Got assigned an intern to mentor him, with an explicit order not to do any of the legwork for him.

We start out with some fuzzy requirements. Intern starts overengineering a generic solution, so I make out a best architecture that conforms to the business requirements and I explain it to the intern why are we going to use such approach and tell him how we are going to do it in three phases.

I explain the intern the first phase, break it down in small tasks for him and return to my projects...

After a couple of days of no words from the intern, I decide to check up on him to see how is he progressing, only to hear him complaining the task is boring. So, instead of doing the assigned tasks, he decided he should do a "design" for a feature I told him explicitly not to do, since it is going to be designed by the design team later on.

I explain it to the intern that we have to do the boring task first because we can't proceed with the next phase of the implementation without the necessary data from the phase one.

Intern says okay and assures me he got it now. Few days later, I check up on him, and he tells me he feels he is doing all the work and that I don't contribute to the project. I call up my boss and tell him intern wants a meeting. Since I was working from home, I quickly pack my things and head to the office. Boss talks to the intern before I managed to get to the office. Once I got there, I meet the intern, and he tells me everything is okay. I ask what did the boss say to make things okay all of a sudden, and he tells me he said we are a team now. Our company has a flat hierarchy model, so he tells me he doesn't feel he needs a mentor, that we are both equal, and that I have no idea how to work in a team, and then proceeds to comfort me on how human interaction is hard and that I will learn it one day... I was like wtf?

I tell him to finish the phase one of the project and start with the phase two, and I leave home again.

I call up my boss and ask him what did he say to the intern, and he says: "nothing much, just explained the project a little bit and how it fits in the grand scheme of things.". I ask about the equal team members thing, and me not being a mentor any longer, the boss goes wtf, saying he never said anything about that to him.

So the kid can't focus on a single task, over-engineers everything and doesn't feel he can learn anything from developers with more experience, doesn't want to obey commands, and also likes to lie to manipulate others.

Tomorrow we'll decide what to do with him...

Sorry for the long rant, it was a long stressful day.

If Programming Languages Were Girls:

Java: Your current girlfriend, you've been going steady for a while now. Things are okay.

Kotlin: The girl Java finds you cheating on, she's just amazing, and you wish you'd met her sooner.

Visual Basic: The girl you accidentally started a relationship with because you didn't know how to say no. But quickly realised your mistake and regretted it.

JavaScript: A childhood friend you occasionally hook up with. But you could never settle for a relationship with them.

Python: A bossy, manipulative girl who quickly turned things sour. But everyone else loves her because of her huge libraries.
-----------------------------------------------------
My and a co worker were joking the other day about what programming languages would be like if they were girls. This is what we came up with (Original inspiration: the Distracted Boyfriend meme (Feel free to add your own!)).

A wild Darwin Award nominee appears.

Background: Admins report that a legacy nightly update process isn't working. Ticket actually states problem is obviously in "the codes."

Scene: Meeting with about 20 people to triage the issue (blamestorming)

"Senior" Admin: "update process not working, the file is not present"
Moi: "which file?"
SAdmin: "file that is in ticket, EPN-1003"
Moi: "..." *grumbles, plans murder, opens ticket*
...
Moi: "The config dotfile is missing?"
SAdmin: "Yes, file no there. Can you fix?"
Moi: "Engineers don't have access to the production system. Please share your screen"
SAdmin: "ok"
*time passes, screen appears*
Moi: "ls the configuration dir"
SAdmin: *fails in bash* > ls

*computer prints*
> ls
_.legacyjobrc

Moi: *sees issues, blood pressure rises* "Please run list all long"
SAdmin: *fails in bash, again* > ls ?
Moi: *shakes* "ls -la"
SAdmin: *shonorable mention* > ls -la

*computer prints*
> ls -la
total 1300
drwxrwxrwx- 18 SAdmin {Today} -- _.legacyjobrc

Moi: "Why did you rename the config file?"
SAdmin: "Nothing changed"
Moi: "... are you sure?"
SAdmin: "No, changed nothing."
Moi: "Is the job running as your account for some reason?"
SAdmin: "No, job is root"
Moi: *shares screenshot of previous ls* This suggests your account was likely used to rename the dotfile, did you share your account with anyone?
SAdmin: "No, I rename file because could not see"
Moi: *heavy seething* so, just to make sure I understand, you renamed a dotfile because you couldn't see it in the terminal with ls?
SAdmin: "No, I rename file because it was not visible, now is visible"
Moi: "and then you filed a ticket because the application stopped working after you renamed the configuration file? You didn't think there might be a correlation between those two things?"
SAdmin: "yes, it no work"
Interjecting Director: "How did no one catch this? Why were there no checks, and why is there no user interface to configure this application? When I was writing applications I cared about quality"
Moi: *heavy seething*
IDjit: "Well? Anyone? How are we going to fix this"
Moi: "The administrative team will need to rename the file back to its original name"
IDjit: "can't the engineering team do this?!"
Moi: "We could, but it's corporate policy that we have no access to those environments"
IDjit: "Ok, what caused this issue in the first place? How did it get this way?!"

TFW you think you've hit the bottom of idiocy barrel, and the director says, "hold my mango lassi."

[Thursday afternoon on a call...]

Client: Before we get started, can you create a sitescape outlining all of the pages and sections of the new website?

Me: Sure! I'll go through the website and shoot you a full layout in xls format as soon as possible, that way you can easily make notes on what you want added, modified or removed.

[Two hours later...]

Client: Hey, did you build that sitescape yet?

Me: Actually, I've been on back-to-back calls with other clients.

Client: So when are you going to get it done?

Me: Well, I have to go through the current website in it's entirety, which I'm guessing is about 1,000 pages. I have to determine which pages work fine on their own, which need to be combined for better presentation and which should be removed due to redundancy. That's something that is tedious and takes some time to complete. That, in combination with having an existing work queue that I need to fit you within and being at the end of the work week, we're looking at Tuesday morning to have it ready.

Client: "Existing work queue"? This is ridiculous. We're paying you good money to make our project your only priority. If we wanted to wait days for work, we would have saved money and paid for a cheaper service. You're already gouging us as it is! If we don't get the sitescape by end of day Friday, we're going with another company.

Me: I would tell you that I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I'm not. I'm not going to feed you a line to make you happy. I'm also not going to work on my days off just to rush something out to you. You hired us because you wanted things done right, not quickly. Your current website is the result of not focusing on quality, but by how fast you can deliver it. We don't work that way. We only build quality products.

By rushing your project, not only do we alienate our current clients, affecting our reputation, but we build product of less than the highest quality. That will upset you because it isn't perfect, and it reflects poorly on us to use it in our portfolio.

If you want to hire someone to pump out this project to your unrealistic deadlines, be our guest. But you paid a 50% non-refundable deposit, so not only will you lose money, but your end product will suffer.

I'm going to let you sleep on this. If you decide tomorrow that another direction is the way to go, we wish you luck. But please understand that if we conclude our business, we will no longer make ourselves available for your needs.

Please find the attached contracts you have signed, acknowledging the non-refundable deposit, as well as the project timeline and scope, of which a "sitescape" was never originally mentioned or blocked out for time.

I hope that tomorrow we can move forward in a more professional manner.

[Next morning...]

Client: My apologies for yesterday. We're just very anxious to get this started.

-----

Don't let clients push you around. Make them sign a contract and enforce it whenever necessary.

Prospective client: “I have a website through which I sell music, both physical copies and downloads, but am having all kinds of issues with it”.

Me: “Like what? Tell me more.”

Client: “Go to www... I’ll go through them with you”.

So I go, and client proceeds to rattle off a list of totally random shit for the next 26 and a half minutes without even stopping for breath, telling me what he’d prefer, talking through how easy other “similar” websites are and comparing his own website to them, as well as all the things that flat out just don’t work. He ended with the line “I just paid my developer who told me it was all good, but now he’s telling me he’s too busy to work on it”.

Meanwhile I’ve had a gander at “view source” and can see it’s been “built” with Wordpress, and with a fuck ton of plugins and shit to boot... you can only imagine the sense of euphoria I’m feeling at this point.

Me: “Did you have a contract with your developer?”

Client: “Nah”.

Me: “Do you have a budget in mind, either for just making right or for ongoing development?”

Client: “Yes, but minimal”.

Me: “So what do you want from me?”

Client: “I want to know how much it’s going to cost to fix!!!!” (apparently irritated by my question).

Me: “Oooook... Is there any way I can have access to your website to investigate, or clone it so I can recreate what’s going on?”

Client: “Yes” (gives me details of how to log in to his hosting, and WP admin).

Turns out, he had over 50 active plugins for literally EVERY. SINGLE. FUCKING. PIECE of functionality on his website. Furthermore, it was pretty clear that some plugin functionality overlapped, because... well, if you don’t know how to do something, install a plugin or seven to get it done, right?

Me: “So can I ask, what exactly is your budget? Just to give me ballpark as to how best move forward?”

Client: After going into how he’s already spent a lot of money on it already, “If we could we agree on below £200?”

Me: “...what, a month?”

Client: “No! In total. To make it right. Once it’s done it’s done, surely?!?!”

*a long silence*

Client: “So... what do you think?”

Me: “Burn it. Burn it all down”.

Our Adobe Illustrator teacher(he taught us a bit of Photoshop before), tasked us with entering a contest for a logo design. The company's name is synonymous to amber in my mother tongue, but instead of it doing something related to that they partnered with T.V. services etc and are doing things in the field. The limitation of the contest is that we have to use a specific color in the amber range(given with the CMYK and Pantone values), and if the design ends up a success, one gets nearly 500$.

I have an idea, but I don't know how I will be going about doing it. I'm not great at either design or drawing. My skills in drawing don't match up with my ideas...

I'll still try it.

Last day on the contract from hell. I'd written a project with one other person in our spare time that performed a critical business function. The following conversation was had between myself, the job thief who was handed my job and their manager, with the 10 other IBM GS "dev domain experts" assigned to that team sitting silently on zoom:

Moi: hey all, what seems to be the problem?
JT: how to update the java for requirement?
Moi: I would assume a text editor, have you tried intellij
JTM: she's talking about ticket BS-101, the data is wrong
Moi: ah, well, you might want to fix that
JT: how to fix?
Moi: update the database and update the logic that depends on it
JTM: what changes are those?
Moi: the ones described in the ticket, I would assume, I'm no longer on that project
JTM: didn't you write this application?
Moi: yes.
JTM: ok, so do you know how to fix the issue?
Moi: definitely
JTM: ok... ... Can you tell us how to fix it?
Moi: yes.
*The sound of silence*
JTM: *will* you tell us?
Moi: I would, but I'm already off the clock, and as of an hour ago I no longer have a contract. And even if I did, I don't have a contract or authorization to work on that system. I'm not actually being paid for this call.
JTM: ... What are we going to do about this?
Moi: I have no idea
JTM: ok, so we can look at getting a 1 month contract to support this
Moi: I'm sure our firm has someone who can definitely help you out
JTM: *heavy raging* ... Can you do the work?
Moi: Unfortunatley, I'm already committed to a new contract at another customer. I also don't do one month contracts. I'm an engineer, not a car wash employee
JTM: well, I don't understand how you can just leave us in the lurch like this?!
Moi: well, respectfully, it was your decision to cut me from the budget because you thought you were close enough to end of the project to get it across the line with junior resources.
Interjecting-JT: I am senior!
Moi: Right. So, basically, you took ownership of the product before go live. We advised against it, in writing, numerous times. We also notified you that we would not carry a bench, so the project resources are now working on other things. We can provide you with new resources for a minimum 6 month duration who can help you out. Also, since we've cycled out, our rate has increased per the terms of our MSA.
JTM: we don't have budget for that! How are we supposed to do this?!
Moi: *zoom glare at JT* that question is more appropriate for your finance officer and the IT director. I can send a few emails and schedule a call with your account representative and the aforementioned individuals so you can hash this out.

-_---------------
I'm free! 🥳 That said, still plenty of residual fodder I need to get out of my system on these guys. Might need to start my own Dilbert.

Manager: Hey, how are things with everything thats been going on? Hows the mood?

Me:

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that holds all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

~Record scratch.mp3

~Freeze frame.mp4

"You're probably wondering how we got to this stage? Let's wind back a little, shall we?"

~reverseRecordSound.wav

A light tapping was heard at the entrance of my office. 

"Oh hey [Boss] how are you doing?" I said politely

"Do you want to talk here, or do you want to talk in my office? I don't have anyone in my office right now, so..."

"Ok, we can go to your office," I said.

We walked momentarily, my eyes following the newly placed carpeting. 

Some words were shared, but nothing that seemed mildly important. Just necessary things to say. Platitudes, I supposed you could call them.

We get to his office, it was wider now because of some missing furniture. I quickly grab a seat.

"So tell me what you've been working on," I said politely.

"I just finished up on our [project] that required proper saving and restoring."

"Great! How did you pull it off?" I asked excitedly. 

He starts to explain to me what he did, and even opens up the UI to display the changes working correctly.

"That's pretty cool," admiring his work.

"But what's going on here? It looks like you deleted my class." I said, looking at his code.

"Oh, yeah, that. It looked like spaghetti code so I deleted it. It seemed really bulky and unnecessary for what we were doing."

"Wait, hold on," I said wildly surprised that he thought that a class with some simple setters and getters was spaghetti code.

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that organizes all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

"Yeah! I put everything in a list of lists."

"What, that's not efficient at all!" I exclaimed

"Well, I mean look at what you were doing here,"  he said, as he displays to me my old code. 

"What's confusing about that?" I asked politely, but a little unnerved that he did something like this.

"Well I mean look at this," he said, now showing his "improved" code. 

"We don't have that huge block of code (referring to my class) anymore filling up the file." He said almost a little too joyously. 

"Ok, hold on," I said to him, waving my hand. "Go back to my code and I can show you how it is working. Here we are getting all the labels and spin boxes into their own objects." I said pointing a little further down in the code. "Down here we are returning the spin boxes we want to work with. Here and here, are setters so we can set maximum and minimum values for the spin box."

"Oh... I guess that's not that complicated. but still, that doesn't seem like really good bookkeeping." He said. 

"Well, there are some people that would argue with you on that," I said, thinking about devRant.

He quickly switches back to his code and shows me what he did. "Look, here." He said pointing to his list of lists. "We have our spin boxes and labels all called and accounted for. And further down we can use a for loop to parse through them."

He then drags both our version of the code and shows the differences. I pause him for a moment

"Hold on, you mean you think this" I'm now pointing at my setters "is more spaghetti than this" I'm now pointing at his list of lists.

"I mean yeah, it makes more sense to me to do it this way for the sake of bookkeeping because I don't understand your Object Oriented Programming stuff."

...

After some time of going back and forth on this, he finally said to me.
"It doesn't matter, this is my project."

Honestly, I was a little heart broken, because it may be his project but part of me is still in there. Part of my effort in making it the best it can be is in there.

I'm sorry, but it's just as much my project as it is yours.

Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

Manager: The thing you working on. We need this now! Like end of the week.

Me: Desirability is not do-ability.

Manager: く( ・◇・)ヾ？

Me: I am still in the middle of figuring out how to do things in the first place, so there are some technologies to research and some problems I yet need to solve. I am in no state to just write down my solution. I don't even have enough information to even estimate how long it is going to take. I am getting there. And yes, I can rush things, but need I remind you that you want solid data as a result that actually means something? As this is *why* this whole project was started. We have some old project doing the exact same thing, but whose output we don't trust. I wonder how that came to be. Additionally, this whole project was on hold for months until I took over. So I neither understand nor accept this sudden sense of urgency. And by the way, you recently added manpower to this project. And adding manpower almost always decreases the productivity in the beginning due to on-boarding and communication overhead. Last Monday, I didn't write a single line of code due to that. So no, this week will not do, as I am also on vacation starting on Thursday that was requested and was approved by you at the beginning of the year. See you in January.

I turned 40 yesterday. Here are some lessons I've learned, without fluff or BS.

1) Stop waiting for exceptional things to just happen. They rarely do, and they can't be counted on. Greatness is cultivated; it's a gradual process and it won't come without effort.

2) Jealousy is a monster that destroys everything in it's path. It's absolutely useless, except to remind us there's a better way. We can't always control how we feel, but we can choose how we react to those feelings.

When I was younger, jealousy in relationships always led to shit turning out worse than it probably would have otherwise. Even when it was justified, even when a relationship was over, jealousy led me to burn bridges that I wished I hadn't.

3) College isn't for everyone, but you'll rarely be put square in the middle of so much potential experience. You'll meet people you probably wouldn't have otherwise, and as you eventually pursue your major, you'll get to know people who share your passions and dreams. Despite all the bullshit ways in which college sucks, it's still a pretty unique path on the way to adulthood. But on that note...

4) Learn to manage your money. It's way too easy to get into unsustainable debt. It only gets worse, and it makes everything harder. We don't always see the consequence of credit cards and loans when we're young, because the future seems so distant and undecided. But that debt isn't going anywhere... Try not to borrow money that you can't imagine yourself paying back now.

5) Floss every day, not just a couple times per week when you remember, or when you've got something stuck in your teeth. It matters, even if you're in your 20s and you've never had a cavity.

6) You'll always hear about living in the moment, seizing the day... It's tough to actually do. But there's something to be said for looking inward, and trying to recognize when too much of our attention is focused elsewhere. Constantly serving the future won't always pay off, at least not in the ways we think it will when we're young.

This sentiment doesn't have much value when it's put in abstract, existential terms, like it usually is. The best you can do is try to be aware of your own willingness and ability to be open to experiences. Think about ways in which you might be rejecting the here and now, even if it's as seemingly-benign as not going out with some friends because you just saw them, or you already went to that place they're going to. We won't recognize the good old days for what they were until they're already gone. The trick is having as many good days as possible.

7) Don't start smoking; you'll never quit as soon as you'll think you can. If you do start, make yourself quit after a couple years, no matter what. Keep your vices in check; drugs and alcohol in moderation. Use condoms, use birth control.

8) Don't make love wait. Tell your friends and family you love them often, and show them when you can. You're going to lose people, so it's important. Statistically, some of you will die young, yourselves.

When it comes to relationships, don't settle if you can't tell yourself you're in love, and totally believe it. Don't let complacency and familiarity get in the way of pursuing love. Don't be afraid to end relationships because they're comfortable, or because you've already invested so much into them.

Being young is a gift, and it won't last forever. You need to use that gift to experience all the love that you can, at least as a means to finding the person you really want to grow old with, if that's what you want. Regardless, you don't want to miss out on loving someone, and being loved, because of fear. Don't be reckless; just be honest with yourself.

9) Take care of your body. Neglecting it makes everything tougher. That doesn't mean you have to work out every day and eat like a nutritionist, but if you're overweight or you have health issues, do what you can to fix it. Losing weight isn't easy, but it's not as hard as people make it out to be. And it's one of the most important things you can do to invest in a healthy adulthood.

Don't put off nagging health issues because you think you'll be fine, or you don't think you'll be able to afford it, or you're scared of the outcome. There will always be options, until there aren't. Most people never get to the no-options part. Or, they get there because all the other options expired.

10) Few things will haunt you like regret. Making the wrong choice, for example, usually won't hurt as much. I guess you can regret making the wrong choice, but my deepest regrets come from inaction, complacency and indifference.

So how can we avoid regret? I don't know, lol. I don't think it's as simple as just commiting to choices... Choosing to do nothing is still a choice, after all. I think it's more about listening to your gut, as cliche as that sounds.

To thine own self be true, I guess. It's worth a shot, even if you fail. Almost anything is better than regret.

This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.

Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.

I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.

The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).

Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.

He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.

After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".

I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.

So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.

I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.

And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.

And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).

I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.

I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.

With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!

I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

My first rant here, don't know how to start, but fuck these self proclaimed senior developers who can't even get their concepts right about basic things and don't believe in reading docs.

Fuck you for asking if sequelize has a method to return details of the logged in user of your app, it's a fucking ORM you dumbfuck. You are a "full stack" developer for fuck's sake.

Fuck you for making those "minor changes" which breaks build and then blame it on any random plugin or lib used, or my commits.

Fuck you for expecting me to review your code on Sundays because you couldn't finish it on time.

I don't like java, at all, but even I get that without it we wouldn't be where we are right now and can't reach where we aspire to reach. But you can't keep chanting "Java is dead, Java is dead" every chance you get. No, it's NOT dead. Nor is going to, anytime soon.

And for god's sake, please stop choosing one library/plugin over another just on the basis of stars on repo, it's not the only (or valid) criteria. Look if you actually even need it. Think.

And please learn how to google first, and also stop using "the" before every the noun, the adjective and the verb. It's the fucking the annoying to read.

And yes, there are different linting presets out there, and just because a piece of code in a plugin/library/boilerplate is not following your specific, and may I say horrible standard, doesn't mean it's a "bad code". It's written by people who have created/worked-on these libraries as side projects on which your entire career is based upon.

And I haven't even talked about the code you write or your domain knowledge or the way you treat other people. So get off your high horse and behave like a developer, a real one.

Okay i'm done - YOU FUCKING ANDROID STUDIO MORONS. Being at a high level in C++, I tried to do some android coding. THERE ARE FUCKING NO GOOD TUTORIALS, NO GOOD DOCS, HECK, THE SELF GENERATED CODE OF THE IDE IS WRONG: WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON YOU FUCKING MORONS?
oh wait, let me first import android.widgets.rant;
or was it android.widgets.devrant.rant; or was it android.dr.rant.RantManager;?

Oh wait, I know lets search the docs?
OH WAIT THE DOCUMENTATION DOESNT HAVE THAT.
NOW HOW ABOUT I JUST TRY THE EXAMPLE CODE? WELL UH-UH! YOU HAVE TO FIND OUT YOURSELF WHAT TO IMPORT IN ORDER FOR IT TO WORK. ALSO, WHAT FUCKING UP WITH THAT PERMISSION SYSTEM? ITS SO BADLY DOCUMENTED!!!

Oh wait, I'm sure that I have to change something in this file... or was it that other file?

GOD
how dare they have style and design guidelines?
MORONS!

I will resort to implement my app idea in godot, idc anymore... I don't want to burn out because I used the "official high standard" tech.

it definitely isn't high standard and definitely not good. Thank you morons@google

THANK YOU FOR NOTHING

A FRAMEWORK WHERE I NEED 2 DAYS TO FIGURE OUT TO ADD EVENT LISTENERS TO MY THINGS IS DEFINITELY NOT ONE I'D LIKE TO USE.

also, whats up with

AudioRecord (int audioSource, int samplerateInHz, int channelConfig, int audioFormat, int bufferSizeInBytes);

ARE WE BACK IN THE C ERA? CAN'T YOU BE BOTHERED TO IMPLEMENT SOME SIMPLE FUCKING ENUMS????

WHATS THE POINT OF AN OOP LANGUAGE IF YOU ARE GOING TO USE IT LIKE C?

Oh wait I found a tutorial ... First trigger: "java scripts". Second trigger: this guy LITTERALLY ONLY TEACHES YOU HOW TO PLACE WIDGETS ON THE CANVAS. THANKS FOR NOTHING SHERLOCK!

Oh btw: did you know that android studio gives the best error messages?
"Error: illegal start of expression"
NO ERROR MESSAGE - NOTHING!
YOU BETTER USE THE IDE OR YOU GO HOME YOU FUCKER!!!

Oh and btw: if you want to read the best documentation - the code itself YOU GOTTA AGREE TO OR TERMS OF SERVICE!!!! WE DONT WANT ANYBODY TO BECOME SUCCESSFUL WITHOUT US KNOWING!!!!!

THANK YOU GOOGLE FOR NOTHING!
YOU FUCKERS!

thanks godot for *atleast* existing. You are the... last pick i'd pick, but :shrug:, I have experienced android studio now.

If anybody has any advice on what to use instead, please go ahead. And you better not tell me how good you are at android studio. I DONT CARE ABOUT WHAT YOU CAN IMPLEMENT IN ANDROID STUDIO. I JUST WANT SOMETHING THAT IS USABLE WITHOUT HAVING TO BE EXTRA CAREFUL WHEN DOING *ANYTHING*!!!!

fuckers.

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.

Today I felt sorry for my boss.

Story behind it:
My boss always encourages me to do the right thing. One of those right things is to enforce quality gates in our build pipelines which, as many of you know, means that the build fails if certain quality parameters are not met. Now an external vendor team merged the code this past thursday for a large feature that they had been working on and our build failed majestically throwing out the statistics and the offending files and lines of code.

All hell broke loose and there were escalations and what not and people working extra hours and over the weekend to try and get it right. So, I get a call from my boss earlier today to explain to me how important it is to release the feature and how it's going to be very bad if we don't. He was trying to justify his ask which was to lower the quality criteria and let the build pass for this week. Of course the dev in me was furious but then I realized it's not him but the corporate culture. Why would he or anyone would risk losing their jobs over the quality of code?

If you work at a place where IT is a support function of the company's primary business, I understand the moral compromises you guys have to make sometimes to keep the ball rolling. Thank you for your effort to make the world a better place.
So, thank you boss for all your support. I know it's not always up to you to decide on things but keep up the good work.

*creates a freelancer account on some website.
*builds portfolio and gets things running.
*meets his first client.

Client: Hello. so your profile says you are an experienced full stack developer. You are just the kind of person i've been looking for.

Me: Yep.

Client: Okay I have a project for you. I am looking at developing a simple website that has a few functions and the budget is 100$.

Me: Okay smooth. Hit me with the descriptions.

Client: it's going to be a dating website. Once a user signs up; the website would automatically take control of the user's media devices in his/her home; automatically playing something romantic. You get me?

Me: Em... Idk about that it seems a bit...

Client: it can be done! Develop the algorithm.

Me: Em... Ok.

Client: Well, next the website uses some complex sorting algorithm and sorts existing members based on their past real life relationships. It puts the best people above the messy ones.

Me: o.0

*client goes on with his bullshit in like another 10 lines of messages.

Me: -_-

Client: so what do you think? How soon can you begin and how soon can we be done?

Me: Do you also want a "butt scratcher" feature? Like a hand pops out of the monitor and asks to scratch the user's anus?

*client leaves the chat.

Me: Oh. I guess he a thing against family guy.

Co-worker: hey, can you create an email?

Me: yeah, who needs one? There are no records indicating any new people starting for another two weeks.

Cw: if for Stan, he started today. Also he needs a computer set up.

Me: who the hell is Stan and why are there no records of this person?

Cw: he's new, he started today so we didn't need an email or computer before today.

Me: I get that they're new, but what happened to giving the IT department at least 3 days notice on new hires so I can make sure things get taken care of?

Cw: you know how it is around here, nobody gets notice for anything. So can you get that email and computer setup for me, he can't work without them.

Me: I get that we don't actually plan for anything around here and that 90% of my job is fixing that failure, but hiring someone isn't like a system failing, people don't just show up and say "I start today" they have to go through interviews and background checks and other stuff, someone besides this person knew they started today so I don't think it's too much to ask that I get an email when the offer is extended to the person so I can prepare a system.

Cw: well we interviewed him two weeks ago and he accepted the offer last week, he's here and waiting so just as soon as you can please.

Me: well here's an email, the computer is gonna have to wait, I have a lot going on today and I don't have any computers ready right now.

*Seriously tempted to make them wait till next week to cover the 3 days notice I've asked for 100 times*

Manager: Hey how come you left so many comments on my PR?

Dev: Well you’ve just recently learned how to code so there’s going to be a lot of things to learn beyond what you’ve picked up in your online coding tutorials. Don’t worry it’s only minor things like you put everything all in one function, left outdated comments in the code, have if statements 4 levels deep, have a console.log after every line of code some of which log .env variables, skipped error handling, cast to “any” a bunch instead of using more specific types, didn’t write any tests and some unrelated tests are now failing due to a circular dependancy.

Manager: THAT IS SO DISRESPECTFUL!!APPROVE MY PR IMMEDIATELY. IT WASN’T EVEN EASY FOR ME TO CREATE THE PR, NOW I HAVE TO MAKE AN UPDATE!? YOU’RE THE DEV, YOU SHOULD FIX IT NOT ME!! NEVER COMMENT ON ANY OF MY PRS AGAIN.

It seems like every other day I run into some post/tweet/article about people whining about having the imposter syndrome. It seems like no other profession (except maybe acting) is filled with people like this.

Well lemme answer that question for you lot.

YES YOU ARE A BLOODY IMPOSTER.

There. I said it. BUT.

Know that you're already a step up from those clowns that talk a lot but say nothing of substance.

You're better than the rockstar dev that "understands" the entire codebase because s/he is the freaking moron that created that convoluted nonsensical pile of shit in the first place.

You're better than that person who thinks knowing nothing is fine. It's just a job and a pay cheque.

The main question is, what the flying fuck are you going to do about being an imposter? Whine about it on twtr/fb/medium? HOW ABOUT YOU GO LEARN SOMETHING BEYOND FRAMEWORKS OR MAKING DUMB CRUD WEBSITES WITH COLOR CHANGING BUTTONS.

Computers are hard. Did you expect to spend 1 year studying random things and waltz into the field as a fucking expert? FUCK YOU. How about you let a "doctor" who taught himself medicine for 1 year do your open heart surgery?

Learn how a godamn computer actually works. Do you expect your doctors and surgeons to be ignorant of how the body works? If you aspire to be a professional WHY THE FUCK DO YOU STAY AT THE SURFACE.

Go learn about Compilers, complete projects with low level languages like C / Rust (protip: stay away from C++, Java doesn't count), read up on CPU architecture, to name a few topics.

Then, after learning how your computers work, you can start learning functional programming and appreciate the tradeoffs it makes. Or go learn AI/ML/DS. But preferably not before.

Basically, it's fine if you were never formally taught. Get yourself schooled, quit bitching, and be patient. It's ok to be stupid, but it's not ok to stay stupid forever.

/rant

!!politics

My employer held a company wide zoom meeting today. It was officially optional, but like 90% of the company attended.

It started out interesting as they had invited a speaker, but it quickly degraded into a gigantic political circlejerk. It was an hour and a half of bashing everyone who doesn’t hold exactly their views, calling them evil, calling them nazis, radicals, militants, racists, etc. — and I don’t share their views, like, at all, so. That really lets me know how they feel!

As far as I can tell, everyone else at the company has the same ideology. Not only does this make me incredibly uncomfortable and require me to act and pretend at all times, it’s honestly kind of infuriating, too. The amount of insults they throw around and blatant lack of tolerance displayed by these “tolerant” people is just incredible.

To them, anyone that doesn’t hold exactly their beliefs is evil, and often a slew of other things, too. And it doesn’t seem to matter how far removed those views are; apparently libertarians are evil as well? Apparently “leave everyone alone” is evil and gets you branded as a militant far-righty? Like, how does that even work? They ascribe to “everyone who doesn’t agree with me is literally Hitler,” I guess.

Fucking hell I can’t stand these people and their politics. And when they all get going on it together? Just. Fucking toxic.

I’ve been so disgusted today after sitting in on that meeting I’ve gotten practically nothing done. And I was so hoping to finally finish this stupid ticket.

Oh, and Mr. PM wants that screwdriver to do even more things now — by next week, of course. Fucking hell.

Why did I switch jobs, again?
Right, to get away from the politics.
Fucking hell.

Dear children let's talk about how to ask a f***ing question.

You don't just go "I need help. I can't figure it out." We had trainings on this, I sat through 3 hours holding your hand to help you try and understand things.

And yet now we have scheduled another 3 hours to help you figure this out because you said you were having difficulty with it because you couldn't figure it out. How about instead of just saying you "Need help", you start by
1. Explaining what you are trying to accomplish
2. What specific issue are you facing? Is there an error message or something?
3. What have you already tried thus far that didn't work?

Instead of "I NEED HELP I CAN'T FIGURE IT OUT!" that is the sign of a lazy f****ing engineer, someone who doesn't want to think, who doesn't want to learn something new who wants to just coast by. Especially when this is going to become an increasingly important part of your job.

And of course you currently are still a whole job level above me because sitting around and keeping a chair warm for 10 years means you are a valuable contributor, instead of what you can actually DO!

This bugs me so much. So remember kids, when you need help, or need to ask a question, ASK IT THE RIGHT F****ING WAY!

!!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.

!dev, more about social media
(and suicide)

ugh. social media.

recently a girl from a nearby high school committed suicide. it's sad, and i know what i'm about to say is going to be controversial, but i think it shouldn't be on social media. maybe her close friends posting it on instagram, to remember her, but that's it.

of course, that's not what happened. people started posting "❤️" on their snapchat stories, and theyre saying they are raising awareness. (they don't know this girl or why she did it or anything, they're just doing it because their friends did it.)

this awareness, is well, temporary.

the point of snapchat is that all the pictures go away, so why would they talk about suicide prevention on there? do they want suicide prevention to go away? this is most prevelent on snapchat, but on others, too.

trend after trend after trend.

thats what people turned her death into. a trend.

just like #prayforparis, and others, but on a local scale.

the problem with social media is that things go away. in a day or two it'll be like this never happened. she won't be remembered like she would if she weren't on social media.

i know what you're thinking. they're just "raising awareness." but for how long?

well, until another trend comes.

people disagreeing with me are extremely welcome to comment.

and any ideas on how this problem can be fixed?

Insecure... My laptop disk is encrypted, but I'm using a fairly weak password. 🤔

Oh, you mean psychological.

Working at a startup in crisis time. Might lose my job if the company goes under.

I'm a Tech lead, Senior Backender, DB admin, Debugger, Solutions Architect, PR reviewer.

In practice, that means zero portfolio. Truth be told, I can sniff out issues with your code, but can't code features for shit. I really just don't have the patience to actually BUILD things.

I'm pretty much the town fool who angrily yells at managers for being dumb, rolls his eyes when he finds hacky code, then disappears into his cave to repair and refactor the mess other people made.

I totally suck at interviews, unless the interviewer really loves comparing Haskell's & Rust's type systems, or something equally useless.

I'm grumpy, hedonistic and brutally straight forward. Some coworkers call me "refreshing" and "direct but reasonable", others "barely tolerable" or even "fundamentally unlikable".

I'm not sure if they actually mean it, or are just messing with me, but by noon I'm either too deep into code, or too much under influence of cognac & LSD, wearing too little clothing, having interesting conversations WITH instead of AT the coffee machine, to still care about what other humans think.

There have been moments where I coded for 72 hours straight to fix a severe issue, and I would take a bullet to save this company from going under... But there have also been days where I called my boss a "A malicious tumor, slowly infecting all departments and draining the life out of the company with his cancerous ideas" — to his face.

I count myself lucky to still have a very well paying job, where many others are struggling to pay bills or have lost their income completely.

But I realize I'm really not that easy to work with... Over time, I've recruited a team of compatible psychopaths and misfits, from a Ukranian ex-military explosives expert & brilliant DB admin to a Nigerian crossfitting gay autist devops weeb, to a tiny alcoholic French machine learning fanatic, to the paranoid "how much keef is there in my beard" architecture lead who is convinced covid-19 is linked to the disappearance of MH370 and looks like he bathes in pig manure.

So... I would really hate to ever have to look for a new employer.

I would really hate to ever lose my protective human meat shield... I mean, my "team".

I feel like, despite having worked to get my Karma deep into the red by calling people all kinds of rude things, things are really quite sweet for me.

I'm fucking terrified that this peak could be temporary, that there's a giant ravine waiting for me, to remind me that life is a ruthless bitch and that all the good things were totally undeserved.

Ah well, might as well stay in character...

*taunts fate with a raised middlefinger*

Four semesters in. As a class we’ve learned Java, SQL, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, C++, C#, and a small amount of PHP

We’ve built databases, websites, apps for phone and desktop, and we’ve toyed with game development in unity

We’ve used multiple IDE’s with differing pros and cons, virtual machines, server development stacks (XAMPP), data structures, and we’ve used multiple sorting algorithms to learn their differences.

Some things on here are immensely more difficult than others. If at 4 semesters in you still don’t know how to AT LEAST google your issues for 10 minutes or even READ THE DAMN BOOK, then please don’t bother asking TA’s for help we have our own assignments to do and can’t afford spend an hour working with you to fix your code while you just ignore our suggestions

Four semesters in you should know where to find help online and if that doesn’t work, how to ask for and accept help. If you can’t then I’m sorry. I’m going to spend my time helping others, before I waste my time trying to help you

Man, I think we've all gotten way too many of these.

Normally most interactions that I have are through email. Eventually some would try to contact me via phone. These are some:

"Hey! We are calling you from <whatever company name> solutions! (most of them always seem to end on solutions or some shit like that) concerning the Ruby on Rails senior dev opportunity we were talking about via email"
<niceties, how are you doing, similar shit goes here...eventually>

So tell us! how good/comfortable would you say you are with C++?"

Me: I have never done anything serious with c++ and did just use it at school, but because I am not a professional in it I did not list it in my CV, what does it have to do with Rails?

Them: "Oh the applications of this position must be ready to take in additional duties which sometimes happen to be C or C++"

Me: Well that was not anywhere in the offer you sent, it specifically requested a full stack Rails developer that could work with 3 different frontend stacks already and like 4 different databases plus bla bla bla, I did not see c++ anywhere in it. Matter of fact I find it funny, one of the things that I was curious about was the salary, for what you are asking and specifically in the city in which you are asking it for 75k is way too low, you are seriously expecting a senior level rails dev to do all that AND take additional duties with c++? cpp could mean a billion different things"

Them: "well this is a big opportunity that will increase your level to senior position"

Me: the add ALREADY asks for a senior position, why are you making it sound that I will get build towards that level if you are already off the bat asking for seniors only to begin with?

Them: You are not getting it, it is an opportunity to grow into a senior, applicants right now are junior to mid-level

ME: You are all not making any sense, please don't contact me again.

=======

Them: We are looking for someone with 15 years experience with Swift development for mobile and web

Me: What is up with your people not making these requirements in paper? if I knew from the beginning that you people think that Swift is 15 years old I would have never agreed to this "interview"

Them: If you are not interested in that then might we offer this one for someone with 10 years experience as a full stack TypeScript developer.

Me: No, again, check your dates, this is insulting.

===

* For another Rails position

Them: How good are you with Ruby on Rails in terms of Python?

Me: excuse me? Python has nothing to do with Ruby on Rails.

Her (recruiter was a woman) * with a tone of superiority: I have it here that Python is the primary technology that accompanies Rails development.

Me (thinking this was a joke) : What do you think the RUBY part of Ruby on Rails is for? and what does "accompanies Rails development" even means?

Her: Well if you are not interested in using Rails with Python then maybe you can tell us about your experience in using Javascript as the main scripting platform for Rails.

Me: This is a joke, goodbye.

====

To be fair this was years ago when I still didn't know better and test the recruiters during the email part of being contacted. Now a days I feel sorry for everyone since I just say no without even bothering. This is a meme all on itself which no one has ever bothered to review and correct in years for now. I don't know why recruiters don't google themselves to see what people think of their "profession" in order to become better.

I've even had the Java/Javascript stupidity thrown at me by a local company. For that one it was someone from their very same HR department doing the rectuiter, their shop foreman was a friend of the family, did him the service of calling him to let him know that his HR was never going to land the kind of developer they were looking for with the retarded questions they had and sent him a detailed email concerning the correct information they needed for their JAVAscript job which they kept confusing with Java (for some reason in the context of Spring, they literally wanted nothing with Spring, they wanted some junior to do animations and shit like that on their company's website, which was in php, Java was nowhere in this equation)

I think people in web development get the short end of the stick when it comes to retarded recruiters more than anywhere else.

I can't help but be disappointed in the direction that technology has directed us into, especially social media.

While I love my girlfriend, she more often than not spends her time scrolling away at the dumbest shit on Instagram, Facebook, .. reels. Reels everywhere. And she's not dumb, mind you. She's an engineer just as much as you (presumably) and I are. Just in a different field.

When looking into it online and stumbling upon more than one study, I learned about the term it had been coined.. technoference. That's the constant interruption of social media into our day-to-day lives, and the dopamine kick it gives -- more so than IRL peers do. Why that is, being the digital equivalent to McDonald's, that's beyond me. But somehow it seems to be better, all while the content isn't even useful. It doesn't allow you to learn anything, to gain insights, or to explore things that could serve you in the real world. Cat videos and random shit that's somehow.. funny? Having pretty much completely disconnected from social media years ago, I seriously fail to see how.

Maybe us nerds in the 90's and early 2000's telling everyone else how we'd change the world and prove everyone who called us freaks wrong, disenchanted as we were (and probably still are), were the catalyst for this social disaster. We had the cognitive skills to do it, but not the social equivalent. I feel guilty... Even though I've always been part of a big tech resistance in some capacity, I still feel guilty. Because I'm one of those people with the skills of those who created this trash fire of a societal status quo. Everyone glued to their screens, 95% of the time not for work. Not even to aid one's ability to function in the real world. Just to combat boredom. All day, for many hours on end.

Where is it going to end? When will people realize the dystopia we got ourselves into? Will anyone but a few fight it? Would those who don't fight it even care?

Hashedram's compilations #1
List of most annoying website designs.

1) Pages with AUTO PLAYING VIDEOS.

Yes I'm looking at you Netflix. Along with every news website known to man. I'm looking to read a fucking article, so why would you even waste your money and bandwidth trying to shove a video of some shit I don't care about in my face, and make it follow me as I scroll down like a fucking insecure puppy. Also, fuck you Instagram.

2) Pages that redirect once immediately after you visit them, thereby fucking with the browser history and the BACK BUTTON just leads back to the same fucking site.

I mean, just why. Did you think I would just go "Hey the back button doesn't work so let's stay on the site and read their awesome content"?

3) Sites showing things in a SLIDESHOW, when it actually should be in a list.

Slideshows are for progressive stories or for showing lists where you don't care about what's in them. Top 10 foods that reduce weight. Slideshow 1/15. Fuck you.

4) LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE USING AN AD BLOCKER

Yes. Yes I am. No I will not turn it off for you, you narcissistic snowflake fuck. And don't even try to guilt shame me into turning it off, because I know you're just going to bombard me with videos of sexy singles in the area if I do.

5) Pages where I see the first 3 lines of an article and have to SUBSCRIBE to see more.

Yes. Brilliant fucking idea. A user wants to see what your site has to offer, so within the first three seconds, don't show him exactly that.

6) Looking up an article and having to read through the entire motivational life story of the author.

I just want to know how to boil eggs, not read about your journey across Africa learning how to make difference recepies using boiled rhino dung.

7) CLICK BAIT.

Title: School boy designs blockchain machine learning game engine

Actual Content: Tic tac toe program made using linked lists

I was 11 or 12 years old, my dad had this policy that only *nix machines are allowed in our home, so I was rocking a Ubuntu pc at that time. I was messing around with it and tweaking some things here and there, but wanted to learn more. My dad showed me how to open python on the command line and gave me some simple tasks to do. Been hooked ever since.

PS. Still going by the same policy, even though I live on my own.

WWDC was not about developers this year. It was a conference call with shareholders and investors. No bold moves, just several consecutive "this product will no longer suck" and "look at what you can do now, big companies" announcements.

watchOS will work now (it's too slow ATM). tvOS will just be less cumbersome. macOS still lagging behind (I mean, I already have great third party apps that clean my hard drive, but thank you for solving a problem I didn't need fixing). iOS 10 is simply about messages (it's not going to make me ditch Telegram, because it doesn't have an Android client, regardless of how large you make emoticons appear on screen). Apple Music will still suck, especially if you have more than one Apple ID. And Apple Maps will continue to be useless outside of the US.

Where did the bold moves go? Where's the "we're breaking up iTunes into several distinct apps that serve their purposes really well"? (Guess iTunes is too valuable a trademark...) Where is the "we will end the WKView vs UIView vs NSView nonsense"? (You know, OOP is about creating classes, which are abstractions and whose instances deal with the particularities of their environment; a View is a View, regardless of where they live; an instance of a View should care about being on a watch or on a phone, not the developer.) Where is the "we love indie developers and will help you"? They showed off a lot of integration with well established apps, that don't really need to stand out any more. They showed that video of "normal people" who have developed apps, but no one knows about them! And then they changed the AppStore so you can pay to advertise your app, but who has the means to do that? Indie devs are surely on a tight budget, so who's that helping again?

For me, this WWDC was sugar coated with a "we love you developers" BS, but was a business statement to large companies ("see what you can do now Uber, Lyft, WeChat, WhatsApp, Doordash, all the P2P payment apps, ESPN, WSJ and so on?"). It's already a known fact that the bulk of the AppStore revenue goes to the top 1% apps. And what's the point of having tvOS be open to developers if it is very unlikely I'll ever develop anything for it unless I work at CBS?

It's great that they want to make it easier for kids to learn Swift. But there's very little point in that, if those kids' apps aren't going to be used and are simply going to make the "we have 2 million apps on the AppStore" announcement look shinier for shareholders. Without a strong indie community, the Swift Playgrounds app for the iPad is just manufacturing workers for large corporations.

And without a strong indie community, things get tougher for indie clients as well. Who will have the money (and therefore the time) to implement all those integrations in order to even dream about competing with heavily funded apps?

Yeah... So thanks, Apple, but no thanks.

Been a while since my last real proper rant.

Multiple projects. Business side going into panic mid. Devs are staying cool as usual.

We, devs, have to hold hands so they don't completely break down.

We are wasting precious time in order to rub their feelings.

Get. Your. Shit. Together.
Or atleast, go cry in a corner AND LET US FUCKING WORK.
STOP. FUCKING. SPAMMING.

Can't fucking work for more than 10 mins.
I go take a shit, I have 200 notifications when I'm back.

Omfg their lives must be so hard, really. How can you fucking go into full retard whenever there's a small roadblock.

DO. YOUR. FUCKING. JOB. And let me do mine.

As soon as you let us work, issues are going to be solved, you'll be less stressed and everything will be fine.

Keep asking the same questions over and over, arguing on non-critical things (who cares about wordings... it's 1min change) and the stress will only build up for everyone.

DAMN. Fuck off, fucking emotional idiots.

Story Time. Inspired by another rant.

Context: I'm In a coding camp years ago, it's the first day.

We're doing introductions (name, why you're here, etc). Always fun to do that....

The folks running the camp are excited to introduce a student who also at one point was a teacher for some sort of girl power coding organization. So this raises questions, why would someone who teaches be a student in this camp?? And even a bigger question is raised when this person introduces themselves for a long time, and as an aside puts down the girls she taught in this program they taught ... like who does that?

horribleLady does that ...

A few hours later horribleLady asks her 12th question of the day (we haven't even started talking about code). Before she asks her question actually says:

“I know, I’m going to be a problem.” -laugh-

🚨🚨🚨 ヽ ( ꒪д꒪ )ﾉ 🚨🚨🚨

Fast forward to group projects and she's this sort of emotional storm, tears, and a sort of angry shouting that isn't angry enough for some folks to say she's yelling at people ... but she is. Fortunately I'm not in the first group project with her, but because we're all working in the same room we all get to see the train-wreck unfold.

The moment she doesn't get something (all the time) everyone in her group has to STOP and figure out what they're going to do about it, then again STOP because she thinks someone is doing something different than what was planned. STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.

In a way, everything had to go through her, she didn’t declare it that way, she didn't present herself as any sort of authority, she would just stop everyone the moment she thought anything was wrong, or she didn't understand it (all the time), and either inject herself or demand help from her team. Everyone around her had to be drawn into whatever problem she had. It was horrific to watch.

Private slack channels would light up like crazy with "OMG", "WTF", "I DON'T UNDERSTAND HER", "FUCK" and "SHE"S HOW OLD!?!?"

So finally it happens to me and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly (capable guy, nice dude, pretty sure he was high all the time).... we're teamed up to work with horribleLady. Thankfully for just one day. I accept this because I figure one day with her is enough penance to try to avoid any further contact later on.

My approach is straight stone face. I refuse to respond to her sulking, or sighing, or general emotional bait she throws out constantly. I saw other students unwittingly take her bait (they were trying to be helpful) only to have her crap all over them with her frustrations or whatever it is is going on.

Still we're teamed up with her her for the day so I'm going to be a good team member and I explain what guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I are doing / trying.... and so forth. But she's just too upset that she's even assigned to work with us, and tells me I'm just not doing it right, and her explanations about how we're not doing it right makes less than 0 sense. I ask her to show me what she means but she won't type anything on her keyboard, she'd just talk about how she’s thinking conceptually in circles and sulk about it rather than listen. I don't respond to any of her shit and say "I'm going to try this." and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I just keep working.

She would later call the instructor over and complain to him for a while and say: "These guys just get it, they're not helping me, I want to be assigned to another group." She doesn't get her way so she just moves to another table in front of us.

After that day I figured it was a great time to ask .... to NEVER be assigned to anything with her because "If I told her what I thought it would just get a lot worse." I got my way ;)

Other students weren't so lucky. Tears, sulking, her special way of yelling at people that somehow never got her in trouble (she should have been kicked out of the program) just kept going on. She refused to even present one group project she deemed not good enough despite the fact that she contributed nothing functional to the project that the TA's didn't write for her...

Amidst the stories she would tell to students was one of how she sued her totally sexist/racist/evil former employer. She never said what came of it, but that combined with her inability to do things reminded me of a rant I read on here.

I sometimes fear being hired someplace and walking in my first day to find I'm assigned to work with .... horribleLady. In this scenario she managed to get hired and they're too afraid to fire her so they assign the new guy to work with horribleLady...

I've no idea what happened to her after the camp.

(I rewrote this rant a few times because it kept circling back to a larger story about the coding camp I wrote about a few years ago, so if this seemed sort of broken up and wonky, yeah it was / is / yeah)

Client: please be sure to let us know with enough notice if you plan on taking any time off so we can anticipate how to operate during your absence.

Me to client 4 months before vacation: "I’m going to be on vacation in July for such amount of time".
Client: OK thanks

Client 3 months before vacation: are you taking any time off this summer?
Me: yeah I’m taking such amount of time in July.
Client: Ok

Client 2 months before vacation: are you taking any time off this summer.
Me: yeah I’m taking such amount of time in July.
Client: Ok

Client a month before vacation: wait you’re taking time off this summer?
Me: yeah, in July.
Client: oh, we need to start figuring out how to manage your absence.

…client has enough time to figure things out.
——-

Client two weeks ago: we’re switching you to a another project where you’ll be replacing someone who’s leaving; and you’ll be developing alone. You’ll be working closely with our software architect. He’ll be the one who can answer all your questions.
Me totally lost on new project as it’s barely documented, sql tables are a mess with barely any relations between them and data structures are totally inconsistent. Supposed to be getting info from partner APIs but I can’t test them and don’t know exactly what data to expect. Only the software architect has the necessary knowledge.

Client a week ago: hey don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions. We can’t afford to fall behind from schedule.
Me: oh don’t worry, I’m already flooding your guy with questions.

Me last Monday to client: hey do you know what’s up with your architect? I’ve been waiting for him to answer some important questions and it’s going to be hard to move forward without him getting back to me.
Client: you’re telling us you’re not going to be able to move forward efficiently until our architect gets back from vacation in two weeks?
Me: wait, he’s on vacation?
(on the inside: when the fuck were you guys planning on telling me he would be gone???)

I just want to add my 2 Cents to the all this GDPR chaos. Because I feel lots of you are missing the point here.

When reading here about GDPR I hear all kinds of fair statements of how flawed it is and how it's mainly hurting the small companies etc etc.

I agree, at this state GDPR might actually be doing more harm than good.

However, I don't think that is what it is about. It's about going in the right direction. If you read/look over the course of history we've had several technological revolutions. Industrial, renaissance. They all start the same:

"This technology is going to change everything, it's going to solve all our problems!" It's something holy. Something that shouldn't be touched or regulated, only embraced.

But as we all know it wasn't all that pretty.

Industrial revolution was hard super underpaid, dirty work. Children had to work too. People were getting sick. Lots of alcoholism, depression.

And what made the factories start taking better care of their employees? Regulation.

Once fines start to come, companies will have to adapt.

We have to learn and understand that these systems like government, company, capitalism. They're built for reasons. They all exist for reasons. And only when it is in balance, things will flourish.

So I encourage you all to stay as critical as you are, but to give it a chance. To have a bit of faith.

It might just turn into something worthwhile!

Thanks for reading!:)

I'm going to make 4 statements of which only 3 are true. You tell me in the comments which 3 are true.

1. At my job in the marketing department, I manage our Facebook ads campaign where we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising.

2. MIS department inexplicably blocked the marketing dept from the Facebook domain altogether near the end of the day.

3. They also block Dropbox although we still have to manage all the distribution of digital video and commercials to our tv advertisers.

4. I work in a technically progressive environment that understands how things work online.

Dear client / customer

You have been misled. The customer is not always right. The sooner you realise this and start listening to us as the consultants you hired the better things are going to get. If you were experts in how to do this stuff you wouldn't need us. Please recognise the skills.

Best regards
The design & development community

Me a while ago talking to a recruiter over the phone. This was for a C++ dev position.

(R)ecruiter : So except for the development things, we are looking for someone who has experience configuration linux. Do you have any experience with that?

(M)e : Sure, I use Linux all the time. What do you mean.

R : Well, Just using Linux isn't enough for this position, you need to have experience in configuration Linux.

M : Well. I can't answer your question if you don't specify what you mean. Do you mean that I need to be able to install my own packages? Set up my dev environment? Bash scripting? Being able to configure my bash profile to have good aliases? Use Linux to develop software? Because I can do all of these.

M : Or do you need someone who can write Kernel modules for the OS, because I don't have any experience in that but would like to learn.

R : Oh, I don't really know what it means. But the paper says that you need to have experience configuration Linux. So what would you say your experience with that is?

Me internally : JESUS CHRIST I JUST TOLD YOU WHAT I KNOW AND WHAT I DON'T KNOW HOW ARE YOU GOING TO ASSESS ME CORRECTLY.

Me 😎 : I use Arch and you have to set it up completely from the ground by your self so I know everything there is to know.

Basically every question was like this with the recruiter. I got further in the process but quit because the workplace looked like it would drain my soul when I got interviewed by the employees of the company.

Jesus Christ though, some recruiters could be replaced by an automated phone system.

I have got a new director at work. My previous director had to retire already, the man was already feeling it and he had been on the institution for more than 35 years....I am 30, so this tells you how much the man has been there.

This new dude.....has the presence of a Caterprie (Pokemon) or an Oompa Loompa. In contrast, the previous director felt like a 4 star General (never been in the presence of a 5 star since those occurrences are world war rare) but I had respected that man so much and loved working with him. I really did loved my boss, he was stern and professional, but kind and friendly to his staff, fiercely protective, no one took advantage of I.T while he was there, he would literally fight for us and took our word before anything else. The man was, well, a true man. A true leader.

He took a chance in putting me as the head of my department, but he had faith in me, and coached me and trained me as much as he could. Had the requirement for his position not been a masters he himself told me that he would have loved to make me his successor, even when I would constantly tell him that I was scared shitless of the work he did and the amount of things he did for the institution, to me this is a very laaaaaaaaarge cowboy hat to fill (this is Texas, he wore a hat, the saying is normally "shoes to fill", but fuck it)

This new guys looks away when the other managers are speaking to him. He constantly interrupts us. He constantly tells us about how the other institution in which he was (rival might I add) does X or Y, its fucking annoying to the point that me and the other managers have a drinking game, for every time he references his old institution we drink one beer over the weekend. It is Saturday night and I am 36 in in total (this is my favorite part of it tho) and it is just annoying.

His train of thought makes no sense to me:

"This application, where did you buy it? we tried purchasing one on Y when I was still there but found none"

Me: "Well, since it was a new government mandate and had nowhere to go we had to develop it in house"

Him: "We had tried to purchase what you guys had but found no place that sold it, so why didn't you try purchasing it?"

Me:.....well, because it was brand new, purchase it from where? We also don't like dealing with vendors that manage these sorts of things because every new requirement takes them weeks to produce on very high budgets, historically, my department has only had maintenance fees for the software that we have and even those applications crap themselves all the time and they take weeks to answer back to us.

Him: So you decided to develop it in house instead? we would never do that! back at y we purchased everything our engineers never really developed anything!

Me: Well then, what is the purpose of having engineers if they are not going to actually develop an application?

Him: IF there is something out there that is better then why should you reinvent the wheel?

Me: For this one I did not reinvent the wheel, I am not talking about creating a programming language from scratch, but how does custom solutions that specifically feed the needs of the institution to be produced otherwise? The department has developers for a reason, because they have very specific needs in here that can only come from a team of developers that are in house satisfying those needs.

Him: Well our engineers never had to do that. Sure projects sometimes had to put on holds because the vendor was busy, but such is the nature of development

Me: No it is not, the nature of development is to create things, it is one thing for my team to go through bugs and software considerations, it is another for me to not provide a service because some random company is taking two weeks on a $300 dllr an hour contract to put a simple checkbox on a form. If a project fails the board is not going to care that some vendor is not doing their job, they are just going to blame me, if that is the case then I would much rather the blame be actually mine than some sucky third party "developer" also, your engineers where not even engineers, they were people with a degree that purchased things, that's it, please do not compare them to my guys or refer them as engineers in front of me, they are not.

Him: Well, maybe.

MAYBE?!! motherfucker I did not kill myself learning the ins and outs of architecture and software engineering on my own time after my fucking bachelors in C.S for your codeless background ass to tell me MAYBE. My word IS the fucking WORD here, not yours. Fuck me I really dislike this dude's management practices.

The shitty part? He is not a bad person, he is not a bad dude that is out to get us, just a simple minded moron with no place as a leader.

I know leaders, I know what a leader is, this is not one.

I was laid off right before Christmas because my manager would not give me any work (bully.. possibly discrimination). I asked for work to do for 2 weeks, even coming up with things to contribute on my own. My contributions were rejected and the lead developer agreed with me that it was fucked up but did nothing. The little work that I was given was always completed above standard and the lead dev had made comments praising my self tasked contributions but each rejection I was told it would be shelved for version 1.2.

Finally fed up, feeling as though I was being completely ignored, I told the lead dev I was going home half day early if there was nothing for me to do. The next day the CTO fired me and even lied to my recruiter telling him that I had not shown up for work for 3 days (easily disproven).

It's now the first of the year, probably not the best time to be looking for a new job, and my current outlook is that I am not going to be able to pay my rent at the end of the month.

My motivation has diminished, my confidence is gone. Job prospects are few. I don't know how to proceed.

I hate people who think that building software is all about one click away and generating things. I got told to complete the task faster than the speed of light.

Fancy me some rant time? Let's name that cunt, "Bob".

"
Hey Bob, I got questions for you. Are you sure you were in your mum's womb for 8-9 months? Are you the kind of twat who honk at people as soon as the traffic light's turning green?

Building software takes time, the CI/CD takes time, TestFlight takes time, approvals from the Google Play store take time, approvals from Apple App Store connect take time, Unit testing takes time and every fucking thing you can name takes time!

It's just like sex, nobody wants to be with someone who can only last in bed for 0.000000000001 nanoseconds, the longer, the better, (but not too long).

It is also like building houses, which takes months to build not hours. As from my experience so far, something tells me that you are not the kind of person who would understand how to build a house but a sand castle which takes only hours to build.

Relentlessly, you bombarded me with a pile of bollocks and a pile of nonsense is not going to fasten up the compilation of the software.

"

[Little perspective: For the last 7 months I'm working in a certain project.]
[The project is full of unimaginative, non-creative devs with 0 initiative and poor technical background.]
[And they're almost all from one country which you all can figure out.]
[But I'm not going to mention it here because I don't want to come up as a racist]
[So there's US (Europeans) and THEM. 3 of US and about 10 of THEM. And we're doing 90% of all the heavy lifting]
---
Yesterday
---
D (Dev from THEM): Hi S, I have a problem with my task
Me: (sighing) Ok let's have a call
* on the call with D we were checking some stuff loosely related to task *
* code wouldn't get invoked at all for some reason *
* suddenly I realize that even if the code would invoke, D's probably doing everything wrong in it anyway *
Me (thinking): I need to double check something.
Me: I can't help you now, I'll get back to you later.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey J, I need your help, I need to clarify the work package in my mind, because I am no longer sure.
J (my European TL): Ok, fire away.
* call started *
Me: Is it true that [blahblahblah] and so D's task depends on me completing first my task, or am I losing my mind?
J: That is correct.
Me: Well she's trying to do this in [that] way, which is completely wrong.
J: You see, that's how it is in this project, you do refinements with them, split these work packages to tasks, mention specifically what depends on what and what order should things be taken in, and in some cases all tasks from given user stories should be done by one person entirely... But they do it their way anyway, assign different people to different interdependent tasks, and these people don't even understand the big picture and they try to do the things the way they think they understand them.
Me: It's a fire in a brothel.
J: Yup.
Me: I fucking love this project.
J: (smiling silently)
* call ended *
---
Me: Ok D, you can't do your task because it's dependant on my task.
D: Oh... so what do I do?
Me: I don't know, do something else until I do my task.
---
A (THEIR TL) (Oh, did I forget to mention that there are 2 TLs in this project? THEY have their own. And there are 2 PMs as well.)
A: Hey S, I need to talk
Me: (sighing, getting distracted from work again) Ok let's have a call
* call started *
A: S, we need this entire work package done by Friday EOD.
Me: I can't promise, especially since there are several people working on its several tasks.
A: D's working on hers for 3 days already, and she's stuck. We want you to take over.
Me: (sighing, thinking "great"): Ok.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey D, A instructed me to take over your task. This is actually going to be easier since you'd have to wait for mine after all.
D: Oh, ok.
---
* I switched the Assigned Person on D's task to myself on Azure *
---
This morning, email from D.
"Hey, I completed my task and it's on [this] branch, what do I do now?"

........................................
Me, hesitating between 2 ways to reply:
(and take note there are people in CC: A, J, P - the last one is THEIR PM)
1) "Hi, Unfortunately you'd still have to wait for my changes because your task is dependent on my task - the column to be changed is in the table that I am introducing and it's not merged to develop branch yet. By the way I already did your task locally, as I was instructed to do it, I'm wrapping things up now."
(y'know: the response which is kind, professional, understanding; without a slight bit of impatience)
2) WHAT FUCKING PART OF "DON'T DO THIS I WILL FUCKING DO IT MYSELF GO HOME JUST GO HOME" YOU DON'T FUCKING UNDERSTAND

Tl;dr porn is ruining my life.

Today I had a meeting with the project leader and the CTO. They had bad news, which did not come as a surprise.

In short, they said I did not pass the expectations they had, and unfortunately need to find somewhere else to work.

This is my third time being told to find somewhere else to work, and I really can't describe how it feels. I was even told that I maybe I should reconsider my future as a developer, and kids can do programming better than I can do.

It's really difficult when all you've done in the last year is to learn and improve your current skills.

I have good grades, a unique experience, built lots of unique projects, and a GitHub portfolio with high activity. The apps I've built are used by many customers today. I also have a blog with 600 k views where I share dev tips.

The thing with this work if I'm going, to be honest, is that they expected someone with senior experience, and unfortunately, I don't have that thus it takes many years to build it. So I started here with almost scratch experience of the things they needed.

On the other hand, it feels like a relief in that I can finally focus on my personal business. And maybe this wasn't the right place to work, maybe it requires a couple of jobs until I find the right place.

Despite the bumpy ride, and what such people tell you, I'm not going to give up.

10 years ago, my school teacher told me I was going to be a carpenter (nothing against that) but I manage to get an MSc degree in the engineering field.

There's a lot of shit going into your head when you receive such message like "What if they are true, what if I can't handle programming, what if I'll never be anything etc".

I'm not giving up, this is just a great story every successful person has.

What my number one problem is, and I will f*** win is porn addiction. Get rid of that, and the future is bright.

Sorry for mixing so many things here.

Just thought I'd share my current project: Taking an old ISA sound card I got off eBay and wiring it up to an Arduino to control its OPL3 synth from a MIDI keyboard. I have it mostly working now.

No intention to play audio samples, so I've not bothered with any of the DMA stuff - just MIDI (MPU-401 UART) and OPL3.

It has involved learning the pinout of the ISA bus connectors, figuring out which ones are actually used for this card, ignoring the standards a little (hello, amplifier chip that is wired up to the +12V line but which still happily works at +5V...)

Most of the wires going to it are for each bit of the 16-bit address and 8-bit data. Using a couple of shift registers for the address, and a universal shift register for the data. Wrote some fairly primitive ISA bus read/write code, but it was really slow. Eventually found out about SPI and re-wrote the code to use that and it became very fast. Had trouble with some timings, fixed those.

The card is an ISA Plug and Play card, meaning before I could use it I had to tell it what resources to use. Linux driver code and some reverse-engineering of the official Windows/DOS drivers got me past this stage.

Wired up IRQ 5 to an Arduino interrupt to deal with incoming MIDI data, with a routine that buffers it. Ran into trouble with the interrupt happening during I/O and needing to do some I/O inside the handler and had to set a flag to decide whether to disable/re-enable interrupts during I/O.

It looks like total chaos, but the various wires going across the breadboard are mainly to make it easier to deal with the 16-bit address and 8-bit data lines. The LEDs were initially used to check what addresses/data were being sent, but now only one of them is connected and indicates when the interrupt handler is executing.

There's still a lot to do after that though - MIDI and OPL3 are two completely different things so I had to write some code to manage the different "channels" of the OPL3 chip. I have it playing multiple notes at the same time but need to make it able to control the various settings over MIDI. Eventually I might add some physical controls to it and get a PCB made.

The fun part is, I only vaguely know what I'm doing with the electronics side of this. I didn't know what a "shift register" was before this project, nor anything about the workings of the ISA bus. I knew a bit about MIDI (both the protocol and generally how the MPU-401 UART works) along with the operation of a sound card from a driver/software perspective, but everything else is pretty new to me.

As a useful little extra, I made some "fake" components that I can build the software against on a PC, to run some tests before uploading it to the Arduino (mostly just prints out the addresses it is going to try and write to).

So... I've seen my dad talking a lot about quantum computers, and it's getting quite embarrassing to be there when he talks about them. He doesn't understand shit about them, except that they somehow use quantum mechanics for something.

Last week my uncle from Spain visited us. He's a Cristian pastor, and a cool guy, so they always talk about god and similar themes. We gathered the family to have a dinner with my uncle as he only was going to be one day with us. This is how part of the dinner went by:

" so, <Uncle's name>, have you heard about quantum computers?"

me thinking:*Oh my God. Please not again... *

"The nasa, the US government and all kinds of powerful entities are getting the quantum computer."

He always talks about THE quantum computer as if it was just one big machine.

"They have found that multiple universes exist through it. If this is what they are telling us, imagine how far they've gone. Remember that technology is always 8 years ahead of actual public technology."

Me:*please dad, stop. Who the fuck is made that claim and how many fucking years ago?*

"Did you know that many people remember that Mandela died in prison, while in the oficial version, he died after it? They must be messing with multiple universes, or multiple timelines are getting intertwined."

Me: *please, not the mandela effect again*

Then my dad procceded to talk about multiverses and how THE quantum computer was the future and about some parts of the Bible that supported it. Bizarre, I know.

When we are alone, I always try to tell him how things actually work but he always twists my claims to support his. Last time I told him that the mandela effect was perfectly explainable by psychological phenomena around forgotten memories. But this is going to far... Fuck the guys that made zeitgeist. Fuck Alex Jones. Fuck random youtube conspiracy channels. They make technology look like fucking magic for muggles.

TL; DR: please save me from IT hell

Note 1: this is a rant that comes after a couple other rants I'm going to call "family business saga" from now on because I feel like this is gonna go on for a while

Note 2: the following may look exaggerated but it's because of how pissed off I am at said person

So I have to help this one family member with his computer but he's worned me out so much last summer that I can't stand him (it's all tech based). At all. Both in person and via text calls. I dread and become pissy each time he's nearby, just his presence makes me want to jump in a hole and stay there for eternity.
And he's not the smartest cookie in the jar when it comes to tech, so he comes to me for help (instead of going to my brother. Aaagh why doesn't he go for my brother as well, it's mentally tiring having to "help" him - as he doesn't learn what I'm trying to teach him even after several attempts). I don't really mind being sought for help when it comes to tech, but this guy takes it one step further.
He entered my room with his computer in his hands saying this friend of his has installed W7 on his PC (why didn't he handle all the things he wants to do, it would save me a lot of anger containment) and that I *had* (it's always "YOU HAVE" because I'm a tech-ish person and I'm in uni for CS) to help him do a bunch of things.
So he boots up the thing and there are 32 updates to do, so I'm guessing that he didn't boot it up after the OS update until now. He leaves my room and I sigh out of relief. He comes back with the AC remote complaining it's too hot in my room and that he's gonna put it down a degree or 2. Jesus christ do not tamper with my AC settings, it's fine to me. The updates are still going on. He leaves again.
The computer takes its time to update and so does he. I'm happily playing minecraft when he comes back, the computer off after updating. He looks at it and says "why is it off?". I reply back "it finished updating.", trying to keep my cool. Even the most simple questions are irritation inducing.
He reboots it and lets it run. After it boots and it's ready to go he just stays there for like 2' without doing anything because the hard drive light was going off. I think he thinks the computer is going to explode if he touches it while the light is blinking 😬
He goes to connect the computer to the internet and gets all surprised that the computer doesn't recognize our home's internet (he has been here before with his computer, I guess, so he had connected, so I think he was expecting it to auto connect like that). I tell him that the computer doesn't recognize our home's connection because it has had a fresh OS installation and so it didn't have any connection registered. He types in the password and the connection is established.
He them starts going on about that he wants to get these pics on the business' website and how does he put them in his computer and all that. I do that for him and he's all like "how did you do that?? 😮" like it's a magic trick
And he's always going on at everything as if it's all a big undoable thing. "How do I do this? You know what, do it yourself and show me because I don't wanna fail". Dude. Bro. Everything - EVERYTHING - you are afraid of doing is undoable. EVERYTHING. Good christ.
I swear I've never felt so glad I'm going back for uni next week

I honestly don't get too mad when people aks me to do things like install programs for them. This is not my dayjob, but when you think of it, they're right when they say "you are a programmer so you must know how to do that". We do know how to do that. When you have a question about plants and you know a farmer, you are going to ask the farmer, even though he is not a gardener. He will know. Just as we know how to use computers very well.

So, I was gonna rant about how it can be difficult to design event-based Microservices.

I was gonna say some shit about gateways APIs and some other stuff about data aggregation and keeping things idempotent.

I was going to do all this but then as I was stretching out the old ranting fingers I decided to draw a diagram to maybe go along with the rant.

Now I’m not here to really rant about all that Jazz...

I’m here to give you all a first class opportunity to tear apart my architecture!

A few things to note:

Using a gateway API (Kong) to separate the mobile from the desktop.

This traffic is directed through to an in intermediate API. This way the same microservices can provide different data, and even functionality for each device.

Most Microservices currently built in golang.

All services are event based, and all data is built on-the-fly by events generated and handled by each Microservices.

RabbitMQ used as a message broker.

And finally, it is hosted in Google Cloud Platform.

The currently hosted form is built with Microservices but this will be the update version of things.

So, feel free to rip it apart or add anything you think should change.

Also, feel free to tell me to fuck right off if that’s your cup of tea as well.

Peace ✌🏼

Xpost from /r/sysadmin:
I occasionally see posts from people who seem like they want to spend every waking hour of every waking minute working on home lab stuff and studying for certs.

If you do this, you're missing out on life which you will regret later, but even if you don't care about missing out on life, it actually is hurting your career.

Being well rounded helps you interact with others at work in a number of ways. It makes you less one dimensional as "the computers guy" and it also gives you topics to discuss with people. If you know how to cook, or brew beer, or bake bread you end up using a lot of your technical and troubleshooting skills. Biking long distancing and learning how to fix your bike helps with your troubleshooting skills too. You learn to look at things from other angles.

Reading novels or writing poetry or making art work also helps because it exercises your brain. Woodworking or metal working involve a lot of skills that'd help your IT career including project planning and measuring and budgeting for each project. Working on cars or motorcycles would be similar. You just have to do SOMETHING.

I have a member of my team who literally has nothing going on in his life other than studying for certs. No friends, no hobbies, and he basically eats nothing but McDonalds and frozen dinners because even making a meal takes time away from his studying. He thinks means he's dedicated and will experience great career success.

But instead he has nothing to talk to anyone about, and when I say nothing, I mean literally nothing. It's borderline terrifying. Even if he was into comic books and video games it might help, which might help him relate to SOME of the IT staff even if the rest of the people at the company know nothing about it. But he doesn't even have that.

This isn't a solitary field anymore. Even if you truly are "the best" you still have to interact with other people and stay mentally stable enough to not burn out. Even if you know more than everyone else (or think you do) you have to try to broaden your horizons.

“I Pay $900 A Month for student loans.”

Not sure why there’s a video about this but let’s watch it...

*Sad music is playing*

“My name is _____ and I pay $900 a month for student loans..”

Yeah so what?

*Sad music continues*

??

*Woman makes a call and asks about when they’re going to make a student loan reform aggressively*

????

Then I realized my family was eligible for low income and I received Cal and Pell grants to pay for my tuition and living.

Then I realized that the salary for my computer science degree has numbed me to a point where $900 a month doesn’t seem too bad. Or awful. I mean I just leased a new car for my mom! And didn’t hesitate (only when having fun negotiating though).

Back then, I would be shocked. But it’s a surreal feeling to see now that I don’t. I was literally confused at the basis of this video. And now I’m surprised at my disconnect from it.

I also realized that they make videos based on how society should react to it. Am I an outcast to society because of this? Why am I not reacting the same way?

Maybe society (nowadays) would disdain me because I’ve come into high income like we all will because of our passion (and the demand for it).

But fuck society. It’s full of the very same people who use technology each and every day. Protesting for things they found trending on Twitter. The ones who refused to learn even though it’s a huge part of their lives. They’re the ones holding us back for an Engel’s Technological Utopia (idk if I’m even correct about the philosopher but anyways..)

We’re above them. We make things they’ll use and in massive numbers.

Don’t let them dictate what you should like. How you should act. Whether or not you should feel lonely while they’re posting pictures of fun times on Facebook.

We should be the ones doing that. Because we are the ones doing that.

That’s why we’re given the best to perform what we love most.

So devs, continue what you’re doing. Small or big, you’re still driving the world forward. Opening pull requests and contributing to open source projects. Answering questions on Stack Overflow not only for the person intended but for the beginner or even experienced professional who may stumble upon it later in a Google search.

And be highly rewarded for it. How society feels doesn’t matter any more when it comes to your passion. You’re important. Your work helps others in ways you can’t even imagine. We’re like one big fucking hivemind of engineers with the accessibility of the internet.

I love drinking on a Sunday!

This one's for all the SysAdmins out there.

About 4 years ago I was asked to take over a dental offices systems administration (~20 machines) after their previous guy had allowed their servers RAID 1 to fail and hadn't done any updates or general maintenance. (please take note this office is my parents dental office).

I since have been recovering from his poor configuration and setup by instating an active directory environment and installing up to date software as well as updating machines on the domain to Windows 10 since windows 7 is no longer supported. I have also been properly licensing everything.

My bosses (my parents) are annoyed with this because "it's more expensive" and "it's too complicated we don't know how to manage it" and I don't know how to explain to them that they aren't fucking systems admins. They asked why they could do it before and I tried to explain that now it's secure and things need to be rolled out on the network level. They had every user running full local admin on every workstation plus the server.

Some people don't fucking understand that just because it's simple doesn't make it a good fucking idea. And because it's cheap doesn't mean it will always be (just wait till Microsoft audits you).

Oh and they also don't understand fucking CAL licensing and refuse to pay for gsuite for all their staff who use it. Instead they just have two gsuite accounts and give everyone the fucking password.

I'm going to have an aneurysm

So a few days ago I shared about the conflict with my colleague on learning React. Today I was let go. Obviously I asked why they would do that and they said they feel the problem isn't even my React knowledge but the fact I don't grasp the fundamentals of OO programming.

Thing is in these 3 months there has not been a single code review. They are either going of what my lying colleague told them (they claimed he was excluded from giving feedback), or the consultants who were hired to help us. And yes, I got feedback I should improve but at the same time the assurance so long as I show improvement it'd be fine. And I was told they could see improvement. So I'm not sure what changed but suddenly there is no budget to keep me on. In any case it feels like shitty corporate bullshit.

But I can't say they are wrong. I struggle to explain simple concepts I know in words. I've worked a series of bad jobs where nobody cared how you did stuff as long as it got done. I feel I'm so behind now and so affected by bad knowledge it's even harder to fix than to learn the first time. So I'm wondering how to fix this.

I'm really gutted too because I loved this company. I was finally getting a fair wage instead of being underpaid. The people were excellent. I felt I could finally relax and feel safe at work. And now I feel betrayed. Which for someone with self esteem issues is very hard. Can't trust in myself and can't trust in others.

I'm gonna try and pick myself up in the morning, but today I feel totally shit. This wasn't how I'd expected things to go. I thought my manager had intended to talk conflicts over but instead I get the boot. And the advice to stop overselling myself. Real useful that. Like it is on me that they hired me despite my subpar interview because my CV looked good. It's a shitty excuse. In any case they're now stuck with a dev that walks out of work, throws false accusations about colleagues, and another person warned me about to not engage because nothing good ever came from it. He's gonna keep over engineering everything and make up for all the time he wastes outside of work creating a dysfunctional environment for everyone. But yeah, easier to fire the new person who does her best despite the odds. And who cautioned against over engineering because we kept missing deadlines. And who believes in refactoring when it is needed because that's how agile works. Yeah better keep someone who has no sense of work life balance and makes others miserable then claiming he's being driven out by your ignorance. And of course the consultants who throw your own people under the bus. Can't get rid of those now.

Ok, so when I inherit a Wordpress site I've really stopped expecting anything sane. Examples: evidence that the Wordpress "developer" (that term is used in the loosest sense possible) has thought about his/her code or even evidence that they're not complete idiots who wish to make my life hell going forwards.

Have a look at the screen shot below - this is from the theme footer, so loaded on every page. The screenshot only shows a small part of the file. IT LITERALLY HAS 3696 lines.

Firstly, lets excuse the frankly eye watering if statement to check for the post ID. That made me face palm myself immediately.

The insanity comes for the thousands of lines of JQuery code, duplicated to hell and back that changes the color of various dividers - that are scattered throughout the site.

To make things thousands of times worse, they are ALL HANDED CODED.

Even if JavaScript was the only way I could format these particular elements I certainly wouldn't duplicate the same code for every element. After copy and pasting that JQuery a couple of times and normal developer would think one word, pretty quickly - repetition.

When a good developer notes repetition ways to abstract crap away is the first thought that comes to mind.

Hell, when I was first learning to code god knows how long ago I always used functions to avoid repetition.

In this case, with a few seconds though this "developer" could have created a single JQuery handler and use data attributes within the HTML. Hell, as bad as that is, it's better than the monstrosity I'm looking at now.

I'm aware Wordpress is associated with bad developers due to it's low barrier to entry, but this site is something else.

The scary thing is that I know the agency that produced this. They are very large, use Wordpress exclusively and have some stupidly huge clients that would be know nationally.

Wordpress truly does attract some of the most awful "developers" and deserves it's reputation.

If you're a good developer and use Wordpress I feel sorry for you, as you're in small numbers from my experience.

Rant over, have vented a bit and feel better. Thanks Devrant.

I have a junior who really drives me up a wall. He's been a junior for a couple of years now (since he started as an intern here).

He always looks for the quickest, cheapest, easiest solution he can possibly think of to all his tickets. Most of it pretty much just involves copy/pasting code that has similar functionality from elsewhere in the application, tweaking some variable names and calling it a day. And I mean, I'm not knocking copy/paste solutions at all, because that's a perfectly valid way of learning certain things, provided that one actually analyzes the code they are cloning, and actually modifies it in a way that solves the problem, and can potentially extend the ability to reuse the original code. This is rarely the case with this guy.

I've tried to gently encourage this person to take their time with things, and really put some thought into design with his solutions instead of rushing to finish; because ultimately all the time he spends on reworks could have been spent on doing it right the first time. Problem is, this guy is very stubborn, and gets very defensive when any sort of insinuation is made that he needs to improve on something. My advice to actually spend time analyzing how an interface was used, or how an extension method can be further extended before trying to brute-force your way through the problem seems to fall on deaf ears.

I always like to include my juniors on my pull requests; even though I pretty much have all final say in what gets merged, I like to encourage not only all devs be given thoughtful, constructive criticism, regardless of "rank" but also give them the opportunity to see how others write code and learn by asking questions, and analyzing why I approached the problem the way I did. It seems like this dev consistently uses this opportunity to get in as many public digs as he can on my work by going for the low-hanging fruit: "whitespace", "add comments, this code isn't self-documenting", and "an if/else here is more readable and consistent with this file than a ternary statement". Like dude, c'mon. Can you at least analyze the logic and see if it's sound? or perhaps offer a better way of doing something, or ask if the way I did something really makes sense?

Mid-Year reviews are due this week; I'm really struggling to find any way to document any sort of progress he's made. Once in a great while, he does surprise me and prove that he's capable of figuring out how something works and manage to use the mechanisms properly to solve a problem. At the very least he's productive (in terms of always working on assigned work). And because of this, he's likely safe from losing his job because the company considers him cheap labor. He is very underpaid, but also very under-qualified.

He's my most problematic junior; worst part is, he only has a job because of me: I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt when my boss asked me if we should extend an offer, as I thought it was only fair to give the opportunity to grow and prove himself like I was given. But I'm also starting to toe the line of being a good mentor by giving opportunities to learn, and falling behind on work because I could have just done it myself in a fraction of the time.

I hate managing people. I miss the days of code + spotify for 10 hours a day then going home.

I tried writing this rant before, but I was (and still am) in too good of a mood so it was lengthy, meandering, and over-specific. so I'll summarize(ish).

summary:
* miscommunication
* working weekends
* incompetence and/or screwy integrations

summary of the summary:
* I can't fix someone else's mess if you don't talk to me!

Summary^3: #TODO: learn telepathy

Shortened rant:
Bossman at work signed up a very lucrative client by promising them something he couldn't deliver because he misunderstood and miscommunicated scope -- anti-fraud, if you've been following my rants.

Their signup (all four...) are screwy and cause issues and nobody knows why. I didn't write the code, have barely even glanced through it, and it uses a third-party (Clover) that's rather screwy.

Bossman has been asking me to do various things concerning the merchant, but has never been around to provide specifics, so I'm left to guess. I've done my best, but due to the aforementioned screwiness, I really have no idea what's going on. I just sort of muddled my way through.

Bossman also asked me, super late on Friday night (after 8:30pm), to rename one of the merchants because there are two with the same name (with different Clover creds, etc.) and that's just confusing. I didn't see the message because late and tired, and he didn't follow up or text/call me until two days later (today, Sunday). I also thought these were strictly for diagnosing and were de-listed. I had no idea the merchant was live and people were actually purchasing things for it. Had I known this I would have freaked out and demanded specifics on Thursday/Friday because wtf? debugging in production? with broken merchants? selling things for real money? scary bad? hello?

Anyway, I didn't see his message until he texted me about it at like 5pm today while I was about 2 hours from my computer. He's understandably frustrated, and I totally don't blame him, but fuck, miscommunication is a serious problem in this company, and that's amazing because it's so freaking small.

But the short version is that I'm likely going to get blamed for all this, Clover screwiness included. Bossman and I set up a call for 10am tomorrow and I'm positive he's going to try pinning it on me. Totally not going to let him, but his social is lv16+ while mine's like. 2 or 3. 😕 I'll see how it goes.

Really though, I should read @rutee07's book and just roast these fuckers.

1. Being the only single wringable neck to keep 40+ websites afloat, plus 3-5 new ones coming in or being built each month all with an overseas team that uses Google Translate to communicate and who are also in an active war zone.
2. Being fired for being “too old” in my mindset about how to do things. I had just turned 40 and my boss was 24 and distracted by all the shiny frameworks when all the marketing person needed was a simple off-the-shelf CMS-based site to publish company offers.
3. Jumping into the middle of a HUGE clusterfuck of thousands of Slack channels, wikis, and Jiras and an outmoded content management system while trying to learn the ropes from a guy who has no time to teach properly and then who abruptly leaves the company with scant documentation on everything that he held mainly in his own head. And there was no way I.T. was going to allow him to have the ability in Zoom to make a video of his training sessions, for no discernibly good security reason at all.
4. Working for only 9 months at two separate companies for two separate frat dudes who could have been clones of each other and whose egos made them into seagull managers* in every sense.
5. Being told by a new employer that they’re hiring me to be the head of their new web team only to find myself shuttled off to obscure contractor roles at MegaCorp Inc and AcmeCorp Inc.

I have 17 more years of this shit ahead of me before I can retire.

*If you haven’t heard of this: Someone who flies in, makes a lot of noise, shits all over everything, and flies out leaving everyone else to clean up the mess.

Finally after one year I understood how to carry out my job. I should do exactly NOTHING. I stopped completely organizing the team, solving bugs, helping the team developing and solving problems, explore and try stupid things said by CEO, PM and consultants.
I stopped for 2 months now and nothing happened.
I work remotely, nobody knows if I'm working or not, because nobody cares really about priorities, bugs, customers or products development.

I gain 10K$ (ten thousand) per month.

I attend skype meeting once per week or less. I say yes to everything, nobody gives a shit to what I say, even if they consider me the technical director. Actually in the meetings I only take care of being considered the technical director.
I achieved the mythical 4 hours working week.

I keep skype open in all my devices in order to answer promptly in case of problem, wherever I'm am, that's the most important thing right now.

I attended some meeting from the toilet or from the bedroom.

It was hard. To understand that the board is only after the next funding and not looking to develop a real product. It's hard to pretend helping people while thinking inside you "fuck you".
You have to let go the "guilt": if you can't login, I KNOW that is my fault, that there is a bug, that is possible to solve it, that resources and planning are needed etc. That's guilt. Just let go and say "next release" and never include it in the next release.
In this way I discovered that some users are paying the application even if they can't login.

The company is not going to disappear in the next 5 years. On the contrary, it's going to receive more money.

So the only "bad" thing is, what will I write in my CV in 5 years?

start teaching people how and why to delete code instead of teaching them only how to write code

compare functional and object oriented languages as well as high level and low level languages and explain what are advantages of using certain language without going into the syntax

let people do mistakes and don’t punish people for making them but let them explain what happened, if they know what was the cause of mistake it is worth ten times than doing things correctly

mix teams per period of time instead of per project

make showcases how to modify ugly code to pretty one and what are the steps and what patterns people should look after

teach by not showing old stuff but showing where old stuff exists in modern things and why it’s important there and what’s the purpose of doing things certain way instead of flat theory based on ancient examples

Woo, rant time.

I've recently changed jobs to a new company due to a number of factors at my old job. I didn't tell my old boss (let's call him X) my expected salary, nor did I tell him which company I was going to.

However, I've been informed by someone that still works there that X has been discussing my new wage in front of everyone; he was telling everyone that I'm going to lose money by moving job and that I made a stupid decision.
I didn't leave due to money, it was due to X's inability to take constructive criticism, the constant subtle sexism of the office and just a generally bad overall feeling about the job/office going forward. Yes, I will admit that money did have a minor part in my decision to leave but I didn't verbalise that to anyone in the office, and I made X aware that my departure wasn't to do with money. I left on good terms.

I feel as though it was wrong of X to talk about his opinions on my new job in front of my ex-colleagues and friends. I don't know, maybe this is the norm and I've just been living in a cave before this, or maybe my last boss was just a bit of a douchenugget. Has anyone else had this experience?

I've got to meet up with everyone from my last place tomorrow to properly say goodbye and things.. but I'm not sure how to approach my old boss when leaving drinks are held now. Should I say anything? Should I just act as though I know nothing about it?

What would you guys do in this situation???

<just got out of this meeting>
Mgr: “Can we log the messages coming from the services?”
Me: “Absolutely, but it could be a lot of network traffic and create a lot of noise. I’m not sure if our current logging infrastructure is the right fit for this.”
Senior Dev: “We could use Log4Net. That will take care of the logging.”
Mgr: “Log4Net?…Yea…I’ve heard of it…Great, make it happen.”
Me: “Um…Log4Net is just the client library, I’m talking about the back-end, where the data is logged. For this issue, we want to make sure the data we’re logging is as concise as possible. We don’t want to cause a bottleneck inside the service logging informational messages.”
Mgr: “Oh, no, absolutely not, but I don’t know the right answer, which is why I’ll let you two figure it out.”
Senior Dev: “Log4Net will take care of any threading issues we have with logging. It’ll work.”
Me: “Um..I’m sure…but we need to figure out what we need to log before we decide how we’re logging it.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, but if we log to SQL database, it will scale just fine.”
Mgr: “A SQL database? For logging? That seems excessive.”
Senior Dev: “No, not really. Log4Net takes care of all the details.”
Me: “That’s not going to happen. We’re not going to set up an entire sql database infrastructure to log data.”
Senior Dev: “Yea…probably right. We could use ElasticSearch or even Redis. Those are lightweight.”
Mgr: “Oh..yea…I’ve heard good things about Redis.”
Senior Dev: “Yea, and it runs on Linux and Linux is free.”
Mgr: “I like free, but I’m late for another meeting…you guys figure it out and let me know.”
<mgr leaves>
Me: “So..Linux…um…know anything about administrating Redis on Linux?”
Senior Dev: ”Oh no…not a clue.”

It was all I could do from doing physical harm to another human being.
I really hate people playing buzzword bingo with projects I’m responsible for.

Only good piece is he’s not changing any of the code.

My last job before going freelance. It started as great startup, but as time passed and the company grew, it all went down the drain and turned into a pretty crappy culture.

Once one of the local "darling" startups, it's now widely known in the local community for low salaries and crazy employee churn.

Management sells this great "startup culture", but reality is wildly different. Not sure if the management believes in what the are selling, or if they know they are selling BS.

- The recurring motto of "Work smarter, not harder" is the biggest BS of them all. Recurring pressure to work unpaid overtime. Not overt, because that's illegal, but you face judgement if you don't comply, and you'll eventually see consequences like lack of raises, or being passed for promotions in favour of less competent people that are willing to comply.

- Expectation management is worse than non-existent. Worse, because they actually feed expectations they have no intention of delivering on. (I.e, career progression, salary bumps and so on)

- Management is (rightfully) proud of hiring talented people, but then treat almost everyone like they're stupid.

- Feedback is consistently ignored.

- Senior people leave. Replace them with cheap juniors. Promote the few juniors that stay for more than 12 months to middle-management positions and wonder where things went wrong.

- People who rock the boat about the bad culture or the shitty stunts that management occasionally pulls get pushed out.

- Get everyone working overtime for a week to setup a venue for a large event, abroad, while you have everyone in bunk rooms at the cheapest hostel you could find and you don't even cover all meal expenses. No staff hired to setup the venue, so this includes heavy lifting of all sorts. Fly them on the cheapest fares, ensuring nobody gets a direct flight and has a good few hours of layover. Fly them on the weekend, to make sure nobody is "wasting time" travelling during work hours. Then call this a team building.

This is a tech recruitment company that makes a big fuss about how tech recruitment is broken and toxic...
Also a company that wants to use ML and AI to match candidates to jobs and build a sophisticated product, and wanted a stronger "Engineering culture" not so long ago. Meanwhile:

- Engineering is shoved into the back seat. Major company and product decisions made without input from anyone on the engineering side of things, including the product roadmaps.

- Product lead is an inexperienced kid with zero tech background -> Promote him to also manage the developers as part of the product team while getting rid of your tech lead.

- Dev team is essentially seen by management as an assembly line for features. Dev salaries are now well below market average, and they wonder why it's hard to recruit good devs. (Again, this is a tech recruitment company)

I just had a chat with the CEO (I'll call him John) of the company I work at. I was trying to get a real alignment on what I need to do to be a valuable resource to this company. They promoted me (without a raise in pay) to a different (management) role, and I do not know what I need to do to be the best in this role.

During the discussion, the CEO failed to provide any usable metrics, or a way to track those, except for phrases like "higher productivity" and "higher quality". How to track? No idea.

So, at this point, me being the idiot I am, wanted to make things explicit:
*Me: Okay, so what if I request for a 20% raise six months from now, what metrics will you look at to decide whether to give me the raise.

(My last raise was a big one, more than 100% or so, more than a year ago. That was a dev role, and I was paid 2 cents earlier, so the doubling to 4 cents wasn't really a big deal.)

John went on a long rant on how people just expect raises every year, inflation, etc. All good and fine.
But then he mentioned something strange.

*John: ...and you know, for the last three years, there has been a race to retain resources. During this race, many companies, including us, had to pay people WAY MORE THAN THEIR VALUE to retain them. These people are going to be the first to be fired during cost-cutting as they are the most expensive resources at the company without any proven value. These people should not expect raises to come soon, and if they do expect that, they need to prove the value themselves.

Now, I, being a simpleton, am wondering how is it fair for an organization to pay someone "more than their value" to retain them once so that they can just be fired two years later. How did the company decide the value of such employees to begin with?

And all this is ignoring the fact that in the company there are no metrics, no KPIs, and performance of a person is how much the CEO likes that guy. How TF the people who joined a year ago and never interacted with the CEO prove their worth?

Developers are building PowerPoints and configuring JIRA/Confluence/Laptops of Sales team, project managers are delegating management to developers and decision-making to the CEO, Technical architect is building requirements documents, Business Analyst is the same person as the QA team lead (and badly stretched), and the Release Manager is the Product Technical Admin that cannot write one sentence in English. And then we got 3.8 hours in meetings every DAY. Why TF are Dev Managers in "QA KPI Meeting"? Why are "developers" writing documentation on "How to create meeting notes at <company>"?
And, in this hell-storm, how does one really demonstrate one's value?

Rant PART 2 [FINAL-inspirational]

In my previous rant I posted what was happening in my life. And now I want to share how it all unfolded.

To remember some things, I was doing a mobile project for school and it was a group assignment. My group was so disperse that I ended up doing all by myself. And in the middle of this my gf and I were fighting.

I spent the last two days coding all day during work (I do coding internship for the college I go to, so my boss was cool about me doing the project during work) and I ended up forgetting what day it was today (today is a holyday, I thought I had to go to work because I forgot). It was such an intense two days that while coding I was forgetting variable names, table row names (I literally spent half an hour on my API trying to find a solution, when the solution was that I was using `seller_fk` on the API, but in the database was `seller_id`) and my mind was imploding. I asked my boss for help on the database (he's really good at it) and my teachers to help me. But everything paid off.

Yesterday I started coding at 8am and ended up finishing the project at 9:28 pm (the day before yesterday was the same thing), 2 minutes before the class of the project to start! I was able to finish the project, finally! But what really remarked me was that from all the groups that were in like 4-5 people, I was the only one who delivered the project that day. All other groups are going to have to deliver the project next week with reduced project grade, while I got 100% of the grade because I delivered on the date.

God is good!

Also my gf and I are good now. We are kinda still recovering emotionally, but are now more respectfull to each other, so I guess something good can comeout of bad things.

Happy coding everyone and never give up!
If I made it out of this whole mess so can you! :)

Not directly a dev related rant but needed to write it somewhere. (Also, long long rant, be aware).

I am currently working on a project for a client who is going to launch a new product. He wants us to create the brand and choose the logo, colours, communication... BUT before everything we have to deliver the website design.

We told him several times that the design has to be created AFTER the brand is created, however, he insisted. Then, we offered him to develop the UX/UI patterns but the colors and a few more things would be delivered after, so his 3rd party dev could make the job.

After working on the first draft, we sent it to him and he refused it, calling it "poor designed". We insisted that it was a draft for the UI which he ignored.

He asked for another design by taking as example a website from another (unrelated) company. We worked for another 2 days and delivered a more finished design, which he automatically refused again.

He called us to his office in order to provide us exactly what he wanted in every part of the site. He only gave us the home page and the product page, and ordered us to work through the weekend (Which we didn't as he is being quite petty about everything and bullying us).

We delivered this third draft and he made changes, sometimes going back to things that he refused before.

Now his 3rd party dev has things to work, but he called yesterday today telling us that the rest of the site must be before friday, date in which we will be showing him how the brand will be and what we have created. He didn't care about and demanded the designs.

I helped the designer to develop the designs of the website as I can work in Photoshop (I am mostly front web developer but can design UI) but he is now busy working on the brand and I had to make ALL the remaining designs, knowing that the client will reject them as soon as they are sent to him, since he hasn't given us any indication on how and what he wants.

We developers sometimes make futile work which will be used a few days or months or in order to provide demos, however, the time I wasted today made me get behind other deadlines, which makes me feel bad for not being able to accomplish them.

Thank goodness I put on my adulting cap and had a talk with my project manager today. He's such a kind and understanding person, truly underestimated qualities.

I'm basically a sub-contractor; a freelance consultant who get jobs from another company (ie my PM) and I messed up the estimate for this project we're working on and I did so in a rather spectacular manner.

60-80 estimated hours are now in the 300:s... I've missed more deadlines in this project alone than I have done in all my career (+10 years) combined. It's bad. It's a complete clusterfuck.

Problem is because of this never-ending project I haven't been able to work on things I can debit since May and I didn't have those margins. I'm fucked financially and I've been so stressed out about that I've literally been loosing sleep over it, found myself ugly-crying in the middle of the night more than once, worrying about how the fuck I'm gonna get on.

In my mind it was a real thing that they wouldn't want to keep working with me after this. Even though the failures in this project isn't _only_ on me, I'm not one to make excuses for myself and I would completely understand if that had been the outcome.

But it wasn't.

Instead he just said he was sorry he wouldn't be able to get all my hours billed by the client (of course not; we've left an estimate and by at least Swedish business law you can't deviate from those simply because you made an incorrect estimation).

But he has no intentions of letting me go as a consultant and assured me there will be other jobs (planned since before this whole ordeal). He's even going to try and get some hours in for me in other projects, small things here and there so I can get some billable hours quickly to help me out.

He knows me and he knows this isn't who I am as a professional. I'm so relieved I could god damn cry.

How I met python
[long read but worth]

There's nothing wrong with falling in love with a programming language for her looks. I mean, let's face it - Python does have a rockin' body of modules, and a damn good set of utilities and interpreters on various platforms. Her whitespace-sensitive syntax is easy on the eyes, and it's a beautiful sight to wake up to in the morning after a long night of debugging. The way she sways those releases on a consistent cycle - she knows how to treat you right, you know?

But let's face it - a lot of other languages see the attention she's getting, and they get jealous. Really jealous. They try and make her feel bad by pointing out the GIL, and they try and convince her that she's not "good enough" for parallel programming or enterprise-level applications. They say that her lack of static typing gives her programmers headaches, and that as an interpreted language, she's not fast enough for performance-critical applications.

She hears what those other, older languages like Java and C++ say, and she thinks she's not stable or mature enough. She hears what those shallow, beauty-obsessed languages like Ruby say, and she thinks she's not pretty enough. But she's trying really hard, you know? She hits the gym every day, trying to come up with new and better ways of JIT'ing and optimizing. She's experimenting with new platforms and compilation techniques all the time. She wants you to love her more, because she cares.

But then you hear about how bad she feels, and how hard she's trying, and you just look into her eyes, sighing. You take Python out for a walk - holding her hand - and tell her that she's the most beautiful language in the world, but that's not the only reason you love her.

You tell her she was raised right - Guido gave her core functionality and a deep philosophy she's never forgotten. You tell her you appreciate her consistent releases and her detailed and descriptive documentation. You tell her that she has a great set of friends who are supportive and understanding - friends like Google, Quora, and Facebook. And finally, with tears in your eyes, you tell her that with her broad community support, ease of development, and well-supported frameworks, you know she's a language you want to be with for a long, long time.

After saying all this, you look around and notice that the two of you are alone. Letting go of Python's hand, you start to get down on one knee. Her eyes get wide as you try and say the words - but she just puts her finger on your lips and whispers, "Yes".

The moon is bright. You know things are going to be okay now.

Should’ve posted this after it happened, but it requires a bit of background anyway.

There’s this guy that oversees our OpenStack environment. My team often make jokes and groan about him in private because he’s so overbearing. A few months back, he had to take us to our data center to show us our new racks, and he kept saying stupid stuff like “you break this and it costs me $30,000” as if he owns everything. He’s just... one of THOSE people. Always speaks in such a condescending way. We make jokes that he is our “best friend”.

Our company is shifting most of our products to the cloud in response to the coronavirus (trying to make it an opportunity for “innovation”). This has involved some structural and responsibility changes in our department, and long story short, I’m now heading the OpenStack environment alongside other projects.

This means going through grueling 1-on-1 meetings with our “best friend”. It’s not too bad, I can be pretty patient with people, so I didn’t mind too much at first. Then a few things happened.

1. He sent a shared folder that he owned containing info related to the environments. Several documents were outdated and incomplete, so I downloaded them, corrected them, and then uploaded the documents to my teams file share, as I was supposed to since we now own the projects.

2. Several files were missing, and when I asked about them, he said “Oh, did you refresh the browser?”. I told him no, that I downloaded them locally and republished them to my teams server, because he was supposed to hand everything off to us at once. He says “Well, silly, how are you going to get updates if you’re looking at them locally?” and kind of chuckles at me like I’m stupid.

3. He insists on training me how to remote into one of the servers to check on cluster space, which in itself is fine. I understand others wanting to make sure things will be done right by the people who come after them. But he tells me to download SuperPutty. I tell him, “oh no, that’s alright. I don’t need putty”. He says “oh cool, what tool do you use for ssh?”. I answer him “Just Git. If I want to I can use a CentOs bash terminal too, because we have WSL installed”. He responds “You can’t ssh through Git”.
I was actually a little shocked. I didn’t know if he was serious or not so I was silent for a few seconds before hesitantly saying “yes you can”. He says “this is news to me” and I so I tell him “every single one of our build jobs fetches code from Git with ssh” and he seemed genuinely shocked and surprised by that.... so then it occurs to me to show him that you can ssh in Powershell and that REALLY blew his mind. He would not shut up about it for several minutes. I was amused until it just got annoying.

Needless to say, my team had been previously teasing me about having to work with him, so they found it hilarious when I told them afterwards.

Best part of being a dev? Rock star status when things are going well: had to get a fix out by 18:00, boss walks by as I'm watching something on YouTube and tells me the client called and wanted to be sure we'd have it done in time, told him not to worry and went back to my video. Pushed the fix at 17:30, and tomorrow I'll be in the same position: every last minute fix delivery only grows my reputation for getting critical last-minute fixes out in time... As skeptical as my boss was at the time when he walked past and saw me on YouTube he had to he polite because he knows how crucial I am to this project

I think tomorrow I'm going to work on my own project and slack off, no one will be able to tell me different

TL;DR you suck, I suck and everybody sucks, deal with it....

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

Let me let off some steam, since I've had enough of people hating on languages "just because"

Every language has it's drawbacks and quirks, BUT they have their strengths also. Saying "I hate {language}" is just you being and ignorant prick and probably your head is so far up your ass that you look like an ass hat. With that being said, every language is either good or bad depending on the developer writing in it. Let's give you an example:

If I ware to give you a brick and ask you to put a nail in a plank, can you do it? Yes, it will be easier if you do it with a hammer, but you have a brick, so hammer is out of the question. If you hit your thumb while doing it... well... sorry, but it is not the bricks fault - it is YOU!

JavaScript, yes it has a whole lot of problems, but it works, you can do a ton of stuff and does a good job at that, it is evolving through node and typescript (and others, just a personal pref), BUT if you used js when you ware debugging that jquery (1.0) plugin written in the free time of a 13 yo, who copy pasted a bunch from SO, well, it is not js' problem - deal with it. Same goes for PHP, i've been there where you had a single `index.php` with bazillion lines of code, did a bunch of eval and it was called MVC, but it also is evolving.. thing is all languages allow you to do some dumb stuff so YOU have to be responsible to not fuck it up (which you always DO btw, we all do). Difference is PHP/JS roll with it because the assumption is that you know what you are doing, which again - newsflash - you don't.

More or less I would blame that shit on businesses which decided to go with undergrads to save money instead of investing in their product, hell, I am in a major company that does not invest that doesn't care a whole lot about dev /tech stuff and now everybody's mother is an engineer - they care about money, because investors care about money (ROI) and because clean code does not pay the bills, but money does.

If we get all of the good practices and apply them to each language every one of them has it's place, that is why there is no "The Language", even if there was, we STILL ware going to fuck it up and probably it was going to be even worse than where we are now.

Study, improve, rinse and repeat... There are SENIORS and LEADS out there that are about 25-30 and have no fucking clue about the language, because they have stuck up their heads up the ass of frameworks and refuse to take a breath of clean air and consider something different than their dogmatic framework "way" of doing things.. That is the result you are seeing. Let me give you a fresh example to illustrate where I am at atm:

Le me works with ZendFramework 2.3-2.5 (why not, which is PHP5+ running on PHP7 [fancy, eh]), and little me writes a module for said project, and tries to contain it in its own space, i.e not touching anything outside of the folder of the module so it is SELF-CONTAINED (see, practices), during 2-3-4 iterations of code review, I've had to modify 4 different modules with `if (somthing === self::SOMETHING_TYPE)` as requested by my TL, which resulted in me not covering 3 use-cases after the changes and not adding a new event (the fw is event-driven, cuz.. reasons) so I have to use a bunch of ifs in the code, to check a config value and do shit. That is the way of I am asked to do things I hate what I've done and the fact that because of CR I have lost case-coverage, a week of work and the same TL will be on my ass on monday that things are now "perfect".

The biggest things is "we care about convention and code style"... right.... That is not because of the language, not because of me, not because of the framework - it is some dude's opinion that you hate, not the language.

New stuff are better, reinventing the wheel is also good, if it wasn't you would've had a few stone circular things on your car and things ware going to be like that - we need to try and try, that is the only way we actually learn shit.

Until things change in the trade, we will be on the same boat, complaining about the same shit over and over, you and me won't be alive probably but things will not change a bit.

We live in a place where state is considered good, god objects necessary (can you believe it, I've got kudos for using the term 'God Object'... yep, let that sink in). If you really hate something, please, oh god I beg you, show me how you will do it better and I will shake your hand and buy you a beer, but until then, please keep your ass-hurt fanboy opinion to your self, no one gives a shit about what you think, we will die and the world will not notice...

Red flags in your first week of your software engineering job 🚩

You do the first few days not speaking to anyone.
You can't get into the building and no one turns up until mid day.
The receptionist thinks you're too well dressed to work in this building, thinks you're a spy and calls security on you.
You are eating alone during lunch time in the cafeteria
You have bring your own material for making coffee for yourself

When you try to read the onboarding docs and there aren't any.
You have to write the onboarding docs.

You don't have team mates.
When you ask another team how things are going and they just laugh and cry.😂😭

There's no computer for you, and not even an "it's delayed" excuse. They weren't expecting you.
Your are given a TI PC, because "that's all we have", even though there's no software for it, and it's not quite IBM compatible.
You don't have local admin rights on your computer.💀
You have to buy a laptop yourself to be able to do your job.

It's the end of the week and you still don't have your environment set up and running.
You look at the codebase and there are no automated tests.
You have to request access every time you need to install something through a company tool that looks like it was made in 2001.

Various tasks can only be performed by one single person and they are either out sick or on vacation.
You have to keep track of your time in 6 minute increments, assigned to projects you don't know, by project numbers everyone has memorised (and therefore aren't written down).
You have to fill in timesheets and it takes you 30 minutes each day to fill them in because the system is so clunky.🤮

Your first email is a phishing test from the IT department in another country and timezone, but it has useful information in it, like how to login to the VPN.
Your second email is not a phishing test, but has similar information as the first one. (You ignore it.)
Your name is spelled wrong in every system, in a different way. 2 departments decide that it's too much trouble, and they never fix the spelling as long as you work there. One of them fixes it after you leave, and annoys you for a month because you haven't filled out the customer survey.

I AM TIRED

warning: this rant is going to be full of negativity , CAPS, and cursing.

People always think and they always write that programming is an analytical profession. IF YOU CANNOT THINK IN AN ANALYTICAL WAY THIS JOB IS NOT FOR YOU! But the reality could not be farther from the truth.

A LOT of people in this field whether they're technical people or otherwise, just lack any kind of reasoning or "ANALYTICAL" thinking skills. If anything, a lot of of them are delusional and/or they just care about looking COOL. "Because programming is like getting paid to solve puzzles" *insert stupid retarded laugh here*.

A lot of devs out there just read a book or two and read a Medium article by another wannabe, now think they're hot shit. They know what they're doing. They're the gods of "clean" and "modular" design and all companies should be in AWE of their skills paralleled only by those of deities!

Everyone out there and their Neanderthal ancestor from start-up founders to developers think they're the next Google/Amazon/Facebook/*insert fancy shitty tech company*.

Founder? THEY WANT TO MOVE FAST AND GET TO MARKET FAST WITH STUPID DEADLINES! even if it's not necessary. Why? BECAUSE YOU INFERIOR DEVELOPER HAVE NOT READ THE STUPID HOT PILE OF GARBAGE I READ ONLINE BY THE POEPLE I BLINDLY COPY! "IF YOU'RE NOT EMBARRASSED BY THE FIRST VERSION OF YOU APP, YOU DID SOMETHING WRONG" - someone at Amazon.

Well you delusional brainless piece of stupidity, YOU ARE NOT AMAZON. THE FIRST VERSION THAT THIS AMAZON FOUNDER IS EMBARRASSED ABOUT IS WHAT YOU JERK OFF TO AT NIGHT! IT IS WHAT YOU DREAM ABOUT HAVING!

And oh let's not forget the tech stacks that make absolutely no fucking sense and are just a pile of glue and abstraction levels on top of abstraction levels that are being used everywhere. Why? BECAUSE GOOGLE DOES IT THAT WAY DUH!! And when Google (or any other fancy shit company) changes it, the old shitty tech stack that by some miracle you got to work and everyone is writing in, is now all of a sudden OBSOLETE! IT IS OLD. NO ONE IS WRITING SHIT IN THAT ANYMORE!

And oh my god do I get a PTSD every time I hear a stupid fucker saying shit like "clean architecture" "clean shit" "best practice". Because I have yet to see someone whose sentences HAVE TO HAVE one of these words in them, that actually writes anything decent. They say this shit because of some garbage article they read online and in reality when you look at their code it is hot heap of horseshit after eating something rancid. NOTHING IS CLEAN ABOUT IT. NOTHING IS DONE RIGHT. AND OH GOD IF THAT PERSON WAS YOUR TECH MANAGER AND YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM RUNNING THEIR SHITHOLE ABOUT HOW YOUR SIMPLE CODE IS "NOT CLEAN". And when you think that there might be a valid reason to why they're doing things that way, you get an answer of someone in an interview who's been asked about something they don't know, but they're trying to BS their way to sounding smart and knowledgable. 0 logic 0 reason 0 brain.

Let me give you a couple of examples from my unfortunate encounters in the land of the delusional.

I was working at this start up which is fairly successful and there was this guy responsible for developing the front-end of their website using ReactJS and they're using Redux (WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS TO ELIMINATE PASSING ATTRIBUTES FOR THE PURPOSE OF PASSING THEM DOWN THE COMPONENT HIERARCHY AGIAN). This guy kept ranting about their quality and their shit every single time we had a conversation about the code while I was getting to know everything. Also keep in mind he was the one who decided to use Redux. Low and behold there was this component which has THIRTY MOTHERFUCKING SEVEN PROPERTIES WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS BE PASSED DOWN AGAIN LIKE 3 TO 4 TIMES!.

This stupid shit kept telling me to write code in a "functional" style. AND ALL HE KNOWS ABOUT FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING IS USING MAP, FILTER, REDUCE! And says shit like "WE DONT NEED UNIT TESTS BECAUSE FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING HAS NO ERRORS!" Later on I found that he read a book about functional programming in JS and now he fucking thinks he knows what functional programming is! Oh I forgot to mention that the body of his "maps" is like 70 fucking lines of code!

Another fin-tech company I worked at had a quote from Machiavelli's The Prince on EACH FUCKING DESK:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."

MOTHERFUCKER! NEW ORDER OF THINGS? THERE 10 OTHER COMPANIES DOING THE SAME SHIT ALREADY!

And the one that got on my nerves as a space lover. Is a quote from Kennedy's speech about going to the moon in the 60s "We choose to go to the moon and do the hard things ..."

YOU FUCKING DELUSIONAL CUNT! YOU THINK BUILDING YOUR SHITTY COPY PASTED START UP IS COMPARABLE TO GOING TO THE MOON IN THE 60S?

I am just tired of all those fuckers.

Got my first Webdev job at a small marketing company, felt very lucky as I didn't have much experience. Turns out I'm the only one that could program. The other guys just use Wordpress. It felt wrong at first, using plugins instead of developing, but we got results and clients were happy. I felt like there was a lot less to this development thing than I'd previously thought! And so we continued.

But I noticed that some of our more plugin heavy sites (not made by me - these were made in some drag/drop Wordpress interface) were running slow. I mean 15 seconds load time slow. I joined devRant around the same time and discovered that no - this is not what normal development actually is. Wordpress seems universally hated. Thank god, because something seemed very wrong!

So with us getting complaints all over the place over page speed from relatively high-profile clients, I've gone and set up a script on a server that downloads the whole front end of these Wordpress sites and serves them up instead of the 'real' thing. Did I mention that there's basically no dynamic content on most of these sites? It works like a charm! I'm now trying to figure out how to get forms and route them into the real, hidden version of the site, as well as automatically updating the html views whenever the client changes anything in the Wordpress backend. Not sure if this has fixed the problem or just enabled bad practice, but I don't think I'm going to be able to stop the others from doing things this way...

For the record, yes there are plugins that do similar stuff but I thought it'd be nice to never use plugins again! And hey, I got to learn all about bash scripting so I can't complain.

For real though, I didn't quite realise how bad the Wordpress thing really was until I came here. Thanks for making me aware, all!

I walk into the kickoff meeting today. The first part of this project had 5 developers and a project manager. Former project manager handled communication and sheltered us from bullshit. We built an amazing piece of software in a very short time. Customers were so amazed that they decided to reboot the project, boost the funding by several million, and let us go again. They specifically requested the same team.

Now the team looks like this: the neediest tester guy, a UX lady that doesn't have any UX background, an agile "visionary", a project manager that doesn't understand how development works, a solutions architect, 3 COTS platform specialists, a devops specialist, and an account lead. They have booked all kinds of workshops and other shit to kick things off.

So development capacity is only 60% of what it was. Management ratio was 1:5 before. Now the management ratio is 9:3. The new project manager thinks developers should be on more customer calls and responding to all customer emails during sprints. We already built this system and devops pipelines end to end. The COTS people, solutions architect, or the UX person can't program. They want us to magically convert this custom application into one based on COTS. What we need to do is make the rest of the business processes that we omitted, integrate known feedback, rework the backend, build better automated testing, improve logging and reporting, add another actor to the system, add a different authentication method, and basically work through the massive backlog.

How do they think this is going to work? Do they think we can download a custom engineered enterprise grade software system from Microsoft and double click all the way to customer satisfaction? The licenses alone are too much for the customer on an ongoing cost basis. I guess we can discuss it during the agile team-building weekend at some remote lake that the team "visionary" has set up. For the sake of fuck.

Like development isn't hard enough. Hire two more developers and lose all of the dead weight. Get a project manager that won't let the trivial shit roll down on us. What the fuck.

As we're all going about our various Easter, Passover, et al., family celebrations, I have the perfect solution to help train your families to stop asking you for help with mundane computer stuff:
Every time someone asks you to do/fix something, give them a full talk about what is going on in their computer around that system.
Don't forget you can talk about lots of things too:
- concurrency
- TCP IP / socket networking
- multi-threaded programs vs. single threads
- RISC vs. CISC processors
- Why linux is better than Windows or Mac
- algorithms
- logarithmic runtime
- teach them how to convert between hex, binary, and base ten
Really pour it on too. Soon they'll either figure out that you are a highly-skilled individual who is not their personal geek squad, or they'll be too afraid of a big lecture to ask for help.
Works with my in-laws like a charm.

A couple of months ago, the father of a friend of mine, asked me if I wanted to help him out with a project.

His late father, whom he inherited a one-person upholstering company from, once created a system in filemaker to do, among others, his financial administration. This system, however, grew organically as time went by, but he passed away before he explained to his son how it worked.

Now this man was running the company, using the parts of the system that he knows, but things were starting to break down. He asked me if I could help him understand what is going on and fix a couple of things.

However, the more I look at it, the more I realize what a monstrosity this has become, because the system has never been cleaned up. For example:

- There is a suppliers table, with the columns "E-MAIL" and "EMAIL". The latter one containing the supplier's website address.
- In order to be able to generate year reports, at the start of a year he copies the previous year's file, removes all records from it and starts using that as the new year's file. (This year, he accidentally created a shortcut instead of copying...)
- Some tables have a misterious column called "#1". It always contains a 1.
- The system consists of about 20 files, each of them containing a single table, although only 10 of them are really used. The other ones are just legacy.
- File, table, column, and layout names are capitalized randomly (all caps, no cap, starting uppercase) and are usually abbreviations, like "st2", "oms3", "off\rek", "b", "VERDBEST6" and "antst".
- One table has 92 columns.
- Of those 92 columns, only about 20, maybe 30, are in use.

Now, my task is finding out what parts are useful and in use, extracting those and create a baby monster out of the giant monster this system has become.

Sidenote: I actually enjoy having to learn a bit about accounting in order to understand this. Planning to use the knowledge I gain to keep track of my own finances.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but I'm fucking sick of my experience with the world.

I have a feeling that all that 1984 conspiracy type of ideas that I previously considered bullshit and fear mongering are real.

(Just to be clear, I'm not including most conspiracy theories which are very ignorant like flat earth, fake moon landing, or antivax, the people that spread those theories can die a horrible death IMHO).

Corporation consolidation is a fact and appears to become irreversible.

Because of technology, I can stay in the comfort of my house, safe from crime and be entertained without needing to have direct contact with humans.
People might say "that's your fault for not leaving the house". True but that is just how the world is.

The outside world in the cities I lived in is not a welcoming place.
Hell if you fucking find a bench it's a goddamn miracle, and if you do and sit for a long time, the police stares at you like you are up to something.

People don't talk to you because "don't talk to strangers".
It can be rare to find water or a bathroom that isn't a complete shithole.

So no wonder I rather stay at home, the outside world is hostile.

So yeah, go to a mall or something. And consume, consume, consume, because the outdoors suck.

Many pioneers thought technology was to improve the quality of life.

But no, it's just more isolation, less direct contact with people, less giving a fuck about other people.

And that's how feel about people of today. The least amount of fuck giving about others possible.

You would you would connect to more people faster, but no, the result is just millions of people browsing through the same "entertainment", shitty aggregated content.

Yes, consolidation affects internet too. Everything goes through fucking google, youtube, or whatever other fucking top 10 company.

Just like the class disparity, 1% of the things online get 99% of the exposure.

So if you're a small time anything, basically fuck you, because you're not something enormous.

Like, I wished I was a game developer, but there's thousands of brilliant indie games that get released every year, and they barely make what they're worth.
So why should I fucking try? So I can get ruined financially and I don't have a place to live in?

Software itself is so complex that is impossible to scrutinize decently.
We all laugh at congressmen asking the zuck silly questions.

Out of touch, true, but in hindsight, it is true to some extent that software is hard to regulate. Every software I on earth doesn't meet some standard one way or another.

Or maybe it's just too many of us right now.
When people scroll their search results to get access to the things they should be interested in, the only practical interface right now is being showing one link at a time.
But there's millions and millions of results.

One redeeming aspect of life is that one day I won't be alive anymore to observe the disgusting world we live in.

This could be just pure rambling and I can't prove any of the things I'm saying, I could just have been making the wrong friendships. So take this with a grain of salt.

"It works on our end", the sentence that made me lose my shit.

I've been working on a project were we're supposed to integrate an API into our system.

When trying to get some user id's (UUID) from said API, we got a type-error in the response (???), so I called their integration support and asked what the fuck they were doing (not really, i was kinda calm at this point).

The answer I got was following:

Integration guy: "Uh, bro, like, I don't even know, it's probably on your end"

Me: "We literally used this endpoint with the same parameters yesterday, and got a result we expected. I noticed you updated your API this morning, did you make any major changes?"

Integration guy: "Yeah we changed the type of user id from string to number"

Me: "So, you changed the type of a UUID (uuid4) from string to number? How did you not think that would be an issue? I can see in your forums that everyone else is having the same issue."

Integration guy: "Nah, it's probably a bug in your code, it works on our end"

Me in my mind: *IT WORKS ON YOUR END?!? IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER IF IT WORKS ON YOUR END, FUCKTARD.*

What I actually said: "Uhm, I'm not sure if works on your end either, I'm not even sure how this change made it to production. But hey, thanks I guess, bye."

WHY AM I NOT ABLE TO YELL AT PEOPLE WHEN THEY ARE BEING RETARDED???

But really though, when you're maintaining an API, you shouldn't fucking care if things work on your end in your dev environment. What matters is how it works in production, for the end user/users.

And I know that 99% of cases it's the users fault by entering the wrong parameters or trying to request with wrongly setup auth and what not, but still.

Don't ASSUME nothing's wrong on your end. It's your fucking job to fix the issues.

And guess what? The problem was on their side.
I'm going fucking bald.

This is going to take a second to get dev related, please bear with me.

So, I'm from a pretty small (and poor) town. Like most small towns, not many give a damn about computer science/IT (that shows by the fact I'm the only CS major. And there's one IT major).

Now, my high school offers a few "career prep" classes. There's (no exaggeration) almost 5 or 6 classes for medical majors to prepare themselves; like 4 different agriculture based classes; 2 business major classes; and surprise surprise...not a damn Computer Science or IT class.

Yes, we have a computer class. But can you even call a "How to Use Microscoft Products" class an computer class? Finally by my senior year, I got pissed off by this.

I had/have relatives that have worked/are working in the school system, so it wasn't hard to get a meeting with the superintendent and the assistant superintendent to discuss my thoughts. They were both open to and even supported my ideas. But due to funding, it wasn't a feasible idea at the time. (Especially since not many care about CS or IT.)

This is where I get really really pissed off. Being that the town is small, the people with money/a name tend to control things. So, a former principal retired with the expectations to work in another county. However, this job fail through. But there was a "magical" opening for a job that didn't exist before this job fail through.

This pisses me off. We can create a job for someone and afford a full time salary for them, but we cant get an actual CS class. (And this isn't the first time a job was created for someone.)

I might lose my job this week

I'm part of a team of 2 tech people
We were hired as programmers. But over these past 10 months we've done everything from helpdesk to fixing network infrastructure, i setup a backup server for the company, started properly managing the companies passwords,and a host of other things not in my contract.
But my boss is changing the deadline again and she refuses to listen to anyone's concerns, she doesn't understand the complexity of what she wants and since the best we've done so far can be considered at best a prototype in my opinion shes going to be disappointed

So at the next meeting me and my coworker are going to politely list our grivences point out all shes had us do at the same time and the impossible deadlines.

I've seen herpitch a fit for less so I'm fully prepared to be fired in rage in which case I'll compile the documentation and information on what we've done to email her.

But I'm pretty sure she won't find anything long term for the 40k salary shes expecting. Especially with how slow she is to do work herself. I was supposed to be on company health insurance since October 2020

In a way I'm kinda relieved at the potential of being fired.

I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.

I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.

We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.

I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?

I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.

So I am getting back into game dev. I keep going back and forth about making a 2D or 3D rpg. Maybe I will end up making a mix.

I also want to make customizable characters in game. I found a decent solution for 2D. An artist is making 2D sprites that allow things to be overlaid. Each component has animations. I can layer sprites and animate them in sync to keep all the pieces moving together.

For 3D this journey of what is possible is a lot longer I think. It is hit or miss finding generic 3D characters with build in morphing. I want to be able to change the body for customization. I think I will have to relearn how to 3D model. As I learn what kind of model I need I am also learning what it takes to do this in Blender. And holy hell, Blender is so amazing now! The stuff I can do easily is staggering. You can sculpt a mesh using sculpting tools. Then do a remesh of that to make a more easily animateable mesh. No remeshing by hand, other than installing a plugin. There are a bunch of plugins that you can buy too. I found one for free that looks promising. But the paid ones are not that bad either. Between $25 to $100 depending upon source, license, and features.

However, being a programmer I want to figure out how to generate 3D and 2D models. There is code out there to do this, but I wonder what the learning curve is on that. The engineer side of me wants to be able to model the shape of humanoids and then auto skin that. I think I will start with modeling a few by hand to learn the way it should work. I want a simple anime look. I did find info on automating face rigs and body rigs. Oh the tools we have now!

Anyway, I am having fun.

After 10 years of thinking of getting into gamedev, I just joined a team game jam and it's going somewhere.

4 months ago I wrote a rant about how difficult it was for me to get into gamedev.

I guess I finally started because:
a) I'm not doing this alone
b) Another person takes care of the art

Regarding "a", computing, programming can be a very lonely task. I realized how much I missed the college years where I was paired up with other people to do something

There's something magical about being in a team.
You may not be a fan of your mates personalities. You may even hate their guts.

But working on something together, when everyone does the thing they should do, when things just flow... it's just magical.

When that happens, "all the bullshit goes away"™, and it's just you and your team sharing the same hope.

As for "b", I think I realized that, at least for my way of thinking, art (even in an initial, rudimentary state) is what ends up creating a game.

While I always tried to do it the other way around, first the game, then the art.

Maybe now I could dabble into pixel art and then use that as the thing that would define the game.

I was also an emotional mess for most of my 20s (and still kinda am, but not that much), so I guess that made getting into gamedev hard too.

Now, here's the negative part: the guy that does the art (and also codes) sucks balls at communicating and at git.

He takes a shitload of time to respond, doesn't address the things I state are important, doesn't join the damn trello, sometimes gives me some sass on his comments.
And he accidentally overwrote my changes on git three times.

The good thing is that he acknowledges his fuckups and fixes them.

I'm not really mad though. I'm almost 30, he's 20 or so.

When I was 20 I was a goddamn mess.
And it's just a week, and the pleasure of working with someone is far greater.

Ok so to recap, we had shit beginning. We couldn't find client like 3 months and thank god that we agreed that we don't register the firm right away. If we did we would be broke a long time ago.

We found first client and he wanted to build some scrapers with gui. So me being BackEnd developer I created API for scraping (boredom) and my friend created website for that api and I just created gui that displays that site. The project was about 1200$. And since there are 3 of us we splited it into 3x400$.

After that it was again really hard to find clients again. We thought of quitting and just going to uni or something but we really didn't want to and anyways we needed to get money for uni ourselfs if we wanted to go.

So we said that as we are not paying anything and not losing money we will continue as long as we can.

And after we managed to get a hold of it and now we have 2 clients and after we finish them we have 2 more.

So I think the most important thing is that you help your coworkers. My friend who finds clients had a rough time at the beggining as I mentioned. So all 3 of us got together and started spamming people for few weeks. That's how we found our first client.

So now we are running. Not a milion dollar company but we are happy that we are doing what we love and that we have money doing it. We aim higher but we don't want to hurry and screw things up as we are young still.

Also thank you for getting interested after 300 days :)

I am calling this a premonition rant, of more rants to come.
I have a feeling in my bones.
We have a newly acquired fat cat customer with bucks to blow who we have done some digital work for already and swag bag of marketing perkiness.
I will call the CEO of this whale "The Porcupine"
The Porcupine has a business degree and industry experience, nothing to do with websites or applications.
It claims to be a visual perfectionist yet never delivers an overall coherent review.
It likes to fixate on minor brand style differences in websites and apps we have built.
The Porcupine seems to be always busy with policy and legal and other things rather than participating in their own projects.
Procrastination on feedback or reviews until the day before release is common.
Many overtime hours worked, not a sliver of thanks. The haughty attitude indicative of somebody who thinks web development is like desktop publishing.

"It's just code" in response to a crash production server change they were warned was a risk that borked all of our responsive templates and took 3 hours to fix.
Their entire brand is shades of pea green, grey and lime. No serif fonts because they are suck. Arial and Helvetica are boss.
One of my devs missed a CSS style on privacy policy hyperlink text that went times new roman and I had various account directors and our CEO on phone telling me how embarrassing it was for us to let this happen.
Anyway. They pay on time and the cost estimates for all the upcoming work are juicy.
We have shitloads going on for an upcoming hard date conference and everything is already compressing.
Therefore I can already smell doom and feel those porcupine quill getting closer to my ass as I beg their AD today if we have any feedback on the 10 or so project reviews yet?
Nope.

Want to make someone's life a misery? Here's how.

Don't base your tech stack on any prior knowledge or what's relevant to the problem.

Instead design it around all the latest trends and badges you want to put on your resume because they're frequent key words on job postings.

Once your data goes in, you'll never get it out again. At best you'll be teased with little crumbs of data but never the whole.

I know, here's a genius idea, instead of putting data into a normal data base then using a cache, lets put it all into the cache and by the way it's a volatile cache.

Here's an idea. For something as simple as a single log lets make it use a queue that goes into a queue that goes into another queue that goes into another queue all of which are black boxes. No rhyme of reason, queues are all the rage.

Have you tried: Lets use a new fangled tangle, trust me it's safe, INSERT BIG NAME HERE uses it.

Finally it all gets flushed down into this subterranean cunt of a sewerage system and good luck getting it all out again. It's like hell except it's all shitty instead of all fiery.

All I want is to export one table, a simple log table with a few GB to CSV or heck whatever generic format it supports, that's it.

So I run the export table to file command and off it goes only less than a minute later for timeout commands to start piling up until it aborts. WTF. So then I set the most obvious timeout setting in the client, no change, then another timeout setting on the client, no change, then i try to put it in the client configuration file, no change, then I set the timeout on the export query, no change, then finally I bump the timeouts in the server config, no change, then I find someone has downloaded it from both tucows and apt, but they're using the tucows version so its real config is in /dev/database.xml (don't even ask). I increase that from seconds to a minute, it's still timing out after a minute.

In the end I have to make my own and this involves working out how to parse non-standard binary formatted data structures. It's the umpteenth time I have had to do this.

These aren't some no name solutions and it really terrifies me. All this is doing is taking some access logs, store them in one place then index by timestamp. These things are all meant to be blazing fast but grep is often faster. How the hell is such a trivial thing turned into a series of one nightmare after another? Things that should take a few minutes take days of screwing around. I don't have access logs any more because I can't access them anymore.

The terror of this isn't that it's so awful, it's that all the little kiddies doing all this jazz for the first time and using all these shit wipe buzzword driven approaches have no fucking clue it's not meant to be this difficult. I'm replacing entire tens of thousands to million line enterprise systems with a few hundred lines of code that's faster, more reliable and better in virtually every measurable way time and time again.

This is constant. It's not one offender, it's not one project, it's not one company, it's not one developer, it's the industry standard. It's all over open source software and all over dev shops. Everything is exponentially becoming more bloated and difficult than it needs to be. I'm seeing people pull up a hundred cloud instances for things that'll be happy at home with a few minutes to a week's optimisation efforts. Queries that are N*N and only take a few minutes to turn to LOG(N) but instead people renting out a fucking off huge ass SQL cluster instead that not only costs gobs of money but takes a ton of time maintaining and configuring which isn't going to be done right either.

I think most people are bullshitting when they say they have impostor syndrome but when the trend in technology is to make every fucking little trivial thing a thousand times more complex than it has to be I can see how they'd feel that way. There's so bloody much you need to do that you don't need to do these days that you either can't get anything done right or the smallest thing takes an age.

I have no idea why some people put up with some of these appliances. If you bought a dish washer that made washing dishes even harder than it was before you'd return it to the store.

Every time I see the terms enterprise, fast, big data, scalable, cloud or anything of the like I bang my head on the table. One of these days I'm going to lose my fucking tits.

Hi, here's how things are working now:
– Me and MerryBandOfDumbasses1 are doing project 1.
– Me and MerryBandOfDumbasses2 are doing project 2.
– Me has project 3 for work with this adorable boss I'd hate to disappoint. (Anyone watching Brooklyn99? He's my Captain Holt)
– Me has to deal with thesis.
– Me is having trouble keeping her head above the water. (emotionally speaking)

Conclusion: Me is fucked.
The end.
*grins for the camera* 😀

just received an email about a "hiring tournament", didn't know that was a thing... soo disgusting

"Hello John

How are things going in your career? Are you interested in remote work, at challenging projects in big companies such as Google, Pinterest, Udemy, eBay, and groundbreaking startups within a warm and continuous improvement environment?

BairesDev is holding an exciting hiring tournament, an online competition where you will fight against other developers for the chance to get hired and win incredible awards with the opportunity to be a part of great projects. We would love to see you there!

It will take place on Saturday, November 28th" (but the image says 12th 🤪🤪)

So you are "fighting" other developers for the chance to get hired, what the heck

Question to all you web developers out there: how do you survive long term in this job without going nuts? I have been working in this industry for almost 7 years and feelings of frustration have accumulated, to the point where I honestly feel like laying g bricks as a job would be more rewarding. Here are the main reasons why:

1) The fact that your job is never "finished" and it looks like and endless stream of tasks. Either the project has money being rolled in or is pretty much dead. Ever changing requirements ensure that most of what you do will be rewritten in 6 months or so. This is ok for the most part, but overtime it does give you the feeling that most of your effort was wasted, and you have the same website/app to show for it, slightly different...

2) The never ending churn of tech, particularly in the Javascript/node ecosystem. Sure, there is a good side of learning new approaches of doing things and it brings variety, but there is the dark side that you never feel you are getting better at doing your job, as every new project does not look anything like the previous. Even if all the stack pieces are the same (never happens), everyone sets it up and organises the project differently enough that you have to spend loads of time solving things you have done before. This makes it difficult to get a sense that you are mastering something...

So, if autonomy, purpose, and mastery are the keys to fulfilling work, I find this career lacking in mastery and purpose...does anyone feels/felt the same? How did you counter it?

So, it's time to fucking rant!

Location: A small startup where direct contact with C-Level members is frequent.

A while back we had a customer using our SaaS product who had gripes about the way it worked.

He contacted our CEO and made a bunch of claims based on bad assumptions.

In the end, he wanted all images removed from his site. I was pulled aside by the CEO and asked if I could handle this for him and make a new screen for them without images.

So I did. I tried to discuss and get deeper into the problem by saying "this seems like a symptom of a problem and not the actual problem. What do you think?" He responded with "That was his request so it must be the problem if it won't take long then let's fix it for him.

- a week later

The problem is fixed and in the wild. No more images. Now he has another request :/

He does not like the pagination on his site. He says " I shouldn't have to click a button when I scroll so I want the be able to scroll and see all my products!"

This time the CEO asks me if this can easily be done and I take him aside and say "no, this will be a big change to our system and will need to be discussed with the team."

The main point I make is that we should go down and spend some time with this customer to find out what the real problem is.

After a half hour of discussion about the real issue he decided to bring in the CTO.

In the end, we implemented infinite scroll, dropping our current product building tasks to service one customer (yeah, it's a bad scene). But we got infinite scroll built and shipped.

- 2 Weeks later

This time he demands that infinite scroll isn't good enough. "If I scroll fast then I have to wait for them to load, they should all load at once!"

This time I have had enough. I can see the CEO is coming over to me to as me how much work is in this. I tell him there are 3 things I have to say...

1. I'm going to implement exactly what he asked by the end of the day.
2. We will only release it to him because it is going to be a shit-show loading everything at once, the load times will be mental!
3. We should fire this customer, right now.

So, I built it. Customer hated it (of course, who the fuck wants to wait 30s for loading. That's basically a lifetime). We changed it back and he was still mad.

- 2 weeks later

Customer leaves. Good riddance.

- sometime later

I am in the customer's store on a road trip. I get a feel for how their store works and they have a different system for making things operate.

It turns out that they did not know what the real problem was. They actually needed a completely different system (from a UX perspective) for accessing their data.

To top it all off, the system would have taken less time to build than the shitty fixes we made over weeks of work. FFS

I guess the moral of the rant is to find the problem, not a symptom of the problem.

There are a lot... I am going to pick the interview dialogue (incl. test) with the government.

Following situation:
-5 recruiters
-3 candidates (including me) who have all passed an online test that did last for 3 hours
The online test was for the government to see how every candidate is good at math, English, situation adaptation, historical questions, a little bit of techy questions like "What does fps stand for?" and basic questions like that.

Even tho I did apply for a job as a software developer, there was not a single fucking question about programming. I shit you not. Anyways...

After everyone did introduce themselves. I was given the following question by one of the recruiters:"How do you think will the regular work look like to you, if you were to schedule it? We will be starting with you, <myName>"
Me:"Since this is hopefully going to be my first job in software development, I can only assume it for now. Based on my knowledge about this specific topic that I have made by reading other software developers' work experiences in form of textual content, I guess that I am going to do this [...] and that [...]. Oh and after this comes the planning phase (I had mentioned the sprints and agile "frameworks") and meetings of how the projects are doing so far.
After this comes the phase of sitting down and getting to work on the project I am assigned to.
At the end comes the "see you tomorrow, xyz" phase and everyone leaves."
Somebody else from the 5 recruiters:"I am sorry to interrupt you right here, but we are not offering you a dev job. It rather is a mixture of dev and sysadmin. You will be working most of the time fixing someone's problem with their PC and not sitting in a dark and empty corner of a warm room."
This was such a disrespect that I could not give an answer to. I was deeply shocked. Developers need more respect. Most of the fucking things you use, are created by developers, you asshole.
"We will be very happy, if you can call us by tomorrow to let us now if you are still interested."
Me does not even bother anymore and blacklists that government as a "trust me. You do not want to work there" type of job offering place.
Since I did not sign any NDA. It is the government of Germany.

PS: I did apply for a *dev* job. But somehow they did decide to create a new job and assign me to it. That is not professional.

I can't be the only one who makes gestures to my computer depending on how things are going. I give it thumbs up when we got it right. Shake my fist when "it doesn't listen to me", etc

Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.

Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.

I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.

Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.

Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.

Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.

So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.

Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.

I HATE automated messages on Slack

Remove fucking GitHub updates, Jira updates, all this stupid bullshit that pollutes actual communication between humans in all that fucking shit and makes me miss actual messages because I ignored a channel where that garbage cancer shit was set up on?

What's wrong with going to fucking Jira and GitHub and checking how things are going THERE?

So I have been a fly on the "wall" for last couple of months and never signed up, but now here I am!

Rant is about a serious topic - gender gap in tech industry!!
Couple of months ago Stackoverflow announced developer survey results! I was shocked by demographics results! It was disappointing to see biggest gender gap in general tech industry!
I believe tech industry can be the first one to have equal pay for women!

However.... (bad part)
I was going through my twitter feeds and saw this! Many of you have seen this tweet too.

(ohh!fuck I cant attach multiple images here, I should have created Medium post, fuck it!)

"They" continue, quoting from the tweet.
1)"....bias in society is reflected in AI"
2) "However, I do think it is our responsibility as designers/developers/users to be aware of this bias and do our best to correct it."

I want to rant about 2nd one. Some of you may not like it including grammar naziz!
As a developer/programmer I take 2nd one personally! I am currently at denial phase though!
And I have an OCD so gonna make points here!

1) Seriously tell me please, how the fuck you can write gender bias algorithm which can pass a big crazy amount of test suite?

2) Google has done many things for last decade to overcome gender gap related issues. I have met some of the nicest people from Google, and this is really hard for me to believe that google AI or that team has anything to do with the results!

3) Someone suggests use "they" in google translated result, can you fucking imagine how wrong that would be??? If I am developer working on that algo or even in that team and I see this ticket in jira with highest priority where it says, "make all translated results gender neutral using only they" - I would fucking like to die and may be in my next life ask me to do that, when I am a toddler!

4) I am an advocate for equal pay, equal rights and equal opportunities for everyone to "minify" this gender gap in tech, but showing google translate results of a gender natural language to make a point is wrong, it is simply undermining the efforts of something really helpful thing.

5) Moving on to the core point - What can be done to lower down the gender gap? I have seen amazing women who can code/manage far far far better than what I ever could imagine, and they are at really good place and deserve to be there. Are they doing enough to inspire other women to join tech industry?
Collective efforts are very much required. And need to keep in consideration that tech industry is highly competitive roles are also changing rapidly.

6) Many big companies have women at higher positions(CEO, CFO,....) what are their efforts to bring more women in tech industry?
(Some of you may not like this, as this is implying that it isn't only men's job. )

7) Going slightly political here, everyday we see really disappointing news related to women and their rights and health, I strongly believe women don't have to ask for or even have to mention about "equal rights" about anything. Everyone is equal!!!
This is 2017 and still fucked up!

Thats all for today! Heading for breakfast!

Alright. This is going to be long and incoherent, so buckle up. This is how I lost my motivation to program or to do anything really.

Japan is apparently experiencing a shortage of skilled IT workers. They are conducting standardized IT skill tests in 7 Asian countries including mine. Very few people apply and fewer actually pass the exam. There are exams of different levels that gives you better roles in the IT industry as you pass them. For example, the level 2 or IT Fundamental Engineering Exam makes you an IT worker, level 3 = capable of working on your own...so on.
I passed level 1 and came in 3rd in my country (there were only 78 examinees lol). Level 2 had 2 parts. The theoretical mcq type exam in the morning and the programming mcq in the afternoon. They questions describe a scenario/problem, gives you code that solves it with some parts blanked out.

I passed the morning exam and not the afternoon. As a programmer I thought I'd be good at the afternoon exam as it involves actual code. Anyway, they give you 2 more chances to pass the afternoon exam, failing that, you'll have to take both of them the next time. Someone who has passed 1 part is called a half-passer and I was one.

A local company funded by both JICA and my government does the selection and training for the Japanese companies. To get in you have to pass a written exam(write code/pseudocode on paper) and pass the final interview in which there are 2 parts - technical interview and general interview.

I went as far as the interview. Didn't do too good in the technical interview. They asked me how would I find the lightest ball from 8 identical balls using a balance only twice. You guys probably already know the solution. I don't have much theoritical knowledge. I know how to write code and solve problems but don't know formal name of the problem or the algorithm.

On to the next interview. I see 2 Japanese interviewers and immediately blurt out konichiwa! The find it funny. Asked me about my education. Say they are very impressed that self taught and working. The local HR guy is not impressed. Asks me why I left university and why never tried again. Goes on about how the dean is his friend and universites are cheap. foryou.jpg

The real part. So they tell me that Japanese companies pay 250000/month, I will have to pay 60% income tax, pay for my own accommodation, food, transportation cost etc. Hella sweet deal. Living in Japan! But I couldn't get in because the visa is only given to engineers. Btw I'm not looking to invade Japan spread my shitskin seed and white genocide the japs. Just wanted to live in another country for a while and learn stuff from them.

I'll admit I am a little salty and probably will remain salty forever. But this made me lose all interest in programming. It's like I don't belong. A dropout like me should be doing something lowly. Maybe I should sell drugs or be a pimp or something.

But sometimes I get this short lived urge to make something brilliant and show them that people like me are capable of doing good things. Fuck, do I have daddy issues?

The company considers the project manager I work with to be the best. After working with him, I consider him to be everything that is wrong with project management.

This PM injects himself into everything and has a way of completely over-complicating the smallest of things. I will give an example:

We needed to receive around 1000 rows of data from our vendor, process each row, and host an endpoint with the data in json. This was a pretty simple task until the PM got involved and over complicated the shit out of it. He asks me what file format I need to receive the data. I say it doesnt really matter, if the vendor has the data in Excel, I can use that. After an hour long conversation about his concerns using Excel he decides CSV is better. I tell him not a problem for me, CSV works just as good. The PM then has multiple conversations with the Vendor about the specific format he wants it in. Everything seems good. The he calls me and asks how am I going to host the JSON endpoints. I tell him because its static data, I was probably going to simply convert each record into its own file and use `nginx`. He is concerned about how I would process each record into its own file. I then suggest I could use a database that stores the data and have an API endpoint that will retrieve and convert into JSON. He is concerned about the complexities of adding a database and unnecessary overhead of re-processing records every time someone hits the endpoint. No decision is made and two hours are wasted. Next day he tells me he figured out a solution, we should process each record into its own JSON file and host with `nginx`. Literally the first thing I said. I tell him great, I will do that.

Fast forward a few days and its time to receive the payload of 1000 records from the Vendor. I receive the file open it up. While they sent it in CSV format the headers and column order are different. I quietly without telling the PM, adjust my code to fit what I received, ran my unit test to make sure it processed correctly, and outputted each record into its own json file. Job is now done and the project manager gets credit for getting everything to work on the first try.

This is absolutely ridiculous, the PM has an absurd 120 hours to this task! Because of all the meetings, constant interruptions, and changing of his mind, I have 35 hours to this task. In reality the actual time I spent writing code was probably 2-3 hours and all the rest was dealing with this PM's meetings and questions and indecisiveness. From a higher level, he appears to be a great PM because of all the hours he logs but in reality he takes the easiest of tasks and turns them into a nightmare. This project could have easily been worked out between me and vendor in a 30 min conversation but this PM makes it his business to insert himself into everything. And then he has the nerve to complain that he is so overwhelmed with all the stuff going on. It drives me crazy because this inefficacy and unwanted help makes everything he touches turn into a logistical nightmare but yet he is viewed as one of the companies top Project Managers.

tl;dr - why you no read this?

Here I am pondering why I continue to return to my job everyday when we are currently at month 13 of a 4 month project... yea let that set in for a minute... which is still at least 3-4 months away from being deployed due to annual leave of key stake holders and the whole Christmas period creeping up and things just not going as planned every step of the way.

There's no greater demotivater - is that even how you spell it - then being stuck in a project for so long you really just don't give a shit if it works or not anymore.

This has gone from a simple - relatively speaking - project to some monolithic mayhem of requirement changes and process adjustments, that have not only delayed our team, but 3rd party vendors needing to change things as well, or the requirements being wrong early so when you get up to business testing it's like "nope, that's not what we wanted" .... despite all the sessions of you personally giving the PM all the damn requirements.

But in saying that, they (3rd party) aren't innocent either, we have found nothing but issue after issue with their product since we started this project that who ever signed off on going forward with the thing should have been shot from both sides - it's not designed for the scale we will be using it yet we didn't find that out till we got so far into the rabbit hole we had a chance to be able to do load testing.

Meh, guess I'll go to work Monday and spend another week in misery trying to deliver something that just doesn't want to know what the finish line is.

Fuck unreasonable deadlines. Just do your stuff as if you have the time of the world. Stop compromising the quality of your work and things are going to be done when they're done. Good quality stuff that's worth the wait.

I started to tell this to myself this week. For months now I took the bait that everything is urgent. And whatever crap management want has to be done yesterday. But.... Well... They pushed it too effing far.

Redo this module that took the former team about six months to finish. You have 10 days.

Well... What? Everyone is saying yes?... Everyone going full code monkey making no progress?

This is the moment I stop compromising and stop listening to your suggestions. I am going to do what I know how to do, the way I know it works, and I will not cut one corner based off your suggestions. I'm sorry, I've been dealing with this shit for too long already, and I don't want to suffer the consequences of degrading the quality of what I write anymore.

Sorry I haven't been as active lately, however this is one of the better prompts, so I feel I should have it in my track record. Beware, it's a long one...

Let's trace the roots: My uncle was building desktops and he told my dad he'd build him one if my dad paid him for the components. These days I know builds aren't rocket science, but back then my parents didn't do their research. So my dad paid him.

Give or take some time, and most of the parts are complete. He underestimated the prices of a few things and had to ask for $200 more to complete the build. This...caused my dad to explode.

Later, I heard my dad ranting to my stepmom in January 2017 about how the last convo he had with his brother was a "Fuck-you conversation" - it was the last because my uncle had died in 2003.

Flash forward to March 2017. My mom and I are sitting in a Fazoli's, a nice sunset out of the full-length windows. I had to probe. HAD TO.

"You promise you won't tell your dad I told you this?" she asked.

"You know Kellie and I can't stand to be around him." I replied.

As the story goes, that last "Fuck-you conversation"? Over a fucking measly $200. Yup, the last conversation between my dad and his brother to ever happen was a shouting match over a relatively short amount of money. I wish I could say my dad had remorse, but he doesn't. He still talks shit. He's also technologically illiterate, so I doubt there was a way his brother was going to be able to reason with him.

In late 2003, my uncle, who had been a smoker, passed away due to cardiac arrest. The build was still not finished. This was one of the OTHER things that I have mixed feelings about.

After my uncle passed, my aunt paid someone to finish the build and get it shipped to my dad. We'll get back to why I feel this is fucked up, stay tuned...

---------

It's Spring 2004. I'm in the last half of what I think is Kindergarten or some shit...too lazy to do the math. Anyway, my dad announces we have a family computer - however, I couldn't read yet. That didn't stop the waste of oxygen that is my father from going in the Windows XP screensavers and putting text in that said "GAGE MORGAN WILL NOT TOUCH THIS COMPUTER." He's such a fuckin' dick, now AND back then.

My mom had an issue with this. I don't know why, but she did. Later, I was slowly taught how to use the mouse, under heavy supervision. Then I went to my grandma's house. She taught me one very specific thing on her old Win98 (386, maybe? IDK my old hw shit man), and because I know you guys are gonna love this one:

"The blue "e" opens up your games!"
The blue "e" does not open up your games, it opens something that can lead to your games.

I went home and tried this...without permission. My dad came down and discovered my lollygagging on the homepage - this is fucking weird. It was before Nextel, IIRC, so Sprint's logo was red still. Yes, we had broadband from Sprint. I don't know what saga led to that going the way of the dodo, but...

Back on track, I literally got my pants pulled down and had my bare bottom beat. He was gonna drag my ass upstairs and lock me in my room, but before he could, he accidentally slammed MY FUCKING RIGHT TEMPLE into the corner of a hardwood table at the bottom of the staircase.

The wailing that resulted probably was different than the previous form, which is probably what got my mom involved. My dad had a way of going too far, and in retrospect I'm more terrified now of what could've happened than I was then.

Later, I was given access to games in the form of my own account and bookmarks bar. That wasn't the end of the madness/drama from my use of that machine, but it was the earliest form.

Ever since Kindergarten, that one fateful day, I've been defying any/all imposed limitations on tech set on me by my parents...well, not anymore, but literally grades K-12. I'm living on my own, aka "adulting" now. It sucks more than you think, man.

---------

Let's tie this up before I reach the limit. I said I thought it was fucked up when my aunt paid to have the build finished and shipped to us after my uncle's death.

Yes, my aunt's intervention led to me ultimately majoring in computer science.

That doesn't change the fact that she shouldn't have done it.

My dad was an asshole to her husband, who passed. She is ultimately too caring. I don't think my jackass father should've been able to get by with that, he didn't deserve the freebie. Someone else should've told him his brother did in fact need that $200.

I haven't seen her IRL since the funeral when my grandpa passed in 2005. 2006 spelled the end of my parents' marriage.

Hope you guys enjoyed this - it's only a small segment of how I got to where I am now - tiny, actually.

That the most important thing in any project is to first make sure YOU have understood what the customer/management wants and that THEY have understood what you are going to do.

Seen so many projects (other people's and my own) go down the drain because people had false expectations.

Also, good management is enormously important for any medium-sized endeavour. I cannot count how often I have seen mediocre to bad middle management screw things up, and devs pull off overnighters and 60+hours work weeks for this super-important project that then goes to the bin because "it turned out to be not so important in the end, sorry."

Finally getting off my proverbial ass and doing something about the lack of games I like. Going to focus on making an engine for the kind of games I want to play.

No, I am not starting from scratch. Going to base my engine on Godot and use it for my own titles. I am not insane. Making it from scratch is too much work these days. But the indies are shifting from Unity to other engines right now. So a lot of wanted attention will be placed on better alternatives. This means more content and plugin choices will be available to Godot devs.

I kept making excuses as to how hard it will be or it will take forever. It only ended up taking me further away from what I wanted. I have my wishlist of features and I will focus on modularizing them so they can be used as needed. If it makes sense I will make these modules available to the community at Godot. This will help get feedback on what can be improved and generalized further. It will also reduce development costs in the long run. I want to take the approach that No Man's Sky has taken for content and generate as much as I can. I am fascinated by generating objects using algorithms. This seems to be a trend in games.

The struggle I have with games: I want to build things like structures in game (aka Minecraft), I want to build characters in game (aka RPGs), I also want to deform terrain (aka organic voxels), and I want a mixed genre (guns and dragons). Nothing like this exists in a form I want to pay for. I also want to be able to mod the game and for other people to be able to mod the game. That really narrows the list of games down to nothing. Sure there are few games that hit these bullet points, but not all in the same game.

I am finding I struggle to be engaged intellectually at work. I do what I have to for a paycheck. I think having a side project will help with this. One that is radically different than what I do at work is going to be helpful. I need to be realistic about expectations. I probably shouldn't expect any real progress for at least 2 to 3 years and probably more likely 5 years. I have some experience with the tool chains from other engines I have worked with. I also want something that I own and is mine. Even if it sucks.

Got contacted by a place I used to be an intern at. They were looking to hire. Things are supposedly better now, so I highballed my salary expectations.

Surprisingly, they were willing to meet those expectations, so that's cool. However, a call they said was going to happen in the morning didn't happen until late afternoon.

Now I'm wondering just how much they've improved on the planning.

Nope, definitely not going to work for that customer anymore. Fuck this shit. At least for this week.

My background: mid-30 years old, some kind of business & IT consultant / lead dev working for a mid sized CRM consulting company, with approx 15 years of experience in development and software architecture, most of the time "thinking" in C#, still learning new languages, being a cloud evangelist and team lead. We usually have customers with customers (B2B/B2C).
Personality type "campaigner" (ENFP-A).

Today the project lead of my client (a big corporation in the energy industry) told me that he still didn't order all the necessary resources for the cloud project. Just to be clear: He's on the client side. We (the architects, one internal and me) told him one month ago what we need for the beginning. Just a few things - an Azure subscription, a license for the CRM platform, and our dev tools.

And now let's guess when the project is planned to begin? Yeah, right: 1st of April. NO APRIL'S FOOL. And guess what? Next Tuesday we'll do the onboarding for the new (external) devs, and NOTHING will be ready. Yeah, just let us build stuff in our minds, and on the whiteboards, because it's an AGILE project, right? We don't need any systems and tools...

And now he sent me the questionnaires which need to be answered before any cloud service can be ordered by the corporate IT. And yes, he didn't answer a single thing, and just meant "Those are architecture questions" (they are not) and (of course) "please provide the answers until Monday morning, so we can FINALLY order the services."

Yeah, you fucktard. Of course it's MY FAULT now. Maybe I should write an email to your boss asking how we can speed things up a little bit...

!personal

So, I was diagnosed with congenital nystagmus at an early fucking age. This is complicated for people who've never heard of it before to comprehend, until they notice the eyes of the person in question. Think of it this way: I lack the biological form of optical image stabilization. Because of nystagmus, I can't fucking drive.

Now, let me tell you, it really fucking sucks. I've never had a girlfriend, never been able to get a job, basically never been able to do the type of shit most of you can already fucking do. Pile that on with college, where I don't really fucking know anybody, and it's really fucking easy to see why I've had depression and nearly fucked my GPA over last semester (2.08, yeah it's embarrassing but fuck it).

That out of the way, nystagmus is rare. So rare that any surgeries to fix it aren't guaranteed to fix the problem, and are only marginally better. I have strong skepticism for any optometrist who acts like they perform this surgery every day, because the numbers simply don't back them up. If there's so few who have this issue, then the amount of operations and opportunities to do them are fucking slim.

Today, my mom came over to Indiana from Ohio, and took me to the local Cheddar's (do other countries have those??). We sit down, and she wanted to re-hash this surgery idea. I have made the statement before that these are the only two eyes that I will ever have, and there's no guaranteed ROI on any procedures, and is probably going to fuck me over if shit hits the fan.

Then she tells me there's this doctor in Maryland. I might be geographically challenged (lol), but I'm pretty sure that's over on the east coast. It's forever from here, we'd probably have to take an airliner.

This doctor made some pretty bold fucking claims. Not only was it possible he could fix the nystagmus, but he could help me use a special form of glasses that would enable me to learn to drive. Knowing that R&D on nystagmus was sketchy because of the aforementioned conditions, I had to tell her that I still don't know how I feel about it. Also, if this doctor moves from Maryland to any of the other states, would he still be allowed to do these things?

I told her I don't know how I feel about it. I'm not sure it's worth the money if we follow through and come to find out it's not enough, and I still can't drive. She acts like this stuff is dead simple. I don't think it is. You have perceived benefits, but there have to be caveats. This would be a major change, and I don't know how I feel about following through with it.

Gdpr thing aside...

Does anybody read the new policy...

I just did for 2 apps (intel driver software and 9ga.. You know it)...

On the things that they collected on the side without you knowing include:
9ga:
Device memory, language, battery level, timezone, unique device identifiers, compass, accelorometer and microphone... Even service provider and signal strength

Intel:
Website you visit, how you use your computer(vague too vague) and computing environment.

Did anybody knew for sure before this that their apps are listening to them? That they just made a profile of you with all the data?

With all this they dont even need your ip they already know who you are and what you do on a daily basis...

There are 20 more but it will be waaay too much to write about. These 2 are way worse since 9ga doesnt use microphone for anything... And why a driver reads what websites i am going to?

Just had my first freelance job here i Korea. I was told that most(?) of my job was going to be front-end web dev, and that the 'required' skillset was html/css. I thought I'd be making some free money, and I was wrong. Ended up doing all sorts of things like sql,js,ajax,php, and EVEN design. Apparently "developers" here are people who can do pretty much everything on computers. How many other countries are like this?

"Did you see, cryptocurrency XYZ has N commits in the past week, but the price hasn't gone up?!?! WhAtS gOiNg oN!?!?"

Dude. If I could just write code to make the price of things in the real world go up, I can assure you, I would have done it.

That's not how this works. THAT'S NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS REEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!

God... normie "crypto experts" who haven't coded a day in their life really piss me off, and are super cringe. The funniest is that none of them or their followers realize it.

Issue in production. Multi billion dollar enterprise. Complex landscape. We sort of make things.

Turns out there is a single point of failure at a specific integration point. Kind of a lot stopped. When I reached out to the people knowing anything about it and I raised the issue that maybe we should make a slight change in how we do things they just brushed it off. Like it was nothing… 😬

No data was lost but everything was delayed for many hours. The _truth_ varied in different parts of the ecosystem causing potential wrong or suboptimal decisions to be taken.

When I asked why this LOS was not detected they told be they have no means of detecting it. 😬

I’m like, yeah, it’s 2023, we’re going to land on Mars and you can bet your ass we can detect it and you are just LAZY DEVELOPERS!

Anyway, I escalated (nicely) and they are now implementing a (more) resilient system and we’re helping the team detecting THEIR LOS in minutes instead of downstream services hours later (they are bad also but it’s not their fault!)

Stay safe!

I love to program — I discovered that about myself a few years ago. Beforehand, I only KNEW how to program. But then I discovered the power programming gives you to create things, and even help your surroundings. So now, I can surely say, that I love programming. Heck, I am even dating a very talented programmer.

But despite all the pleasure I derive from it, I feel lonely sometimes. True, there are millions of programmers all over the world. I also know I am not the only one who prefers coding over going to the movies, taking a walk, eating or sleeping.

Why do I feel this way?

My loneliness is a gendered loneliness, as there are not many women in my field. For sure, there are women who study computer science in high school or at the university, and some even work as programmers. But they are very, very few!

I often underestimate my abilities and feel intimated for no apparent reason

#random thoughts

Rant rant = new Rant();
rant.type = Rant.REVELATION;
rant.content = "

Being depressed with recent stuff about my ex, I've been going out a lot more than I use to, thus engaging in conversation with people I've never talked to before, and it made me realize something. Maybe it's because the world it's more connected nowadays, but I think it's more about our career (be it CS Engineer, Software Dev, Web-Dev, etc...) and correct me if I'm wrong but I think we are the kind of people that knows about everything (maybe not everything, but know basic stuff that can't be considered general knowledge) because that's what we do, we spend our days updating ourselves, growing in knowledge.

What's my point? That, thanks to this ability, we can work, cooperate or even socialize in a rather easy way. For example, I learned bit of color theory and design principles for a school project. Fast forward some months, I meet this girl that had a degree in Digital Design and I could talk to her about her field, and even knew things she forgot.

I don't know, for me, it's amazing how we can shape shift and mold to the situation, easier than any other career.

Am I wrong or missing something? Let me know
";
rant.publish();

Story Time!

Tittle: About Larry.

Fun Game: Tell me if / when in this story you know the plot twist.

Setting: Years ago, non coding job.

I work with Larry a lot, Larry works remote. In technical terms Larry is senior to me and I escalate some technical issues that get assigned to Larry. I've never met Larry in person.

Larry can be hard to work with, but he's plenty good at his job and I don't mind his prickly side. Sometimes it takes telling Larry something a few times before it sinks it, but that's not a big deal. Sometimes it seems like Larry doesn't remember his cases entirely, but he has a lot of cases. Also Larry has good reason for how he works considering the land of scubs who usually escalate to him without any thought / effort.

Larry's escalation team is short staffed and they're trying to hire folks, but that's been like that forever.

So one day I get an email that Larry is going to be out of the office for a few weeks. Nothing unusual there.

My current case that I share with Larry sort of floats in limbo for a while. The customer is kinda slow to respond anyhow and there's nothing that I need Larry for.

Finally I get automated notice that my case has had a new escalation engineer. Laura. Laura is much more positive and happy compared to Larry. Understandably Laura isn't up to date on the case so we go back and forth with some emails and notes in the case.

The case is moving along just fine, we're making progress, but it's slow because of the customer's testing procedures. Then we hit a point where this customer's management pushes on sales for a solution (this customer's management is known for doing this rando like for no reason).

Down the management chain it goes and everyone wants a big conference call to get everyone up to date / discuss next steps (no big deal).

Now I really don't want to do this with Laura and throw her into the deep end with this customer, she doesn't have the background and I'd rather do this call with Larry & Me & Laura. Also according to the original email Larry is due back soon.

I start writing an email to Laura about "Let's try to schedule this for when Larry gets back."

Then I stop ... I don't really know why I stop but when it is a "political case" I want some buy in on next steps from management so I go talk to my manager.

-Plot Twist Incoming-

Long story short, my manager says:

"Laura IS Larry..."

O

M

G

I had no idea. Nobody told me, nobody told ANYBODY, (except a couple managers).

Back up a few months Larry apparently went to his managers and told them he was going to transition, surgery and all, in a few months.

Managers wondering how to address this went to HR and some new hire very young to be a manager HR manager drone logiced out in her bonkers head that "Well it shouldn't matter so don't tell anyone."

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!??

Thank god I didn't send that email...

I did send an email to Laura explaining that I had no idea and hoped I didn't say anything stupid. She was very nice about it and said it was all good.

After that incident made the management rounds (management was already fuming about being told not to tell anyone) things came to another critical point.

Laura was going to visit the company HQ. Laura had been there before, as Larry, everyone knew her as Larry... nobody (outside some managers) knew Laura was Larry either. With nobody knowing shit Laura was going to walk in and meet everyone ...

One manager at HQ finally rebelled and held a meeting to tell his people. He didn't want Laura walking in and someone confused, thinking it was a joke or something horrible happening.

HR found out and went ballistic. They were on a rampage about this other manager, they wanted to interview me about how I found out. I told HR to schedule their meeting through my manager (I knew they didn't want my manager to know they were sniffing around).

Finally the VP in our department called up the HR head and asked WTF was going on / kind of idiots they had over there (word has it legal and the CEO were on the call too).

HR had a change in leadership and then a couple weeks later there were department wide meetings on how to handle such situations and etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amazon mturk. Job was to rate grammatical corrections.

First of all, it's surprising how often people forget commas. That's like, the #1 error with these things.

People just keep going on and on and on and on and on and never break their sentence even if there was supposed to be a comma and it really makes the voice in my head fell like it's running out of breath but it can't stop because the sentence is still going and [...]

The corrections are generally okay. I took many more college-level English classes than I think I needed to, so my English is fairly decent. For this reason, I might be a bit more of a stickler than I need to be for this job.

But this one threw me for a loop, because it's just such a bad correction. Not only does it miss the obvious errors but creates a new, equally obvious error.

This is one of the reasons mturk is interesting to me. Sure, I don't make.... practically anything. But you come into such a variety of work that it's almost addicting in a sense.

As I am not that advanced (started off as a 'jack of all trades' - huge mistake) in programming (about a bit below average), I'm just overwhelmed by knowledge of someone here, yet I am happy to know how much I can learn in next couple of years. 😀 I feel kinda stupid when I see everyone posting what programming horror or stuff they are going through and I am there be like (sometimes) - I know some of these words 😂
I am a newbie in this community (but soph. student in uni) thus I'd like to just say hi and wish everyone a good day even if things are not good at the time🤗😃💪

A connection was looking for a developer in the city my brother-in-law recently moved to (for my sister's career), so I connected them. They exchanged a couple of emails, and he has an on-site interview tomorrow!

He and I are both .Net developers, and I'm older/more experienced, so I offered to rearrange my schedule to help him with some interview prep tonight.

He said no, that he's pretty confident about things, that he'll do some studying and research on his own.

Good for him and his confidence, but I'm kinda salty that he didn't take me up on my offer. I'm pretty damn clever. How dare someone reject my offer for assistance?? I hope the interview goes well of course but if it doesn't I'm very much going to feel some silent "I told you so!"

We often rant about people who think that because we can program we can do everything with computers.

But I have to admit that when I get asked what I do I often only say that I program or do something with computers. I usually don't get more specific because it's so hard to explain to someone who doesn't know anything about the subject that I would have to explain the basics each time. And I'm just to lazy for that.
It's nice when people ask me how it is going at work but I probably won't say anything more than ok or fine because my day was fucked up by a memory alignment bug in the chainloader and I now don't have the patience to explain what these both things are and why they fuck up my day.

Do not touch Salesforce.

Especially Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

It is a fucking joke this product even exists. Buy Hubspot instead. Marketing Cloud is the single worst piece of software I have had to implement out of 4 years working in software and a lifetime working in tech.

Literally nothing works. You click a button and bam, nothing. The UI actively lies to the user. Nothing is guaranteed to work and support is some guy in India who shrugs his shoulders and walks away. Things will randomly break and warning messages are tiny, indecipherable babble that mean nothing.

If you are dev, walk away. If you are a potential customer, walk away. This company DESERVES a bad reputation for the absolute heap of dogshit that is Marketing Cloud.

The worst part is that it's likely going to affect my job and my career because of how fucking dogshit it is.

Fuck Salesforce in case the messaging isn't clear.

OMG you fucking little cunt!

Previous issue with this co-worker we hate eat other but can maintain minimal contact due to covid. Last interaction was actually nice, we joked a bit.

He teaches me how to do the build and ‘updated’ the confluence page. By update he striked through one paragraph.

Been doing these for week and now others what builds done all the time and since I am not an asshole they can approach me to do this but now I spend all
day long doing builds.

Work on a classified app so it has to
be burned on a disk, taken to a ‘secret machine’ and deployed. Takes about an hour and people are like. Can you rebuild it? I forgot to commit something?

So I updated the page to flush out the directions. Did not remove one thing only added things simple things like do a ls -lah in the dist folder to make sure the are built correctly. Things like check to make the symlink works, bolded words.

He was not at standup so I figured he was out of the office today and was going to ask him to review tomorrow.

Fucker goes in to make changes while I am making changes and doesn’t think to msg me telling me?

He is removing things and moving things which is fine just let me know! What a dick!!!!!

Screenshot of all the activity today, I am
in blue. I will spend all day watching the page to make sure I get the last fucking edit!

I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get a ride to the airport on Friday and I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get a ride to the airport on Friday and I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get my car out the time to do it again and I look forward to hearing from you in awhile I have a few questions about the other I have a few questions about the same as the other day I will have a talk at you and I hope to see everyone again and again I apologise I didn't get a response to your advertisement for a while but it is a little chilly here is a copy to the store to buy the car is in a good way to start a little more time with the family for a while but it is a little chilly here is a copy to the time of the year for the first time in a long time and I don't want it for a couple days so I'm just trying for you guys I just want a ride with us to get a few things done and I will be there at the end if this works out well for you and your family a very happy and excited about this weekend so I'm just going to go to the store and get back with me and my family is going to be a little late today but I'm still in my car and I will be there at like midnight so much and have to be at work at the moment but I'll try again later in life I have been trying to get a hold of the guy that I have a meeting with you to discuss the details of the job and I have been working in my room so I can get a ride to the airport on Sunday so we are all on my own and I will be there at noon so I'll just be me my money back and I will get it done this weekend but I will be there at the same time and where would we have been in the hospital for a week or two to see you soon and have a great day today love it and it will not work for me to come in and get a new phone or in person and I am not sure how long it would have taken it off and on again and again I apologise I didn't know you were going to be a little late to the game and it will not work on it this morning I was wondering if you had a choice but I don't know if you have any questions please feel free to contact me at any rate is higher up for it and the other is a good time to come in for an appointment with the surgeon on my phone and I don't want to be a good friend to come in at all and the other is a good time to call and talk about what we can do to help you feel better I can come by to pick up the kids from school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next few days and I have a few more days before we get into my car to go out for lunch at home and I will be there at the same time as you can imagine how hard is it to late to get a new car is a lot more done with the interview and the kids will have a good day at school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next two days so we are all on my way home from the gym and then I will be able to make it today because I'm a very nice person who can do it for you if you want to come by and see you soon and have to go back in the office tomorrow morning at work today but I'm going back and I will be there at the same time and where would we have been trying all of us and the rest are you still interested I can send you a picture of the front and back of the house and the kids are going well with the family for a while but it is a little chilly here is a picture of the front and back of the house is in my prayers as a friend but it will have a great weekend and I will be there at the end if this works out well and that your mom and dad are going to be a bit of an emergency at least you have a good day at school today so I'm going to be in the office tomorrow and will be back to the hotel now I'm in bed with a friend and then I will be able to make it to the meeting tonight but I will be there at the same time I was in a hurry and come to the office and I will send the other side and a little about me and you will see that you sent it out and get a good deal and you have the address of where I can get a ride to work on it this week but will have a good day at school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next two days so we are going to be in the office tomorrow and I have been working in the morning and I will get it done this weekend but will be back in the office on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday are going well for you and your wife is not the case then you have the address of your day goes on and I have been working in the morning and I will be there at the same time I am in need and I'll see what the status is on the way to the airport and then we will have a great day at school today so I'm trying to get a hold of the guy who was the guy who was the guy who is going well and I am going to be out by then but if I can find a way to get the car out the door to go to the store and I have to be in a relationship with a friend and then I will be able to make it to the meeting and will get the info for the guy who was the guys are doing the meeting at the church

I am an Indie game developer. I've been working solo for two or three years now and teaching myself. I can work in 3D modeling applications as well as program in c++ and do blueprint in unreal engine. I know most of the pipeline and the suite.

I'd like to transition to doing game Dev full time or at the very least do programming as my job. I have no degree.

I'm looking for contracts or whatever I can get and I'd like to get suggestions on how I should go about quitting my shity night shift job at a factory and finally work in tech.

I've got a couple contracts going on right now that I am not sure if they are going to last. I would like to know how I should go about finding more and or what things I should do in order to get residual income so I can focus on my own projects.

I have several of my own games in the works and I'm developing some tools for the marketplace. Advice?

How the hell are you going to have a WebDev degree and not know what SSL is in 2022.

I also shouldn't be the one to notice your CPanel has a ton of unnecessary extra files and folders, and when you go to a subdomain corresponding to some random folders we find a "hacked by some dude" message. : |

I get your mom paid for the domain and hosting for you but you should really fucking know that information yourself.

And I don't care if your mom says 'everything is fine' on her side. You were hacked you need that information so you can tell when things are added that shouldn't be and in this case notify the host site in case the issue is on them while also knowing how to reset everything properly site specifically

Fuck. I should start charging my friends for being stupid and taking my time with things they should know how to do.

My degree is an associates of 'General Programming'. They have a degree in specifically 'Web Development'

90% of my web development knowledge is self taught. If her program didn't cover fucking ssl she needs her money back

Personal update:
So i have been to psychiatrist few days ago. I got a prescription for anti depression drugs and today is the 4th day of my therapy. I feel a bit better. At least i can sleep can focus on things. Unfourtanetly mentaly i dont feel better. That rant that i wrote before didnt help me neither (i deleted it). That drug that im taking has a shit ton of possible side effects uncluding anger. My massive untrust to people dosent help neither.

To anybody who didnt read the previous rant. I have meet a classmate that had a idea for a android app. I have fought he is one of that bad, stupid kind. I was wrong i said bad things to him but eventualy i helped him by showing where he can get help with the app.

I shouldnt have responded to him in the first place. Now i feel bad. I have no idea how you are going to respond im scared. I prejudged him but im now sorry. I have no idea how my life is going to go.

I also have tried applying for a awesome C# internship, perfect for a student: paid and might get experience in C#. I have send them 2 emails on the address that they gave me during open days (where i had talked with HR and devs personaly about their job) and i got no responce since last month...

Finals for the first semester are closing in as well. I dont know if im going to pass or not. And that is the worst thing i have to worry about now.

So at the beginning of the year I took a new job at a large, stable company. Leaving a failing startup, toxic leadership, and an absolutely stellar development team in the process. Given what's happened in the world since then, I'm overall pretty happy with the decision to have some more stability for me and my family.

That being said, I'm super bummed out (and weirdly burned out) now because I feel like I'm becoming a worse engineer.

I've worked for large organizations before (single digit thousands of employees), but never have I experienced a personification of enterprise memes like this. Leadership too out of touch, lots of bullshit work just to make worthless reports look good, horrific legacy codebases and infrastructure, you name it.

My biggest problem are the expectations are shockingly low. I went from a hyper demanding work environment where the fate of the entire company seemed to hang in the balance each and every week, to an environment where we literally invent arbitrary, bullshit deadlines and requirements so we have something to feel some stress about. And even still, most of the deadlines are laughably far away. The pace of work that's not only accepted, but praised is so slow that I find myself procrastinating more and more. I spend so little time doing any work, and even less time doing things that would pass as "interesting", that I feel like the engineering and problem solving part of my brain is starting to rot.

To make matters worse, the culture is weirdly confrontational despite the pace being so slow. The people here are _incredibly_ pedantic and will launch into 15 minute arguments over the tiniest incorrect details in a story title. Interrupting someone just so you can say what they were going to say is a daily trial. And most ridiculous of all, _repeating_ word for word what someone _just_ finished saying like it was your thought and you didn't even hear them. I don't even know what the motivation for this could be because it makes them look like total clowns.

I've tried to bring up some of the things I find ridiculous, but most everyone has just accepted them at this point and there's virtually no effort to try and make things better. I only get stupid non-answers like "obviously you've never worked at a large enterprise before". Yes I have. Twice. We didn't partake in half the bullshit that happens here.

Honestly this was all just a passing frustration for the first month or two, but 7 months in I'm starting to see myself become complacent. My current output would be absolutely _shameful_ to myself from a year ago, and even my personality has started to shift to the point that I just go with the flow and don't challenge anything.

I've stopped keeping up with tech trends. I've stopped experimenting with new things. I've tried to do more work on personal projects, but the burnout is starting to affect my life outside of work. In general I've just completely stopped trying, and I absolutely fucking hate it.

I also feel like a total tool for complaining about having a cushy, stable job where I barely have to do anything given the current world climate. But I'm more miserable now than I think I've every been in my career. Has anyone else experienced this and found ways to combat it? How do you get your motivation back once it's lost and there isn't even any pressure to regain it?

I totally blame myself for becoming part of this joke. That's totally on me for not continuing to push myself, but I never realized how much of my "drive" from the last job was coming from the high stakes we were operating under. I really just want to get back to being proud of my work and pushing to be better.

Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post. This turned out to be a weirder rant/self-roast than I intended. But I'm hoping this will be the first step to kicking my own ass back into shape.

I've been laughed at a lot for thinking this way, but I'm honestly frustrated by how little information exists on the web for people who want to take Operating System development a step further. I mean, the OSDev Community is amazing and offers pretty, much everything one needs to know at the system level. But my issue is: What if someone didn't want to use existing compilers and assemblers like GCC and NASM, and do everything from total scratch? I mean, the original Unix came from somewhere, right? I know you're going to think "Why not? It works.". Well, I just think it's crazy how few people (such as Linus and the GNU foundation) are out there that have the ability to create such things without help from existing software tools. Sure, it could take me decades of careful practice and experience, but my passion is for creating software at this level and becoming one of those people is very strong. I just wish I knew where to begin and who to learn from.

My shortest naps are giving me the worst nightmares where I wake up before the alarm. These mostly consist of violence around. People running in groups with HUGE rocks to thrash onto others, violence on a daughter by her own family, people completely destroying terrace walls.

This needs to stop somehow. It is clearly influenced by the things happening around the world right now. I just don't understand how will we ever reach a point where there is enough peace. A point where humanity can be understood without baseless justifications.

Being a hothead maybe doesn't mean you need to heat it up every time before using it. Anger against any injustice can be put to really good use. But going around destructing someone's mental health or physical belongings and then later faking regret after knowing the truth is 😔

Please. "Look before you leap." OR if you've already leapt, think twice of the outcomes and what lead you to doing something so disturbing, so easily. Sincere apologies could convince the affected person to not jump off the cliff.

I swear the affected ones can be capable of equally powerful and destructive revenge. But they somehow manage to take the "there must be a reason" path and choose to see the good in everything. Sadly, this certainly starts with home.

It’s actually been quite a fun day, after some ranting on one of our slack communities flutter channel, myself and my team realized we were in a really good place to give back.

We have been working on a large scale flutter application for about a year, phase 1 is about done and we at 11k LOC.

We have been doing a big push for testing over the last 2 months and are at about 50% coverage. The thing we realized is that is the 1 place flutter has fallen short with documentation.

Very little about what we learned for testing our code came out of a google search, or it came out of cobbling bits together from numerous searches and sources.

So we decided we are going to plan and host a virtual meetup to discuss what we have learned and hopefully teach a few people some useful things and hopefully also learn a few new things too.

In addition, and as it has a longer shelf life, we going to setup a medium publication for the company and start a series to cover small specific topics, specific use cases or scenarios that we had trouble with and solved.

Today I had my first thing to type out, had worked out how to test that a function that was passed into a widget was called. So the parent passes the child and onTap function but you are testing the child not the parent as the child is reusable...

Anyway, so with that idea I got hold of marketing for some assets, setup the publication and proceeded to type out 3 articles today, all nice short ones under 2 min reading time.

It really is nice to give back, it’s not like I am Remi smart and can go and write BLoC, but I am smart enough to figure shit out and type it up so that the next guy hopefully benefits from my brain bashing.

I started a short term contract job that requires access to company online resources. Only problem is the office I'm working in has really bad internet. The connection speed at best is comparable to dial up and at worse just non-existent. I tried tethering to my phone but this wasn't working either due to low signal. I mention this as an issue early on the week to the boss. Later in the week the boss asks how things are going at the same time that the network is down. I tell him the same problem. He then tells me his computer is fast and he has internet, so I show him the 2 computers I have access to and how they are too slow/no internet. He then tells me a bad workman blames his tools and he's not happy with me for having problems.

Don't even know what to say to that. I just told him this role wasn't working for me and clocked out.