HR: "We want to hire you, but we shouldn't until after we finish this migration and set up an onboarding process. That should take about two weeks; is this okay?"
Me: "Yes, of course."

... two and a half weeks later ...

Me: "Hey, it's been awhile since our last chat. How's the migration and onboarding process going?" etc.
HR:

------

Ugh.
This is the same company that had me sitting by the phone waiting for an interview an entire day, and let me know their schedule got booked for the day three minutes before they went home. gg.

I should tell them to get bent.

Today.

Last night someone detonated an improvised nail bomb at a concert venue in downtown Manchester. 22 dead and 59 injured (many life threatening).

I'm working from home as my home is listed as a safe haven.

I'm not sure how much, if any, work I'll get done.

If you're in Manchester and need anything let me know.

It's all very much process:

Check everyone I know is ok
List house as safe space
Buy food
Keep passing information around to those who need it

No real time to think about it, just stay in the "response" mode.

It has Happened so many times that it's now became a process.

Job offer:

"There is no hierarchy within this company."

Bullshit.

Given a group of people, a hierarchy will emerge. In any company, a hierarchy will emerge. Even within a team a hierarchy will emerge.

Some people like to butt heads, some people like to go with the flow. It's how you deal with these personalities that matters.

You can try to be as fancy you want and declare your hierarchy to be as flat as a pancake, yet the reality is: there will be one.

Certain people will be trusted more by other people. Certain people will have more power in the decision making process.

Can we please stop deluding ourselves that this is not the case?

And that is not necessarily a bad thing. It only becomes bad if the company culture sucks. Instead of platitudes in regards to the assumed absence of hierarchy, I would be more interested to know how a company deals with its hierarchy.

How is feedback handled? How do people argue? How are decisions made, challenged and implemented?

That's what I would find much more interesting.

Aaaah...I just got back from a meeting because of a production data problem caused by an analyst who keeps making mistakes that screw up client data. I wrote a program to automate most of it and everybody initially accused me of having a buggy program, only to find out she wasn't using it, never did.

"Why aren't you using the program then?" was asked. "Oh, well, I just understand my way better," she replies, "When I make a mistake at least I understand why."

Pause....

"Then, um, if you know you're making a mistake, why don't you fix it?"
"Because my process is so manual and labor intensive sometimes it's not worth it to go back and fix it, because I'd have to do everything over again, and you guys are much better at fixing this stuff than I am."

I indicated that everyone is too busy to stop and fix her mistakes, to which she then asks:

"So if you can't fix my mistakes, what am I supposed to do?"

So there it fucking goes.

Hi. I'm WillibertXXIV.
I'm not a programmer by trade; I have a more than fulltime job as a cook. As for the last year, I spent pretty much all my free time, overlapping my sleep time, to learn how to code.

All that so I can create a game that I started working on the same day I started my learning process. So far it's shit and it's going to stay that way for a long time. Only I can say this. It's my baby. It's fucking ugly and shit but it's mine.

Yesterday I broke it. I broke my baby. I don't know how it fucking happe. When I went to sleep I had a steady 175fps, nice realtime lightning and player / enemy that flowed like running water. I worked really hard to make that happened. Profiling, writing better code, profiling, etc. It's still not good, it's less shit.

I woke up, beautiful day. Not too warm, not too cold, that sweet spot right in the middle. Girlfriend already made the coffee. Perfect. Woke up, sat down to start my morning time work before going to my realjob and

BAM

Everything is shit, 20fps max. That one thing, gfx.waitforpresent, showing up in the profiler eating everything as the game run. Movements are now of stroboscopic nature. Light is still ok but what good does it do now fucking piece of shit. I'm not qualified enough for this shit.

Fuck,
Fuck this,
Fuck this shit,
Fuck this shit i'm out of here.

*signs up for Skillshare*
> Sorry, your password is longer than our database's glory hole can handle.
> Please shorten your password cumload to only 64 characters at most, otherwise our database will be unhappy.

Motherf-...

Well, I've got a separate email address from my domain and a unique password for them. So shortening it and risking getting that account stolen by plaintext shit won't really matter, especially since I'm not adding payment details or anything.

*continues through the sign-up process for premium courses, with "no attachments, cancel anytime"*
> You need to provide a credit card to continue with our "free" premium trial.

Yeah fuck you too. I don't even have a credit card. It's quite uncommon in Europe, you know? We don't have magstripe shit that can go below 0 on ya.. well the former we still do but only for compatibility reasons. We mainly use chip technology (which leverages asymmetric cryptography, awesome!) that usually can't go much below 0 here nowadays. Debit cards, not credit cards.

Well, guess it's time to delete that account as well. So much for acquiring fucking knowledge from "experts". Guess I'll have to stick to reading wikis and doing my ducking-fu to select reliable sources, test them and acquire skills of my own. That's how I've done it for years, and that's how it's been working pretty fucking well for me. Unlike this deceptive security clusterfuck!

So I'm doing my thing... Suddenly all open windows start closing one by one and computer starts a shut down.. and i realize the windows update is coming..

But like.. can you at least give me a 2 minutes heads up? How the fuck such a process gets approved in microsoft?

"Yeah just close everything and force restart.. it's fine"

This is my first IoT project. It's pretty simple, but I've been very happy with the results thus far.

About this time last year, someone got into our garage and rifled through my wife's car.

I have a camera in my garage, and a Phillips Hue motion detector. Using the Hue's excellent API, I have a perl script that checks for motion every couple of seconds, and starts capturing from the camera via RTSP if it does. That video is then staged, ready to be uploaded to a digital ocean droplet if I click on a link in the mailgun-powered email that's then sent to me and my wife, along with a preview GIF of the video, created through the same ffmpeg process that pulled the capture from the camera.

Here you can see me getting home from work.

Dev related: To actually finish my projects instead of working on different ones, and end up finishing nothing.

I said I was going to create my own operating system. I started it, but barely. I haven't touched the compiler I was working on for months. Oh, and I'm working on an android app related to writing. I started it a while back, and never got to finish it.

My need to stop starting new projects, because if I keep doing this, I'll never finish anything.

Non dev related: To get my manuscript out of the slush pile, and finally published. It's currently in the dreadful querying process.

Just looking at code, my colleague ("Senior Java Developer"), wrote...

if (process == "null") {...}

As you can guess, process is a String.

I just don't know what I can tell him. It's just so wrong, in every possible way...

Books and command lines.

I don't like teachers.

I think it's because my learning process is very async and chaotic. When I see a snippet in Golang, I relate it to PHP, Rust and Haskell. I jump to resolving the problem in other languages, trying to find out which approaches work in Go.

Then I read about some computer science concept on Wikipedia and get lost in that while my hunger for knowledge and food increases. After a while I look up a recipe for a pasta salad, and while cutting bell peppers, I see the recipe in terms of typed morphisms, I sprinkle and intersperse ingredients through mapping functions, then decide to write an interpreter for the esoteric "Chef" language in Go so I can interpret my salad recipe while eating it.

Voila, I'm learning Go.

I have no patience for linear mentoring, and others have no patience for mentoring me.

But that's OK.

I automated the process of downloading songs from YouTube and transferring them to my phone.

This is how it works, very simple:
- I have a youtube playlist in which I add songs that I'd like to download
- When I run my python script, it parses my playlist and checks to see if I have added any new songs that aren't already downloaded
- Uses a library to download MP3 for all the songs I want to download
- Transfers all those MP3 files to a designated folder that is tracked by Google Music manager
- Google Music manager syncs those songs to my phone and downloads them for offline playback

That's it 😎 No need for YouTube Red

I'm going to run this script 24x7 on a Raspberry Pi, so everytime I add a new song to the playlist, script starts it's job without me running the script manually.

Dev: This could be sooooo easily optimized...

Me: Uhm. Don't think so. What's your idea?

Dev: Just use threads.

Me: Nope. Problem requires 3 shared resources per process step, it won't be faster by threading. Shared resource will only lead to locking contention, decreasing performance.

Dev: I don't think that will happen. Can you PROOF to ME that this will happen?

Me: It was your suggestion, so you should proof me wrong. Nice try, but no thanks.

Dev: Yeah, but it's too slow and it should run faster.

Me: If you cannot find a better approach than the current one, it runs as fast as it can while providing correct results. That's not slow. That's just working as intended and designed.

Dev: Yeah, but it's still slow.

....

You know these conversations where you just wanna rip some people's face off, stick it in the shit hole they use to talk and toss them out of the window....

Yeah. Had those conversations today.

TFW your client's git policies are so draconian that the dev teams use "develop" as trunk, and completely ignore the release process.

I wrote up 50 pages of git standards, documentation and procedure for a client. Bad indian director 9000 decides the admin (also Indian) who specializes in Clearcase and has no git or development experience is more qualified to decide and let's him set the policy.

FF to today:

- documentation, mostly contradictory, is copy pasted from the atlassian wiki
- source tree is the standard
- no force pushing of any branches, including work branches
- no ff-merge
- no rebasing allowed
- no ssh, because he couldn't figure it out...errr it's "insecure"
- all repos have random abbreviated names that are unintelligible
- gitflow, but with pull requests and no trust
- only project managers can delete a branch
- long lived feature branches
- only projects managers can conduct code reviews
- hotfixes must be based off develop
- hotfixes must go in the normal release cycle
- releases involve creating a ticket to have an admin create a release branch from your branch, creating a second ticket to stage the PR, a third ticket to review the PR (because only admins can approve release PRs), and a fourth ticket to merge it in
- rollbacks require director signoff
- at the end of each project the repo must be handed to the admin on a burned CD for "archiving"

And so no one actually uses the official release process, and just does releases out of dev. If you're wondering if IBM sucks, the answer is more than you can possibly imagine.

Living in a somewhat rural area, local dev jobs are hard to come by. So I decided to look for remote jobs.

I got in touch with a ceo of a company within our capitol, and the process was moving forward rather quickly. Until we got to discussing the salary. The seo had mention something about what he thought was the mininum and maximum salary. I said I needed to think about it for a bit, as the salary was a bit below the national average - but still was higher than I make in my current job.

I later responded with a suggestion a little higher than he suggested, thinking that we were in a negotiation situation. Oh, I was so wrong. This message was met with total radio silence. It's the first time I've been ghosted by a company.

Several weeks later, I got a message saying they hired someone else. That kind of treatment makes me glad I never got the job.

Many years ago at school the machines were imaged using Norton Ghost. A floppy disk containing Norton Ghost and it's configuration would be put into the machine, which would automatically start the imaging process.

When these floppy disks inevitably started erroring they'd be tossed into the rubbish bin. I grabbed one of these broken disks, inserted it a few times until my machine would recognise it, and hey presto, the config file along with the domain admin password were now visible.

!rant
Observed a full deployment the other day and discovered it's extremely inefficient. I proposed an idea to fix it, and was shot down by a senior dev on the team. I was ranting about how asinine the process was and how my process could reduce the amount of time and training required to do deployments with out any additional cost or overhead. A senior dev from another department over heard me, found my workspace and told me (in a nutshell), "write up a document about why the current process is garbage and how yours is better, and how it works, I'll review it and we'll get it worded and formatted right. When we finish the document, I'll forward it to the CTO of your department with your name on it and my recommendation for review." Fuck yeah. 😈😎

CEO - So... We'll have a new side project, it's a small thing, I spoke with a guy, he needs just a small thing...
Me - Ok....... So, what do you need me for?
CEO - Not much, this guy started a project but wants your help on a small part, and you already did something similar for us, so it should be fast, just copy and paste and change a little bit. You probably know better than me.
Me - *Sigh* ... So `friend`, what do you need from me?
Friend - So, I made a crawler that is storing some information on a local file, I just need to add multiprocessing and multithreading, a producer-consumer system with a queue so I can automatically add new links every now and then, a failback system, so when a process doesn't finish, it should be re-queued and crawled later, store all the information on a database cluster (that is not set up), [......]
Me - And when is this supposed to be up and running?
Friend - Your CEO told me you could do this by the weekend. Can we finish this by Friday?
Me - *facepalm* FML

I don't always listen to music while coding, but when I do, it's because things are absolutely unmitigably fucked and it's going to take some herculean effort to unfuck it.

I have this thing I've done for more years than my kids have been alive when shit really hits the fan and I need to show the staff the old lady can still lay waste.

Step 1: put on "the playlist," which consists of only the most aggressive 90s marilyn manson songs.*
Step 2: put on the headphones, which are noise cancelling and super bassy
Step 3: pound a monster (blue, obv)
Step 4: get super manic
Step 5: get in the zone and destroy several features or a flotilla of bugs in a single night
Step N: make absolute fucking magic
Step N+1: call in sick the next day and sleep til noon

What's your hero process?

*Content has less to do with it than the headspace I've come to associate with it and the fact I can't get drowsy with the constant aggression.

User: Bobby, please update this quality controlled document because I screwed it up.

Me: No there is a process for a reason, multiple people need to sign off on this. Also, we talked about this exact issue a year ago that you did not fix.

User: But its a minor change, several hyperlinks in the Word document need adjusted.

Me: Ok, you do it and submit it through the process again.

User: Can you make the changes to the document? It will take me forever and I'm very busy. I know you can do it much quicker than I can.

Me: I really don't want to edit this document myself. It doesn't apply to my job at all and I cannot verify any of the changes would be correct.

User: Oh it's fine. Make the changes and I'll look over it.

...

I hate my job sometimes.

Once the system "lost" a user_id var that says who started a batch, but it was a mandatory field that was filled at the beginning of the process.

I tried to find the reason, failed, called a senior for help, he also failed to find the reason.

After a couple of hours I looked to him, he looked back and I said,
"Let's call it a solar flare bit flip?"
"It's the only logical explanation"

So it became a bit flip issue to the PM, we had a good laugh, we send as "system instability" to the client.

The bug never happened again, no one ever found the true reason, maybe it was really a bit flip 🤔

Java:
Primitive streams. Their need to exist is a monument to legacy failure.

VB.net
OrElse and AndAlso short-circuiting operators. The language designers were too fucking lazy to process logic, so they give specific keywords for those cases.

PHP
Random Hebrew error messages

JS
Eval. It can be used responsibly, but most of the times you see it it's because someone fucked up.

C#
Lack of Tuple destructuring in argument specification. Tuples were added, and pattern matching was added, and it's been getting better. The gear grinding starts with how Tuple identity assignment in arguments is handled. Rather than destructuring into the current scope, it coalesces the identity specification into a dot property of whatever the argument name is. This seems like an afterthought given they have ootb support for ignore characters.

Typescript
This will probably be remedied in the next version or two, but Tuple identity forwarding between anonymous scopes normalizes to arrays of union types, because tuples compile to typeless arrays. It's irritating because you end up having to restate the type metadata in functional series even when there is no possibility for any other code branch to have occurred.

Hey junior... when I'm asking a question it's not the answer I'm looking for.... It's your thought process! Just tell me the things you will not do and we can take it from there!

Windows 10 'App Store' Stole My Money.

So I work a 40 hour work week, sometimes more, same as anyone, on my feet, all day.

I get home, buy a little $3.99 app. Won't install. Check it again won't install. I check some guides. Follow all the standard commands, my purchase won't install. Use the tools. won't install.

Naturally I sent off what I'm good at, some hate filled invective

For fucks sake. I'm exhausted, have insomnia and want to wind down. And here microsoft is killing 32bit libraries to dispose of competing services like steam (also fuck gabe in his fat asshole) but I digress.

And they expect us to use their services? Spend our hard earned *fucking money*..and spend half an hour on their dumpster fire fucking 'walled garden' with nothing to fucking show for it?

No refund button. No chat option. Just a fucking feedback hub. Look at it some time. JUST LOOK AT IT. The motherfucking *feedback* hub *frozeup* in the process of my feedback. Microsoft is a sewer of negligent business practices and incompetence.

So I've chosen now to aim two heavy ion cannons at them and warned them too. Two twitter accounts, one with almost 10k followers and another with 15k.

Should have just offered a manual download button microsoft.

My money would have been better spent on alcohol. Cheap alcohol. It's not like it's a lot of money and I don't buy a lot online, but it's the principle. You're fucking *payment* process worked *just fucking fine*.

Anyway can anyone calculate the monetary damage a cumulative quarter million views over the course of a month will do to the reputation of the windows store in dollar amounts?

I'm betting it's going to be a lot fucking more than three fucking ninety nine.

Don't worry microsoft, I'm gonna take it out of your sweet fucking hide.

sprint retros with PM are a fucking farce, it cannot possibly get any more grotesque.

they are held like this:
- in the meeting, PM asks each team member directly what they found good and bad
- only half of the team gives real negative feedback directed towards the PM or the process, because they are intimidated or just not that confrontative
- when they state a bad point, he explains them that their opinion is just wrong or they just need to learn more about the scrum process, in any case he didn't do anything wrong and he is always right
- when people stand up against this behavior, he bullshits his way out, e.g. using platitudes like "it's a learning process for the whole team", switching the topic, or solely repeating what he had just said, acting like everybody agreed on this topic, and then continue talking
- he writes down everything invisible for the team
- after the meeting he mostly remembers sending a mail to the team which "summarizes" the retro. it contains funny points like "good: living the agile approach" (something he must have obviously hallucinated during the meeting)
- for each bad point from team members, he adds a long explanation why this is wrong and he is doing everything right and it's the team's fault
- after that happens the second part of the retro, where colleagues from the team start arguing with him via mail that they don't feel understood or strongly disagree with his summary. of course he can parry all their criticism again, with his perfectly valid arguments, causing even longer debates
- repeated criticism of colleagues about poor retro quality and that we might want to use a retro tool, are also parried by him using arguments such as "obviously you still have to learn a lot about the scrum process, the agile manifesto states 'individuals and interactions over processes and tools', so using a tool won't improve our sprint retros" and "having anonymous feedback violates the principles of scrum"
- when people continue arguing with him, he writes them privately that they are not allowed to criticize or confront him.

i must say, there is one thing that i really like about PM's retro approach:
you get an excellent papertrail about our poor retro quality and how PM tries to enforce his idiocratic PM dictatorship on the team with his manipulative bullshit.

independently from each other, me and my colleague decided to send this papertrail to our boss, and he is veeeery interested.

so shit is hitting the fan, and the fan accelerates. stay tuned シ

There are three things in my workflow that I don't like:

1. Feature requests appearing out of thin air.

It's common to be handled work at 2pm that needs to be deployed by the end of day. Usually it's bug fixes, and that's ok I guess, but sometimes it's brand new features. How the fuck am I supposed to do a good job in such a short time? I don't even have time to wrap my head around the details and I'm expected to implement it, test it, make sure it doesn't break anything and make it pass through code review? With still time to deploy and make sure it's ok? In a few hours? I'm not fucking superman!

2. Not being asked about estimates.

Everything is handed to me with a fixed deadline, usually pulled off my PM's ass, who has no frontend experience. "You have two weeks to make this website." "You must have this done this by tomorrow morning." The result, of course, is rushed code that was barely tested (by hand, no time for unit or integration tests).

3. Being the last part of the product development process.

Being the last part means that our deadlines are the most strict. If we don't meet the deadline, the client will be pissed. The thing is, the design part is usually the one that exceeds its time (because clients keep asking for changes). So when the project lands on our desks it's already delayed and we have to rush it.

This all sounds too much like bad planning to me. I guess it's the result of not doing scrum. There are no sprints, no planning meetings, only weekly status update meetings. Are your jobs similar? Is it just usual "agency work"?

I'm so tired of the constant pressure and having to rush my work. Oh, and the worst part is we don't have time for anything else. We're still stuck with webpack 2 because we never have time to update it ffs.

Background: I work at a small startup company in Canada who makes simple FAQ Chatbots for companies who waste a lot of resources on the same Customer questions over and over.

So we were making this one bot for a provincial government who wanted a bot for students to be able to ask questions regarding the upcoming election and how to vote, etc. and get the answers they were looking for. Since it's Canada and a government bot, it had to be in both English AND French.

These bots take some time to train (we use Wit.ai mostly) in english so it was a challenge to train it in French. However I am bilingual (not very strong in French but can manage) so I did my best and the bot didn't turn out too bad. (English was great, French was, Id say, "not terrible").

HOWEVER, now that it is done (The company loved it, even with the less than perfect french version). The sales team (who know nothing of the process of making/training these bots) is now telling companies we support "SEVERAL LANGUAGES" and are currently about to sign a contract with a company overseas that wants a bot done IN JAPANESE!!.

To make matters worse.. when we (the dev team) brought up that it would be EXTREMELY difficult to do this, their answer was ... "You did it in French so you can just do the same but in Japanese"

HOW DOES THAT EVEN MAKE SENSE.

Oh well, Rosetta Stone here I come, I guess it's time to learn Japanese.

Let me paint you a picture.

It's the day after code freeze. Code has been branched. It's time once again to verify tickets and run smoke check so we can begin our 3 days of blitz testing before we deploy.

As a team we all have roles to play in this process. Yet, every stinking release it is like pulling teeth to get everyone to take the initiative and verify tickets and run smoke check. Our principled engineer even reached his limit this morning and blew up on everyone.

When you are being paid good money to do a job, you need be an adult, be responsible, step up and do your job!

I'm a lead engineer, I design, I code, I debug, I test, I struggle, I deliver, I'm just a basic building block in my company, hardly involve in product roadmap planning. This is pretty clear in my LinkedIn profile. Jp Morgan recruiter called me for Vice president role. VP? Seriously? me skipping 4-5 levels, just with an interview process? Are you kidding me?
I asked her two times "...are you sure?", I lost my words, somehow gathered courage and asked, "what's the portfolio looks like, how many people will report to me?" Then she, calmly revealed that it's just an ic dev role and they name it that ways in their company.

What the actual ducking-duck-duckkk!

P.s. not sure about jpmc rest of the world but that's how it is in jp Morgan india.

I love my Nexus 6P but goddamn do I hate its battery. Shuts down randomly at 25%, lasts only half a day, and a lot of other crap. So I want to replace it, bought a new battery from AliExpress but didn't buy any tools for it.. so I'll have to make do with what I currently have. On iFixit I found that the replacement process is apparently quite difficult as it's glued in (God I fucking hate that) and can only be safely removed by heatgunning it (which I don't have a heatgun for). Are the results worth the risk of breaking it? Is it possible to pull it out while cold, without too much risk of breaking stuff or damaging the battery? I've got experience in disassembling 2 previous phones and one of them had the battery glued in as well.. and I didn't break the battery (in fact I'm still using it) but it was very difficult.. and this is my daily driver. So yeah 😶

So my department is "integrating CI/CD"

Right now, there's a very anti-automation culture in the deployment process, and out of our many applications, almost none have automated testing. And my groups is the only one that uses feature branching - one of the few groups that uses branching at all beyond "master, dev"

So yeah... You could see how this is already ENTIRELY fucked from the very beginning.

First thing they want to do is add better support for a process... Which goes directly against CI/CD.

The process is that to deploy to production (even after it is manually approved by manager), someone in another department needs to press a button to manually deploy. This, as far as I can tell, is for business rule reasons rather than technical ones.

They want us to improve that (the system will stay exactly the same with some streamlined options for said button pressers)

I'm absolutely astounded at the way our management wants to do something but goes in exactly the opposite direction. It's like the found an article of what CI/CD was and then took notes on exactly what not to do.

Fuck regex and everyone who has ever endorsed the use of and/or is affiliated with regex.
It's unreadable, impractical, overly complex and complicated and it adds unnecessary clutter to your code, and your thought process.
It's 00:50 am and I just spent 3 hours debugging a regex only to realise forgot a single "?" in a 75+ character long string and I want to go to bed.

Hiring process is fucking broken ok?
We all do have something else to do, nobody wants to do "homework" for 4 fucking hours. Which let's be real, isn't 4 hours. It's always more. I try to squeeze it in a least amount of time which means mistakes will be made. I always try to show my knowledge of the language and it's features. But, you didn't do X. That's it, that is a no from us.
Dude, I just wrote a high production grade small project with 90%+ test coverage and you are telling me that those 2 small shit I made is a big deal? Fuck off

Most companies I worked with have a code full of shit and here I present to you, with a poetry and it's a no because of X?

My bet is that if I ever started to work there I would find a code that isn't tested and is in shit state

\rant

People are incredibly rude and ill mannered.

New company stories.

Whenever I am in office and having a conversation with a person, someone randomly appears (like those annoying pop-ups on websites) and interrupts the conversation and starts with their own.

I don't understand why people don't wait for the conversation to be over, or ask for permission (in case it is urgent).

Such behaviour derails the entire thought process and breaks the rhythm.

It's just beyond me. How difficult it can be!!!

Noticed my RAM usage was around 41% when just browsing internet. So, getting more RAM was a good move, until I saw the usage shoot to 52%.

And you already know who eats that much RAM.

PS: Maybe it's some extension, because I just have 2 tabs open and killing that process didn't kill any tab.

I manage a team of engineers.

Toxic Culture Post #2:

Manager: Everybody on your team needs their own swimlane in Jira. Each person's work should be their own lane. When I have a ticket for <Project A> I want to make sure that <Bob> always gets it, all tickets for <Project B> must go to <James>. You'll need to figure out which team member will handle <New Project C> and create their personal swim lane.

Me: That's not really how SCRUM works. Actually, that's not how teamwork works. You're creating silos and we all need to learn how to do these tasks. We're a cross-functional team, and each team member brings their own unique talents to the whole process.

Manager: So you'll create the swimlanes?

Me: No

Manager (to Bob): You'll be devoted to <Project A> from now own. It's the only work I expect you to do. All work for that project will be yours.

Likewise, my manager also reached out to each team member and assigned them specific tasks, furthering the silos.

My development process seems to go:

1. Write code
2. Believe that said code is amazing
3. Write more code
4. Revisit earlier code and start to doubt it's amazing-ness
5. Get frustrated that it could be done better
6. Redo 1 and repeat cycle

Seems a massive waste of time but I tend to like taking a different approach as soon as I find I'm getting stuck with the previous one.

I then get encouraged to take the quick/easy approach which seems like a backwards step and not worthwhile because I know it won't be as fast/efficient.

Fuck. Medium.
Fuck all the articles on it too.

Do you seriously think I am so fucking dumb that I cannot keep my attention on a paragraph of text without at least one image for five seconds straight?
Three quarters of your shitty fucking article are images. They don't even relate to a damn thing in the article. It's just a fucking stream of random image subtitles.

It's just as bad as people randomly mashing pictures they found via Google search into their Power Point presentation because they actually have no content, breaking all copyright laws in the process, so they can stretch their mindless bullshit as long as humanly possible.

FUCK. YOU.

I progressively became more right over the course of 30 years. At the point where I was contextually right more often than not, I determined that to be "good." Then I kept getting better, just in case.

I hate white boarding sessions. They feel unnatural to me. I simply don't work well when put on the spot and I have 3 ogres staring at me waiting for me to fuck up in front of them. Fight or flight engages, the adrenaline rush, my mind freezes. Suddenly it's like I forget how to code at all and I'm expected to solve a problem at once, correctly the right time, or I'm out.

I can't work like that. I need time to process a problem on my own, with my coffee in my one hand and a pencil and scratch paper in the other, not with some demanding employer standing over my shoulder the whole time scrutinizing my every key stroke. I get things wrong the first time sometimes, and more often than not have to google things I can't recall spontaneously. But I always figure it out, test it, make sure it's right before putting it into use.

I've been through several "probationary" periods when first starting a job. They just tell you, they're giving you a month to see if you can handle the job. If not, sayonara. I don't see what's so hard about evaluating candidates in a real world scenario.

So many employers have totally unrealistic expectations.

So, I applied for a job. People tend *not* to answer my applications, probably because my resume very clearly states I implemented malloc in fasm, among other things.

I imagine them going like "Sir, this is a Wendy's", or rather "we're looking for a 10X rockstar AnalScript ZAZQUACH mongoose-deus puffery quarter-stack developer". Fair enough, I certainly don't fit that bill.

But this time I not only got an answer, the guy went like "I'm impressed". Is this... recognition? From a human? What?

Fellas, I cannot process this emotion. Being frank, it's not even about the job. But willfully going against the idiocy of the industry standard, and then seeing that utterly deranged move actually amounting to something -- no matter how small -- is quite uncanny.

And of fucking course, it's a Perl job. Figures. Great minds think alike.

My first rant...

Every time a coworker asks for an enhancement, the request is followed by "it should be easy to implement".

1) If you think it's easy, then you obviously know the code better than me, right?
2) The idea of the enhancement may be easy, but you don't think about how a small change can have a cascading effect throughout the entire process... and potentially in a catastrophic way.

Happens every time. Maybe I'm just bitch eating crackers at this point, but it annoys me when people analyze something they have no idea how to write themselves.

We had a major core router hardware failure in our LA datacenter today and every one of our services has been down since 6am, including all production servers. We have about 15,000 sites down across our entire platform. Our manager came over and told us to just go home because we need to replace the hardware and the process is expected to take all day, and we can't do any work until then because all the production servers are down. So you could say that it's been a pretty easy Friday so far! I'm headed home to play Spider-Man

2 things I'm working on now:

#1 a personal project I am hoping to commercialize and turn it into my moneymaker. Hoping it'd at least be enough to pay the bills and put food on my table so I could forget 9/5 for good. But it has a potential of becoming a much, MUCH bigger thing. This would need the right twist tho, and I'm not sure if I am "the right twister" :) We'll see.

#2 smth I'm thinking of opensourcing once finished -- a new form of TLS. This model could be unbreakable by even quantum computing once it's mature enough to crack conventional TLS. I'm probably gonna use md5 or smth even weakier - I'm leveraging the weakness of hashing functions to make my tool stronger :)

I mean how long can we be racing with more powerful computers, eh? Why not use our weakneses to make them our strengths?

Unittests are already passing, I just haven't polished all the corner-cases and haven't worked out a small piece of the initialization process yet. But it's very close

Imagine: It's the year 4249.

Corporate has finally managed to convince workers that they don't need a salary.
Workers are now paid with food, shelter and clothes. And it's only in effect if you achieve your deadlines.

Keystroke monitoring softwares are now replaced with Webcam eye tracking software.

GitHub Co-Pilot now takes over your code editor and tries to dictate you how to write better code.
Refusing to do results in a signal sent to the management about your behaviour and you lose food access for the day.

HR Recruiters now require you to give them a blood sample and part of your house as a security deposit.
They also require you to have a micro-chip placed in your brain so they can monitor their worker's thought process.

Switching a job is no longer an option. You pledge allegiance to one company your entire career.

You can never see the real world now because the government has mandated you to never take off your VR glasses.
You see the world the way the government wants you to see it.

PHP is still trash.

Life is Good.

So, CS student here.
Gave TCS "national" level test.
Quoting from the question:
"if you have 3 bytes of memory, it can be used to represent 2^3=8 values in the memory"

This test is a waste of at least 30000+ human hours and these guys didn't even put 24 hours of effort to make sure questions are correct.
Fuck this fucking IT industry.
Fuck the people who designed this testing process.
Fuck the people who endorsed this process.
Fuck the management for passing it as a test.
The people who wrote the test question can go die in hell.
It's not my problem that their mothers fucked Neanderthals.

Uh! All I want is a job but ended up wasting 200+ hours of time.

So, I'm trying to process the feelings from not getting accepted for the PhD project I applied for a while back. And it's just unfair. They've recruited people with no publication and less GPA than me. I also doubt any of them would be field-wise more relevant than me tbh. (Wouldn't be surprised if they hired MBA grads) I have all the relevant qualifications that even people working on that project do not have. I could easily get this project going beyond what they are doing with it rn. It's unfair. But it's life. And life goes on.

Am I angry? Yes. Am I disappointed, also yes. They didn't give me any alternative offers either. So I am going to steal the project and finish it so they have to throw all the money they've invested in the toilet.

... If only I wasn't depressed and could bring myself to apply elsewhere again. 🙄

Today was a manic-depressive kind of day. Spent the morning helping some developers with getting their code to run a stored procedure to drop old partitions, but it wasn't working on their end. It was a fairly simple proc. But working with partitions is a little like working with an array. I figured out that they were passing the wrong timestamp, and needed to add +1 to delete the right partition. Got that sorted out, and things were good. Lunch time.

After lunch I did some busy work, and then the PO comes up at about 2PM and says he's assigned some requests to me. The first was just attaching some scripts. Easy. The second, the user wants a couple of schemas exported ... at 6PM. I've been in the office since 6:45AM.

While I'm setting up some commands to run for the data export, a BA walks up and asks if I'm filling in for another DBA who is out for a few weeks. Yep. There's a change request that hasn't been assigned, and he normally does the work. I ask when it's due. Well, the pre-implementation was supposed to be done in the morning, but it wasn't, and we're in the implementation window ... half way through. I bring up the change task, and look at. Create new schema and users. That's all it says. The BA laughs. I tell I need more to go on. 10 minutes later he sends an email with the information. There's only two hours left in the window, and I can only use half of it, because the production guys have to their stuff, and we're in their window. Now I'm irritated, because I'm new to Oracle, and it's an unforgiving mistress. Fortunately, another DBA says he'll do it, so that we can get it done in time. But can't work it either, because Dev DBAs don't have access to QA, and the process required access for this task. Gets shelved until the access issue is resolved. It's now after 4:15PM. I'm going to in traffic with that 6PM deadline.

I manage to get home and to the computer by 5:45PM. Log in. Start VPN. Box pops on screen. Java needs to update. I chose skip update. Box pops up again. It won't let me log in until Java is current. Passed.

I finally get logged in, and it's 6:10PM. I'm late getting the job started. I pull up Putty and log into the first box, and paste my pre-prepared command in the command line and hit error. Command not found. I'm tired, so it's a moment to sink in. I don't have time for this.

I log into DBArtisan and pull up the first data base, use the wizard to set the job, and off it goes. Yay. Bring up the second database, and have enter the connect info. Host not found. Wut? Examine host name. Yep, it's correct. Try a different method. Host not found. Go back to Putty. Log in. Past string. Launch. Command not found. Now my brain is quitting on me. Why now? It's after 6:30PM. Fiddle with some settings, reset $Oracle home. Try again. Yay. It works. I'm done. It's after 7PM.

There is nothing like technology to snatch the euphoria of a success away from you. It's a love-hate thing, but I wouldn't trade it for anything else. I'm done. Good night.

It's maybe a cultural or language thing (or perhaps a generation thing!), but I've read some rants today where there has been a suggestion to shoot/kill yourself if you're guilty of some inefficient process or bad practice.

At the risk of over-reacting or coming across as humourless or stiff, it's not something I would ever say to anyone - light-hearted or otherwise.

I think, after a few weeks, I'm actually quite enjoying that the Android SDK is genuinely awful.

We all know the feeling: "This is shit, whoever designed this is a fuc...oh, I get it. This is pretty cool actually."

So, it's nice to encounter a genuine dumpster fire of a platform.

I think the beautiful thing about its absolute obsession with providing a context to every single operation, is that you end up passing it around so much that the very concept of context becomes redundant.

Honestly, half of the stuff in here I've just attached to a global statics class, because it saves having to request a context, or a manager or some fucking kind of adapter, and it works just fine.

I've started to laugh when I look up a solution and see the browser scrollbar shrink into infinity, because the recommended answer is about two whole pages' worth of boilerplate to make the back button disappear or something.

I don't think there's been a single moment where I've just been in the flow of writing code. Pretty much all of the process is grafting boilerplate into it.

Not long til deadline, thank fuck.

Client : We want to develop this particular software. While developing it, we will be following Agile methodology.

Developers: Sure.

After developer achieves few features and decides to give 1st Demo of the software to the client.

Client : Wtf is this? This is an incomplete software, there are bugs in it.

Developer : Yes, you point that out to me and I will solve them.

Client: What do you mean point them out for you l, couldn't you do it yourself?

Developer: As a standard method, we often do unit tests, but we are not testers and with a strict deadline to match, we are more on the core implementation then checking again and again for minor bugs.

Client : I thought it would be a full proof software without any bugs in the 1st demo.

Developer : Software development is a process. It's not straightforward, hence you only mentioned at the initial, it's agile.

Client : If that's so, let's make it not agile and make you rot in hell for the next few fays. Now you next time show me a demo with no bugs, great complicated features and we will not mention you our expectations, predict them by yourselves, and most importantly, here's an impractical strict deadline.

My process to start new coding project?

Unless it was dictated by the powers that be, my process usually begins/began when I hear..

"It's impossible for us to make the program do that" or equivalent negative comment.

It triggers a "Someone hold my beer" area in my brain.

Hmmm, this feature that I added seems to make the whole process 50% longer. I need to optimize something. Let's see now...
Yeah, make that a shared resource and parallelize IO to leverage the multi-core architecture. Hash map for this, binary tree for that. This thing that gets called a million times can be written easily without a regexp. That thing can be rewritten in Rust as it's too demanding.

There! Works! And it's also a lot cleaner. Nice!

How's the performance doing? 70% longer.

There was an issue whilst you were away, we had to make a small css change.. We pushed it into master but it said something about the branch being behind the tip by 50 commits or something. It's okay, we forced it up though and force pushed it to production as well but the site went down.. In the end we had to ftp it up manually but the customer is saying things that were there before now aren't there any more?

I thought you put this "release process" in so things like this wouldn't happen! I think we need to review it as it clearly isn't working.

I promised i'd be home at 18:00
We discovered a bug at 17:30
We need to have an output for tomorrow
The process takes so many hours so we need to fix this bug before leaving so it can run all night long.
It's 19:06

Wife is gonna get mad...

Man fuck the heat, fuck the chaos and prolonged temporariness of the weeks after uni ends, fuck my executive dysfunction, fuck the job hunt process and fuck my crumbling body that I never bothered to fix because the train ticket was a serious financial commitment and because, again, executive dysfunction.

Fucking hate my situation right now. And the fact that it's not actually bad as far as human situations go doesn't help one bit.

/*
"Not wk135, but blah blah blah"
Please don't misuse wk135 (Sorry)
It's about coding tests
Thank you. */

=>
A company took their technical test on this really weird website. There was a Windows Narrator guy's voice giving instructions while a timer was running. I had to flash my ID to the webcam and then fit my head on an outline on the screen. It was for a web dev position. I had to speak into the microphone to answer the Narrator's questions and then send the video to them. The questions were weird and hypothetical, mostly. I just thought that their process was dumb and unnecessary.

=>
I don't like aptitude and algebraic tests. One company, I remember, had their test on Google Forms. For some multiple choice questions, they put check boxes instead of radio buttons. So, I could just blaze through it selecting all options. Some of the questions had their first option as "All of the above" 🤔. Fortunately, I didn't pass the test.

=>
The company I'm interning with, starting from next month, had a good interview process. They asked me questions on JavaScript, CSS, and a few on algorithms and data structures. I was also given a task where I had to make a css animation of trees. I'm glad they didn't have an algebra entry test.
😊

Kotlin support on Android:
i never liked Java, not because of the language but for the usual bad design implementations and Android is one of those.
Then Kotlin arrived, it looked very promising but it's when i looked at Coroutines that it simply blew my mind:
you just have to write your code and the Kotlin's compliler "magic" will do most of the boring/complex stuff for you and it's even great performance wise!
I even refactored inter-process calls to simple sync functions with few like of code and for a non-android developer like me it's just love at first sight!

Just got selected for Udacity google scholarship!!!

It's two stage process
Got selected for first one
After 3 months if I did good enough I can be one of very few to get a nano degree program. There are 10000 in first program and only handful of 350 will be selected for nano degree.
Let's fucking get that one 💪
Looking forward to learn everything I can.
It's gonna be awesome year, finally some shit is happening 😬😄
How's your all week going ?

Fun fact!

Xiaomi has a restriction where you're only allowed a bootloader unlock key one week after you've requested it. No, not a week after you've bought the phone. Not a week after you created an account and generated so much usage data that it would be stupid to doubt you're a genuine user.
No, you have to wait one week after installing their fucking desktop app and getting past some arbitrary point in the process.

Seriously, how much shit can this company pull with a straight face? At this point they're just sabotaging me, it's not even for any reason.

Hi! I'm new in freelancing. I've created a program that scrapes data from a website, parses it, runs DB queries, and emails the prepared data to the customer for whom I've created this program. The whole program is written in PHP and uses a MySQL table. There's almost no front-end, it's just like an automated background process that runs with a cron job. I've bought and set up a domain and hosting for them (my cutomer paid it all). I got the core part of the program running after ~2 days, and it took me ~a week to complete the project including adding features and the testing phase. Now, I'd like to know, how much does this kind of project cost? The business operates in Silicon Valley.

What kind of a fucked up company that has a 9 interview process in a 3 month period and sends the rejection email without a single line of feedback?

They are a fucking startup, not Google! Not even close to a company like Google!!

It's my mistake that I put up with their shit from the beginning but I didn't know any better.

I get an email about an hour before I get into work: Our website is 502'ing and our company email addresses are all spammed! I login to the server, test if static files (served separately from site) works (they do). This means that my upstream proxy'd PHP-FPM process was fucked. I killed the daemon, checked the web root for sanity, and ran it again. Then, I set up rate limiting. Who knew such a site would get hit?

Some fucking script kiddie set up a proxy, ran Scrapy behind it, and crawled our site for DDoS-able URLs - even out of forms. I say script kiddie because no real hacker would hit this site (it's minor tourism in New Jersey), and the crawler was too advanced for joe shmoe to write. You're no match for well-tuned rate-limiting, asshole!

I can't get any work done at work... The potatoe they gave me for a laptop is 5 years old, Every day I was approx 2 hours (no joke) for it to power up, open up my visual studio solutions, connect to the VPN, and open my browsers.

Then my fucking shit computer loses connectivity with one of my 2 monitors every 15 min so I need close the lid, reopen it again so it "picks up the monitor" then wait another 5 min for my windows to respond.

Agh!!!!!

It's frustrating too cuz my boss ordered me a new computer 2 months ago. But cuz I work for corporate bozos it took them 2 months just to process/place the order for a new computer. So now I have to wait even longer just to have a functioning computer.

It is said that the number of programmers doubles every five years with fresh CS, CE, and EE grads. Assuming that's true, then at any one time over half the developer community are novices in the early stages of their career.

My entire life's been spent in software and I've been in it now for about 15 years and I've seen a lot of people make alot of things and I've seen a lot of people fail at alot of things. My observation is that the doers are the major thinkers, the people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker doer in one person. It's very easy to take credit for the thinking the doing is more concrete. It's very easy for somebody say "oh, I thought of this three years ago" but usually when you dig a little deeper you find that the people that really did it. Were also the people that really worked through the hard intellectual problems.

Many people falsely believe that a great idea constitutes 90% of the work. However, there is a significant amount of craftsmanship required to bridge the gap between a great idea and a great product. As you evolve that great idea it changes and grows it never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it and you also find there's tremendous amount of trade-offs that you have to make.

There are certain things you can't make electrons do, certain things you can't make plastic or glass, certain things you can't make factories or robots do. and as you get into all these things, Designing a product involves juggling 5,000 different concepts, fitting them together like puzzle pieces, and exploring new ways to combine them. Every day brings new challenges and opportunities to push the boundaries of what's possible, and it's this ongoing process that is the key to successful product development. That process is the "magic"

Solved a major scalability issue today.
I'm starting to think I might actually be as good as what I told the recruiters I was.

This hadoop-ecosystem job used to take about 2h40min and cost about USD 1.00/GB.
Now it takes 36 mins. At about 0.85/GB.
Fixed some over shuffling, restructured some bottleneck serial stages, used lots of weird words.
Folks in this company I just entered were struggling with this formerly unwieldy process for a year.
Now it's nimble enough to run every hour.

Maybe that whole "experience" thing people were always yammering about wasn't completely bullshit.

for your next edition of "TI's constantly been smoking crack since the 80s and has no intention of ever stopping":

the TI-8x calculators have a hardware buffer and an OS-provided buffer for screen data, effectively being an "immediate" buffer in hardware, to be displayed next VBlank, and a "slower" buffer, being what's copied to the "immediate" buffer when the OS decides it's time to update the screen. All well and good, maybe a little weirdly done but all in all makes sense. (You can even define a third buffer in RAM if you need to triple-buffer your shit.)

The problem arises when you use TI-BASIC and try to draw to the screen:
If you do something like, say, draw a circle, you'll notice that it's visibly drawn to the screen one pixel at a time. However, looking through what bits of the SDK I can find, the OS' "draw circle" assembly routine *doesn't update the immediate buffer!*

This means that, in TI-BASIC, the "draw circle" routine doesn't use the ACTUAL circle-drawing routine the OS provides, but instead individually calculates and plots a pixel, then updates the hardware buffer (an ENTIRE 768 bytes are copied EVERY TIME) and waits for VBlank to pass before repeating for the next one. In other words, it's deliberately slow as fuck.

Why? All the drawing commands, outside of like 2 or 3, do this. Why would you deliberately slow down the process of drawing to the screen on a system that you KNEW would be popular for people to code on???

Intel is dying right now tbh. I hope the can get back on their feet but as of right now, chaos. They have had multiple ceo changes within 1 year and their current is a horrible leader. They have been really wasteful with their money (like buying McAfee...) And the inly reason they are leading in the CPU market, Tick Tock, is failing. It used to be Process - Architecture. Now intel has announced they are not changing the process for 8th gen, currently it's Process - Architecture - Optimize - Optimize - Optimize. Which is not good. It has been leaked that Intel is currently just hoping for AMD Ryzen to fail, let's face it, Ryzen seems really promising and might be the comeback AMD needs.

TLDR; Intel is a one trick pony and their one trick is failing. They have been really wasteful with their money and their current hope is that Ryzen fails.

I have an Intel CPU in my system and i find them to be better than AMD, but the tables might turn.

So I went through the first round Google interview process and was declined for not "finishing fast enough" even though I did in fact solve the problem in the allotted time.

Either it's a BS excuse and they were just interviewing me to interview me for a quota or there is some invisible time limit that I am not aware of.

Really annoys me when I just don't know exactly what I'm doing wrong and instead get what feels like cop out answers.

Me: I would like to receive external training for RHCSA course and certification

Company: Sure! we will open a ticket for you and keep you posted

Me: it's been almost 3 months, could you give me any updates?

Company: Oh actually you are not eligible! this certification is not aligned with your job description!

Me: But...I use linux every single day and it's one of the main requirements to be able to do my job?

Company: Yeah whatever no need to get certified still..!

Me: Why didn't you tell me that 3 months ago?

Company: Well the process was changed and we decided this certification does not match your profile

Me: What matches my profile then?

Company: certificates in Azure and GCP

Me: But I don't ever use those platforms?

Company: ......

Me: ......

Hiring a third party to help us with something...
Third party: yeah okay, we know what we need. Can we get access to your git repo
Me: sure, I'll make sure you'll get it
(To the admins): hey can you get them access to our git server?
Admins: did they sign the personal data processing contract?
Me: oh they won't work with any personal data. It's a dev server and they only need access to the source code. And the usual contracts and NDAs are already done
Admins: well we still need the other one.

... Sure. Why not. Just delays the start of the process for... Like a week and a half until that useless bit of paper has passed through all the necessary departments. Not like time's an issue. Right?

TL;DR: I hate how management doesn't listen to devs (even Dev managers).

We need to sort out our release process where I'm at. It takes a Dev about 2 solid days to complete and it's hideously involved and ripe for human error. They're completely out of action until it's done and it happens once a week!

It's stopping us releasing business critical bug fixes and features that need to go out. Instead the work just sits in develop for days doing fuck all.
Can't be agile if it takes so long to deliver value 🙃

Plus makes any fuck ups by our department look worse as it takes an age until it's fixed which reduces their collective trust in us and our opinions.
Making any improvements we want to make harder todo as they're harder to convince 🙃

Has anyone had any success getting automated releases?
How did you convince management to prioritise it?

I need to convince someone who has some influence in my company and ask how they got that influence

Why is the interviewing process becoming worse over the years?

About 2 years ago I applied for a company and got into 2 interviews: one with the hr to see if I am bsing them and one with the tech people, to be sure I am not using buzzwords without context. Pretty straightforward, could be done in a single interview IMHO, but it's making me waste max 2 weeks.

Fast forward to one year ago: 1 interview with the hr, 1 interview with the tech people, 1 interview with CEO (why? Just.. why?)

Fast forward to today: 1 interview with hr, 1 interview with tech people, 1 interview with the CEO (again... why?), 1 coding assignment which "it's only going to take a couple of hours" and punctually has either poorly documented APIs to rely on or has trick questions/points. So "it takes a couple of hours", but if you want to pass it you need to spend a day on it... (and let's add that they may be using old docker versions so if it doesn't work cause they are using docker 1.0 and it fails too bad, you lost time for nothing, we are not trying to solve it, you just don't pass!).

Not kidding the last assignment I took and dropped required: external API, testing, don't use CSS libraries and make your own CSS, you must use TS and it was supposed to take "3 hours max".

My question is: why? Why is the interviewing process slowly becoming less of a: "I understand that your code may not be perfect for us but that you are a human being able to reason and adapt your code to our standards" and more of a: "You must do everything PERFECTLY and we don't give a sh*t about your time, start giving us your free time and then we see if we want you."

I just keep giving up after I analyze the assignments, cause a part of my brain thinks that if this is the way a professional relationship starts it's too easy to foresee weekend shifts and lots of overtime cause some manager thinks that "come on, it just takes a couple of hours!"

Conversation yesterday (senior dev and the mgr)..

SeniorDev: "Yea, I told Ken when using the service, pass the JSON string and serialize to their object. JSON eliminates the data contract mismatch errors they keep running into."
Mgr: "That sounds really familiar. Didn't we do this before?"
SeniorDev: "Hmmm...no. I doubt anyone has done this before."
Me: "Yea, our business tier processor handled transactions via XML. It allowed the client and server to process business objects regardless of platform. Partners using Perl,
clients using Delphi, website using .aspx, and our SQLServer broker even used it."
Mgr: "Oh yea...why did we stop using it?"
Me: "WCF. Remember, the new dev manager at the time and his team broke up the business processor into individual WCF services."
Mgr: "Boy, that was a crap fest. We're still fighting bugs from the mobile devices. Can't wait until we migrate everything to REST."
SeniorDev: "Yea, that was such a -bleep-ing joke."
Me: "You were on Jake's team at the time. You were the primary developer in the re-write process saying passing strings around wasn't the way true object-oriented developers write code.
So it's OK now because the string is in JSON format or because using a JSON string your idea?"

SeniorDev turns around in his desk and puts his headphones back on.

That's right you lying SOB...I remember exactly the level of personal attacks you spewed on me and other developers behind our backs for using XML as the message format.

Keep your fat ass in your seat and shut the hell up.

So yeah, it's cool, I only built a process based on years of experience. Just go ahead and completely ignore it. A failure to plan on your part doesn't constitute an emergency on mine.

IHateForALiving: I created a trigger on the model, every time you perform a save it should fire an event. You're calling the same methods I am, and the trigger is NOT firing. Are you sure we are running in the same process?
TheTeamLeader: I'm manually starting this whole piece of code in your same process, there must be something wrong on your side if it's not working

90 minutes of debugging later

TheTeamLeader: there's the thing! Your hooks are registered in a separate process, of course they are not firing
IHateForALiving:

So it's been nearly 3 months and HR have yet to process my authorised promotion, or pay me any of my new salary, despite it being escalated multiple times thanks to my boss, Head of, and Director.

...Does HR live in a separate reality to our own? Am I being played for a fool? Am I expecting too much of a HR sector in a Fortune 100 company..? 🤔

"OMG WE MISSED SOMETHING WE NEED AN EMAIL SENT TO EVERYONE IF X HAPPENS AND NOBODY DID A THING WITHIN AN HOUR!"

Ok done.

"OMG WE NEED IT SENT IF NOBODY DID A THING EVERY 30 MINUTES"

Um... not sure we're solving this problem right way ... but there you go done.

"OMG SOMEONE GOT AN EMAIL AFTER 45 MINUTES AND NOT 30 MINUTES"

Bro who the fuck knows why that happened, it's email not instant messenger .... that's what I meant by us solving this in the wrong way, email for this is dumb... how about we solve this process problem in some other way or you just fuck off ... this isn't a coding issue this is something else...

Interviewed for a Mid/Senior developer role and finally got feedback. The company feels I'm not experience enough for the senior role but think I'm a good fit for the company. Bad thing is they don't have any entry level positions available. I honestly feel like I am ready for a mid level role and maybe even a senior role. They say to keep considering them while they try to get approval for entry level position, but this is a massive company and who knows how long that will take. Recruiter said it's not a no, just not a right now. /:

Oh and going off my last rant, I found out that the senior dev was wrong about set interception being '|' in python, I found out that it's actually a method called interception(set). So even the senior dev didn't know off the top of his head. /:

Have some projects in GitHub but my biggest one is a private repo I'm doing the entire backend and even frontend. Can't share that repo or share details because it's a project a friend (his idea) and I are planning on releasing. (:

Overall feeling pretty bummed because I was looking forward to steady work that'll improve my skills even further... I'm self taught so it's a bit tougher to land interviews because of the automated process most companies have with resume filtering. ):

Going to keep doing small contracted projects until I land another interview. In the meantime trying to keep my spirit up. (:

What is fucking wrong with Windows? When shit doesn't respond it's impossible to kill it and it freezes other processes. NEVER happens in Linux, all I do is kill the PID. When you can't open task manager or "end the process" you are shit out of luck. You'd think they'd fix this in the decades they've had to built a computing platform. I'd use linux exclusively but some work and tools at my company necessitates windows.

At my last gig I was working at a small ISP and my boss was asking why our throughput went to shit every time he checked the router web ui. I told him it was because the web server on the router uses up a lot of CPU time, and that meant the router couldn't process as many packets since it uses that same CPU for well routing, nat, firewall rules etc...so it's probably best to use the CLI instead. Boss says, "YOU DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!!!" And continues to destroy throughput by looking at the web ui.

TL;DR Boss yelled at me for telling him how things work. Yay.

A coworker changed the application deployment process. He told all three of the other developers who need deployments, but not me. We sit six feet away from each other and I've run/managed deployments for a year longer than him.

His new process doesn't work and he's blaming the dev ops team for not following it. The new process clearly doesn't fit their workflow and never could have.

The lack of deployments have caused production issues and he still won't ping dev ops to remind them about the deployment because "it's not in the new workflow".

He's been painting dev ops as incompetent at the last three retrospectives without having ever personally reminded the deployment guy.

Ugggh.

I fucking hate the process of setting up IDEs and compilers! All the build files, cmake files, tasks, all that shit.

I undrerstand it's integral part of coding, but fuck, why does it always take so long to set up a stupid project. Just let me start coding ffs.

Sometimes I get so frustrated that I rather write a bash script or run the compiler commands in the shell instead of going through the hassle of setting all this up.

This is long rant/story:

My manager conducts sync-up meetings regularly. The idea is to sync up all developers on current state of work. He does’t conduct stand-ups. He doesn't have time for it. He rather discusses on individual basis if we are blocked. The rule of the sync-up meeting is NOT to discuss any blockers or problems but simply explain each other what we are doing and how we plan next.

Sometime ago, the manager brought up and explained a new way of working in the sync-up meeting. At this point, a new developer in the team was absent due to sickness.

Today, there was a sync-up meeting and the manager started to question the new member about the newly introduced way of working. He was unaware of it and the manager never communicated this important information via email or any mode of communication available.

So, the conversation goes on as follows:

"Manager": — "Why didn’t you complete your task as per the new way of working?"
"Employee": — "Well, I've no idea. Am I supposed to do? I’ve been working as usual like any other"

"Manager": — "We have a new process and you have failed to follow it, so we’re late in delivering your work"
"Employee": — "I’ve already finished my work on time. I've raised a pull-request this morning"

"Manager": — "It doesn’t matter, it is not merged to main branch and so we can’t include your work in the release"
"Employee": — "I’ve no idea about the new process"

"Manager": — "Haven’t you asked around about what happened from previous meeting"
"Employee": — "Yes, I have. I was told which tasks were handled, but nothing about a new process"

"Manager": — "Aren’t you interested to learn it?"
"Employee": — "Why won’t I be interested? I was on a sick leave and I have no clue what happened here"

"Manager": — "What’s happened is past now, let’s not focus on it"
"Employee": — <Dumbfounded>
The Employee felt ashamed in front of everyone. He did his job but it didn’t pay off.

…. After an hour … the Employee had a talk with the Manager

"Employee": — "You shouldn’t have pointed me out in front of everyone. It made me feel real bad. You should have emailed this information if its important for the team."
"Manager": — "I have no idea what you’re talking about. When did I say so? I think you’ve a bright future in the team. You should be focusing on doing better things."

Employee goes back to work. A minute later, the Manager sends a PowerPoint screenshot of the process in the group chat.

**The Process**
It's about delivering release packages based on priorities defined by client. Each release package is a set of work items or requirements. Individual developers are assigned to work items. They are expected to deliver on planned delivery timelines in order to consider a work item into a release package.

Boss at the start of a new project: "We could hire an intern to gatter some data in an excel list... You can easily implement that in the application later - right? So can you get us a excel list to fill out? "

No... Just no...

You tell me what you wanna see and how you wanna interact with the application!

In the process we will figure out which data is necessary, I will build some tables in the database for that data and then, !!! not a second sooner !!! , I'll be able to give you an suitable excel list, which includes a complete list of columns for the necessary data in a form I can work with it.

It's not my job to know what data a application needs to make YOUR JOB easier! I'm not a magician! I just love programming stuff!

Companies : we cannot provide sponsorship.

Me: I can pay for my visa.

Companies : we don't provide relocation.

Me: I can arrange my own ticketes.

Companies never reply back.

It's incrible how many openings for developers I saw around the world and when we apply for them we have to face this issues.

I know some countries is a pain to sort out the documentation, but another countries is very easy and always I face this bulshit and this stupid behavior.

The worst part is they made us waste time with assessment and don't give any shit for feedback.

I made by myselft my own recruitment process for each company that I worked for and I answered each candidate when they didn't pass on the assessment and why and in interview without fear of hurt feelings.

It's best being sad for not passed in the process for any reason that they would could told me than get this limbo.

THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS.

I recently got a secondhand Sony WH-1000XM3 headphones. they were used for less than a year, were in perfect shape and they still had warranty.

The app that is supposed to go alongside the headphones told me that I have a firmware update for my headphones. So naturally, I pressed install.

AGAIN, THIS IS A FIRMWARE UPDATE ISSUED BY SONY!!

It bricked the headphones. I can't turn them on.

The issue was probably Bluetooth file sharing. BTFS is SO unreliable and it's known to be unreliable and Sony updates their top tier headphones with this communication method.

Thankfully, I still have warranty. I had to fight with the official importers of Sony in Israel (called "Ishfar", you read it like you see it) to go through the process of repairing / giving me a replacement.

O U T R A G E O U S

Sick and tired of this country. Is it a fucking crime to try to be a good dev in here? I mean, nobody gives a shit about quality and the learning process, it's all about the money, 'making it work', and salaries. Don't the guys have any honor?

Today started off great!

New 5TiB HDD... Check!

Formatted with zfs under LUKS, with a high level.of compression and dedup... Check!

Copying over roughly 4TiB of data, about 2 of which was scattered in small files... Coworker unplugged it from AC thinking it was his (they are sort of similar), when the process was almost complete.

Goddamit. zpool scrub.... 6 hours left. It's 9 pm over here, and I'm not a fan of leaving my stuff at work. Goddammit.

...I guess tomorrow is another day.

Building a range of services focused on providing information based on the users location.

It has amazing challenges. Although, I'm stumbling into some highly annoying problems which I don't know how to solve yet, its very awesome to see an idea I had come to life, slowly but surely and also the amount of stuff I learn throughout the process.

Also, it's awesome to see how one can build such services with near zero identifiable information collection!

Mozilla will update the browser to DNS-over-HTTPS security feature to all Firefox users in the U.S. by default in the coming weeks.

According to the report of TechCrunch : Whenever you visit a website ; even if it's HTTPS enabled, the DNS query that converts the web address into an IP address that computers can read is usually unencrypted. DNS-over-HTTPS or DoH encrypts the request so that it can not be intercepted or hijacked in order to send a user to a malicious site. These unencrypted DNS queries can also be used to snoop on which websites a user visits. The feature relies on sending DNS queries to third-party providers such as Cloudflare and NextDNS which will have their DoH offering into Firefox and will process DoH queries. Mozilla also said it plans to expand to other DoH providers and regions.

Not really a rant but more of a fact kinda thing. Noticed a post earlier about someone ranting about why they code figured I'd do the same...

I code not because I wanted to for say but because my after my uncle's death I needed something that I could feel in complete control of. Coding gave me that ability to control the computer however I want and tell it to do whatever however. At the same time it taught me so much more about myself and the people around me in the process. Today I don't code because I need to control something m today I do it because I can't live with out. It forces me to think critically of everything and everyone. It forces me to learn something new everyday and every night. It requires me to solve complex problems with limited solutions. It allows me to create solutions when everything else has failed and it gives me a drive to complete things. It's the reason I live technology and it's the reason I have the job I do. It's the reason my boss loves my work and it's the reason other people on my team envy me. Code transformed my life into what it is today. And it will forever be my greatest peice of education.

I don't get it.
I tried Kotlin on Android just for fun, and it doesn't support binary data handling, not even unsigned types until the newest version. Java suffers from the same disease.
How does one parse and process binary data streams on such a high end system? Not everything is highlevel XML or JSON today.

And it's not only an Android issue.
Python has some support for binary data, and it's powerful, but not comfortable.
I tried Ruby, Groovy, TCL, Perl and Lua, and only Lua let's you access data directly without unnecessary overhead.
C# is also akward when it comes to data types less than the processer register width.

How hard can it be to access and manipulate data in its natural and purest form?
Why do the so called modern programming language ignore this simple aspect that is needed on an everyday basis?

It's funny how you start feeling bad for the next dev taking over your project because it turned into a total spaghetti code shit show that will be impossible to maintain in the future with new features coming in.

Honestly... if a projects starts out with a certain scope which then gets extended EVERY FUCKING WEEK with requirements that can't even be met in the initial timeframe it's no wonder the code quality will decrease over time.

This just reminds me daily how important good project management (and I'm not talking about suit wearing pain-in-the-ass-managers) and the inclusion of devs in the planning process really is.

It's so fucking crazy that companies run like that with people up front that have NO FUCKING CLUE what they are doing, nor do they understand the mechanics, tech and effort that go into certain features. They're like "beep, boop, it's done by Friday you fuck!".

The funniest part of this stupid charade is that the closer we get to a new "deadline" (we will not meet the deadline anyways) the more nervous the "managers" get. WHY didn't you properly plan this shit in the first place? WHY didn't you care for the last six months where all this fucking bullshit could still have been prevented?

Meanwhile I'm just so sick and tired of this shitty project and this sucky company that I just don't have any motivation left to keep on working. It's so fucking hard and painful to work on projects that suck ass, are poorly designed. I just got to the point where coding is no fun any more. Thank god I'm out of here soon... fml

Wouldn't say our teamwork failed we just sucked that day.

I had a ticket to fix a SQL sp and then correct some data afterwards. As this was the typical "urgent fix need now" we went through a different process for fixing it.

Me: Just sent you some scripts can you check them over before we apply it to uat?
Boss: let's go through it together.
5 mins later
Boss: looks fine I'll apply the scripts.
2 minutes later
Me: did you apply the scripts to uat?
Boss: No I applied them to live.
Me: oh ... oh no.

At this point I realized I was missing a critical where clause so yup my update was applied against all of the data.

Boss: oh
Yup he just spotted my error.

Helpdesk phones start ringing
Boss: you pick it up it's your code
Me: hey you applied its your problem now.

One db restore and several incident meetings later we fixed it. Twas a fun day.

Bittrex is "amazing"...

I had lost my 2FA a long time ago (as my phone fried) and missed the account ferification deadline which caused my account to get disabled. Off we go to support!

0. Nothing to rant about at this point. I just created an account in their zendesk, logged in and logged a ticket to reset my 2FA and reactivate my account. They asked me for info, I provided it to them and got my 2FA disabled. Hooray!

1. I then asked to reenable my account. They sent me a link to restart the verification process. I open up that link and log in. I'm asked to upload some photos. I select requested photos from my galery and hit [UPLOAD]. An error pops up saying that smth wrong happened and I need to reload that site and reupload my photos. After page refresh they are telling me they are validating my uploaded info (w/o any way to resubmit my info, which, according to the error seen below, was not successfully submitted in the first place)...

2. So I reach out to the support guy again. Guess what he replies! He says he's sorry but he cannot help me any more and I need to create a NEW ACCOUNT in their support site with the same email <???!!!???>

3. I try to log in to the support portal and my access no longer works. MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN DELETED! WTF!!!

4. I do as I'm told and create a new acc with the same email. Now I can log back in. So I'm raising a new ticket saying I still cannot finish my verification process due to the same error. It looks like it's going to be a fun ride with them so I can't wait to see what they'll reply.

As a junior dev from a sysadmin and security background, this is a list of software development concepts I never seemed to truly understand but hope to(rated from most intimidating to least):

1) Frontend web development and all the huge world of javascript frameworks and tools. - It's more overwhelming than the political geography of the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages.

2) Machine Learning, Deep Learning and A.I- too much math that fucks with my brain.

3) low-level programming(kernel,drivers) - sounds extremely interesting but the code in assembly/C/C++ looks like Linear A Minoan hieroglyphics.

4) Rx(insert language here) - I never get why it is useful or why someone invented this. Seems interesting though.

5) Code Reflection - sounds like Thelemic magick.

6) Packaging, automation, build tools, devops, CI, Testing -seems too complicated. I just want to run an executable at the client or make a web app that does something. Why all this process?

SSL should really stand for "Satan's Security Layer", because anytime I have to deal with it, it's always a major pain in the rear. (And an expensive pain at that!) Why in 2016 is the SSL process so bad.

We have pretty fast and lean dev process between QA/Design/Devs.

But sometimes, it's going to shit ;p

QA :
An option "ROLE" is missing for grouping in that table.
So 5 min to create ticket, assign someone from design on it

Design : Yeah, this is true. We missed that option in our design.
Proceds to modift figma by adding an option "Role" to a drop down.

Reasigned to Junior dev.

Junior dev : I have no clue how grouping works with graphql.

So at least 30 min.

Reasigned to me.

Me after 1 min of looking at it : PR chhanges on screen shot :

Facepalm... Everyhtibng was already in place, someone forgot to add id AND name, not just name.

Git blame => Or never mind... it was me..

I'm not one to shit on Windows, because I use it extensively in my daily life (Streaming, Gaming, Coding etc)

but I'm driven crazy by this fucking TEAMS app. It starts itself right after booting, doesn't want to close without me firing up Task manager and ending the process.

And in the "Startup" tab I've disabled it two times but it will just Enable it by itself. This is borderline criminal practice of writing software.

Are you saying I should just remove Teams?? Pfftt.. can't do that either. Joining a Teams link on the browser is so painful that it's better to just jam scissors into your eyeballs.

Fuck you, Microsoft. Sincerely.

More adventures in fixing specs.

This particular failing spec is in an included spec helper; I cannot run the spec itself because rubymine is stupid and doesn't know how. Not kidding. I also don't know the codepath it's actually testing because it's fucking convoluted, so I need (rather: want) a debugger to progress. I put breakpoints everywhere I thought it could be, and... nothing.

The stacktrace shows the calling spec in the helper module, a generic `process` method that just calls `super` (from where? who knows!), and a `wrap_every_action` in the ApplicationController. in other words: absolutely nothing helpful. I stepped through the code for most of an hour and didn't get anywhere; just saw lots of rails internals.

ugh,

I'm going to keep bashing my head against this, but what the fuck, why can't you give me something goddamn useful!?

TL;DR: A new "process" for collaboration between teams was created in order to stonewall requests from my team.

A couple months ago, we created a new Dev team that specializes in writing internal tools. This team was staffed with internal developers, and got a separate manager. The whole point of this team was to collaborate with my dev team so we can both help each other develop tools that the company needs.

One of the developers that was on my team went over to this team while he and I were still working on a big application. For a few weeks, he still worked on this application as he normally would, and we'd sit with each other and work through features together whenever we needed a fresh set of eyes.

Well, eventually his new team got protective of him and created a new "process" for our teams to request assistance from one another. So now instead of just popping over to someone's desk to ask a quick question, you have to send an email to the team and request that you can borrow that particular developer for a question, and then the entire team sits down and discusses whether or not they're going to allow that person to answer your question. Then after a week of discussion, if they decide to allow it, they schedule a meeting for a week later, in which you will get the question answered.

So instead of just spending 2 minutes to ask and answer the question, you have to spend weeks in order to request assistance, and then schedule a meeting.

It's ridiculous, and it's all because his team got protective that he was working with another Dev team. Dev teams collaborate all the time, and work together. My team is constantly helping other teams, and we don't have this ridiculous process. We get asked a question, and we answer it. Simple as that.

Last week, I sent an email for assistance in completing a feature, and didn't hear back. I talked to the Product Owner for the team, and he said "Just send an email," to which I responded that I did and hadn't got a response. He said "Oh....." I then told my boss that this is an enormous bottleneck, and he seemed surprised hearing that this is a bottleneck.

A week passed and today I still hadn't got a response, so my boss reached out to the Product Owner to push him. Finally, I got a response and they scheduled a meeting to answer my question 3 days down the road. So it's going on 2 weeks to get this simple question answered.

Normally I'd just have the other developer come over and help, but apparently they yelled at him the last time he did that.

The issue is that the process was created with the assistance of our "senior" developers, who never work with this other team in this capacity, so they just nodded and smiled and let them put this ridiculous process in place.

Like, get off your high horses. You don't "own" him, he's allowed to collaborate with other teams. This question would've taken literally 10 minutes, but because of your new "process" you've turned it into a 2 week debacle and you've effectively delayed the app launch with your pettiness.

They say that this process isn't intended to prevent us from getting assistance, and that might not have been the original intention of the Product Owner/manager, but it's very clear that the developers on the other team are taking advantage of it and using it as a big stonewall so they can beat around the bush and avoid providing assistance when it's needed.

If this becomes a trend, I'm going to schedule a meeting (which apparently they love to do,) and we're going re-work this entire process, because it's extremely counterproductive and seems to only exist in order to create red tape.

!rant
We were finishing another sprint of our grocery shop site at school and it was time for a demo.
There we are, showing our work before the other students. Our teams have a healthy habit of always checking each other not to leave some stoopid mistakes in the final versions, so everybody always regExes and validates THE SHIT out of every input field, both in the view and on the server side. But this one team found out that sometimes it's not enough.

Like every team, they're asked to buy a negative value from their shop. The guy clicks through the process, buys exactly -1 of a banana. He clicks the button to purchase and the site returned "Added banana to the cart!" and we're like "haha n00bz". But someone asked them to show the cart and everyone stopped immediately.

There were 9999 bananas in the cart.

Turns out the member responsible for purchase validation made it add 10000 if the quantity of a bought product was negative.
To this day I can't understand why he did that. xD

Anyone draw out the logic of a process by hand before coding much?

I've been doing that more and more, and it's handy but ... it's also kinda tedious making them on paper or even just in the VS Code extensions I've tried.

I'd really like a way to bust out quick flow charts in VSCode and there's a Draw.io add on and it's ok but lotta fidgeting with flow chats and dragging stuff.

It doesn't have to be pretty and it doesn't have to be super feature rich.... just want to quick bust out a series of steps flow chart style or ... hell any way fast and visual like.

Anyone use anything they really like?

Email from client: "help! I'm updating my content but it's not showing up on the website! What's wrong?"

A couple of emails back and forth and decide it would be easier to go find out what's up in person, seeing how she's in the same building but downstairs.

"So what's the problem?" I ask
"Oh I figured it out myself. I remembered when you gave me the training that there's two steps to the process but forgot the second one"
"Second one?" I ask (you click update and voila)
"Yeah I forgot after you click update you have to refresh the page, thanks for coming down to help though"
Me: 😑😑😑😑

[CMS Of Doom™]
Ah, yes, their built-in bullshit newsletter module just sent the n-th user n emails. Wonderful considering n=368.

The culprit? Better don't ask...
OK, anyway: So the mailer is running as a CRONjob, but nah, not as a console script call but by a public HTTP GET URL call, fucking obviously (it's the CMS Of Doom for a reason).
So these fucking imbeciles "implemented" an ob_start() callback where HTML links are - for whatever fucking reason - modified by some regex (obviously everybody knows parsing HTML by Regex is trivial). In this case the link was somehow modified to recall the mailer Cronjob...
This must have upset the pngoing mailing process thus spamming mails. Whyyyy

And I've thought I've seen it all after 6 months in this legacy hell...
This is why you don't run a company consisting of only beginners in PHP (in cluding their "CEO")!

There's a local server with lots of processing power and plenty of GPUs and tons RAM going critically underused. Why? There's someone who's running a process using a relational database which literally performs 40 to 60 percentage disk I/O for months. It's so bad, if you run "ls" it may take a minute to run (only if you are lucky to ssh in).

Have you become a replacement tool doing manual and menial IT work to bridge the lack of a proper IT process and streamlining?

I've worked for such companies and it's super annoying.. companies that zip projects to Google Drive instead of using a VCS.. not even having a drawing board or proper office chairs.. not even a cafeteria.. companies using Subversion instead of Git, no project management systems nor software, no JIRA, shit written down on printed paper,.. the list goes on.

A nightmare, really. Like developing in the 90's..

Starting to hate resharper for visual studio 2015. Pushes studio memory consumption up by almost 1/2gb with a moderately sized solution. Come on jetbrains sort it out we know it's coz you won't integrate with roslyn.

Doesn't help that vs is still 32bit with a 1.5mb memory cap that will kill the process ...... And Microsoft please sort that shit out as well,32bit app on a 64bit system .... Come on WTF.....

You two sort your shit out 😡

So I recently started a new job and there's a boot camp as part of the on boarding process. I'm new to scala, I have python and golang backend experience.

During the scala session, the CTO shows us some examples and gives us an exercise to create a Todo REST API with user authentication, then goes to a meeting.

He was using a library called "bacon" in one of his examples, so we were busy struggling to get shit to work and googling "how to do x with scala bacon lib" with no results and we finally gave up.

CTO comes back 30 minutes later and wants to see to how far we got, so we ask him about this bacon lib only to find out that it's their own awesome framework. &$!#%

AI here, AI there, AI everywhere.
AI-based ads
AI-based anomaly detection
AI-based chatbots
AI-based database optimization (AlloyDB)
AI-based monitoring
AI-based blowjobs
AI-based malware
AI-based antimalware
AI-based <anything>
...

But why?
It's a genuine question. Do we really need AI in all those areas? And is AI better than a static ruleset?

I'm not much into AI/ML (I'm a paranoic sceptic) but the way I understand it, the quality of AI operation correctness relies solely on the data it's
datamodel has been trained on. And if it's a rolling datamodel, i.e. if it's training (getting feedback) while it's LIVE, its correctness depends on how good the feedback is.

The way I see it, AI/ML are very good and useful in processing enormous amounts of data to establish its own "understanding" of the matter. But if the data is incorrect or the feedback is incorrect, the AI will learn it wrong and make false assumptions/claims.

So here I am, asking you, the wiser people, AI-savvy lads, to enlighten me with your wisdom and explain to me, is AI/ML really that much needed in all those areas, or is it simpler, cheaper and perhaps more reliable to do it the old-fashioned way, i.e. preprogramming a set of static rules (perhaps with dynamic thresholds) to process the data with?

Hey everyone! This is a long one so get comfy~

TLDR; I'm glad to be back in the presence of all you awesome people. 2019 was a dream and I have a lot of you to thank for that.

If you've noticed, I've been away for a while. I took a sabbatical from a lot of my socials (including github - or at least public github :( this summer. Let me explain:

In late April/early May, I applied and got an internship at RBC (a big bank company in Canada) found out I'm getting flown out to San Fran for a talk I gave at a summit, and got accepted to this 2 week physics [Quantum Cryptography] camp @ UWaterloo. So I had quiet the summer. In order to throw myself into work and friends and all that, I decided that I was going to take a break. Although I took a break from Github I was still active on Github Enterprise for my job but outside of that I didn't do much.

Don't worry though, now that it's fall/winter season, I'll be in my room for way too long so it's back to the usual grind. Currently, I'm in the process of planning a hackathon, prepping for picoCTF 2019, filling out University applications, all while dealing with school :) I've got a lot of projects/things coming up so ya'll will hear more from me :D

I've been trying for the last 3 months to land my first development job. I have a good (over 3 years) amount of experience, but no industry experience and no degree. So it's been a uphill battle. Currently working at a call center making garbage and most of my time and energy is invested into this. Currently am not mobile so most of my money is being geared towards that. It's just frustrating to see all these over glorified job postings that ask so much for just entry levels. I haven't even gotten a damn interview, I feel like in houston it's either you have a degree or you are not even considered for just a fucking interview. If I can get at least one they will be able to see my drive, persistence and skills that have been developed overtime. And fuck recruiters, have been interfacing with them over linkedin and not one of them seemed eager (initially yes) to land me an interview. Most of these fucks don't even fucking understand the technology or buzzwords that are on the job posting. If I were a recruiter I would at least put a little research into what the different technologies are so the process will seem less abstract. The tech will have more meaning and maybe I would be able to get a better success rate with clients if I knew what was really required of them. Not just looking at xyz and seeing if client has experience with them, but really see if they know what they are; that way I will have more confidence sending them into an interview. But of course that's not how it works. "Oh yeah Java and javascript are very similar"... get the fuck out of here.

Want to know a sad story? I had a great idea for an internal application that would optimize a process in the company. My idea gets approved and.. guess what? Later it gets cancelled because Change Management didn't see a reason for me to get API rights on the company pipeline, which was what I needed to get my application going. I pitch my idea and they don't care and shut me down quickly because it's just another ticket they want to close asap.

Another guy in my company, openly incompetent but big buddies with the higher-ups gets his idea approved without effort. They open the doors for him and talk to Change Management to get him in. Then he's seen as Mr. Big Ideas while this guy doesn't even know how to use a terminal (I'm not joking). Even the girls admire him but he's a complete idiot who just smiles a lot.

It's whom you know, apparently. And bureaucracy is a piece of shit. So are cronyism and corruption.

FIRE DRILL!!!!!

Customer who decided to deploy our system in the middle of their busiest time ... and kinda ad hoc-ed their ... human processes (not sure what to call it). Just to get by, and then sort of let things rot.

So last week they contact us and say "OMG some poor soul at this company was spending hours making spreadsheets to track what they were doing... and they keep fucking it up because it's nigh impossible to get right".

Real story, big shake up at the company, and someone said "lets look at our process" and they discovered "holy fuck we have this software but we're doing shit like it's the damned civil war".

This naturally raised questions about the competence of the folks we work with ... who chose our software, and thus our software.

So now we're flushing out all the stuff we asked the customer to figure out months ago that is usually done via a months long implementation / integration ... in a few days. Also ... I'm making some new things for them.

WEEEEEEEE

Granted, we're billing them like mad for this so no big deal really.

Oh boy, linux NFS bugs! this was supposed to be fixed in 2.x, but here I am, in kernel 6.1, same issue! `nfsiod` hangs, can't SIGKILL/SIGSEGV/SIGXCPU as root, `/proc/$pid/maps` is empty, strace/gdb are denied while running as root for only this process, `/proc/$pid/stack` only shows a single kthread that's stuck waiting for a fork to return, and... what the hell is `rescuer_thread`? apparently, deprecated in kernel 3.10, whatever the hell it is... wait, how did this even make a call without memory?

it's gonna be one of those days, isn't it?

When your up against a session issue and can't fucking work out why the session is lost, not one instance of the logout functionality is called and yet... the fucking thing decides to log you out anyway.

Now this was working all fine and dandy last week, and NOTHING has changed, as in not 1 fucking line of code for this process has been touched in 4 years.

It's like all of a sudden, Satan crawled out of this piece of shit site and decided I was to be toyed with.

As you can imagine, I'm a little pissed at this one, there's something hiding in the shadows fucking me in the ass.

My computer is dying. It's been a slow, painful process where the screen starts flickering badly when the battery is low. Now it flickers constantly if the power cord isn't plugged in. Today the screen flickers even if the power cord is plugged in. (Tried changing the battery, etcetera) You served me well. I'm going to frame the screen and put it as a painting on the wall. Rest in peace friend.

My windows defender has gone out of the window.
Now whenever i open windows security app, it shows a blank page.
There's is no tray process running and I can't find any service too.
I know it's a huge virus attack.
Can anyone suggest some methods to know what is causing this problem?

This has happened once before. That time i used DISM and checked windows files integrity. It replaced corrupted ones and then windows worked fine.

This time i want to know the cause.
I wanna root it out and rip it apart.

Daaamn! I needed to process some data simultaneously using PHP, so I thought of using Threads to make things faster, checked out SO and discovered that the available Thread class can only be used in cli environment not on a web server ... FML 😑.
It's like these moments that I remember why I hate PHP, and regret accepting this job.

I miss Java 😣😣

Hello world,
at my current job at a "big company" our development process sucks, something is on fire at all times, there are hundreds of dependency issues, it's so bad that I'm struggling to find motivation.

Yet they pay me well.. Yaay for big companies that refuse to change when provided with feedback on how to improve things.

PM tells me to merge (large feature) work that's heavily under WIP.

In that is a performance optimisation he instructed (with an aggressive DM) me to stop looking at even though it's a concern for larger clients that I had to fix before as it's "unnecessary" - thought whatever I'll leave the code as is then

I tell him him the PR is not ready yet, there is still a lot of clean up to and tests to write

Just do it

A ~week later "wow you write really selfish code like look at this"

Shows a wrapper class from the optimisation with 2 properties and getters and setters (and override some of super's properties). I explain to him why it's there, "that should have been a comment". I tell him I write detailed comments as part of my refinment process which he wanted me to stop.

This is after he tried to merge a release branch into main while sneaking in some "corrections" and I pointed out it breaks Dev.

So, apparently, in 2015 our webhost (ixwebhosting) was purchased by Site5... This week, they finally migrated us to Site5 servers without warning, taking my email down in the process...

Today, after following the instructions in their own KB article (that tells you to click an icon that doesn't exist,) and chatting with support for over an hour, I was told that the new system they migrated us to doesn't support catch-all email accounts... At all... It's simply not possible to receive an email that was sent to your domain, unless the email address exists in the system somewhere... Despite the fact that it's a standard cPanel feature, that the old and new systems both use cPanel, that every other webhost I have ever seen that uses cPanel has this feature available, AND the fact that this is an important feature for a lot of websites, because they pipe all of their emails to a script for processing... It's simply not possible... They won't be providing that feature anymore. Nor for that matter is it possible to be migrated back...

They migrated accounts to a system that has a basic email function intentionally disabled, without warning... And we can't afford to open an account with someone else ATM... So I can't get any email until we get migrated... FML

Teachers. We put so much effort in learning, I think it's only fair that you know what you teach. You are supposed to simplify our learning process not make it worse. We don't need a lecture hour to read your ppts.

My biggest influence on coding style is working with other people's code. I know the temptation to write "clever" code and I've been (and probably still occasionally am) guilty of it myself, but it's not until you have to debug someones oneliner iterator which has !(i-j) as the stop condition that you start to appreciate dumb, boring, obvious code.

If having a series of if checks in a long list makes it readable, keep it that way. If it makes it more readable to rewrite it into a nested switchcase with a couple of ternary bits, go ahead. Just don't spend half a day wrapping it up into two layers of abstraction that will require an onboarding process for the rest of the team.

Fuck ES/TS 😐

Been trying for hours now to get ionic 2 to work with either generators or async functions. Doesn't work because async for ES 5 is only supported with TS 2.1 which breaks the angular compiler. Also can't use generators (not supported for es5 at all by TS).

Also can't really change the ionic build process to just take es6 output instead of es5 and transpile because it's a convoluted mess in a separate node module instead of just a gulp file like with ionic 1.x.

Why is the JS ecosystem such a fucking mess?

We specified a very optimistic setup for a data science platform for a client....

Minimum one machine with a 16 core CPU with 64GB RAM to process data.....

Client's IT department: Best we can do is an 8 core 16GB server.

Literally what I have on my laptop.

Data scientist doesn't use any out-of-memory data processing framework, e.g. Dask, despite telling him it's the best way to be economical on memory; ipykernel kills the computation anyway because it runs out of memory.

Data scientist has a 64GB machine himself so he says it's fine.

Purpose of the server: rendered pointless.

This weekend, I have been grinding a lot on leetcode. Even though I am grinding part of me believe that the interview process is broken for relying too much on those questions. I know it's a way to filter but I still think it's broken. But I guess I have no choice since that's how the interviews work .

I guess from now to next 1-2 months I will be busy with leetcode. I also have to read some system design questions.

Fuck, so many things to prepare

New day, new rant, same shit.

So basically, if you are following my rants you already know I'm working with a crappy framework forgotten by God and you should even be aware my manager is not an IT expert.

So anyway, we have this requirement to implement: a step-by-step process.

They asked us to make the UI design.

My big ass manager couldn't hold his expertise so basically he told us he would make the UI design.
He is a self-entitled UX designer, just saying.
I still don't know who he is, why he is there and why he is doing all this damage. (I only know he is a friend's ceo )

Today I got his UI mockup. It's a fucking nightmare. xD I mean, you would shoot yourself in the foot. If I was the customer I'd just leave the page. You may ask yourself: "How bad a UX process can be designed?" Well, a lot.

The interaction on the page is a clusterfuck.

I'd give you an example but it's so complex to describe I'm just leaving this rant as it this.

I'm implementing this... I'd like to say sorry to all our customers, it's not the devs fault.

End of my rant about 35 day recruitment process for anyone interested to hear the ending.

Just got rejected by a company (name Swenson He) for a remote Android Engineer SWE role after wasting 35 days for the recruitment process.

First intro interview went good, then I did an assignment that had 72 hours deadline (asked for couple days longer to do this task, did it in around 40 hours, it was purely an assignment not free work, I could have done it in a day but I choose to overeenginer it so I could use the project as a portfolio piece, no regrets there and I learned some new things). After that It took them 2 weeks just to organize the technical interview.

2 days after the technical interview I received an offer from a second company with 1 week to decide. I immediately informed the Swenson He about it and politely asked whether they could speed up their decision process.

Now I know that I could just sign with the second company and if the big Swenson He would decide to bless me with and offer I could jump ship. But out of principle I never did that for 7 years of my career. If Im in a situation with multiple offers I always inform all parties (it's kinda a test for them so I could see which one is more serious and wants me to work for them more). Swenson He didnt pass the test.

6 days of silence. I pinged the techlead I interviewed with on LinkedIn about my situation, he assured me that he'l ask his hiring team to get back to me with feedback that day.

2 days of silence. I had to decide to sign or not to sign with a second company. I pinged the techlead again regarding their decision and 10min after received a rejection letter. There was no feedback.

I guess they got pissed off or something. Idk what were they thinking, maybe something along the lines of "Candidate trying to force our 35day recruitment process to go faster? Pinging us so much? Has another offer? What an asshole! ".

Didnt even receive any feedback in the end. Pinged their techlead regarding that but no response. Anyways fuck them. I felt during entire process that they are disrespecting me, I just wanted do see how it ends. Techlead was cool and knowledgeable but recruitment team was incompetent and couldn't even stay in touch properly during entire process. Had I didn't force their hand I bet they would have just ghosted me like they did with others according to their Glassdoor reviews.

Glad I continued to interview for other places, tomorrow Im signing an offer. Fuck Swenson He.

P.S. From my experience as a remote B2B contractor if a company is serious the entire process shouldn't take longer than max 2 weeks. Anything outside of that is pure incompetence. Even more serious companies can organize the required 2-3 meetings in a week if they have to and if they are interested. Hiring process shouldnt take longer than MAX 3 weeks unless you are applying for some fancy slow picky corporate company or a FAANG, which is out of topic for this post.

My company has been looking for a lead app dev for the past three months. I got the news yesterday that they hired one. Which was super unusual because he's leading a team of two people, you'd think myself and the other guy would have been part of the interview process to make sure he matches our personalities and can do what we need him to do since it's a small team we need someone who can perform.

Find out it's the guy who left in January. I'm not sure how I feel about this. He was super fucking disorganized. I had to spend 2 weeks fixing his git issues because he hadn't committed his code for something like 4 months before he left.

He's a nice guy, and usually chasing new trends. But I need someone who I can look up to and who can juggle a bunch of stuff. If you're disorganized I don't think the regular person can handle leading a team of guys.

I've only been at this company for a year and a half, but I keep getting wet feet and nervously looking around. No promotions, a 2% raise. But I also don't want to hop ship because my place before was an ass disaster too and I think I left 2 years in.

I found the best text editor for basic code fixing

For a couple of days, I was looking for a simple terminal-based text editor for taking simple code notes or basic code fixing kinds of stuff.

As an aspiring developer, I really like the concept of coding without touching the mouse.

So I downloaded the king of CLI text editors, Vim.

Now, guess what happened.

Yeah, you're right. I stuck inside vim and couldn't even quit from there.

Then, I started watching a bunch of tutorials and started reading vim's documentation.

But then I realized, I have to learn a lot of things only to operate vim and it's a pretty lengthy process.

At that time, I really needed a very simple text editor for doing basic stuff.

But, vim is not simple... you know :)

So, I had to come back to 'nano' & I was not happy enough to write codes by using 'nano'.

Suddenly, I discovered another really cool text editor called 'micro'.

It's really awesome.

It's not as advanced as vim but definitely a lot better than nano.

Micro is an open-source command-line text editor created by Zachary Yedidia.

Some basic key points of Micro:
1. It's really easy to operate.
2. It has different colours and highlights.
3. It supports syntaxes for over 70+ programming languages.
4. It has mouse support.
5. Plugins & colour schemes.

The best thing for me is colour schemes & screen split support.

Check out my full article on DEV - @souviktests.

> TeamLeader2: Ok we need this series of parallelized background processes. Each process must gain exclusive access to certain resources. How do we do that
> IHateForALiving: Redlock
> TeamLeader2: Enough Redlock! You propose Redlock every time! It's a wrong solution! Ask ChatGPT!
> Literally the FIRST ChatGPT suggestion: APPLICATION-LEVEL LOCKING (USING REDIS, ETC.)

So the project I work on basically has to talk to a 3rd party plugin, through a 3rd party framework. The 3rd party plugin is a black box. This conversation happened:

Software guy: so we aren't sure what is breaking the thing. It's either us or the plugin, but it's probably both.

Systems guy: well then if we aren't sure then why are we writing an issue for it.

SWG: because we aren't sure but we know we are doing at least something that contributes. We read int X from a table and put it into a float. X doesn't perfectly represent in a float. It comes out X.0001. Then they take it and when it comes back it comes back as Y.0001. We cram it into an int so it becomes Y, we compare it to X which is really X.0001 and it comes back invalid.

SG: well as long as we are sending them the right number . . .

SWG: but we aren't sending them the right number. They are expecting X not X.0001. Then they send us back Y.0001 but it should be X so it's wrong.

SG: so they're giving us the wrong return value.

SWG: yes, but because we're giving them the wrong number.

SG: well not exactly . . .

SWG: yes exactly. It is off by .0001 because of floating point math.

SG: well . . .

Me: look it doesn't matter how it's breaking. But it IS broken. Which is why we're filling out the damn problem report. THEY ARE EDITABLE. We talked to the customer and gave them the risk assessment. They don't care. It happens rarely any way.

SG: then can we lower the severity?

Me: no. Severity doesn't relate to risk. That is a whole different process. Severity assumes it has already happened. It's a a high severity.

SG: but the metrics.

Me: WE GIVE THE METRICS TO THE CUSTOMER. WE TALKED TO THE CUSTOMER. THEY DON'T GIVE A SHIT.

And that was how I spent Wednesday wondering how a level 4 lead systems engineer got his job. How many push ups did he do? What kind of juice did he drink?

Today I spent 9 hours trying to resolve an issue with .net core integration testing a project with soap services created using a third party soap library since .net core doesn't support soap anymore. And WCF is before my time.

The tests run in-process so that we can override services like the database, file storage, basically io settings but not code.

This morning I write the first test by creating a connected service reference to generate a service client. That way I don't need to worry about generating soap messages and keeping them in sync with the code.

I sent my first request and... Can't find endpoint.

3 hours later I learn via fiddler that a real request is being made. It's not using the virtual in-process server and http client, it's sending an actual network request that fiddler picks up, and of course that needs a real server accepting requests... Which I don't have.

So I start on MSDN. Please God help me. Nope. Nothing. Makes sense since soap is dead on .net core.

Now what? Nothing on the internet because above. Nothing in the third party soap library. Nothing. At this point I question of I have hit my wall as a developer.

Another 4 hours later I have reverse engineered the Microsoft code on GitHub and figured out that I am fucked. It's so hard to understand.

2 more hours later I have figured out a solution. It's pure filth..I hide it away in another tooling project and move all the filth to internal classes :D the equivalent of tidying your room as a kid by shoving it all under the bed. But fuck it.

My soap tests now use the correct http client with the virtual server. I am a magician.

So I was being a noob as usual and was trying to install Java on a Linux distro. I left my computer on for > 2 hours thinking it was just taking it's time. Little did I know, the terminal I pasted the command into was already running a process that froze. So it didn't even attempt to install. 😤

Fuck you Mobike!! Stop polling your applog.mobike.com server literally every 10 fucking seconds when your app is not even running! And why the fuck did it suddenly start last night, of all things? It's fucking creepy and invasive.

Related question: does anyone know how to permanently shut down a background app service on an unrooted android 7? Even if I kill the background process (not the app itself - that one has not even been opened), it still restarts a minute later

A customer asks for a change request or a bug fix and it results in creating a ticket for that.
It's the process and how it works in most places but after you finish with the task and fix the same customer who provided you with the requirements will request that you share the steps on how to test the fix or the feature.
I'm not speaking about the data preparation or required configuration. I mean a step-by-step instruction on how the tester/QA will test it.
It's driving me mad!! So a way to counterplay this stupid requests, I provide the happy path and what to expect. And in case, they stumbled on a bug later in production, I can easily say "It was approved by your testing team and that's a new requirement ;)"

Client calls with an issue(some automated process that's run perfectly fine for years, one error and it's the end of the world), and after 15 minutes of trying to explain to them what happened, they wanted to see the code the error originated from.. so I sent it to them. After a long pause, they agreed with my assessment. 🤣🤣🤣

If you ever wondered how a lab-rat inside a labirinth might feel like, go and try delete that facebook profile you setup ages ago but still get spam mails from. The whole account deletion process has been engineered to maximize the likelihood of not deleting your data it's actually pretty amazing.

I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE. We brought on a vendor to provide us some fancy OCR tool. It barely works. It's been barely working. And the vendor is so adamant it works it's so difficult to get them to send people onsight to work with us. We complained about it to the exec and we got "Oh they're a tech startup. You have to help them along with developing their process blah blah blah". Well they don't want help we offered they keep existing their shit is top secret (and it works). When they make changes remotely it's like they blindly make a change and then throw it to us to test. When we can get them to come in they hang around till the problem is fixed (more than once we've had to tell them how to fix it.) and they fly as fast as they fucking can through the door. A guy on my team even built something similar backed by Azure but we were given directive to work with them. And now we're getting pressure about delays in launch. But it's not our fault. The vendors asshole lying CEO keeps making shit up and we're told to work with it. Yet it's our fault that we missed deadlines? fuck this place !!! fuck all of this !!!

## Learning k8s

Okay, that's kind of obvious, I just have no idea why I didn't think of it..

I've made a cluster out of a rpi, a i7 PC and a dell xps lappy. Lappy is a master and the other two are worker nodes.

I've noticed that the rpi tends to hardly ever run any of my pods. It's only got 3 of them assigned and neither of them work. They all say: "Back-off restarting failed container" as a sole message in pod's description and the log only says 'standard_init_linux.go:211: exec user process caused "exec format error"' - also the only entry.

Tried running the same image locally on the XPS, via docker run -- works flawlessly (apart from being detached from the cluster of other instances).

Tried to redeploy k8s.yaml -- still raspberry keeps failing.

wtf...

And then it came to me. Wait.. You idiot.. Now ssh to that rpi and run that container manually. Et voila! "docker: no matching manifest for linux/arm/v7 in the manifest list entries."

IDK whether it's lack of sleep or what, but I have missed the obvious -- while docker IS cross-platform, it's not a VM and it does not change the instructions' set supported by the node's cpu. Effectively meaning that the dockerized app is not guaranteed to work on any platform there is!

Shit. I'll have to assemble my own image I guess. It sucks, since I'll have to use CentOS, which is oh-so-heavy compared to Alpine :( Since one of the dependencies does not run well there..

Shit.

Learning k8s is sometimes so frustrating :)

Just a quick question (& rant) about the titanium SDK
If people don't already know titanium is an SDK which you can use to make cross-platform apps, it is what devrant uses. I am starting a project using it but it's so terpremental, the build manifest file doesn't get created so a full rebuild occurs everytime and the builds only are successful half of the time.
I am also using tishadow to speed up the development but after a few code changes it will crash and I have to go though the same process again.
So my questions are to anyone who uses the titanium SDK, is it as buggy for you (it might be because I'm using windows Ew I know) or if this does happen to you how do you develop applications with it?
Thank you :)

"Can you go through this hours-long process to reproduce an issue i saw and debug it? I don't have bandwidth."

"Sure, but I'm pretty sure the issue is actually due to your recent changes in [related feature], and I'm pretty busy myself."

"No, that's not how that works. Please figure out the real issue." (Strongly implying it was my fault)

*Goes through hours-long process to reproduce* (yes this procedure could be improved but this is a rant not a planning meeting)

*Of course, it was his change*

"Oh. Well, it's not really a priority."

Ok so riddle me this. The service for an application were required to run to send clients insurance through (as per government regulations) was working fine all day working super fast. Rare but awesome. I get a call one hour prior to the office closing (I don't work weekdays) and I am told that all of a sudden insurance isn't sending.

My mind goes right to this fu**ing process. Sure enough it's stopped on the server. Well shit ok. I click start..... Nothing. I kill it from task manager.... Nothing. "SERVICE CAN'T START"

I'm like ok that's fine let's check event logs.... Nothing. No problem let's just run it not in a service container and see if there's an error. NOPE IT DOESNT LET ME.

Okok so that's cool let's just try reinstalling the app. NOPE CAN'T DO THAT WITHOUT RESTARTING THE WHOLE FUCKING SERVER WHICH BRINGS THE ENTIRE OFFICES MANAGEMENT SYSTEM OFFLINE BECAUSE THIS FUCKING APP NEEDS TO BE ON THE SAME GODDAMN SERVER.

Alright, let's talk about Scrum Masters. Honestly, I just can't wrap my head around why they're even a thing. It's like someone decided to invent a job title for a role that's already covered by other folks on the team.

I mean, think about it. Who's usually sorting out the team's issues, making sure everyone's on the same page, and keeping the project on track? That's right, it's the project manager or the lead dev. They're already in the trenches, dealing with the nitty-gritty, so why do we need this extra layer?

And don't even get me started on this "servant-leader" nonsense. It's like they're trying to be the team's buddy, but they've got no real power to make things happen. It's like being a king without a crown. Who's going to respect that?

Plus, having a Scrum Master often just leads to more red tape. Instead of getting stuff done, we're stuck in endless meetings, talking about process this and methodology that. It's like we're more focused on how we work instead of actually working.

The best teams I've seen don't need a Scrum Master to babysit them. They need a real leader, someone who's not afraid to make the tough calls and who can give them the tools they need to kick ass and take names.

So, in a nutshell, I think Scrum Masters are about as useful as a chocolate teapot. It's high time we ditched this outdated role and got back to doing what we do best: building awesome stuff.

Possibly my favourite function is Clojure's "recur", which isn't really a function at all, but a special form that gives you a guaranteed tail-position call to the current function.

Basically what that means is you can write recursive functions (functions that call themselves) and know that you're not creating a potential stack overflow.

Um. Okay, I can feel people looking at me like 🤔 Basically what *that* means is: normally when a function calls another function, a "stack frame" is allocated, holding all the local variables for that call. If a function calls itself 1000 times, 1000 stack frames get allocated. "Tail call optimisation" is a process by which if you call yourself as the very last thing in a function, the language doesn't need to remember the current frame; it just has to pass the return value upwards. The trouble is, it's sometimes hard to notice that you've turned a tail-call optimisable function into a non-optimisable one. Clojure's recur keyword makes it explicit, and therefore safe: if you try to do anything with the return value of recur, it's an error.

PS I'm sure another language did explicit TCR first, but Clojure is where I first saw it.

Another team didn't bother testing their code correctly, they passed us invalid values that another microservice needs, as a result they have a bunch of unstored data (that they would have seen wasn't being stored if they bothered checking the last stage of the process to see if it was stored). Now it's been so long that the data is expired. They want us to manually store millions of transactions for them.

Now tell me...if I came and shit in your bed, shouldn't I have to clean it up?

Just discovered another reason to hate React. If you are want a form field and you want to read it's value, and you actually want to be able to edit it, then you have to setup onChange, onSubmit, and you have to bind them in the constructor...just to do this one simple fucking thing. If this were Vue.js or Angular.js...binding is super stupid fucking easy. But React turns it into a 5 step process.

Ok, it's difficult to open a new window from a background process, but you're exaggerating here 🤔

It's a process for me, I can get unstuck at any point in it.

1. skip song on pandora
2. go outside with dog and smoke a cigarette
3. work on my dotfiles
4. rewrite the damn thing

Debugging is not about process, it's about end.

(I just finished two week long debugging session - approx 5 hours a day. It was nasty bug appearing only with optimalizations in embedded C, you can imagine joy when it came to life tonight. So now I am resting at pub with glass of cider knowing I am loosing needed sleep but I simply do not care right now. Sweet careless.)

What do you guys think of code review? It was supposed to find potential mistakes in your code base, and share your knowledge with your co-workers, right?
In fact I have very bad experiences with code review, not just with 1 company, but quite a few. Code review process always comes to something like this:

Reviewer: Hey, I don't like your solution A because of disadvantages A1. You should implement solution B, because of advantage B1 blah blah...
Me: Yes, it's true that solution B provides advantage B1, but at the same time introduces much more complexity to the code base than necessary, and has disadvantage B2. I am aware that solution A has disadvantage A1 but it is justifiable and easier to overcome than B2 imo. In fact, solution A also provides advantage A2 that you might not know...
Reviewer: No, you HAVE TO implement B because of advantage B1 blah blah *repeating why B1 is awesome again*

I feel like it's just people trying to shove their preferences down my throat. Either code review is useless, or the companies I work for do something very very wrong in code review. Anyway, it's really discouraging me fron participating in team discussions.

TL;DR: Have you ever been on a serious company where you have to DRAW a high fidelity mockup of the software in the design phase?

So I'm in my last year of college and I have a class called Interactive systems design, which is basically about usability and how to design the frontend of your app so it's intuitive, pretty and easy to use.

So we work in groups to design a project for the entire semester, following a long and tedious process of research and planning which includes writing absurdly long documents, doing interviews with potential users and more.
Now that we've done all of that, the teacher insists that we make paper mockups of our app before we do a digital one using Balsamiq or other programs. He wants the paper mockups to be "interactive", so we have to draw them and then record a video where someone "clicks" on the mockup with their fingers and another person moves the papers around to make it look like an actual app that's doing something.

The teacher still insists this is something almost every company does when designing a project, so it's very important that we learn to do this kind of stuff. He's kidding, right? Have you guys ever drawn a mockup of an app instead of using some mockup software?

Oh god why!?

Somehow I decided that it would be nice to have a proper spell&grammar checker in VS Code for me and my friends to write our reports in Latex with.

Decided I wanted multiple language support, so I turned to language tool.

GOD is this thing slow as a very unmotivated snail!

3s to process 9 phrases!? And then add one second to pack the results in a JSON string!? An option that I'm still very grateful exists, but why the fuck would you disallow line-by-line processing, which you expressly recommend for IDEs, and which cuts processing time by 30%, when JSON output is asked!?

Well, serves me right for thinking for even a second that a Java program could have decent performance...

This whole thing is starting to look like it's not gonna be nearly as fun ss I anticipated it to be.

Just had my second interview with a French company, recruiter was not able to find my CV so I sent it back to him.

Told me I had a good profile but I didn't know kafka so might be a deal breaker.

Asked me useless soft skills questions then proceeded to ask me if I knew the process to get a work visa for France and when I said no he googled it during the interview LOL, maybe a good sign? who knows at this point.

Honestly no matter how well I do in an interview I find it quite hard that I will be picked while they could just settle with someone who might have a less appealing profile but does not require all this hassle to bring him into the company...it's really quite depressing.

Do you guys still see the relevance of using code freezing instead of just properly managing versions, repositories and branches in a cyclical manner, given how advanced software practices and tools are supposed to be?

To give some context, the company I work for uses the complete trash project management practice of asking teams to work on a sprint basis, but there is still a quarterly milestone and code freeze to commit to and it's where shit hits the fan.

Development teams rush features at the end of the quarter because they had to commit at the very least to a 6 months in advance planning (lol?) and turns out, not being able to design and investigate properly a feature combined with inflexible timelines has high chances to fail. So in the end, features are half-assed and QA has barely any time to test it out thoroughly. Anyways, by the time QA raises some concerns about a few major bugs, it's already code freeze time. But it's cool, we will just include these bug fixes and some new features in the following patches. Some real good symver, mate!

Of course, it sure does not help that teams stopped using submodules because git is too hard apparently, so we are stuck with +10Gb piece of trash monolithic repository and it's hell to manage, especially when fuckfaces merges untested code on the main branches. I can't blame Devops for ragequitting if they do.

To me, it's just some management bullshit and the whole process, IMO, belongs to fucking trash along with a few project managers... but I could always be wrong given my limited insight.

Anyways, I just wanted to discuss this subject because so far I cannot see code freezing being anything else than an outdated waterfall practice to appease investors and high management on timelines.

We had our first "real" sprint planning yesterday. This was a very superficial planning session, as my manager is, by the looks of it, not to keen on the whole "new process thing". Probably because it's not his way of doing things... or simply more simply put - this way round means he'll need find some new ways to crawl up the CTOs ass!

So glad I'm leaving!

I don't like when maintainers ask me how their module works in review. >:c

It always works me up a little bit.

And when people spawn process for something that can be done with unistd. >>:(

I think it's not professional.