner*

That kind of boss who give you a task one minute before you leave your desk to home.
Me inside: I hate you, very much, sir.

Well my home office is a proper mess currently. It isn't so much an office as a corner desk in the child's nursery, but house hunting went on hold.

It features the likes of my devrant ducky, crazy aarons thinking putty, a stuffed gnu, and a galileo thermometer among other paraphernalia; also a plastic goat that screams when I push down on it. That last one is a huge help to me these last few weeks.

I use a MacBook Pro at home and a Windows laptop at work. The trackpad on the Windows laptop is flaky, so I prefer to use it with an external mouse.

However, my desk at home is kind of glossy/reflective, so if I’m working at home on the Windows laptop and trying to use the mouse, it doesn’t work well at all.

Since I don’t actually have a mousepad (I only ever use the trackpad on the MacBook Pro), I started looking around the house for something I could use instead that would make the mouse work better. I needed something large, rectangular, non-reflective, heavy enough that it wouldn’t slide around the desk as I moved the mouse...

You guys work from home because of coronavirus?
Me on the other hand, have to work on weekend on my desk to finish an urgent project, it’s for the ministry of education (who closed all schools and launched an online courses) to monitor the effectiveness of the new platform and fix some bugs on it.

work from home. desk and pretty much everything with it stolen in family dispute. I'm holding my laptop on a small nightstand. finally got a new pc today at least :/

I have a dedicated office space at home with a huge desk that was given to me by my mom and stepdad as a gift with a really nice chair that my wife got for me. It has a nice long whiteboard to write whatever it is I am doing, a bookshelf with tons of coding books and guitar magazines and shit. A closet with good space and in a corner sits my guitar and amp.

Where can I be located during coding hours? In the floor, on the living room, using a box to put one of my laptops in.

Why am I like this?

At home, on standing desk made mostly out of cardboard and hope, with 5 month old daughter asleep and attached to me with a sling

My setup at work and at home. I'm using Ubuntu on both.
I hardly use my desk at Home. Most of the time I'm using the notebook while I'm watching TV.

So I enventually spent 2 years working for that company with a strong b2b market. Everything from the checkouts in their 6 b2c stores to the softwares used by the 30-people sales team was dependant on the main ERP shit home-built with this monstruosity we call Windev here in France. If you don't know it just google and have some laugh : this is a proprieteray FRENCH language. Not french like made by french people, well that too, but mostly french like the fucking language is un fucking french ! Instructions are on french, everything. Hey that's my natural language okay, but for code, really ?

The php website was using the ERP database too, even all the software/hardware of the massive logistic installation they had (like a tiny Amazon depot), and of course the emails of all employees. Everything was just handled by this unique shitty and so sloooooow fucking app. When there was to many clients on the website or even too many salespeople connected to the ERP at the same time, every-fuckin-piece of the company was slowing down, and even worse facing critical bugs. So they installed a monitor in the corner of a desk constantly showing the live report page of Google analytics and they started panic attacks everytime it was counting more than 30 sessions on the website. That was at the time fun and sad to observe.

The whole shit was created 12 years ago and is since maintened locally by one unique old-fashion-microsoft dev who also have to maintain all the hardware of all the fucking 150+ people business. You know, when the keyboard of anyone is "broken" cause it's unplugged... That's his job too. The poor guy was totally overstressed on a daily basis and his tech knowledge just saddly losts themeselves somewhere in the way. He was my n+1 in a tech team of 3 people : him, a young and inexperimented so-called "php developer" who was in charge of the website (btw full of security holes I discovered and dealed with when I first arrive at the job), and myself.

The database was a hell of 100+ tables of business and marketing data with a ton of specific logic added on-the-go during years. No consistent data model or naming. No utf8. Fucked up relations that ends with queries long enough to fill books. And that's not all, all the customers passwords was just stored there uncrypted. Several very big companies and administrations were some of these clients. I was insisting on the passwords point litterally all the time, that was an easy security fix and a good start... But no, in two years of discussions on the subject I never achieved to have them focusing on other considerations than "our customers like that we can remind them their password by a simple phone call if they lost it". What. The. Fuck. WHATTHEFUCK!

Eventually I ran myself out of this nightmare. I had a few bad jobs already, and worked on shitty software already. But that one really blows my mind (and motivation for a time too). Happy it's over.

Spends 5 days working from home at my desk.... Stressful week...

Spends weekend playing diablo 3 with son at same desk.... Relaxing...

Wife says I need to get out more.... *looks outside* raining...

Another Developer: bro, shit hit the fan. The x web service is throwing some error. Can you take a look please. I want to go home. I'm tired.
Me: Yea sure bro no worries.
Another Developer: I go pee, after that I will delegate the ticket to you.
(Another Developer goes to the washroom)
Me: (04:59 PM) Oh time to pack-up and get the fuck out of here
Me: (05:08 PM) Receive a message on Viber from Another Developer. It reads "Fuck you, I'm going to rub my balls on your desk"

I use my PC mainly for gaming, Anime and home stuff.
Pc is a big tower under the desk btw.

Main monitor is a 34", 1440p, 60hz from LG (it's rather old). Second one is a 29", 1080p monitor from Phillips which I also could rotate. I really have no idea what I should use it for and I never really put it on anyway.

I could do more or less professional recording for Twitch or whatever but I'm to lazy and no pro, so I only use it for some multiplayer game sessions.

Questions or ideas how to optimise my setup are welcome.

Cable management is a mess btw.

My 'working from home' desk

All employees are working from home. I found out that some developers who work 1-2 days from home don't even have a desk in theirs apartments. Now i understand why working from home is considered as unproductive.

I posted one for work already but this little guy sits on my desk at home.

Meet Donkey, he's 32 years old and suffers from male pattern baldness. My mom made him for me when I was 2 years old (thus the odd name I gave him) and he's been with me ever since.

Sat here at my desk, facing a wall after my desk being moved whilst I was working from home, counting down the days until I resign.

5 Years here and was ready to leave almost 2 years ago but let them convince me to stay around. Now stuck with a 3 month notice.

Built the same homepage 5 times in as many weeks due to constant changes and ready to throw in the towel.

I'm here until Christmas, then I am going it alone. Just not sure how I am going to make it to Christmas without walking out

My coffee cup! Came home one Christmas and mom had been cleaning up a storage room. I've given it too her when I was young, but she never used it because it was ugly and heavy. She wanted to throw it away, but I took it, and it has been on my desk from the first day I started my job.

I'm not a developer by profession and my home setup is always messy (where I develop personal projects) but I am an intern sysadmin so here is my office desk :) wanted to join the whole show your desk movement

Pardon me if the tags are not right. Im fairly new and mostly a reader.

Here's my flow:

1. Sit at my desk and contemplate the Universe
2. Sort out specifics by pacing back and forward
3. Draw like a mad man
4. Copy an old project and change a few lines of code
5. Go home happy that the Universe is safe once again

;)

Saw some desk pic yesterday; here's mine at home. Mostly for gaming, but I do some work occasionally at it. Laptop's setup so I can monitor some Asterisk servers at work.

Gaming rig is:
4690k@4.5ghz
16gb RAM
GTX 980
Acer 24in 1080p 144hz Gsync monitor

Laptop:
2009 MacBook Pro
2.53ghz Core 2 Duo
8gb RAM
SSD

Some years ago but it's funny.
The company give to me a new laptop with windows Home Edition,
After few months I have installed Pro Version.
1 month later the laptop didn't work anymore, nothing on display, no beeps, zero.
Tried to replace ram and check but nothing works.
The CTO asked the supplier and they asked about SO, and they said it's not turning ON because i have installed Windows Pro.
Than the CTO had a brilliant idea: try put the hard disk in another laptop and install Windows Home, and put back in the defective one. I refused to to that, it's stupid and he insisted, then I put the laptop in his desk and I said: if you want do this you can do, im not stupid enough to do this.
He got really mad, 1 week later i got a brand new one 😅

My new home office.

I haven't posted on DevRant in a while so thought I would share my new home office set up.

My old set up was great. Dual screen standing desk, fast desktop and great monitors.

Since having a new baby a few months back, the home office is now a nursery. My only option is to sit at the kitchen table or stand in the kitchen (I prefer standing).

So here it is, my new office. Laptop on a kids toy box, fit snugly between chopping boards and tomatoes.

And hey, I don't actually mind at all, I love my family.

Just remember that when life gives you tomatoes 🍅 ...

I can get a lot more done working in Starbucks, than from my own desk at work or home. Wonder if anyone else is the same way

Remember to exercise kids!

My back is dying. Work equipment is great, but at home my posture is screwed from my chair not going high enough and my desk being too high for my arms to be parallel.

- a split keyboard with a touchpad in the middle that will let you control all gestures on a computer

- a set of desk/monitors that adjusts perfectly for ergo for anyone

- a vertical laptop dock that is modular so you can add extra memory/video processing power and only using your laptop as a CPU/secondary graphics card

- a set of kitchenware and plates that would be so easy to clean and would never get stained

-an insect home alarm system that tells you where the fucking insect is so it doesn't take you by surprise/you can call someone to remove it

- a clothing brand that has a buy one gift one operation mechanic, where you buy a shirt and an article is donated to a local charity

- a restaurant

- a simple, yet robust database option that walks users through creating good databases that is super user friendly

- an app that takes tattoo designs in any format, converts them, allows for editing, and then can hook up to a special printer that gives you the transfer you will use on the client

!dev
This boring story with stupid ending started on Monday with me going out to buy some food and cook something delicious, day like always until my mind went nuts.

I work from home and cook my meals by myself cause I love cooking.
To buy ingredients I go shopping couple times a week always making the same steps, doing this for over a year now and by this time everything was automatic so I could think about work problems and solutions.

I start usually by getting up from my desk around noon, not many people doing shopping at that time and I can proceed quick.
Algorithm is like this: go to kitchen and look at the fridge, go out, wait for traffic lights, take tram, ride two stops, wait for the traffic lights again, go to supermarket, do shopping and finally go back the same way. Boooring.

When I get out from tram that day l looked at traffic lights to go green, as always and that’s the place where everything started to go bad.

So I was waiting there doing nothing and then stupid idea got me.
I figured out I can stop looking at light to make this day different and look ahead.
Then simply start walking when people from other side start walking.

It worked smoothly on those lights and I was happy I can do things differently from now on. I proceed with this idea on the way back and motherfuckers started walking on red. Twice !!!!
Almost died.

Since then three times some car was driving on green near me in those places and people started walking on red.

It got me worried about world determinism instantly. I might increased some entropy to much and some world developer changed some line of code while I was shopping and from that time death is passing by me.

Now it got me to the point where the more I follow this way the more I am worried about my life. Started thinking about ordering ingredients online.

So if you read this you know that I know your plan and I will be changing supermarkets and paths to it randomly starting from next week.

Or not I hope nobody hacked my mind and only thing that read and write to it is my consciousness.

I feel relief now.

An intern made a very bad impression on the first day.

This was before I become a developer. I was working in commercial art sales. One day, I had an appointment to onboard two new interns together.

Intern 1 shows up and I ask her for her signed confidentiality agreement. The boss had sent it out a week before and told me the interns were bringing the signed paperwork on their first day. I see the surprised look on her face and she says she forgot. She’s lucky I had access to another copy. If I didn’t, things could have gotten pretty awkward if I had to contact my boss, who was out of office. If there’s no signed agreement, I can’t onboard her and I’d have to send her home. The appointment was made with intern 1’s availability in mind, so intern 1 could have spent her time coming to the office for nothing and being turned away because of a stupid mistake she made.

While we wait for intern 2 to arrive, I try to engage in small talk with intern 1. I try to get to know her a little better and I ask “are you still in college/university?” She word vomits that she thought she had graduated, but six months later she hadn’t received her diploma and she called the school and they told her her pre-college credits had not transferred, so she’s finishing those credits now.

Oh, intern, you should have just simplified all this to “I’m finishing up my degree” or “yes, I’m still in college.” This is TMI. You don’t want to give out information about yourself that could put you in a bad light. You need to know to be discreet about yourself. You’re 22 years old. It’s really bad judgement to say this to your supervisor (me) and we’ve only known each other for ten minutes. I’m not your friend, I’m your supervisor. Honestly, I thought the explanation didn’t make sense because she would have found out about the credits when she tried to transfer them and when she applied for graduation. I didn’t prod for more details.

I did have to tell my boss about intern 1 forgetting the paperwork. It’s not something the intern would be reprimanded for, but it is something that’s not a good sign. The paperwork had been sent by the boss a week prior. It’s troublesome that an intern would forget to complete an important task that was sent by the boss. This was never a problem with prior interns.

Boss did freak out because boss thought I onboarded intern 1 without intern agreeing to the confidentiality agreement. Boss hadn’t considered an intern would forget the paperwork and didn’t tell me what to do if this did happen. I reassured boss that I had printed a new copy and had intern 1 sign the agreement.

I didn’t say anything about the word vomit. The content was troubling, but I was concerned this would be gossip and I wasn’t out to sabotage the intern.

Forgetting the paperwork and the word vomit were signs the intern wasn’t reliable. Intern had trouble taking direction even when it was written down. She’d do stupid things like invite her boyfriend to the office for hours and let BF sit at the boss’s desk—boss caught her and boss’s office is visible from our public viewing floor, so visitor did see this too. I suspected she might have an diagnosed learning disability.

In the end, intern didn’t ask for a reference letter. Boss said that if intern asked for one in the future, the answer would be no.

Intern 1 is the reason why I don’t want to be in change of interns ever again even though I’m not in art sales anymore.

I'm testing a shitforbrains code in production because I don't have any other options. He went on vacation and said that the code should work, and if it doesn't it is my problem.

I am contemplating taking a shit under his desk and working from home. Then he would have to deal with my shit aswell. Literally.
The tables have turned my friend...

My coWorker cried at her desk all day because of a post on Facebook. Apparently her aunt was trying was finding a new home for her grandma's dog.

(Don't Ask!)

Often times I have to share the burden of 'Dr. Phillin' her just so I can work done. I tell my other coWorker this so he knows her fragile mental state and I get this back in Slack.

Getting sent home from work because I fucked my back and I've never hated sitting down so much, so painful...

Won't even be able to sit at my desk and code :'-(

Shit night. Sat at my fucking desk to work on my fucking tasks. Started at about 9:30. Now is 12:21 and I'm in my fucking bed.

Guess what I finished? 70% of the new template for fucking home page of one website.

I'm supposed to finish the new design for two websites and present at tomorrow morning meeting.

And I couldn't even finish one full page. My brain is just giving up on everything.

I just have to sleep and get up early. Hope my fucking body get up early.

Bought myself a standing desk (one that rests on top of an existing desk), a new chair with good lumbar support and a few other office bits and pieces before the end of the tax year in the UK. I didn't think I'd be able to put them through my Ltd Co next year because of IR35 changes, but they have been delayed now.

The only thing I don't have yet at home is dual monitors. Otherwise the setup feels great. 30 Mins sitting followed by 30 Mins standing is doing wonders for my old back

Dev walks in carrying a 2-liter bottle of Mt. Dew..
Dev: “Check it out, I forgot to bring my Mr. Dew from home, so I stopped at the gas station to up a bottle and they wanted $1.50, but they had 2-liters for $1.89. Much better deal. I’m all about saving money”
Me: “Um, $1.89 for a 2-liter isn’t a deal. Last week I bought several 2-liters for 69 cents each.”
Dev: “Pfftt…for the fake stuff. I want real Mt. Dew.”
Me: “Hy-Vee has all their Pepsi products on sale for 69 cents. How much do you pay for those 16oz bottles?”
Dev: "Only around $5 for a 6-pack. It's a much better deal when I buy in bulk."
Me: "I can buy 6 bottles of 2-liters cheaper than you buy a 6 pack of 16oz bottles. Buying a 6 pack at a time isn't buying in bulk."
Dev: "I hate 2-liter bottles. It goes flat before I drink it all and the soda tastes different."
Other Dev: "Um..what's that on your desk?"
- laughter all around -
Dev: "You -bleep-holes."

Last week I wired up my home network (including custom modem and routers) myself, because the stuff my ISP wanted me to use was garbage.
Luckily Germany has "router-freedom" so ISPs are not allowed to force us to use their device to dial into the network.
I did everything myself, because the 'technicians' they kept sending me were just idiots who didn't know anything, considering the highly paid job they are doing. Usually they told me, to get the device from my ISP, because my "Router" (actually a business grade, standalone Modem by Cisco, to feed my Router) didn't even have WiFi ( lol ). Also all Technicians didn't arrive at the agreed date but at some other time. I wasn't able to wait any longer.
So I did it myself.

Consider me something more like a student of theoretical computer science. Not actually supposed to be experienced with hardware stuff.

The ISP is serving me with a DOCSIS 3.0 Network based on the television cable network in my city. For some reason they are providing the internet-access to only one socket in the apartment, which has a rather uncommon "WICLIC" connector. After having trouble getting an adapter for WICLIC to common coaxial F-Connectors (used by every DOCSIS-Modem), I made one myself.

After setting up everything (not that hard, once the connectors fit) my modem told me, that, while I'm perfectly connected to the ISPs internal Network, I still can't access the internet.

So I called the ISP...
After getting ranted at, about that what I'm doing is illegal and only certified employees are allowed to do this and I will break more, than actually do good and that I can't just connect my own "Router" (again I needed to correct her: Modem) I hang up the phone.
Also she accused me of hacking their devices because I'm not supposed to see my IP address... (My Modem told me on its web interface. I didn't even need telnet for that.)
I went to the ISPs head office, told the first desk as many technical terms as I could remember and got forwarded to something like the main technician.

He was a really nice guy. The only sane and qualified person I dealt with at this company. He asked me for my Address and Device Model, I told him my MAC and last internal IP, I had seen and he activated my internet access within a minute.
We talked a while about the stupid connector that ISP is using in the homes and he gifted me some nicer adapters to connect my modem to the wall.

Why do ISPs hate their customers that much?

I think another intriguing job asides programming is engineering (*for some*). A week has past and I've been on the hike assisting my beloved brother on his contracted engineering job while I am less occupied. The job is based on 🗼Tower analysis and It's quite risky as you'd have to climb up to 56 meters high just to take readings of antennas, and fix some other stuffs. The only thing I find intriguing about this job is his love for it, funny enough he also thinks I love the job too and I guess I'm guilty for his thoughts (*Sorry bro, I love the job for you not me*).
With my little experience so far on my *new brotherly job* I noticed the most hectic task isn't going up and down the tower taking readings but at the end of all operations, he'll have to gather the values and snapshots he took while on the tower to prepare reports on msword & excel for the other buttwags at the office (or home I guess)
then archive and sends via mail. Seeing this lengthy process I was forced to ask why he wasn't using any reporting tool like Jotforms or any other equivalent and I was willing to look up some recommendations for him, his reply was: "I'm already used to this form of reporting, its what I was trained with and what the company provided, nevertheless a friend of mine suggested something of such weeks back but I would have to pay monthly fee for its usage which is quite on the high side and I don't think I'd prefer that."
Sounds convincing but not enough, okay here is another deal: You use an android phone right? and at my office we work on system automation (*basically does not know what I do for a living probably thinks I'm a hacker the illegal one*), how about i design you an android app for you to capture the tower data and a PC software for you to auto generate the msword & excel reports, I can get this ready for you in less than 5 nights (*I've got less task on my desk, and was willing to take the timeout to prepare the solution that he needed, all I needed to hear for a kick start was an "Okay" just to be sure he wants it*) I suggested and re-assured but up to this point he still declined my offer and is willing to stick with his current reporting pattern (*Me died*).

When you’re out of town for the night and you left your MacBook at home on your desk... what a genius I am.

What a long horrid weekend this has been.
So much overtime gathered though.

Started Friday 5am, went to Oslo to do some drone footage for one of our clients. Got back home at 11:30pm.
During the day I had also been doing some work for this other client we have, they were supposed to have project launch the 22nd, but called on Friday and said it has to be on the 15th instead.

I got a few hours of sleep, woke and worked all day till I passed out at my desk for a few hours, went to the office (on a sunday) to talk to the PM and CXO about the project (great help, they were my rubber ducks)

Good part, I get so many days off now

There are days I imagine what my life would be like as a farmer instead of being a developer.
Two major sets of fully manual tests due on one day, after I've been alone in the office for two weeks handling all development, testing and support requests; inbox full of dumb questions that are answered in docs; people at my desk asking for shit that won't get done; and although the other devs are all back, one is "working" from home, one has no permissions to SVN, and the other is still learning how to do anything useful.
To top it all off, I've a meeting in twenty minutes, and I've managed to get coffee on my shirt and in my ear buds in a curious incident involving my headphones getting dunked in my coffee and going towards me at high speed.
Oh, and my wife just called saying the baby is screaming like a banshee at home, so I have that to look forward to.
Ugh...

Reading a post on Quora lead me here. At first, I didn't like the look and feel so I hit f12 to see if I code see the source code. One would think that after x hours spent coding at my work desk, I would just want to sit at home and watch tv or play games. However, there is something fulfilling about seeing a coded product and taking a quick glance at some source code.

!rant
My humble home lab setup in a nook in my desk, complete with a devrant sticker.

The conversations that come across my DevOps desk on a monthly basis.... These have come into my care via Slack, Email, Jira Tickets, PagerDuty alerts, text messages, GitHub PR Reviews, and phone calls. I spend most of my day just trying to log the work I'm being asked to do.

From Random People:
* Employee <A> and Contractor <B> are starting today. Please provision all 19 of their required accounts.
* Oh, they actually started yesterday, please hurry on this request.

From Engineers:
* The database is failing. Why?
* The read-only replica isn't accepting writes. Can you fix this?
* We have this new project we're starting and we need you to set up continuous integration, deployment, write our unit tests, define an integration test strategy, tell us how to mock every call to everything. We'll need several thousand dollars in AWS resources that we've barely defined. Can you define what AWS resources we need?
* We didn't like your definition of AWS resources, so we came up with our own. We're also going to need you to rearchitect the networking to support our single typescript API.
* The VPN is down and nobody can do any work because you locked us all out of connecting directly over SSH from home. Please unblock my home IP.
* Oh, looks like my VPN password expired. How do I reset my VPN password?
* My GitHub account doesn't have access to this repo. Please make my PR for me.
* Can you tell me how to run this app's test suite?
* CI system failed a build. Why?
* App doesn't send logs to the logging platform. Please tell me why.
* How do I add logging statements to my app?
* Why would I need a logging library, can't you just understand why my app doesn't need to waste my time with logs?

From Various 3rd party vendors:
* <X> application changed their license terms. How much do you really want to pay us now?

From Management:
* <X> left the company, and he was working on these tasks that seem closely related to your work. Here are the 3 GitHub Repos you now own.
* Why is our AWS bill so high? I need you to lower our bill by tomorrow. Preferably by 10k-20k monthly. Thanks.
* Please send this month's plan for DevOps work.
* Please don't do anything on your plan.
* Here's your actual new plan for the month.
* Please also do these 10 interruptions-which-became-epic-projects

From AWS:
* Dear AWS Admin, 17 instances need to be rebooted. Please do so by tomorrow.
* Dear AWS Admin, 3 user accounts saw suspicious activity. Please confirm these were actually you.
* Dear AWS Admin, you need to relaunch every one of your instances into a new VPC within the next year.
* Dear AWS Admin, Your app was suspiciously accessing XYZ, which is a violation of our terms of service. You have 24 hours to address this before we delete your AWS account.

Finally, From Management:
* Please provide management with updates, nobody knows what you do.

From me:
Please pay me more. Please give me a team to assist so I'm not a team of one. Also, my wife is asking me to look for a new job, and she's not wrong. Just saying.

I really miss my company-issued stand-up desk, and actually going to a different facility every morning: both the drive and the office. I also miss being able to go to someone else's desk, or walking right up to a white board to hash something out at a moment's notice.

This is really my first experience working from home at length, save for 3 weeks I had when my son was born (in lieu of a paternity leave). I have to say, I don't particularly care for working remotely. It'd be different I suppose if i was able to be a digital nomad and work from different locations, but being confined to my own four walls blows. I much prefer working in an office with other devs and being able to collaborate face-to-face, without all the damn giphy's in slack.

Hardwares guys help a dumb dev out. Got my work station finally set up at home. This cord is attached my Dell Thunderbolt docking station.

If I lightly bump the cable the laptop or the desk I loose connectivity to my displays.

What can I replace this fucker with?

I keep my desk at work uncluttered, and I haven't set up a workspace at home yet, but when I do, the pride of my desk will definitely be my namesake.

!Rant

How do you get your motivation back?

I had so much motivation on the way home, then got to my desk and decided, I didn't have the motivation

Help!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So heres the redflags I noticed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've realised that I should probably get another desk at home if I want my productivity back. It's small, rickety AF and my wife keeps putting crap on it. Any other tips for keeping productivity up @ home?

!rant but tips

TL;DR consistent commitments form a habit.

I didn't write any code or do any major tasks past 5 days. Rest at home 2 days and went to short trip for remaining. Answered a few business calls. Made few important calls. Didn't bring my laptop with me and used my gf's one for less than 2 hours. (Majority of that 2 hours was spent on changing her W10 Japanese display language into English.)

This morning I found it hard to gain the productivity and concentration I had past few months. I thought I have lost it and got back to my old lazy 🐒 self.

Couldn't able to touch, well didn't have the mood to touch to be precise, my major tasks. I did my best to sit at my desk and finish minor small tasks that I can find the whole morning. That's the best I could do and probably the wise one I did.

After lunch time around 2pm, I gained my concentration back. I worked on my major tasks till 7pm. And now going home happy.

So my "productivity-is-a-lot-like-intercourse" analogy belief became stronger. As long as I commit to my desk and keep my work routine, I won't be losing my concentration and productivity for a long period.

Probably my room is where I’m most comfy programming because it’s the place I’m most comfortable in general.

I have a weird unhealthy attachment to my room. When I have to leave to go to a friends and some family’s over night or sumn I am really uncomfortable the entire time until I get back.

I know I’m literally playing into the stereotypical nerd, but what you don’t understand is I am the stereotypical nerd.

You could easily say I just get a really bad case of Home Sickness and I guess that is the case but idk why it’s as bad as it is.

And the honorable mention for programming spots was when I was in high school at my big desk I had for 2 years straight. Damn I loved that spot

I found a use for my OPO now!

Spent all morning trying to figure out why my PC emulator created from AVD is lagging. Checked HAXM is installed and running but still slow.

So now my OP1 is the dev phone, has a new home on my desk connected to my PC

!long rant
Trying to work from home is always a pain, since we need to use company laptops (no ifs, ands or buts about it).
Yesterday I took the laptop in to check for updates that just wouldn't run while at home (my first mistake), and I couldn't get past the "Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to login" screen, laptop keyboard didn't seem to be registering clicks, and an external keyboard wasn't either (and I forgot about the on-screen keyboard). A couple of restarts later with no further changes to the situation, the laptop then didn't get past the BIOS screen.
So I called support (my second mistake) and logged an incident.
Couple of hours later someone comes to my desk and asks about the issue, so I describe it, show them (by now the laptop was once again getting past BIOS screen), and leave them to it. Since these laptops are just used as preconfigured VPN and RDP gateways, I said it would be okay if he just wanted to reinstall the OS (my third mistake).
Several hours later, after staying late last night waiting for it to finish, I loaded my profile, installed updates, shut down, grabbed my stuff and left, without checking VPN or RDP over WiFi (my fourth mistake).
Turns out that some of the buttons on the keyboard just no longer work, but now USB keyboards do work, and I can just use OSK to login while out. I figured this would be my only issue with things, and that it was acceptable.
This morning I attempt to use the laptop, and forgot about OSK and the faulty delete button, so spent a few minutes on that. Try to connect to WiFi and find it can't connect, because of course, it doesn't remember the WiFi password, so I root around for the code in some drawer, enter it, and it works. VPN tries to connect and... get told to insert my smart card, which is already inserted, because the driver is wrong!
So I'm sitting here writing a post, not quite believing that I'm considering cancelling my plans for the day to go into the office because of a bloody driver issue now...

My favorite method to learn something new is just to buy a book or download a paper about it or something lock myself up in my desk and not go home until I accomplished something. Those have been some fun nights so far!

Have you ever considered switching to IT support/help desk?
I mean, sometimes I try to analyze my own situation from a 3rd person perspective and I realize I could have a pretty much stressless job with still enough money to live a normal life.
I have a BSc and MSc(soon to have) in CS, with focus on AI/ML. I've always been a geek with a problem solving attitude, that's why I got into computers in the first place. And now I'm pondering if I should just try an IT Support position, it's the kind of things I used to do as a teenager when a classmate had a network/computer problem, it doesn't even feel like a job to me. I could call it a day, get home at 5/6pm, and spend time on my personal projects (software, infosec) with a fresh mind, going to bed (and sleep) knowing that the next day would be a nice one. No clients wanting a new feature that you gotta implement and push on a production server friday afternoon because your ceo(who is also a pseudo proj manager) just said:"Yes, we can", while you watch the technical debt rising like amazon's stocks.
Maybe this is just the burnout talking, I don't know. Maybe I should just try being a software engineer outside of Uni in the first place, and only then start pondering.
Maybe a sysadmin position...
Have a nice day

I just had the sudden thought that I should get a standing desk stand for home. Not an entire desk but I'm thinking something to raise the kb, mouse and 27in monitor. But can't seem to find a suitable one. All the pics either have a laptop or 2 monitors.

I'm thinking I just need an extension I can put on top of my existing desk.

Does anyone know a good one at a good price. And how do you feel about actually using it. Does it help. I saw one con is potential joint problems... And still could have had posture...

Depends on which desk we're talking about...

Office desk: an empty can, a tophat well as a demo and some Russian paracetamol I found from a pocket of my winter coat.

Home Office #1 desk: the keyboard for another computer, a plant, a bunch of magazines and newspapers belonging to someone else, a roll of kitchen paper, someone else's meds, a cup of cookies, another cup of small tomatoes, a Swiss army knife, a bike computer and a tablet.

Home Office #2 desk: wife's laptop, a bunch of chargers for a myriad of devices, a Kindle, some envelopes full of stickers, others with bills, a lot of random crap, and usually when I'm at the desk, one or two purring felines

Does anybody know a good, not so expensive Mini PC? Something like an Apple Mini. Maybe I want to buy something like that to have a quiet, Little pc at my Home Desk so I Can work with it. It should run Linux quite well (drivers)

Taking a leave for 14 days from work, just to use my vacation days, really messes with my biorhythm :D My day/night cycle shifted about 12 hours.. Programming during the night for a freelance project, sleeping 1-2 hours during the day just to rest my eyes a bit..

I'm from Belgium, but the second developer, on the project, is from San Francisco.. It's quiet nice to have someone to talk to about the development process when every one else I know is asleep.

I'm not made for a dayjob at a desk, I need to be at home, in my bed or at my own desk, choosing my own hours, just.. Working on projects with some music, some snacks,.. Much more productive that way than, instead, being forced to work from 9am to 6pm.. You can't force creativity or inspiration
.

I slept 9 hours this week, spread over 4 days... I'm not the most healthy person, I know :D

This is a repost of an original rant posted on a request for "Community Feedback" from Atlassian. You know, Atlassian? Those beloved people behind such products as :

• Thing I Love™
• Other Thing You Used One Time™
• Platform Often Mentioned in Suicide Notes, Probably™*

Now this rant was written in early 2022 while I was working in an Azure Cloud Engineer role that transformed into me being the company's main Sysadmin/Project Manager/Hiring Manager/Network Admin/Graphic Designer.

While trying to simultaneously put out over 9000 fires with one hand, and jangling keys in the face of the Owner/Arsonist with the other, I was also desperately implementing Jira Service Desk. Normally this wouldn't have been as much of a priority as it was, but the software our support team was using had gone past 15 years old, then past extended support, then the lone developer died, then it didn't work on Windows 10, then only functioned thanks to a dev cohort long past creating a keygen....which was now broken. So we needed a solution *now*.

The previous solution was shit of a different tier. The sight of it would make a walking talking anthropomorphised sentient puddle of dogshit (who both eats and produces further dookie derivatives) blush with embarrassment. The CD-ROM/Cereal Box this software came in probably listed features like "Stores Your Customer's First AND (or) Last Name!" or "Windows ME Downgrade Disk Included!" and "NEW: Less(-ish) Genocide(s)"!

Despite this, our brain/fearless leader decided this would be a great time to have me test, implement, deploy, and train everyone up on a new solution that would suck your toes, sound your shaft, and that he hadn't reminded me that I was a lazy sack enough lately.

One day, during preliminary user testing I received an email letting me know that the support team was having issues with a Customer's profile on our new support desk. Thanks to our Owner/Firestarter/Real World Micheal Scott being deep in his latest project (fixing our "All 5 devs quit in the last 12 months and I can't seem to hire any new ones" issue (by buying a ping pong table)), I had a bit of fortuitous time on my hands to investigate this issue. I had spent many hours of overtime working on this project, writing custom integrations and automations, so what I found out was crushing.

Below is the (digitally) physical manifestation of my rage after realising I would have to create / find / deal with a whole new method for support to manage customer contacts.

I'm linking to the original forum thread because you kind of need to have the pictures embedded in said reply to get really inhale the "Jira-Rant" ambiance. The part where I use several consecutive words as anchor links to tickets with other people screaming into the void gets a bit sweet n' savoury too - having those hyperlinks does improve the je ne say what of it all.

bit.ly/JIRANT (Case Sensitive)

--------------------------

There is some good news at the end of this brown n' squirty rainbow though!
Nice try silly little Jira button, you can't ruin *my* 2022!

• I was able to forget all about Jira a month later when I received a surprise vacation home! (To be there while my Mom passed away).
• Eventually work stress did catch up to me - but my boss thoughtfully gave me a nice long vacation! (By assaulting *while* firing me (for emailing in a vacation request while he was a having a bad (see:normal) day))

I'm anti-social, but sitting alone in my home office day after day is starting to get to me.

Thinking of renting a desk at a co-working space.

I am thinking of taking some random photos and create stop motion videos of desk toys I have at home. Guess it would be pretty fun thing to do during lockdown😄

It suuucks having to code split-screen on a 15" 1920x1080 laptop on a small desk that's only 2 feet wide. That's my home setup..

Code-cramp, I say. Time to upgrade sometime.. I need a new desk, for instance..

Happened today on the way home
---
*Doesn't feel keys in usual pocket*
Shit, where are my keys?
*Checks other pockets*
Oh, I put them where I usually put my wallet.
...
Shit, where is my wallet? (I forgot it on my desk 🤦‍♂️)

I've put my back out. Today I'm super grateful for a nice desk chair and working from home.

So far not much has changed in my office, only a colleague or three are working from home for two weeks as a precautionary measure after returning from a Coronavirus hot-spot.

For myself I see little danger: I commute by car, the office is so far Coronavirus-free, and I still have to go to shops to get food etc.

I'm more comfortable working in the office, as the environment is set up better, and I can chat with colleagues more easily when needed. If I should need to WFH for extended periods, I'll need another monitor (currently I have one nice 27" BenQ monitor on my desk at home), and a mechanical keyboard (the one I bought is in the office).

So sick of the this bullshit we have to put up with. This 14 year old kid thinks he can just do as he pleases and walk right over top of us and continuously disrespects us. He's nothing but a lying, disrespectful, manipulative, thieving, two faced little prick. He's always lying to our faces and is always stealing from us. My husband constantly asked him not to let the dog on the bed and everytime he just says sorry it won't happen again, his definition of sorry is sorry I'll try harder not to get caught. We've bent over backwards to help him and be nice to him. We've taken him places, bought him things, bought him food and let him have some of our food and drinks then he just turns around and treats us like shit and just gets away with it, he knows that no one will do anything unless there is proof even though everyone knows it was him. My husband caught the dog on the bed again the other day, so he snaps and starts yelling at him and tells him he's going to take his bed out and burn it so he won't have a bed to put the bog on. So instead of saying anything to my husbands face he just leaves a note on his desk saying "go ahead and burn my bed and see what happens" provoking him even more my husband snaps again and drags his mattress and box springs out and is literally about to light it on fire and I was barely able to stop him. So the little shit gets home from school sees his shit out in the yard, gets butt hurt and wipes shit on my toothbrush and of course gets away with it like always cause there was no proof. Smh. And it's like this all the time, he just goes behind our backs and plays these little fuck fuck games. Then he cries to his family playing the victim and they all just baby him. I've never seen so much disrespect towards a marine corps veteran in my life.

-- Have you ever self hosted a Linux/Free Bsd server at home?
-- What was the maintenance like in terms of operation and cost compared to an online service?

I and my partner are planning to self host our Ubuntu server locally because currently though we spend less than $1100 a month on Azure with moderate CPU usage but we plan to scale out with believes that the server cost might sky-rocket.

We made a budget of $25k for the setup which includes cost of hardware, bandwidth and power.

We also made some research concerning most used hardwares for home servers because we really are newbees talk of hardware. What we found are options related to the Intel Xeon as CPU, some others say use NAS, while some are more of advertising.

$25k on the desk,
we care more about speed than of space. How can we make the setup totally worth it? You don't have to spare us a change, just some headlight and way to go.
Your advice are needed. Thank you.

We create home automation S/W and have it installed in the workplace.

For some reason the lights in the Help Desk/Testing department didn't turn on this morning. At the time our lead engineer was there too.

Rather then try sort it out themselves, they called R&D and got us to check the issue out. Turns out the lighting had been tripped over the weekend when the maintenance department was doing some work.

As we were investigating the issue they were just talking about their weekend so could of easily investigated it themselves!

Few minutes into work and I'm already hungry and sleepy. I had breakfast before I left home today. It's raining over here don't feel like moving from my desk.