Ask questions during interview.
Ask about trainings - it's usually a good sign when company offers training budget. Ask about specifics - sometimes it's a shared pluralsight account, and nothing else, which means that that had an idea and half assed it into existence.
Ask tech recruiter about overtime, a good sign is when they have no idea or say that it must be budgeted and scheduled - it means that it does not happen often.
Ask if it is possible to select and change projects, and how often it happens - if often, it may be bad low level management, or people learning new things and jumping between projects.
Also make sure to ask about rules for promotions and pay rises. Good company wił have a clear set of rules in place.
All of the above apply to mid to large companies.
For small company, i'm sure it will be different.

Before new years eve I prepared a sheet on google sheets that allowed people to add drink recipes and order drinks (specify how many of each drink they want), calculated part of budget each person had to cover and generated shopping list of drink components with exact amounts needed.
It was more fun to make that thing than to attend the party.

Started a new job last week. Pays a tad below average for position, but i get training time and budget for anything i want.
So far i have had few days of company introduction, and now a week for training courses related to position.
I have not seen any code yet, brought no value in, just joined.
Massive green flag to me.

***ILLEGAL***
so its IPL(cricket) season in india, there is a OTT service called hotstar (its like netflix of india), the cricket streams exclusively on hotstar..
so a quick google search reveals literally thousands of emails & passwords, found a pastebin containing 500 emails&passwords ...but those are leaked last year most of passwords are changed & many of them enabled 2FA.. after looking through them we can find some passwords are similar to their emails , some contains birth year like 1975,1997 etc, some passwords end with 123 ..so after trying a few different versions of the passwords like
1) password123 -> password@123, password1234
2) passwordyear -> password@year
2) for passwords similar to emails, we can add 123 ,1234, @ etc
created a quick python script for sending login requests

so after like 30-40 mins of work, i have 7 working accounts

*for those who have basic idea of security practices you can skip this part

lessons learnt
1) enable 2FA
2) use strong passwords, if you change your password , new password should be very different from the old one

there are several thousands of leaked plaintext passwords for services like netflix,spotify, hulu etc, are easily available using simple google search,
after looking through & analysing thousands of them you can find many common passwords , common patterns
they may not be as obvious as password ,password123 but they are easily guessable.
mainly this is because these type of entertainment services are used by the average joe, they dont care about strong passwords, 2FA etc

Company i work for just posted updated pay rates.
It's good. They went from lower end of spectrum to a little above the average in terms of pay, and benefits stay the same - solid.

Not leaning on unit tests. I usually write them after testing my code manually, and lose time for testing feature by hand.

Why the hell does that happen?

In the early 2010s, at select locations, Nokia Oro phone was offered bundled with a portable IPL hair removal device. Its enclosure was made entirely of leather, layers upon layers of compacted leather of different kinds. It gave you access to Queer Mode™ — engage it and have sex with any of your thoughts. Your mind was your oyster, but it was in fact being turned into a two-bedroom all-white apartment designed by Karim Rashid.

As the tech was getting older, the only way to source capacitors was syncing your Alienware table clock with the root node using a non-laptop that had shapeshifting black goo for keyboard.

Small puppy that ran Windows 8 was always smothered in shit. The white non-kitten ran Nokia’s version of QNX.

I spent ~12h working on a simple issue/bug.
7h was spent on rebuilding local dev environment which is a clusterfuck of maven profiles, tomcat, some autogenerated degeneracy, and 2 different build systems for JS.
5h spent on actual bug fixing, code reviews and so on.
FML

Send an email.
Or, more seriously: invite only people who must be there, and can add something to the discussion, have an agenda, stick to it, and plan the meeting so that it ends at the start of lunch break. That way everybody will be interested in finishing on time or earlier.

Got pissed that my story delayed the whole project by 3 weeks (major story, lots of changes, and management decided to put me in a few extra activities outside of the project).
Stayed up until like 23:00 to deliver PR.

Yukki Music Bot
okay so, I'm bout to post my first rant and its basically about this telegram bot whose dev team I'm a part of, Yukki Music Bot.
It all started around April 2021 when most of us were busy streaming Netflix, chilling and locked up due to Covid that some people decided to make something interesting and for the community.
It was at first just a simple bot which just played music on call but now, due to the countless efforts and time by the Team Yukki, now you can even stream Ipl in telegram voice chat! and almost all of the music platforms are supported by Yukki >~<.
Check it out at @TeamYukki in GitHub!

Get to know the new company better (Changed job shortly before Christmas).
Learn some DPs, DDD, k8s, finish introduction to hacking course, start doing htb and thm machines, finish and defend my thesis, finish books clean code, thinking in java (reading it to fill in gaps on knowledge), a few books about pentesting.
Among non tech goals: pass drivers license exam for cars, another one for motorcycles, go back to learning russian.

Update of previous post
I just got assigned to a project.
Project-specific training is designed to take up to 20 days.
I got materials, videos, and a person who is in this project for a long time to supervise training and introduce me to the project.
Only problem is that the project apparently uses 5 years old version of base framework.