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Wow this one deserves a rant. Where should I even begin? I got a new job for over half a year now doing work in an agency. We're building websites and online shops with Typo3 and Shopware (not my dream, but hey). All fine you might think BUT...
1) I have been working on the BIGGEST project we have all by myself since I started working at this company. No help, nobody cares.
2) If something goes wrong all the shit falls back to me like "wHy DiDnT yoU WoRk MoRE?". Seriously? How should one dev cover a project that's meant for at least two or three.
3) The project was planned four years ago (YES that's a big fat FOUR) and sat there for 3,5 years - nobody gave a fuck. I got into the company and immediately got the sucky shit project to work on.
4) I was promised some time to get familiar with the projects and tech we use and "pick something I like most to get started". Well that never happened.
5) I was also promised not to talk directly to our customers. Well, each week I was bombarded with insults, a shitload of work and nonsense by our customers because (you guessed it) I was obligated to attend meetings.
6) The scheduled time for a meeting was 30 minutes, sometimes they just went on for over two hours. Fml.
7) Project management. It does not exist. The company is just out to get more and more clients, hires more god damn managers and shit and completely neglects that we might need more devs to get all this crap finished. Nope, they don't care. By the way: this is not like a 200 employee company, it's more like 15 which makes it even sadder to have 4 managers and 3 devs.
8) We don't use trello (or anything to keep track of our "progress"), nobody knows the exact scope of the project, because it was planned FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.
9) They planned to use 3 months on this project to get it finished (by the way it's not just an online shop, it has a really sophisticated product configurator with like 20 dependencies). Well, we're double over that time period and it is still not finished.
10) FUCK YOU SHOPWARE
11) The clients are super unsatisfied with our service (who would have guessed). They never received official documents from us (that's why nobody knows the scope), nor did they receive the actual screen design of the shop so we just have to make it up on the go. Of course I mean "I" by "we", because appearently it is my job to develop, design and manage this shit show.
12) My boss regularly throws me in front of the bus by randomly joining meetings with my client telling them the complete opposite of things that we discussed internally (he doesn't know anything about this stupid project)
13) FUCK YOU COLLEAGUES, FUCK YOU COMPANY, FUCK YOU SHOPWARE AND FUCK YOU STUPID CUSTOMERS.
14) Oh btw. the salary sucks ass, it's barely a couple of bucks above minimum wage. Don't ask me why I accepted the offer. I guess it was better than nothing in the meantime.
Boy that feels good. I needed that rant. But hey don't get me wrong. I get that dev jobs can be hard and sucky, but this is beyond stupidity that I can bear. I therefore applied for a dev job in research at a university in my dream country. Nice colleagues, interesting projects, good project management. They accepted me, gave me a good offer and I can happily say that in 6-7 weeks my current company can go fuck themselves (nobody knows the 10.000+ lines of code but me). Just light it up and watch it burn!21 -
There once was a bright young engineer who was hired by a company to design their new light ship.
Like 50 seconds after getting inside the company, the engineer was approached by a douchebag in a business suite.
"Hey, can you make us a mock up of the ship's design in the next hour or so? Nothing fancy, it must be very simple! To not overcomplicate it! Just a simple mock up so we can all see what are we talking about in this project! Please do not overthink this!"
The engineer, young and naive, just folded some piece of paper and gave the douchebag a paper boat.
"Fantastic! That's all we need for the presentation for the investors!"
A couple hours later the suite was back screaming.
"YOUR FUCKING FARSE! YOUR SHITTY SHIP EMBARRASED US ALL! THE VERY MOMENT OUR CEO TRIED TO STEP ON IT IT SANK! YOU ARE FIRED AND WE WILL SUE YOU FOR INCOMPETENCE! I ASKED YOU SOMETHING SIMPLE AND YOU CAME UP WITH THIS OVER ENGINEERED PIECE OF CRAP, YOU SON OF A.. [many, maaany expletives suppressed for brevity sake]"
This is how I feel everytime someone asks for "a tiny change" or some "very simple solution".
If it was so simple that it could be done in such short notice, than why the fuck do it at all, instead of buying it? I heard people sell all sorts of things in the internet nowadays. Software fucking included.5 -
Fuck the memes.
Fuck the framework battles.
Fuck the language battles.
Fuck the titles.
Anybody who has been in this field long enough knows that it doesn't matter if your linus fucking torvalds, there is no human who has lived or ever will live that simultaneously understands, knows, and remembers how to implement, in multiple languages, the following:
- jest mocks for complex React components (partial mocks, full mocks, no mocks at all!)
- token cancellation for asynchronous Tasks in C#
- fullstack CRUD, REST, and websocket communication (throw in gRPC for bonus points)
- database query optimization, seeding, and design
- nginx routing, https redirection
- build automation with full test coverage and environment consideration
- docker container versioning, restoration, and cleanup
- internationalization on both the front AND backends
- secret storage, security audits
- package management, maintenence, and deprecation reviews
- integrating with dozens of APIs
- fucking how to center a div
and that's a _comically_ incomplete list; barely scratches the surface of the full range of what a dev can encounter in a given day of writing software
have many of us probably done one or even all of these at different times? surely.
but does that mean we are supposed to draw that up at a moment's notice some cookie-cutter solution like a fucking robot and spit out an answer on a fax sheet?
recruiters, if you read this site (perhaps only the good ones do anyway so its wasted oxygen), just know that whoever you hire its literally the luck of the draw of how well they perform during the interview. sure, perhaps some perform better, but you can never know how good someone is until they literally start working at your org, so... have fun with that.
Oh and I almost forgot, again for you recruiters, on top of that list which you probably won't ever understand for the entirety of your lives, you can also add writing documentation, backup scripts, and orchestrating / administrating fucking JIRA or actually any somewhat technical dashboard like a CMS or website, because once again, the devs are the only truly competent ones - and i don't even mean in a technical sense, i mean in a HUMAN sense of GETTING SHIT DONE IN GENERAL.
There's literally 2 types of people in the world: those who sit around drawing flow charts and talking on the phone all day, and those WHO LITERALLY FUCKING BUILD THE WORLD
why don't i just run the whole fucking company at this point? you guys are "celebrating" that you made literally $5 dollars from a single customer and i'm just sitting here coding 12 hours a day like all is fine and well
i'm so ANGRY its always the same no matter where i go, non-technical people have just no clue, even when you implore them how long things take, they just nod and smile and say "we'll do it the MVP way". sure, fine, you can do that like 2 or 3 times, but not for 6 fucking months until you have a stack of "MVPs" that come toppling down like the garbage they are.
How do expect to keep the "momentum" of your customers and sales (I hope you can hear the hatred of each of these market words as I type them) if the entire system is glued together with ducktape because YOU wanted to expedite the feature by doing it the EASY way instead of the RIGHT way. god, just forget it, nobody is going to listen anyway, its like the 5th time a row in my life
we NEED tests!
we NEED to know our code coverage!
we NEED to design our system to handle large amounts of traffic!
we NEED detailed logging!
we NEED to start building an exception database!
BILBO BAGGINS! I'm not trying to hurt you! I'm trying to help you!
Don't really know what this rant was, I'm just raging and all over the place at the universe. I'm going to bed.20 -
!!rant
!!ANGER
Micromanager: "Hey, Root!
Since you're back, and still not feeling well, we have an easy ticket for you: Rewrite the slack integration gem! Oh, you don't have to re-implement all of it, just make sure it all works the same way it does now. That bitch you worked with once over a year ago who kept throwing you under the bus to management and stealing credit for your work? Yeah, she wrote the original code like four years ago. It's perfect, so don't touch it. but she can fill you in on all the details you need and get you up to speed on how to test it.
But yep! It should be simple. and I just knew you would love this ticket, so I saved it just for you. Nice and quick, too, to get you an easy win.
You know, since you have to repair your reputation with product. and management. and the execs. and the rest of the team. and me. Yeah, product doesn't trust you so they don't want to give you any tickets. They just can't trust you to get them out and have them work. So you have a lot of hard work to do."
Spoiler: The bus-thrower wasn't much help. (Surprise.)
Spoiler: The ticket was already in my backlog -- one of a grand total of two tickets.
Spoiler: I don't find the ticket fun. Maybe if I was to write the entire implementation with a nice DSL? but no, "don't touch the perfect code." Fuck you.
Spoiler: It isn't going to be nice or quick. But, she (micromanager) is looking to lose me, so that really is an easy win. for her.
And. just. argh. fuck you. i've been exhausted and dying for well over a year, but you've kept ignoring that (and still are, despite me providing goddamn legal forms from fucking doctors stating it in plain fucking english, which you also fucking ignore), and you just keep piling on the work and demanding the ridiculous of me despite it. Yeah I can pull it off sometimes. No, I really shouldn't, and I'm surprised I can. (also, "Time off? What, and lower your productivity even more? ____ doesn't even take vacations. And how are you doing on that ticket?") And no, none of my tickets have ever had any fucking problems. Not even when there are upstream service outages. Not. a. single. fucking. one. Ever. And the only things I've ever missed were things that bloody product never put in the fucking ticket, so fuck you with your "repair your reputation" bullshit.
god, i fuckiNG HATE THESESTUPOID ANWETLJAF SAJEWTKW BITCHFACEDUCKFUCKERS
Why the FUCK am I still fucking working here?
Right, because I've been burned out and dying so much I can't pass a fucking interview so I can fucking leave.
jasdkl;fk
ugh. Anyway. If you ever find yourself starting work at a Cali fintech company whose internal mascot is a very fine duck? Just run. I absolutely guarantee you will be miserable.15 -
ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.
I'll summarize the few I remember.
First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.
Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'
and gems like:
def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end
^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.
Next up are a few of my personal favorites:
Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am
LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?
And for design decisions...
The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'
I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.
Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.
But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.
Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.
Yep, it's garbage all the way down.16 -
College can be one of the worst investments for an IT career ever.
I've been in university for the past 3 years and my views on higher education have radically changed from positive to mostly cynical.
This is an extremely polarizing topic, some say "your college is shite", "#notall", "you complain too much", and to all of you I am glad you are happy with your expensive toilet paper and feel like your dick just grew an inch longer, what I'll be talking about is my personal experience and you may make of it what you wish. I'm not addressing the best ivy-league Unis those are a whole other topic, I'll talk about average Unis for average Joes like me.
Higher education has been the golden ticket for countless generations, you know it, your parents believe in it and your grandparents lived it. But things are not like they used to be, higher education is a failing business model that will soon burst, it used to be simple, good grades + good college + nice title = happy life.
Sounds good? Well fuck you because the career paths that still work like that are limited, like less than 4.
The above is specially true in IT where shit moves so fast and furious if you get distracted for just a second you get Paul Walkered out of the Valley; companies don't want you to serve your best anymore, they want grunt work for the most part and grunts with inferiority complex to manage those grunts and ship the rest to India (or Mexico) at best startups hire the best problem solvers they can get because they need quality rather than quantity.
Does Uni prepare you for that? Well...no, the industry changes so much they can't even follow up on what it requires and ends up creating lousy study programs then tells you to invest $200k+ in "your future" for you to sweat your ass off on unproductive tasks to then get out and be struck by jobs that ask for knowledge you hadn't even heard off.
Remember those nights you wasted drawing ER diagrams while that other shmuck followed tutorials on react? Well he's your boss now, but don't worry you will wear your tired eyes, caffeine saturated breath and overweight with pride while holding your empty title, don't get me wrong I've indulged in some rough play too but I have noticed that 3 months giving a project my heart and soul teaches me more than 6 months of painstakingly pleasing professors with big egos.
And the soon to be graduates, my God...you have the ones that are there for the lulz, the nerds that beat their ass off to sustain a scholarship they'll have to pay back with interests and the ones that just hope for the best. The last two of the list are the ones I really feel bad for, the nerds will beat themselves over and over to comply with teacher demands not noticing they are about to graduate still versioning on .zip and drive, the latter feel something's wrong but they have no chances if there isn't a teacher to mentor them.
And what pisses me off even more is the typical answers to these issues "you NEED the title" and "you need to be self taught". First of all bitch how many times have we heard, seen and experienced the rejection for being overqualified? The market is saturated with titles, so much so they have become meaningless, IT companies now hire on an experience, economical and likeability basis. Worse, you tell me I need to be self taught, fucker I've been self taught for years why would I travel 10km a day for you to give me 0 new insights, slacking in my face or do what my dog does when I program (stare at me) and that's just on the days you decide to attend!
But not everything is bad, college does give you three things: networking, some good teachers and expensive dead tree remnants, is it worth the price tag, not really, not if you don't need it.
My broken family is not one of resources and even tho I had an 80% scholarship at the second best uni of my country I decided I didn't need the 10+ year debt for not sleeping 4 years, I decided to go to the 3rd in the list which is state funded; as for that decision it worked out as I'm paying most of everything now and through my BS I've noticed all of the above, I've visited 4 universities in my country and 4 abroad and even tho they have better everything abroad it still doesn't justify some of the prices.
If you don't feel like I do and you are happy, I'm happy for you. My rant is about my personal experience which is kind of in the context of IT higher education in the last ~8 years.
Just letting some steam off and not regretting most of my decisions.
15 -
A brief, and biased opinion of what love is in the dev world:
Love is my employees bringing me something to eat when they know I stay back so that they can all go out do whatever they can do.
Love is my CMS admin getting his ass up and walking all the way to my office when the director walks in to say some STUPID FUCKING SHIT to me that he(CMS Admin) knows would have me 2 fucking seconds away from getting out of my chair and drop kicking the fuck out of him.
Love is the rest of my employees getting up to follow along in case(certainly) one dude is not able to hold me down.
Love is them knowing that I know that their mere presence there will make me chill the fuck out and not choke the fucking director
Love is the CMS Admin proof reading every email I send to a bitch that was trying to get smart, to make sure that I was not being agressive.
Love is said CMS Admin bringing me coffee or a coke congratulating me on listening to him about X email not being aggressive (there is no passive in my vocabulary, just balls out "isn't this your fucking job" aggressive)
Love is my lead developer showing to work after medical treatment fucked up as all hell because he knows that if he is not there I will do a billion things myself in order to give him some rest.
Love is taking my CMS admin and lead dev out to eat when a major stakeholder shits on something I damn well know it took them a while to finish. Love is also letting me open up to said stakeholder to tell them how much of a fucktard they are, sometimes they let me loose, and I appreciate that.
Love is every small person in the company approaching you to tell you of their issues, becuase they care more about the productivity they give to their users, rather than the bullshit numbers their managers care about.
Love is the staff of other places taking care of you because you are not a VP dickhead that treats them like shit.
Love is the HR reps sending you personal e-mails asking you for help because their shitbag of a boss does not count for help and leaves them in the blank with shit software, for which said HR go above and beyond for you later on even though said shitbag manager said no.
Love is your team getting angry and responding respectfully at people when they talk shit about their manager on their emails (manager being me)
Love is your employees closing your door for you when they know you are overwhelmed and you need a quick second to pull yourself up.
Love is not wanting to leave this miserable place because you know some dickweed will be left in charge of the people that care for you, trust you, work for you regardless of the date, and confide in you.
They got me locked in, this shitty institution, for now. Until I find a way to bring my entire team with me.8 -
Hey Root, remember that super high-priority ticket that we ignored for five months before demanding you rewrite it a specific way in one day?
Yeah, the new approach we made you use broke the expected usecases, and now the page is completely useless to the support team and they're freaking out. Drop everything you're doing and go fix it! Code-complete for this release is tonight! -- This right after "impacting our business flow" while being collapsed on the fucking floor.
Jesus FUCKING christ, what the fuck is wrong with these people?
If I dropped the ball on a high-priority ticket for two weeks, I'd get fired, let alone for five fucking months.
If I was a manager and demanded a one-day rewrite I can only imagine the amount of chewing out I'd receive, especially on something high-priority.
And let's not forget product ownership: imagine if I screwed up feature planning for someone so badly I made them break a support tool in production. I'd never hear the end of it.
Fucking double standards.
And while I'm at it. Some of the code I've seen in this codebase is awful. Uncommented spaghetti, or an unreadable mess with single-letter variables, super-tightly coupled modules so updates are nearly impossible, typos in freaking constants added across sixty+ files, obviously-incorrect comments, ... . I'll have to start posting snippets to show them off. But could I get away with any of it? ha. Hell no. My code must be absolutely perfect. I hear about any and every flaw, doesn't matter how minor, and nothing can go out until everything is just so.
Hell, I even hear about flaws in other peoples' code during my code reviews. Why? Because I should have fixed it, that's why. But if I do, I get yelled at for "muddying the waters."
Just. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.
It's like playing a shell game where no matter which shell I pick (or point to their goddamn sleeve where they're clearly hiding it), I get insulted for being so consistently useless, and god damn, how can I never find the fucking pea or follow the damned rules? I'm so terrible and this is why "nobody trusts me." Fuck you.
I'll tell you why I can't find your damned pea: IT'S RATTLING INSIDE YOUR FUCKING HEADS, you ASSHOLE FUCKING IMBECILES.
That's right: one pea among the lot of them.
goddamn I am fucking pissed off.8 -
In my last rant (https://devrant.com/rants/5523458/...) I regaled you lovely folks of how I had to diplomatically yet firmly defend my work/life boundaries during off-work hours for non-life threatening affairs (a frustratingly common occurrence), and concluded the thread by mentioning that I still had a job, but would make a note of my frustration of that for whatever exit interview happens.
Well, no need for those notes any longer.
I and half of the engineering force, along with several senior managers were laid off this morning in the form of a "mandatory on-site all hands".
I live and work in NYC. Several people took trains and booked rooms from as far away as Boston to be here (or at least I know of specifically two people who commuted up here on Sunday to be here for the "all hands"). I presume those people used their travel benefits to get here and back.
We were dismissed before the meeting even took place, and according to a coworker I became friends with (yes, despite my snarky comments in other threads, I *do* actually have coworkers I became friends with lol) who survived at least this round of layoffs, once the actual all-hands commenced, the company first disclosed the layoffs, then announced being awarded a major contract with the very client the entire org had been working on overdrive to win for the last nine months. He had already been looking for a new job and got an offer last Friday, had been mulling it over, but told me once we were off the phone he was calling them up and accepting. He had three people reporting to him, and lost two. Even he had no idea it was coming until one of his now-former subordinates asked him to come outside and told him they'd just been let go.
I knew going in to this startup that "it's a startup, anything can happen, just mind the gap". That's why I asked on numerous occasions and tried to get time with our CFO to ask about revenue and earnings; things that in my years at this place were never disclosed to the rank and file, I'm not a professional accountant or CPA by any means, but I did take a pair of corporate accounting classes in community college because I like the numbers (see my other rants about leaving the field and becoming a math teacher), and I was really curious to know how the financial health of the business was.
It wasn't so much a red flag as it was an orangish-yellow that no one ever answered those questions, or that the CFO was distant but not necessarily cagey about my requests for his time; other indicators were good while interviewing--they had multiple fully integrated, paying customers (one of which being a former employer from years ago, which aided me in having strong product familiarity during the job interview), but I guess not enough to be sustainable.
Anyway. I'm gonna use the rest of the week to be a bum, might get out of the city and go hang with friends Pittsburgh, eat some hoagies and just vibe for a while. I've got assets and money stashed up to float pretty easily for a while, plus a bit of fun money so losing the job isn't world ending. Generalized anxiety because everything is going to shit worldwide, but that quickly faded into the backdrop of the generalized anxiety I always have because existentialism or something like that.
Thanks for reading. Pay the teachers.5 -
!rant, TL;DR at the bottom
Holy fuck, Yesterday, I got absolutely schooled by a literal newbie.
And I mean, NEWBIE newbie, the dude just started a Computer Science degree, and has been learning Java only for a MONTH. He has 0 prior experience with code or anything of the like, and he's somewhat of an Ars(Israel's version of a Gopnik).
So I was helping him with some stuff he didn't understand, and lo and behold his code was probably the most aesthetically pleasing and organized code I have seen in my 8 years of programming(I know 8 is not much, but It's at least above beginner level). The dude's a perfectionist, so I was like, "Okay, very impressive, but makes sense for perfectionism"(I straight up told him: "Damn, I've seen people with years of programming experience who can't learn to write this well, and you do this by default? I envy whoever's going to work with you"), and then I saw the way he writes checks(as in, methods that return a boolean) and I think I came.
The code was:
[First method in the picture]
And I know, it doesn't look as ✨ WOW✨ as I make it sound, but in my personal opinion this both looks much better and is much more readable than what I normally write:
[Second method in the picture]
and whenever there are longer or more complicated checks it makes it look like a simple puzzle that just fits in all the pieces nicely, for example in a rectangle class we had to write an 'isIn' method, this is how I wrote it:
[Third method in the picture]
His way of writing the same thing was:
[Fourth method in the picture]
Which I think is soooooo much better and readable and organized,
It's enough just looking at the short return statement to immediately understand everything that's going on.
"Oh, so it just checks if the SW(South West, i.e. Bottom Left) corner is above and to the right, and if the NE(North East, i.e. Top Right) corner is bellow and to the left"
Point of the story? Some people are just fucking awesome. And sometimes the youngest/most inexperienced people can teach you new tricks.
And to all of you dinosaurs here with like, 20+ years of experience, y'all can still learn even from us stupid ones. If 8 years can get schooled by a 1 month, 20 years can get schooled by a 1 year.
Listen to everyone everybody, never know where you might learn something new.
TL;DR: Got schooled by a local "Gopnik" who only started learning programming a month ago with 0 prior experience with his insane level of organization and readability.
30 -
Thoughts prior to feedback meeting, about how it's gonna go.
---------------------------------------------------------
Scenario one:
Supervisor: The shit is this? You call this a research work? Get the fuck out of here! You're fired and even your unborn kids are banned from coming into this institute ever again!
Me: *walks out sobbing* (dunno how one can walk out of a zoom meeting, but this is imaginary so who's counting?)
Scenario two:
S: Umm, good work. I just don't think it's presentable. Maybe come back in like a few weeks when you actually polish this into a "real scientific work".
Me: *sobs after meeting. Starts preping for seppuku cuz no idea where I'm headed with this work any further*
Scenario three:
S: nah man. This is no good. Let's start from the bottom. Like, start data collection from the beginning or something.
Me: *sobs and commits seppuku on the meeting.* (I just have a pen tho. Hope it has the same effect as a sword)
---------------------------------------------------------
There are other scenarios, but they all end up in me sobbing and/or committing seppuku in/after the meeting so yeah the drama is running high right now.11 -
I used to think that I had matured. That I should stop letting my emotions get the better of me. Turns out there's only so much one can bottle up before it snaps.
Allow me to introduce you folks to this wonderful piece of software: PaddleOCR (https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/...). At this time I'll gladly take any free OCR library that isn't Tesseract. I saw the thing, thought: "Heh. 3 lines quick start. Cool.", and the accuracy is decent. I thought it was a treasure trove that I could shill to other people. That was before I found out how shit of a package it is.
First test, I found out that logging is enabled by default. Sure, logging is good. But I was already rocking my own logger, and I wanted it to shut the fuck up about its log because it was noise to the stuffs I actually wanted to log. Could not intercept its logging events, and somehow just importing it set the global logging level from INFO to DEBUG. Maybe it's Python's quirk, who knows. Check the source code, ah, the constructors gaves `show_log` arg to control logging. The fuck? Why? Why not let the user opt into your logs? Why is the logging on by default?
But sure, it's just logging. Surely, no big deal. SURELY, it's got decent documentation that is easily searchable. Oh, oh sweet summer child, there ain't. Docs are just some loosely bundled together Markdowns chucked into /doc. Hey, docs at least. Surely, surely there's something somewhere about all the args to the OCRer constructor somewhere. NOPE! Turns out, all the args, you gotta reference its `--help` switch on the command line. And like all "good" software from academia, unless you're part of academia, it's obtuse as fuck. Fine, fuck it, back to /doc, and it took me 10 minutes of rummaging to find the correct Markdown file that describes the params. And good-fucking-luck to you trying to translate all them command line args into Python constructor params.
"But PTH, you're overreacting!". No, fuck you, I'm not. Guess whose code broke today because of a 4th number version bump. Yes, you are reading correctly: My code broke, because of a 4th number version bump, from 2.6.0.1, to 2.6.0.2, introducing a breaking change. Why? Because apparently, upstream decided to nest the OCR result in another layer. Fuck knows why. They did change the doc. Guess what they didn't do. PROVIDING, A DAMN, RELEASE NOTE. Checked their repo, checked their tags, nothing marking any releases from the 3rd number. All releases goes straight to PyPI, quietly, silently, like a moron. And bless you if you tell me "Well you should have reviewed the docs". If you do that for your project, for all of your dependencies, my condolences.
Could I just fix it? Yes. Without ranting? Yes. But for fuck sake if you're writing software for a wide audience you're kinda expected to be even more sane in your software's structure and release conventions. Not this. And note: The people writing this, aren't random people without coding expertise. But man they feel like they are.6 -
Today after longer vacation I came back to work.
Edit: wrote this rant long time ago, but never finished. Was too pissed.
Some easy meetings, then wanted to start on an easy job.
Just migrating some things from bash regex voodoo to proper tools like JQ.
Finished in roughly 1 h. Lovely.
Made some tea, ate some cookies.
Set up dev environment, found no documentation what so ever, got it running after half an hour.
Annoying, but ok.
Then I tried my scripts...
They worked... Except they didn't.
Console log empty, response code 200 with state: GENERATE_NO_FILES.
Eh. Fuck you. Just fuck you.
Fixed the logging configuration, which was broken since uhm... 2 years plus?
Well... Another half another hour gone...
Kinda pissed now.
Still script return failed...
Poking and trying to sprinkle debug all over that shit cause everything seems ... An incohesive, inconsistent diarrhea.
3 hours later...
Made the ticket to rewrite it.
I did nothing wrong at all.
The API just has no workflow at all. The
*seperate* API calls have to be in an **specific** order - as otherwise the generation will fail, as the prerequisites for the generation are not fulfilled.
Yeah. Completely logical. Especially not to give out any kind of warning or an error message like requirements not met, blablabla.
I drank that evening 2 six packs of beer. I was raging mad....
Then gave that shit to another manager, as I never want to touch that nuclear waste again....
How can someone be so brain damaged -.-1 -
!rant
For all of youse that ever wanted to try out Common Lisp and do not know where to start (but are interested in getting some knowledge of Common Lisp) I recommend two things:
As an introductory tutorial:
https://lisperati.com/casting.html/
And as your dev environment:
https://portacle.github.io/
Notice that the dev environment in question is Emacs, regardless of how you might feel about it as a text editor, i can recommend just going through the portacle help that gives you some basic starting points regarding editing. Learn about splitting buffers, evaluating the code you are typing in order for it to appear in the Common Lisp REPL (this one comes with an environment known as SLIME which is very popular in the Lisp world) as well as saving and editing your files.
Portacle is self contained inside of one single directory, so if you by any chance already have an Emacs environment then do not worry, Portacle will not touch any of that. I will admit that as far as I am concerned, Emacs will probably be the biggest hurdle for most people not used to it.
Can I use VS Code? Yes, yes you can, but I am not familiar with setting up a VSCode dev environment for Emacs, or any other environment hat comes close to the live environment that emacs provides for this?
Why the fuck should I try Common Lisp or any Lisp for that matter? You do not have to, I happen to like it a lot and have built applications at work with a different dialect of Lisp known as Clojure which runs in the JVM, do I recommend it? Yeah I do, I love functional programming, Clojure is pretty pure on that (not haskell level imo though, but I am not using Haskell for anything other than academic purposes) and with clojure you get the entire repertoire of Java libraries at your disposal. Moving to Clojure was cake coming from Common Lisp.
Why Common Lisp then if you used Clojure in prod? Mostly historical reasons, I want to just let people know that ANSI Common Lisp has a lot of good things going for it, I selected Clojure since I already knew what I needed from the JVM, and parallelism and concurrency are baked into Clojure, which was a priority. While I could have done the same thing in Common Lisp, I wanted to turn in a deliverable as quickly as possible rather than building the entire thing by myself which would have taken longer (had one week)
Am I getting something out of learning Common Lisp? Depends on you, I am not bringing about the whole "it opens your mind" deal with Lisp dialects as most other people do inside of the community, although I did experience new perspectives as to what programming and a programming language could do, and had fun doing it, maybe you will as well.
Does Lisp stands for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses or Los in stupid parentheses? Yes, also for Lost of Insidious Silly Parentheses and Lisp is Perfect, use paredit (comes with Portacle) also, Lisp stands for Lisp Is Perfect. None of that List Processing bs, any other definition will do.
Are there any other books? Yes, the famous online text Practical Common Lisp can be easily read online for free, I would recommend the Lisperati tutorial first to get a feel for it since PCL demands more tedious study. There is also Common Lisp a gentle introduction. If you want to go the Clojure route try Clojure for the brave and true.
What about Scheme and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? Too academic for my taste, and if in Common Lisp you have to do a lot of things on your own, Scheme is a whole other beast. Simple and beautiful really, but I go for practical in terms of Lisp, thus I prefer Common Lisp.
how did you start with Lisp?
I was stupid and thought I should start with it after a failed attempt at learning C++, then Java, and then Javascript when I started programming years ago. I was overwhelmed, but I continued. Then I moved to other things. But always kept Common Lisp close to heart. I am also heavy into A.I, Lisp has a history there and it is used in a lot of new and sort of unknown projects dealing with Knowledge Reasoning and representation. It is also Alien tech that contains many things that just seem super interesting to me such as treating code as data and data as code (back-quoting, macros etc)
I need some inspiration man......show me something? Sure, look for a game called Kandria in youtube, the creator, Shimera (Nicolas Hafner) is an absolute genius in the world of Lisp and a true inspiration. He coded the game in Common Lisp, he is also the person behind portacle. If that were not enough, he might very well also be Shirakumo, another prominent member of the Common Lisp Community.
Ok, you got me, what is the first thing in common lisp that I should try after I install the portacle environment? go to the repl and evaluate this:
(+ 0.1 0.2)
Watch in awe at what you get.
In the truest and original sense of the phrase (MIT based) "happy hacking!"10 -
I don't care about market cap. Stick your hype-driven business practices up your ass. Infinite growth doesn't exist. I won't read your fucking books and attend your fucking bootcamps and MBAs. You don't have a business model. Selling data is not a business model. Fuck your quick-flip venture capital schemes, and especially fuck your “ethics”.
I will be the first alt-tech CEO. I only care about revenue. The real money, not capitalization bubble vaporware. You don't need a huge fleet of engineers if you're smart about your technology, know how to do architecture, and you're not a feature creep. You don't need venture capital if you don't need a huge fleet of engineers. You don't need to sell data if you don't need venture capital. See? See the pattern here?
My experience allows me to build products on entirely my own. I am fully aware of the limitations of being alone, and they only inspire lean thinking and great architectural decisions. If you know throwing capacity at a problem is not an option, you start thinking differently. And if you don't need to hire anyone, it is very easy to turn a profit and make it sustainable.
If you don't follow the path of tech vaporware, you won't have the problems of tech vaporware, namely distrust of your user base, shitty updates that break everything, and of course “oops, they raised capital, time to leave before things go south”.
A friend of mine went the path I'm talking about, developed a product over the course of four years all alone, reached $10k MRR and sold for $0.8M. But I won't sell. I only care about revenue. If I get to $10k MRR, I will most likely stop doing new features and focus on fixing all the bugs there are and improving performance. This and security patches. Maybe an occasional facelift. That's it. Some products are valued because they don't change, like Sublime Text. The utility tool you can rely on. This is my scheme, this is what I want to do in life. A best-kept secret.
Imagine 100 million users that hate my product but use it because there are no alternatives, 100 people in data enrichment department alone, a billion dollars of evaluation (without being profitable), 10 million twitter followers, and ten VC firms telling me what to do and what data to sell.
Fuck that. I'd rather have one thousand loyal customers and $10k MRR. I'm different, some call it a mental illness, but the bottom line is, my goals are beyond their understanding. They call me crazy. I won't say it was never about the money, of course it was, but inflating your evaluation is not “money”. But the only thing they have is their terrible hustle culture lives and some VC street wisdom, meanwhile I HAVE products, it is on record on my PH. I have POTDs, I have a fucking Golden Kitty nomination on health and fitness for a product I made in one day. Fuck you.6 -
End of my rant about 35 day recruitment process for anyone interested to hear the ending.
Just got rejected by a company (name Swenson He) for a remote Android Engineer SWE role after wasting 35 days for the recruitment process.
First intro interview went good, then I did an assignment that had 72 hours deadline (asked for couple days longer to do this task, did it in around 40 hours, it was purely an assignment not free work, I could have done it in a day but I choose to overeenginer it so I could use the project as a portfolio piece, no regrets there and I learned some new things). After that It took them 2 weeks just to organize the technical interview.
2 days after the technical interview I received an offer from a second company with 1 week to decide. I immediately informed the Swenson He about it and politely asked whether they could speed up their decision process.
Now I know that I could just sign with the second company and if the big Swenson He would decide to bless me with and offer I could jump ship. But out of principle I never did that for 7 years of my career. If Im in a situation with multiple offers I always inform all parties (it's kinda a test for them so I could see which one is more serious and wants me to work for them more). Swenson He didnt pass the test.
6 days of silence. I pinged the techlead I interviewed with on LinkedIn about my situation, he assured me that he'l ask his hiring team to get back to me with feedback that day.
2 days of silence. I had to decide to sign or not to sign with a second company. I pinged the techlead again regarding their decision and 10min after received a rejection letter. There was no feedback.
I guess they got pissed off or something. Idk what were they thinking, maybe something along the lines of "Candidate trying to force our 35day recruitment process to go faster? Pinging us so much? Has another offer? What an asshole! ".
Didnt even receive any feedback in the end. Pinged their techlead regarding that but no response. Anyways fuck them. I felt during entire process that they are disrespecting me, I just wanted do see how it ends. Techlead was cool and knowledgeable but recruitment team was incompetent and couldn't even stay in touch properly during entire process. Had I didn't force their hand I bet they would have just ghosted me like they did with others according to their Glassdoor reviews.
Glad I continued to interview for other places, tomorrow Im signing an offer. Fuck Swenson He.
P.S. From my experience as a remote B2B contractor if a company is serious the entire process shouldn't take longer than max 2 weeks. Anything outside of that is pure incompetence. Even more serious companies can organize the required 2-3 meetings in a week if they have to and if they are interested. Hiring process shouldnt take longer than MAX 3 weeks unless you are applying for some fancy slow picky corporate company or a FAANG, which is out of topic for this post. -
Having just endured 30 excruciating minutes of utter braindead idiocy that is trying to setup and configure WPA2-Enterprise on a Windows 10 machine, I wanna go and fucking kill myself.
How can it be so bad after so many years this protocol has been out?! Not only can the authentication options be changed only in the who knows how many years old control panel settings and not the modern settings app, but once you finish setting up the network, you can no longer modify some of the key attributes like which CA certificates to validate the radius server against!
What. The. Fuck. Microsoft.
I swear, I don't usually get my jimmies rustled at work, but this... This just bloody infuriated me!2 -
!tech
i was feeling very disturbed thinking about this thing, so just wanna share here. trigger warning : this is about 2 recent news (1 national and1 international) about crimes against women and its affect on me, a male , somewhat privileged guy with rarely any women in life.
news 1 : some lady in iran getting killed by police due to religious laws . news 2 : a receptionist girl in india getting killed for not providing sexual services to hotel people .
i will come back to first news in a bit, but second news has shaken me to the very core. i saw a post where her dead corpse was being taken up by her acquitances and she is just ... lifeless, hands going sideways, face hung at one side, mouth open... damn :'(
read more here : https://indiatoday.in/india/story/...
i am not at all related to this news, but somehow, i as a guy feel disgusted and being responsible for this sad event. this is not an act of power or lust , this is an act of a horrible mentality.
i come from the city where the world's most number of hate crime and crime against women take place. and pathetic politicians and people of power blame it on women's dressing and mens "naive nature" and , "boys being boys, accidentally making mistakes" . little did anyone know that this mentality has been cooking in the streets for last so many years.
i am a single child with no siblings or grandparents, my relatives rarely visit me and my last 24 years on earth rarely involved any female companionship apart from my mom.
i like girls, i find them cute. i really want to be with someone, to have a consensus relationship. but the talks among my homie groups and other male friends have gone toxic to the level that a national issue syarted feeling relatable.
the feeling of getting affection from someone has somehow turned into a lust, a "game", a "service". one guy( who recently shifted to other state) would use to tell us how he would visit " red light areas" , another one(also left) once tried to ask for that "service" in a camp where we were staying during a trip, and used to tell how he would hook up with girls on Instagram.
we used to laugh at those things, find them interesting and enjoyable. i would think about them in deep, thinking that this is something possible, a transactional access to sex, with me now earning enough to afford it.
now, seeing this news i feel so shitty and being a horrible human. those thoughts were not originally mine, but i didn't opposed them. rather i laughed on it , and thought that once am even more powerful financially and politically, could even entertain that approach.
As a guy, i want to say i am deeply, terribly sorry.
This mentality needs to be changed. my homie group is not just the only group of males that has such vile thoughts having openly propagated. every park, every company meeting , every library, every gym, anywhere i go, i can just show up a coffee cup and shout "women,huh" and can get a laughter followed by several low voices whospers on which girl is a "s***" there .
there are multiple points of failure in our society that are causing these. the news 1 from the start of this rant is the very first : role of government and religion on controlling "dresses and behaviour" of women
another comes the role of sex, culture and gender education in institution. institutions in my areas are so fucked up: they teach how plants fuck and bees suck honey to a puberty hit student, but doesn't teach consent, relations and personal behavior at any age. my school would even try to sometimes make all girls sit in a seperate row and other times would force guys to sit with girls. don't know what they got for this authoritative behaviour, but that sure didn't impacted our brains very rightly.
lastly this needs to be made clear in evevry guy's mind that paid prostitution, forced prostitution and consensus relationship are 3 different things, and only a respectable , consensus relationship is something you should think about and prepare for.14 -
How fucking hard can it be to show a simple image. Guess which app has this feature.
Images are cropped to frame, but you can tap to fit the whole image to frame instead. No way to see the image on full screen. Pinch to zoom works, but it will immediately unzoom if you let go even one finger.1 -
I work in a small team. As the senior dev I tens to focus on important tasks that shape the core of the product but some times I can’t divide my self when there are multiple tasks at hand, so I pass some tasks to the an other mid level dev.
So the task was to create an automation in order to CD (continuously deliver) an order from WHMCS of the (git versioned) product to customers UAT, PROD envs.
To get a background this is an old guy with “constricted” experience in PHP/jQuery/Joomla/Wordpress.
So when we were breaking up the tasks he told me he would like to implement this so i gave him the task as i was busy with core features.
I was like what could go wrong? I know he doesn’t know much about CI/CD but he can read right? He will google right? He will search for CI/CD solutions that do this out of the box right? He will design on paper or what ever and do small POCs right? He will design the flow first before starting the implementation right? RIGHT?
So fast forward to today I had a call with him this morning about some DB staff. And he wanted to show me his progress…
His solution is:
(parentheses is my brain)
1. Customer completes WHMCS order (perfect)
2. Web Hook 🪝 action (YES)
3. cpanel gets source and “automatic!” Init, all using pure PHP code ignoring the usage of the current framework (ok… something is missing)
4. cpanel web hooks(?) WHMCS to send email to customer with the envs initial setup page(?)
5. Customer opens link and adds setup info (ok fuck, fuck, fuck)
(Ok stay cool composed, lets ask some questions maybe he thought it all in a cool way I can’t get my mind around)
Me: So how are you gonna get the correct version from the repo to the env and init the correct schema?
Dev: I haven’t thought about it yet.
Me: Are we gonna save each version to a file system then your code is going to fetch them?
Dev: I haven’t really thought about it we will see. But look on customer init user setup I implemented a password strength validation and it also checks if the password is the same.
So after this Pokémon encounter I politely closed teams. Stood up drank some (a lot) coffee ☕️. Put out the washed laundry while reflecting on life’s good things, while listening to classical music 🎼 .
Then I sat on my office chair drank some more coffee, put some linking park starting with in that order:
“Numb” then “What I’ve Done” and ended with “In the end, it does really fucking matter”
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