Yesterday: Senior dev messages out a screenshot of someone using an extension method I wrote (he didn’t know I wrote it)..

SeniorDev: “OMG…that has to be the stupidest thing I ever saw.”
Me: “Stupid? Why?”
SeniorDev: “Why are they having to check the value from the database to see if it’s DBNull and if it is, return null. The database value is already null. So stupid.”
Me: “DBNull is not null, it has a value. When you call the .ToString, it returns an empty string.”
SeniorDev: ”No it doesn’t, it returns null.”
<oh no he didn’t….the smack down begins>
Me: “Really? Are you sure?”
SeniorDev: “Yes! And if the developer bothered to write any unit tests, he would have known.”
Me: “Unit tests? Why do you assume there aren’t any unit tests? Did you look?”
<at this moment, couple other devs take off their head phones and turn around>
SeniorDev:”Well…uh…I just assumed there aren’t because this is an obvious use case. If there was a test, it would have failed.”
Me: “Well, let’s take a look..”
<open up the test project…navigate to the specific use case>
Me: “Yep, there it is. DBNull.Value.ToString does not return a Null value.”
SeniorDev: “Huh? Must be a new feature of C#. Anyway, if the developers wrote their code correctly, they wouldn’t have to use those extension methods. It’s a mess.”
<trying really hard not drop the F-Bomb or two>
Me: “Couple of years ago the DBAs changed the data access standard so any nullable values would always default to null. So no empty strings, zeros, negative values to indicate a non-value. Downside was now the developers couldn’t assume the value returned the expected data type. What they ended up writing was a lot of code to check the value if it was DBNull. Lots of variations of ‘if …’ , ternary operators, some creative lamda expressions, which led to unexpected behavior in the user interface. Developers blamed the DBAs, DBAs blamed the developers. Remember, Tom and DBA-Sam almost got into a fist fight over it.”
SeniorDev: “Oh…yea…but that’s a management problem, not a programming problem.”
Me: “Probably, but since the developers starting using the extension methods, bug tickets related to mis-matched data has nearly disappeared. When was the last time you saw DBA-Sam complain about the developers?”
SeniorDev: “I guess not for a while, but it’s still no excuse.”
Me: “Excuse? Excuse for what?”
<couple of awkward seconds of silence>
SeniorDev: “Hey, did you guys see the video of the guy punching the kangaroo? It’s hilarious…here, check this out.. ”

Pin shoulders the mat…1 2 3….I win.

This story is 100% true.

I got hired onto a team of construction workers to build a house. We set up a meeting with Management to find out what kind of house they wanted us to build, where’s the floor plan, what it’s going to be used for, who it’s for, etc. Management said that they didn’t know all that, we should just get started. They told us that we were going to use “Agile” which means that we just work on small deliverables and build the thing incrementally.

The developer team lead argued that we at least need to know how big the thing is going to be so that we can get started pouring the foundation, but Management told him they just don’t know. “What we do know,” Management said, “is that the house is going to have a bathroom. Just start there, and we’ll know more when it’s done. You have two weeks.”

So we just bought a port-a-potty, and screwed around on the internet for two weeks. Management was outraged. “You call this a house? This is the worst house ever! It doesn’t even have a tv!”

So we bought a tv and put it in the port-a-potty, attached to an outdoor generator. We were going to buy a a dvd player and get it hooked up to cable, but Management rejected the expense request, saying that they didn’t know if we needed it, and we’d come back to that later.

Management decided that we definitely need storage space, so we bought a boxcar and duct-taped the port-a-potty to it. Then to our horror they set up some desks and put a few miserable business interns in there. It went on like this…

After a few years the boxcar grew into a huge, ramshackle complex. It floods, leaks, it’s frozen in the winter and an oven in the summer. You have to get around in a strange maze of cardboard tubes, ladders and slides. There are two equally horrible separate buildings. We’re still using just the one outdoor generator for all power, so electricity is tightly rationed.

Communication between the buildings was a problem. For one of them, we use a complex series of flag signals. For the other we write notes on paper, crumple the paper up, and toss it over. Both of these methods were suggested as jokes, but Management really liked them for some reason. The buildings mostly talk to each other but they have to talk through us, so most of what we do is pass messages on.

It was suggested that we use paper airplanes instead of crumpled up balls, but the fat, awkward fingers of the Business Majors who inevitably take those jobs couldn’t be trained to make them. I built an awesome automatic paper airplane folder, but once again they couldn’t be trained to use it, so they just went back to crumpling the notes up in balls.

The worst part of all this is that it’s working. Everyone is miserable, but the business is making money. The bright side is that this nightmare complex is done so now we know what kind of building they actually needed in the first place, so we can start work on it. Obviously we can’t tell Management anything about what we’re doing until it’s finished. They noticed the gigantic hole in the ground where the foundation is coming in, but we told them that it’s a cache reset, and they mostly ignore it except when the occasional customer falls in.

I’ll probably be out of here before the new building gets finished. I could get a 50% raise by switching jobs, but Management still doesn’t think I should get a raise because I missed a couple sprints.

Dear self proclaimed wordpress 'developers/programmers', kindly go fuck yourself.

I'm not talking about wordpress devs/designers who don't claim to have a better skillset than they have and are actually willing to learn, those are very much fine.

I'm talking about those wordpress people who claim that they're developers, programmers or whatever kind of bullshit which they're obviously not.

"A client's site crashed, you have to fix it!!!!!" sorry, come again? It's YOUR client's site. It's hosted on our hosting platform meaning that WE are responsible for KEEPING THE SERVERS UP AND FUNCTIONING.
You call yourself a wordpress 'developer' with 'programming experience' for 10 years but the second one of your shitty sites crashes, you come to us because 'it's your responsibility!!!'.
No, it's not. Next to that fact, the fact that you have to ask US why the site is crashing while you could easily login to your control panel, go to the fucking error logs and see that one of your facebook plugins crashes with a quite English error message, shows me that you definitely don't have 10 years of programming experience. And if you can't find that fucking article which tells you exactly where the motherfucking error logs are, don't come crying to us asking to fix your own fucking bullshit.

"My clients site got hacked, you have to clean it up and get it online again ASAP!!!!" - Nah, sorry, not my responsibility. The fact that you explicitly put your wordpress installation on 'no automatic updates' also doesn't help with my urge to fucking end you right now.
Add to that that we have some quite clear articles on wordpress security which you appearantly found too difficult (really? basic shit like 'set a strong fucking password' is too difficult for you?), you're on your own.

"I'm getting an error, please explain what's going wrong as soon as you can! this is a prio 1!!!!" - Nope. You were a wordpress dev/programmer right? Please act like one.

I'm not your personal wordpress agent.

I'm not your personal hacked wordpress site cleanup guy.

I'm not even a fucking wordpress professional. No, I'd rather jump off a bridge than develop wordpress bullshit for a living.

That you chose to do this, not a problem. Just don't rely on me for fixing your shit.

I'm sick of cleaning up your bullshit.

I'm done with answering your high prio tickets about bullshit which any dev could find out with just a few minutes of searching.

Oh your wordpress site isn't showing up so high in google? Yeah sure, shoot a ticket at us blaming us for your own SEO mess. I'm a fucking sysadmin, not a SEO expert.

I'm fucking done with you.

Go die in a fucking corner.

Tips for all the programmers out there:

- A programmer is not a PC repair man, just no one seems to remember about that

- Programming is thinking, not typing.
Counting starts from zero, not one.

- Even after completing a degree and courses and working on IT projects, learning never stops. If you want to stay competitive you should also work on personal projects that force you to use languages and software you never work with on the job.

- You don’t need serious math skills to be a developer. However, you’ll need basic algebra, logic, strong problem-solving skills, and most of all, patience.
- You don’t need a degree to be a developer - programming is like almost any profession: if you’re good at it, people will pay you for your skills, regardless of how you got there.

- Sleeping with a problem, can actually solve it.

Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.

Some context first and then the rant!

Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.

Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!

Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.

In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)

He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.

The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.

Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).

Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.

Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!

Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.

Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).

Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.

From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.

I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.

The way 90% of the population wears their face masks really explains a lot about their approach to using software, apps & websites as well.

I feel like giving up.

I am not a developer for the salary, or just to solve analytical puzzles. Those are motivators, but my main drive is to make the world more comfortable and enjoyable, better optimized, build ethical services which bring happiness into people's lives. I want to improve society, even if it's just a tiny bit.

But if users invest absolutely zero percent of their limited brain capacity into understanding a product that already has a super-clean design and responds with helpful validation messages...

...why the fuck bother.

I used to think of the gap between technology and tech-incompetent people as an optimization problem.

As something which could be fixed by spending a fortune on UX research. Write tests, hire QA employees, decrease tech debt, create a bold but unified & simple design.

But the technologically incompetent just get more entitled with every small thing you simplify.

It's never fucking fool-proof enough.

Why can't I upload a 220MB PDF as profile picture? Why doesn't the app install on my 9 year old Android Froyo phone? Why can't I sign up if my phone number contains a  U+FFFC? Why does this page load so slowly from my rural concrete bunker in East Ukraine? WHY DO I HAVE PNEUMONIA, HOW DID I GET INFECTED EVEN THOUGH I WAS WEARING A MOUTH MASK ON MY FOREHEAD?

This is why I ran away from Frontend, to Backend, to DBA.

If I could remove myself further from the end user, I would.

At least I still have a full glass of tawny port and a huge database which needs to be normalized & migrated.

Fuck humans, I'm going to hug a server.

** Non Dev Rant **

I just need to rant about this because I'm furious.

Last night I had a house warming party. It was mostly, if not all, of my girlfriend's friends. I'm a cranky old developer so I don't have friends.

Everyone was nice and dressed nice and brought us gifts.. all of the gifts were pretty much specifically for my girlfriend.

So this one girl came... she's younger.. around 25. She came with no gift (I wasn't expecting gifts I just need to mention it for the plot), and was dressed in sweat pants. Alright, no problem.. I really don't care at least she's here.

So as more guests arrive I finally get a gift. Someone brought me a case of beer and a couple of yummy cookies. I had to put it down on the kitchen counter for a bit because I needed to grab more chairs.

The basement door where the chairs are is 10 feet away from where I left my present..

I come back from upstairs.. not even 5 minutes later and I see sweat pant girl stuffing one cookie in her fucking mouth and the other in her pants...

Are you fucking kidding me!? I bought desserts and snacks and all the alcohol you can think of and you steal MY fucking present. Not just one of them... but BOTH.

She saw the other guests give me it.. say "here buddy this is for you"... followed me in the kitchen and STOLE my fucking cookies.

I was going to eat them this morning with my coffee and I realized I couldn't because this fucking ass hole took my fucking cookies!!!!

I hosted this party for my girlfriend's SJW ass hole fucked up friends... put a smile on my face... pretended to like people... and for once didn't yell at someone... and the fucking thanks I get is 2 stolen fucking cookies.

Fuck her.

This pro developer in my work just made me look like a fucking useless potato today. Although he was really nice and made me understand what the problem was.

Damn man, he knows too much 😓

“Yeah but you’re not a *real* developer”

Fuck. you.

I wrote 80% of this code base. I do 80% of the tickets/storyboard points. I do all of the QA. My nose is to the grindstone every fucking day honing this craft and sweating my balls off like a blacksmith staring into the red hot kiln while the sores of previous mistakes scream bloody murder from the unrelenting exposure to heat. I saw this amazing industry of opportunity, freedom and self examination and wanted in no matter what it took. I glued myself to every pithy resource I could possibly get my hands on and crawled through the muck and filth of it all until I could keep myself warm with the smallest spark of my own making. I stoked that spark until it became a fire and stoked that fire until I could set entire forests ablaze. I listened to the ungrateful people keeping warm by my combustion saying it “wasn’t hot enough” or “would have been a nicer colour if they did it” or “could have warmed up just fine jogging on the spot”. I made painstaking alterations to my ignition and watched my undeserving benefactors gradually be silenced and begin to sit quietly by the heat. I jumped into that inferno daily, was reduced to ash daily and emerged reborn daily. But you are right! I didn’t get scammed out of $40k+ studying technology in an archaic institution from instructors who don’t give a shit and answering “D all of the above” for 4+ years straight therefor my opinion doesn’t mean shit. Push your bullshit to prod and watch the server come burning out of the cloud as the apocalyptic swarm of angry tickets come flooding in why don’t you? Bet they didn’t teach you that in school. You’ve never poked around inside an open source codebase in your life. They are just a mystery boxes of magic that unless someone holds your hands with finely crafted instructions containing a 50/50 picture to word ratio you throw a hissy fit. Every problem that comes up instead of working to solve it you reflexively point to the first person in the room while thinking with your pea brain how you can possibly scapegoat them into taking the fall for whatever it is that’s come up today you couldn’t possibly understand.

Not a real developer?

Fuck. You.

I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.

Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.

It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...

I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.

Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.

Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.

He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.

I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.

I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.

If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.

To be a good developer, you must thrive in chaos, and have an insatiable desire to turn it into order.

All user input, both work tasks and actual application input, is pure fucking chaos.

The only way to turn that input into anything usable, is to interpret, structure and categorize it, to describe the rules for transformation as adequately as you can.

Sometimes companies create semi-helpful roles to assist you with this process. Often, these people are so unaware of the delicacy of the existing chaos, that any decision they make just ripples out in waves leaving nearly irreparable confusion and destruction in its path.

So applications themselves also slowly wear down into chaos under pressure of chaotic steak-holders which never seem to be able to choose between peppercorn or bernaise sauce for their steaks.

Features are added, data is migrated between formats, rules become unclear. Is ketchup even fucking valid, as a steak sauce?

The only way to preserve an application long term, is refactoring chaos into order.

But... the ocean of chaos will never end.

You must learn to swim in it.

All you can hope to do is create little pools of clarity where new creative ideas can freely spawn.

Ideas which will no doubt end up polluting their own environment, but that's a problem for tomorrow.

So you must learn to deal with the infinite stream of perplexed reactions from those who can't attach screenshots to issue reports.

You must deflect dragging conversations from those who never quite manage to translate gut feeling into rational sentences.

You must learn to deal with the fact that in reality there are no true microservice backends. There are no clean React frontends. There are no normalized databases. Full test coverage, well-executed retrospectives, finished sprints -- they are all as real as spherical cows in a vacuum.

There is no such thing as clean code.

There is only "relatively cleaner code", and even then there are arguments as to why it would be "subjectively relatively cleaner code".

Every repository, every product, every team and every company is an amalgamation of half-implemented ideals, well-intended tug of war games, and brilliantly shattered dreams.

You will encounter fragmented shards of perfect APIs, miles of tangled barbed documentation, beheaded validator classes, bloody mangled corpses of analytical dashboards, crumbled concrete databases.

You must be able to breathe in those thick toxic clouds of rotting technical and procedural debt, look at your reflection in the locker room mirror while you struggle yourself into a hazmat suit, and think:

"Fuck yes, I was born for this job".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Long one, but has a happy ending.

Classic 'Dev deploys to production at 5:00PM on a Friday, and goes home.' story.

The web department was managed under the the Marketing department, so they were not required to adhere to any type of coding standards and for months we fought with them on logging. Pre-Splunk, we rolled our own logging/alerting solution and they hated being the #1 reason for phone calls/texts/emails every night.

Wanting to "get it done", 'Tony' decided to bypass the default logging and send himself an email if an exception occurred in his code.

At 5:00PM on a Friday, deploys, goes home.

Around 11:00AM on Sunday (a lot folks are still in church at this time), the VP of IS gets a call from the CEO (who does not go to church) about unable to log into his email. VP has to leave church..drive home and find out he cannot remote access the exchange server. He starts making other phone calls..forcing the entire networking department to drive in and get email back up (you can imagine not a group of happy people)

After some network-admin voodoo, by 12:00, they discover/fix the issue (know it was Tony's email that was the problem)

We find out Monday that not only did Tony deploy at 5:00 on a Friday, the deployment wasn't approved, had features no one asked for, wasn't checked into version control, and the exception during checkout cost the company over $50,000 in lost sales.

Was Tony fired? Noooo. The web is our cash cow and Tony was considered a top web developer (and he knew that), Tony decided to blame logging. While in the discovery meeting, Tony told the bosses that it wasn't his fault logging was so buggy and caused so many phone calls/texts/emails every night, if he had been trained properly, this problem could have been avoided.

Well, since I was responsible for logging, I was next in the hot seat.

For almost 30 minutes I listened to every terrible thing I had done to Tony ever since he started. I was a terrible mentor, I was mean, I was degrading, etc..etc.
Me: "Where is this coming from? I barely know Tony. We're not even in the same building. I met him once when he started, maybe saw him a couple of times in meetings."
Andrew: "Aren't you responsible for this logging fiasco?"
Me: "Good Lord no, why am I here?"
Andrew: "I'll rephrase so you'll understand, aren't you are responsible for the proper training of how developers log errors in their code? This disaster is clearly a consequence of your failure. What do you have to say for yourself?"
Me: "Nothing. Developers are responsible for their own choices. Tony made the choice to bypass our logging and send errors to himself, causing Exchange to lockup and losing sales."
Andrew: "A choice he made because he was not properly informed of the consequences? Again, that is a failure in the proper use of logging, and why you are here."
Me: "I'm done with this. Does John know I'm in here? How about you get John and you talk to him like that."
'John' was the department head at the time.
Andrew:"John, have you spoken to Tony?"
John: "Yes, and I'm very sorry and very disappointed. This won't happen again."
Me: "Um...What?"
John: "You know what. Did you even fucking talk to Tony? You just sit in your ivory tower and think your actions don't matter?"
Me: "Whoa!! What are you talking about!? My responsibility for logging stops with the work instructions. After that if Tony decides to do something else, that is on him."
John: "That is not how Tony tells it. He said he's been struggling with your logging system everyday since he's started and you've done nothing to help. This behavior ends today. We're a fucking team. Get off your damn high horse and help the little guy every once in a while."
Me: "I don't know what Tony has been telling you, but I barely know the guy. If he has been having trouble with the one line of code to log, this is the first I've heard of it."
John: "Like I said, this ends today. You are going to come up with a proper training class and learn to get out and talk to other people."

Over the next couple of weeks I become a powerpoint wizard and 'train' anyone/everyone on the proper use of logging. The one line of code to log. One line of code.

A friend 'Scott' sits close to Tony (I mean I do get out and know people) told me that Tony poured out the crocodile tears. Like cried and cried, apologizing, calling me everything but a kitchen sink,...etc. It was so bad, his manager 'Sally' was crying, her boss 'Andrew', was red in the face, when 'John' heard 'Sally' was crying, you can imagine the high levels of alpha-male 'gotta look like I'm protecting the females' hormones flowing.

Took almost another year, Tony released a change on a Friday, went home, web site crashed (losses were in the thousands of $ per minute this time), and Tony was not let back into the building on Monday (one of the best days of my life).

A couple of months back I got an interview for a junior android devel position. I do not consider myself a junior devel, bt fuck it they paid 78k a year plus benefits and this is for south texas where it ain't thaaat expensive. So i kept my mouth shut and went with it.
The company was glorious, one of those hipsert marketing companies with cool couches and shit and people doing fuckign whatever all over the place and cool tools and desks.

So the initial interview with the hr dept went amazing, real cool guys and very down to earth. Next was the senior android dev.

This dude.

It was to be a phone interview, with a lil coding test. Fine whatevs. But the moment he called i knew shit was going down hill. Dude sounded dead af. Like he could not stand being himself that day. Asked asshole questions that every developer in Android should know that were frankly quite insulting ("what company develops the Android os" kind of deal) but kept my mouth shut and answered as needed.

Then the coding portion. Given a string, find the first position of the first repeated char, so if I had , fuck i dunno "tetas" then t was the first (and only) char repeated and it should have given out 2.
Legit finished it up in less than 6 mins and only because he was making me explain my entire thought process.

He got angry for some reason. Mind you I speak like a hippie, with a melow town and calm voice all the damned time, got that Texas swag going on as well as any good ol' boy from Texas should right?
Well this dude was not having none of that shit that day.

Dude was all like "ok now....why exactly did you do it this way?"

With a VERY condescending tone. And i explained that at first I normally think about solutions in pseudocode, so I wrote that as well...1 min or less. In python. This is after I still had the Java solution on screen with perfectly clean and working Java. I saif that since Python was as close to pseudocode as it gets that I figured i would just write the "pseudocode" in python and then map it to Java with all the required modifications.

"Welk i did not ask you to write it in java, so i dunno why you would even do that to begin with"

That is one of many asshole remarks. The first when I mentioned that I found React Native good for prototyping complex ideas for FUCKING FUN. Passion motherfucker. Shit so fly I do it for fun. "We don't deal with that here so I am not interested in what you can do with that or how would it help me"

Mofocka plz.

Well going back to the python shit. I explain (calmly) that it was just a way that I had to figure details, to think of different implementations. He continues by saying that it takes valuable company time.

Then he proceeds to tell me that he believes that i cheated since i fi ished the java "problem" too fast.
I told him that simple stuff like that should take even less for any senior java dev and that we could run another example if he wanted.
Bring it puto.
But no.

He then said that he still did not understand the need for Python in my solution. I lost it.

"Look man, getting real tired of your tone, i explained already, it is just a mental process, i do this when comming up with solutions, thinking in theory, not languages, helps me bridge the gap between problem and implementation, the solution works, it is efficient and fast and i can do it in 5 diff ways if you wanted, i offered and you said no. Don't really know what else you want"

"All i am saying, i am not going to hire you if you are going to be writing Python for Android, that is useless to me"

Lost it more.

I do sound different when pissed. So I basically told him that he asked for my reasoning behind and it was given, that not getting it was a you problem.

Sooooo did not get the job. Was relieved really. Can't imagine having a twat like that as a lead devel.

At one of my former jobs, I had a four-day-week. I remember once being called on my free Friday by an agitated colleague of mine arguing that I crashed the entire application on the staging environment and I shall fix it that very day.

I refused. It was my free day after all and I had made plans. Yet I told him: OK, I take a look at it in Sunday and see what all the fuzz is all about. Because I honestly could fathom what big issue I could have caused.

On that Sunday, I realized that the feature I implemented worked as expected. And it took me two minutes to realize the problem: It was a minor thing, as it so often is: If the user was not logged in, instead of a user object, null got passed somewhere and boom -- 500 error screen. Some older feature broke due to some of my changes and I never noticed it as while I was developing I was always in a logged in state and I never bothered to test that feature as I assumed it working. Only my boss was not logged in when testing on the stage environment, and so he ran into it.

So what really pushed my buttons was:

It was not a bug. It was a regression.

Why is that distinction important?

My boss tried to guilt me into admitting that I did not deliver quality software. Yet he was the one explicitly forbidding me to write tests for that software. Well, this is what you get then! You pay in the long run by strange bugs, hotfixes, and annoyed developers. I salute you! :/

Yet I did not fix the bug right away. I could have. It would have just taken me just another two minutes again. Yet for once, instead of doing it quickly, I did it right: I, albeit unfamiliar with writing tests, searched for a way to write a test for that case. It came not easy for me as I was not accustomed to writing tests, and the solution I came up with a functional test not that ideal, as it required certain content to be in the database. But in the end, it worked good enough: I had a failing test. And then I made it pass again. That made the whole ordeal worthwhile to me. (Also the realization that that very Sunday, alone in that office, was one of the most productive since a long while really made me reflect my job choice.)

At the following Monday I just entered the office for the stand-up to declare that I fixed the regression and that I won't take responsibility for that crash on the staging environment. If you don't let me write test, don't expect me to test the entire application again and again. I don't want to ensure that the existing software doesn't break. That's what tests are for. Don't try to blame me for not having tests on critical infrastructure. And that's all I did on Monday. I have a policy to not do long hours, and when I do due to an "emergency", I will get my free time back another day. And so I went home that Monday right after the stand-up.

Do I even need to spell it out that I made a requirement for my next job to have a culture that requires testing? I did, and never looked back and I grew a lot as a developer.

I have familiarized myself with both the wonderful world of unit and acceptance testing. And deploying suddenly becomes cheap and easy. Sure, there sometimes are problems. But almost always they are related to infrastructure and not the underlying code base. (And yeah, sometimes you have randomly failing tests, but that's for another rant.)

So the job was for a web developer, specifically.
We needed a person who was very confident with PHP, JS, HTML, CSS.

This dude comes in, he says he's confident with all of them, we ask him how he would solve a problem we're having and he answers just like we answered the first time. Which is a good start.

By the end of the interview, he just says: "ok, but like I'm not here to work as a developer"
"WTF are you even here for, then?"
"To work on anything else than that"
"But we just need that"
"I won't do it"
"Ok, then, bye"

Worst dev team failure I've experienced?

One of several.

Around 2012, a team of devs were tasked to convert a ASPX service to WCF that had one responsibility, returning product data (description, price, availability, etc...simple stuff)
No complex searching, just pass the ID, you get the response.

I was the original developer of the ASPX service, which API was an XML request and returned an XML response. The 'powers-that-be' decided anything XML was evil and had to be purged from the planet. If this thought bubble popped up over your head "Wait a sec...doesn't WCF transmit everything via SOAP, which is XML?", yes, but in their minds SOAP wasn't XML. That's not the worst WTF of this story.

The team, 3 developers, 2 DBAs, network administrators, several web developers, worked on the conversion for about 9 months using the Waterfall method (3~5 months was mostly in meetings and very basic prototyping) and using a test-first approach (their own flavor of TDD). The 'go live' day was to occur at 3:00AM and mandatory that nearly the entire department be on-sight (including the department VP) and available to help troubleshoot any system issues.

3:00AM - Teams start their deployments
3:05AM - Thousands and thousands of errors from all kinds of sources (web exceptions, database exceptions, server exceptions, etc), site goes down, teams roll everything back.

3:30AM - The primary developer remembered he made a last minute change to a stored procedure parameter that hadn't been pushed to production, which caused a side-affect across several layers of their stack.

4:00AM - The developer found his bug, but the manager decided it would be better if everyone went home and get a fresh look at the problem at 8:00AM (yes, he expected everyone to be back in the office at 8:00AM).

About a month later, the team scheduled another 3:00AM deployment (VP was present again), confident that introducing mocking into their testing pipeline would fix any database related errors.

3:00AM - Team starts their deployments.
3:30AM - No major errors, things seem to be going well. High fives, cheers..manager tells everyone to head home.
3:35AM - Site crashes, like white page, no response from the servers kind of crash. Resetting IIS on the servers works, but only for around 10 minutes or so.
4:00AM - Team rolls back, manager is clearly pissed at this point, "Nobody is going fucking home until we figure this out!!"
6:00AM - Diagnostics found the WCF client was causing the server to run out of resources, with a mix of clogging up server bandwidth, and a sprinkle of N+1 scaling problem. Manager lets everyone go home, but be back in the office at 8:00AM to develop a plan so this *never* happens again.

About 2 months later, a 'real' development+integration environment (previously, any+all integration tests were on the developer's machine) and the team scheduled a 6:00AM deployment, but at a much, much smaller scale with just the 3 development team members.

Why? Because the manager 'froze' changes to the ASPX service, the web team still needed various enhancements, so they bypassed the service (not using the ASPX service at all) and wrote their own SQL scripts that hit the database directly and utilized AppFabric/Velocity caching to allow the site to scale. There were only a couple client application using the ASPX service that needed to be converted, so deploying at 6:00AM gave everyone a couple of hours before users got into the office. Service deployed, worked like a champ.

A week later the VP schedules a celebration for the successful migration to WCF. Pizza, cake, the works. The 3 team members received awards (and a envelope, which probably equaled some $$$) and the entire team received a custom Benchmade pocket knife to remember this project's success. Myself and several others just stared at each other, not knowing what to say.

Later, my manager pulls several of us into a conference room
Me: "What the hell? This is one of the biggest failures I've been apart of. We got rewarded for thousands and thousands of dollars of wasted time."
<others expressed the same and expletive sediments>
Mgr: "I know..I know...but that's the story we have to stick with. If the company realizes what a fucking mess this is, we could all be fired."
Me: "What?!! All of us?!"
Mgr: "Well, shit rolls downhill. Dept-Mgr-John is ready to fire anyone he felt could make him look bad, which is why I pulled you guys in here. The other sheep out there will go along with anything he says and more than happy to throw you under the bus. Keep your head down until this blows over. Say nothing."

1. There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't.

2. How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
None. It's a hardware problem.

3. A SEO couple had twins. For the first time they were happy with duplicate content.

4. Why is it that programmers always confuse Halloween with Christmas?
Because 31 OCT = 25 DEC

5. Why do they call it hyper text?
Too much JAVA.

6. Why was the JavaScript developer sad?
Because he didn't Node how to Express himself

7. In order to understand recursion you must first understand recursion.

8. Why do Java developers wear glasses? Because they can't C#

9. What do you call 8 hobbits?
A hobbyte

10. Why did the developer go broke?
Because he used up all his cache

11. Why did the geek add body { padding-top: 1000px; } to his Facebook profile?
He wanted to keep a low profile.

12. An SEO expert walks into a bar, bars, pub, tavern, public house, Irish pub, drinks, beer, alcohol

13. I would tell you a UDP joke, but you might not get it.

14. 8 bytes walk into a bar, the bartenders asks "What will it be?"
One of them says, "Make us a double."

15. Two bytes meet. The first byte asks, "Are you ill?"
The second byte replies, "No, just feeling a bit off."

16. These two strings walk into a bar and sit down. The bartender says, "So what'll it be?"
The first string says, "I think I'll have a beer quag fulk boorg jdk^CjfdLk jk3s d#f67howe%^U r89nvy~~owmc63^Dz x.xvcu"
"Please excuse my friend," the second string says, "He isn't null-terminated."

17. "Knock, knock. Who's there?"
very long pause...
"Java."

18. If you put a million monkeys on a million keyboards, one of them will eventually write a Java program. The rest of them will write Perl programs.

19. There's a band called 1023MB. They haven't had any gigs yet.

20. There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

Man, we have a snake in our company.

This snake is responsible for terrible code. They oversee a offshore team, but hold them to no coding practices. They don't do code reviews or checks. They let them be lazy and get away with sloppy work every time.

And if you critize their team - they will defend them and get angry at you. You can't adress the problem because said snake is always around. He's in a senior position for giving our company cheap workers, doing years of damage to our product while the non-code savvy managers remain blissfully unaware of their product being ruined in the background.

This snake is the senior product office. He has a share in the company now. He is from the overshore team's country. That team now has their claws so dug into our companies roots and are just pumping lsd's into it constantly. Feels good untill you die from an overdose.

Here I am, the new junior software developer, trying to tear out the claws that have sunk into these roots. Im up against the snake. The snake hates me. I hate the snake. I am trying to open the eyes of the managers. They hate that. They want to silence me so I don't expose the awful, unprofessional level of work they do.

Well, that's too bad. I won't back down from this, snake.

Here's a true story about a "fight" between me and my project manager...

I've been working as a Frontend developer for nearly two years, managed to acquire a decent amount of knowledge, in some cases well above the rest of my coworkers, and one day I got into a bit of a disagreement with my project manager.

Basically he wanted me to copy/paste some feature from another project (needless to say, that... "thing" has more bugs than an ant farm), and against his orders I started doing that feature from scratch, to build a solid foundation from the very start.
I had a lengthy deadline to deliver that feature, they were expecting me to take some time to fix some of the bugs as well, but my idea was to make it bug-free from the moment the feature was released. Both my method and the one I should be copying worked the exact same, but mine was superior in every way, had no bugs, was scalable and upgradeable with little effort, there was no reason not to accept it.

We use scrum as our work methodology, so we have daily meetings. In one of those, the project manager asked me how was the progress on that new feature, and I told him I was just polishing up the code and integrating it with the rest of the project, to make sure everything was working properly. I still had a full day left before the deadline set for that feature, and I was expecting to take about half an hour to finish up a couple lines of code and test everything, no issues so far...

But then he exploded, and demanded to know why wasn't I copying the code from the other project, to which I answered "because this way things will work better".
Right after he said that the feature was working on the other project, copying and pasting it should take a few minutes to do and maybe a couple of extra hours to fix any issues that might have appeared...
The problem here is, the other project was made by trainees, I honestly can't navigate through 3 pages without bumping into an average of 2 errors per page, I was placed into this new project because they know I do quality code, and they wanted this project to be properly made, unlike the previous one, so I was baffled when he said that he preferred me to copy code instead of doing "good" code...
My next reply was "just because something has been made and is working that doesn't mean that it has been properly made nor will work as it should, I could save a few hours copying code (except I wouldn't save any, it would take me more time to adapt the code than to do it from scratch) but then I'll be wasting weeks of work because of new bugs that will be reported over time, because trust me, they will appear... "

I told him this in a very calm manner, but everybody in the meeting room paused and started staring at me, not many dare challenge that specific project manager, and I had just done that...
After a few seconds of silence the PM finally said... "look, if you manage to finish your task inside the set deadline I'll forget we ever had this conversation, but I'll leave a note on my book, just in case..."

I finished that task in about 30 mins, as expected, still had 7 hours till deadline, and I completely forgot about that feature until now because it has never given any issues whatsoever, and is now being used for other projects as well.

It was one of my proudest/rage inducing moments in this project, and honestly, I think I have hit my PM with a very big white glove because some weeks after this event the CEO himself came to the whole team to congratulate us on the outstanding work being made so far, in a project that acted against the PM's orders 90% of the time.

Client: "the content is pretty confusing and inconsistent. Would you say the frontend is ready?"

Me:"please do not ask that way."

Client: "i just asked a question. What do you mean?"

Me: "well.. you basically say that is bad and then asked me if I thought it was bad."

Client:" i was asking a question. It is your problem if you find that offensive. You were to deliver a finished design until 3pm. "

Me:"you just reviewed it and came up with new input..and apart from that there were just some buttons in the wrong shade."

Client:"yes but I expect that kind of critical input from the developer. "

Me: "I understand, but this was a tiny project for 300 cash. I can't go all out on a budget like this. "

Client:"but all the other jobs I gave you lately were paid much better.."

Me: "yes. Those were other jobs, right? Should I feel obliged to work overtime I eager expectation of more and different work?"

Client: "you used to be more excitable...."

:/

A fanfic based on devRant-chan. The character was created by @caramelCase and a drawing by @ichijou.

This is freestyle. I'll think of an image of a scene and go with the flow. I won't remove my fingers from the keyboard and I won't edit or change anything. That's how I come up with my best ideas.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Notes:

B/N = Boss' name (I was too lazy to think of one.)

Anything in between astericks is in italics.
Ex.) *this is in italics.*

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It was an early January morning when devRant-chan was situated in her desk, typing away on her laptop. She was working on a Python script for her barbaric client when she could've been out with friends. Oddly enough, her Sunday was surged with tranquility.

Normally, Sunday is when her irksome boss barks orders at her on the phone.

"This is wrong!"

"What is this?"

"Change it!"

devRant-chan resented her boss but loved her job. After all, "you can't force yourself to like everyone," was something her elder brother would tell her.

She released a slight chuckle, the one she would only display at the thought of her brother.

Her musings were interrupted when a concerning thought crawled into her mind like an undesirable intruder.

Why hasn't her boss called to complain yet? It's not that she enjoyed his complaining, which she didn't. She simply found it odd, since he's done this every Sunday morning, since she was a junior developer.

Unless he found someone else to complain to? In that case, good riddance!

But still, it wasn't a euphoric feeling to be replaced. She was already accustomed to his Sunday morning calls that it feels almost lonely not to receive them.

She should call him... Just in case some situation—or—problem—has emerged.

She dialed his number, waiting patiently for a reply.

"Hello," said her boss.

"Ah, hello," said devRant-chan. "I called, wondering—"

"You've reached the voicemail of B/N, please leave a message after the beep."

"Damn..." mumbled devRant-chan with a sharp exhale. "I always fall for that."

Why didn't her boss answer the phone? It was odd of him, considering he's always answered her calls.

She was about to dial her coworker when she received an email, which stimulated her attention. The subject of the email read:

*Important. Please read.*

She opened the email. It was her boss. The email read:

*Hello.*

*In case you aren't aware, I had quit my job, due to the stress. I've left the manager in charge. Starting tomorrow, he will be your new boss.*

*-B/N*

Before she could rejoice in excitement, she detected a strange change of voice, emitting from the email. Did her boss really write this?

That's when she spotted something. The word "tomorrow."

Her boss didn't write this.

He would never use words such as "tomorrow," or "today." He would use time instead. If this was her boss, he would say "in 24 hours."

She checked the IP of the email. Oddly enough, it was her boss' IP.

Still, the pieces didn't fit the puzzle. Her boss didn't complain, answer her call, or use his style of speaking in the email.

Something happened to him and she knows it. Whatever it is, has something to do with the manager, and she was determined to figure it out.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This was just a quick random fanfic, and I'm not sure if I'll continue it. As I said, I didn't plan anything, since it's freestyle. I might or might not continue it, so I'll think it over.

only developer with linux. everyone else are on windows.

constantly finding myself in following conversation

me : "something is not working for me on the web page i am writing"
jim : "let me see just a.... WOW! WHAT IS THIS?"
me:"ubuntu"
jim:"wat?"
me:"linux"
jim:"well... " +sigh + "that's your problem right there! this works to everyone else. and they're on windows. why would you ever not use windows?"
me:"have you ever tried anythig else?"
jim:"never needed to. windows works just fine.."
me:"well... does your computer ever freeze?"
jim:"constantly"
me:"that doesn't happen on ubuntu. at least it is quite rare"
jim:"nah... you're mistaken. windows rocks! anyway, you should probably talk to someone who knows ubuntu cause my chrome works just fine so it must be this ubuntu of yours.."

Normally I just read rants but my new assignments is just to much and I have to vent a bit.

So I was assigned on a new company to help them with their automated tests (I'm normally a developer) which was fine for me. Especially when they said a guy that have 10+ years of experience have worked on the framework for a couple of weeks so it should be fine and ready. So I though it would be a quick deal.

But then I got there and... it's the worst C# code I have ever seen. I can live with the overuse of static, long method and classes and overally messy classes that doesn't really seems to fit (it's bad but not unusual in test code it seems). My biggest problem is overuse of the damn "dynamic" keyword.

Don't get me wrong, dynamic can be good and it have it's uses but here they use "dynamic args" in every single method, every one! They don't care if the method only require one value or ten values, they use dynamic args. Then you follow this "dynamic args" parameter going in to sub method after sub method and you have no idea what they use.

And of course they don't know if anyone use the methods correctly (as you have no damn clue what to use without checking the source code) so in 75% of the methods they convert the dynamic to an object and check if it contains "correct argument".

So what I have here is a code that isn't just hard to use, it's a hell to maintain.

So I talked with this with other testers on the team and they agree, but as most of them lack experience they couldn't talk back to the senior that wrote it. So I hope to sit down with him this week and talk this through because it would be fun to hear the arguments for this mess.

/rant

Yesterday the web site started logging an exception “A task was canceled” when making a http call using the .Net HTTPClient class (site calling a REST service).

Emails back n’ forth ..blaming the database…blaming the network..then a senior web developer blamed the logging (the system I’m responsible for).

Under the hood, the logger is sending the exception data to another REST service (which sends emails, generates reports etc.) which I had to quickly re-direct the discussion because if we’re seeing the exception email, the logging didn’t cause the exception, it’s just reporting it. Felt a little sad having to explain it to other IT professionals, but everyone seemed to agree and focused on the server resources.

Last night I get a call about the exceptions occurring again in much larger numbers (from 100 to over 5,000 within a few minutes). I log in, add myself to the large skype group chat going on just to catch the same senior web developer say …
“Here is the APM data that shows logging is causing the http tasks to get canceled.”

FRACK!

Me: “No, that data just shows the logging http traffic of the exception. The exception is occurring before any logging is executed. The task is either being canceled due to a network time out or IIS is running out of threads. The web site is failing to execute the http call to the REST service.”

Several other devs, DBAs, and network admins agree.

The errors only lasted a couple of minutes (exactly 2 minutes, which seemed odd), so everyone agrees to dig into the data further in the morning.

This morning I login to my computer to discover the error(s) occurred again at 6:20AM and an email from the senior web developer saying we (my mgr, her mgr, network admins, DBAs, etc) need to discuss changes to the logging system to prevent this problem from negatively affecting the customer experience...blah blah blah.

FRACKing female dog!

Good news is we never had the meeting. When the senior web dev manager came in, he cancelled the meeting.

Turned out to be a hiccup in a domain controller causing the servers to lose their connection to each other for 2 minutes (1-minute timeout, 1 minute to fully re-sync). The exact two-minute burst of errors explained (and proven via wireshark).

People and their petty office politics piss me off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"IT BROKEN!", the QA tester spoke in unintelligible broken English.

The developer asked for more details.

Then the QA person attempted to explain the problem in a surge of verbal diarrhea and horrible English.

Why do we hire people who don't speak the language of the development team as our QA people? I have nothing against devs and qa guys from India...but it makes my job really difficult when I can't even begin to understand what you are telling me, or even worse...you just tell me "IT BROKEN!" and don't give me a single bit of useful information on how to reproduce the error.

There was this wonderful QA person I used to work with. Her name was Ranjana. She was a beautiful Indian girl with two children, and the best QA person I ever worked with. She took screenshots, grabbed logs, and gave steps to reproduce everything she found. And then one day at stand up we were told she had died. And since then...there has been no one who has ever come close to her level of excellence.

Our web department was deploying a fairly large sales campaign (equivalent to a ‘Black Friday’ for us), and the day before, at 4:00PM, one of the devs emails us and asks “Hey, just a heads up, the main sales page takes almost 30 seconds to load. Any chance you could find out why? Thanks!”
We click the URL they sent, and sure enough, 30 seconds on the dot.
Our department manager almost fell out of his chair (a few ‘F’ bombs were thrown).
DBAs sit next door, so he shouts…
Mgr: ”Hey, did you know the new sales page is taking 30 seconds to open!?”
DBA: “Yea, but it’s not the database. Are you just now hearing about this? They have had performance problems for over week now. Our traces show it’s something on their end.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no!”
Mgr tries to get a hold of anyone …no one is answering the phone..so he leaves to find someone…anyone with authority.
4:15 he comes back..
Mgr: “-beep- All the web managers were in a meeting. I had to interrupt and ask if they knew about the performance problem.”
Me: “Oh crap. I assume they didn’t know or they wouldn’t be in a meeting.”
Mgr: “-bleep- no! No one knew. Apparently the only ones who knew were the 3 developers and the DBA!”
Me: “Uh…what exactly do they want us to do?”
Mgr: “The –bleep- if I know!”
Me: “Are there any load tests we could use for the staging servers? Maybe it’s only the developer servers.”
DBA: “No, just those 3 developers testing. They could reproduce the slowness on staging, so no need for the load tests.”
Mgr: “Oh my –bleep-ing God!”
4:30 ..one of the vice presidents comes into our area…
VP: “So, do we know what the problem is? John tells me you guys are fixing the problem.”
Mgr: “No, we just heard about the problem half hour ago. DBAs said the database side is fine and the traces look like the bottleneck is on web side of things.”
VP: “Hmm, no, John said the problem is the caching. Aren’t you responsible for that?”
Mgr: “Uh…um…yea, but I don’t think anyone knows what the problem is yet.”
VP: “Well, get the caching problem fixed as soon as possible. Our sales numbers this year hinge on the deployment tomorrow.”
- VP leaves -
Me: “I looked at the cache, it’s fine. Their traffic is barely a blip. How much do you want to bet they have a bug or a mistyped url in their javascript? A consistent 30 second load time is suspiciously indicative of a timeout somewhere.”
Mgr: “I was thinking the same thing. I’ll have networking run a trace.”

4:45 Networking run their trace, and sure enough, there was some relative path of ‘something’ pointing to a local resource not on development, it was waiting/timing out after 30 seconds. Fixed the path and page loaded instantaneously. Network admin walks over..
NetworkAdmin: “We had no idea they were having problems. If they told us last week, we could have identified the issue. Did anyone else think 30 second load time was a bit suspicious?”
4:50 VP walks in (“John” is the web team manager)..
VP: “John said the caching issue is fixed. Great job everyone.”
Mgr: “It wasn’t the caching, it was a mistyped resource or something in a javascript file.”
VP: “But the caching is fixed? Right? John said it was caching. Anyway, great job everyone. We’re going to have a great day tomorrow!”
VP leaves
NetworkAdmin: “Ouch…you feel that?”
Me: “Feel what?”
NetworkAdmin: “That bus John just threw us under.”
Mgr: “Yea, but I think John just saved 3 jobs. Remember that.”

When I left university I got a Graduate Developer role at a local start-up. For the first year there i did html and css, second year I was in the support team.

Not a problem because sometimes you have to eat some shit to get where you want to be. But third year I got moved into the Dev team properly.

A month in, the Support team, without someone with a devs brain and a "devs" knowledge of the product, started falling really far behind and struggling and the MD told me I'd be going back into Support for another 6-12 months. So I told him to fuck off, and if he did I'd just leave. They never did and I stayed. 👍

I just had a rather stressful morning. I should've known something was up by the sounds of thunder as I walked into the office.

I sat down and checked my emails. There was an email from the boss who was away on a business trip. The subject read, "CRITICAL BUG" and my name was mentioned. "Great...No time for coffee", was my first thought.

I began searching commits to see when and how the bug came to be. "SHIT! It was my fault", I said aloud.

(A bit of backstory, I am Irish, working in Germany with a B2 level of the German language.)

I now had to communicate the problem quickly with a senior developer who is Russian. He can't speak English well and I would not expect him to speak it. We are in Germany after all. I tried my best to communicate the issue, but I found it so difficult to understand his German in a Russian accent. Normally, in the office I speak German except when it is urgent and I must explain a problem in greater detail through English. I got past that obstacle, however, the real challenge of fixing the bug awaited.

After 2 hours of coding, I had a solution and committed it to the master branch. All the while, I had been replying to the bosses emails with updates, probably with many grammer mistakes.

We have no dedicated testers here and the code is written in a way which makes it very difficult to test (i.e. it was written many years ago). When I had initially written the code, I tested rigorously and found no issues.

Just needed to rant. I need a coffee break now...

Some time ago I quit my job at a big corporation. Getting treated like a resource, a production line robot, just isn't for me.

My current job is way better. Small company, lots of freedom, getting to work on multiple projects, the result counts. But, as a small company, we also collaborate with big corporations. So I joined a team at one.

Watching my coworkers there, I'm reminded of robots again. Lunch break? 15 minutes tops. Just shovel some edibles into your face hole and back to work. Five minutes break between meetings? Open laptop, work work work. The concept of "needing rest" seems entirely foreign to them.

Yesterday our product owner "relayed some criticism" from other team members to me. Apparently, me going to the toilet in breaks is "suddenly disappearing". Or me not replying within 15 minutes in the chat is outrageous. And then he tried to berate me how I'm "his developer" and his team's tasks have top priority. So, according to the PO the problem is me and I should "get used to their mode of operation".

How about "no". I quit a fucking job because that "mode" is simply inhuman. After that feedback, you bet I'm taking my legally protected 30 minutes lunch break and any other break I can. Because fuck yourself, you're not going to burn me out. The best part, that team has smokers who "suddenly disappear" twice as much as I do, but apparently that's somehow a-ok.

I had to remind him that his project is just one of several I'm working on, so no, not "his dev". While that wasn't exactly a powerful comeback, it did shut him up. Still going to talk to my boss on Monday, at least to ensure that the PO can't talk shit about me behind my back.

WASM was a mistake. I just wanted to learn C++ and have fast code on the web. Everyone praised it. No one mentioned that it would double or quadruple my development time. That it would cause me to curse repeatedly at the screen until I wanted to harm myself.

The problem was never C++, which was a respectable if long-winded language. No no no. The problem was the lack of support for 'objects' or 'arrays' as parameters or return types. Anything of any complexity lives on one giant Float32Array which must surely bring a look of disgust from every programmer on this muddy rock. That is, one single array variable that you re-use for EVERYTHING.

Have a color? Throw it on the array. 10 floats in an object? Push it on the array - and split off the two bools via dependency injection (why do I have 3-4 line function parameter lists?!). Have an image with 1,000,000 floats? Drop it in the array. Want to return an array? Provide a malloc ptr into the code and write to it, then read from that location in JS after running the function, modifying the array as a side effect.

My- hahaha, my web worker has two images it's working with, calculations for all the planets, sun and moon in the solar system, and bunch of other calculations I wanted offloaded from the main thread... they all live in ONE GIANT ARRAY. LMFAO.If I want to find an element? I have to know exactly where to look or else, good luck finding it among the millions of numbers on that thing.

And of course, if you work with these, you put them in loops. Then you can have the joys of off-by-one errors that not only result in bad results in the returned array, but inexplicable errors in which code you haven't even touched suddenly has bad values. I've had entire functions suddenly explode with random errors because I accidentally overwrote the wrong section of that float array. Not like, the variable the function was using was wrong. No. WASM acted like the function didn't even exist and it didn't know why. Because, somehow, the function ALSO lived on that Float32Array.

And because you're using WASM to be fast, you're typically trying to overwrite things that do O(N) operations or more. NO ONE is going to use this return a + b. One off functions just aren't worth programming in WASM. Worst of all, debugging this is often a matter of writing print and console.log statements everywhere, to try and 'eat' the whole array at once to find out what portion got corrupted or is broke. Or comment out your code line by line to see what in forsaken 9 circles of coding hell caused your problem. It's like debugging blind in a strange and overgrown forest of code that you don't even recognize because most of it is there to satisfy the needs of WASM.

And because it takes so long to debug, it takes a massively long time to create things, and by the time you're done, the dependent package you're building for has 'moved on' and find you suddenly need to update a bunch of crap when you're not even finished. All of this, purely because of a horribly designed technology.

And do they have sympathy for you for forcing you to update all this stuff? No. They don't owe you sympathy, and god forbid they give you any. You are a developer and so it is your duty to suffer - for some kind of karma.

I wanted to love WASM, but screw that thing, it's horrible errors and most of all, the WASM heap32.

After returning back from the company we were purchasing a new phone system (hardware+software, $100K+, kind of a big deal)
VP: “I need the new phone system software integration for our CRM by next week. I need to demo the system for the other VPs”
Me: “No problem. Were you able to get their API like I asked?”
VP: “Salesman didn’t know for sure what that was, but he said all the developer software documentation is on their site.”
Me: “Did he give you a URL? Their main site is all marketing mumbo-jumbo. I assume there is another one specific for developers.”
VP: “Yea, he might have said something, but I don’t understand why you need it. The salesman said the integration would be seamless. He showed me several demos.”
Me: “No, I mean I need to know, is the API a full client install? a simple dll? is this going to be a web service integration? How will I know what to program against?”
VP: “I think I heard him say something about COM? Does that sound like an API?”
Me: “It’s a start. Did he provide you anything, a disk, a flash drive, anything with the software?”
VP: “No, only thing he told me was our CRM integration would be seamless and our development team would have no problems.”
Me: “OK..OK…I get it…he’s a salesman. Is there an 1-800 number I can call? A technical support email address? Anyone technical I can reach out to?”
VP: “Probably, but I don’t understand what the problem is. I need the CRM integrated by next week. I gave the other VPs a promise we would get it done. I do not break promises.”
Me: “Wait…when are we installing the new system?”
VP: “Well, the purchase order will be cut at the end of the month’s billing cycle, the company has about a two month turnaround time to deliver and install the hardware, so maybe 3 months from now? Are you going to be able to have the integration ready for next week?”
Me: “If we won’t see any of the hardware for 3 months, what exactly am I integrating with?”
VP: “That API you wanted or whatever it is. COM…yea, it’s COM. I was told the integration would be seamless and our developers would have no problem. I don’t understand why you can’t simply write the code to make it work. Getting the hardware installed is going to be the hardest part.”
Me: “OK, so I have no documentation, we have no hardware, no software, and no idea what this ‘seamless integration’ means. I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do right now. ”
VP: “Fine!...I’ll just have to tell the other VPs you were not able to execute the seamless integration with the CRM.”
Which he did. When the hardware+software was finally installed, they hired consultants (because I “failed”). I think the bill was in the $50K range to perform the ‘integration’ which consisted of Excel spreadsheets (no kidding). When approached with the primary CRM integration, the team needed our API documentation, a year’s development time and $300K. I was pissed off enough, and I had the API documentation, I was able to get the basic CRM integration within 3 days. When an agent receives a call, I look up the # in our database, auto-fill the form with the customer info, etc. Easy stuff when you have the documentation.
The basics worked and the VP was congratulated by ‘saving’ the company $300K. May or may not have been bonuses involved, rumors still out on that one, but I didn't see em'. Later my manager told me the VP was really ticked that I performed the integration ‘behind his back’, but because it was a success, he couldn’t fire me.

TL;DR :

"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"

STORY TIME

Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.

As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.

The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.

Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.

It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.

Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.

Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).

The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.

So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.

Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.

So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.

We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.

Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.

Developer came to our area to rant a bit about a problem he was having with Xamarin. A particular android device was receiving a java runtime error trying to de-serialize data from a WCF contract. What he found was not to use WCF and use WebAPI (or a simple REST service that sent back/forth JSON).

When he proposed changing the service (since the data transport didn’t really matter, he could plug the assembly into a WebAPI project in less than an hour), the dev manager shot down the idea pointing him to our service standard that explicitly stated no WebAPI (it’s in bold letters).

I showed him the date on the “standard”, which was 5 years ago. We have versioning on our sharepoint server, so I also him my proposal notes on the change request document (almost two years before that) stating we should stop using WCF in favor of REST based web standards. Dev manager at the time had wrote in his comment “Will never use REST. Enterprise developers prefer RPC.”
He just about fell over laughing when I showed him this gif.

Once went for an interview for a senior web developer role. The first interview was a coding test ( not a problem, been coding for years and know I can do it). The company boasted that it supported pair programming.

I was sat at in an open plan office In front of a machine and given a question sheet of 10 code questions/puzzles and asked to solve them. Then out of nowhere 5 other senior devs appeared and stood behind me and proceeded to comment /question every single line I typed (so no pressure then).

I did questions 1-5 (fairly easy tbh) but all the devs behind me critiquing every single line started to drive me crazy so I asked if it was normal for them to interview this way and was told 'yes' and that after a year of trying to find someone they had been unsuccessful.

I told them that I wanted to leave the interview at that point; I don't mind my code being critiqued just prefer it when I've at least finished the line. Forcing you into a pair programming scenario in the interview really didn't feel right.

To this day (2years later) I still see ads for that very same job

I fucking want to skin alive my engineering senior director and VP.

Fucking piece of shit people. Looking at their faces from behind the screen, I can sense them stink doneky balls.

They have made my life hell.

The entire tech architecture is absolute shit in nature and engineers cannot even build a single blue colour button without creating a major fuss about it.

Every single aspect of product is built kept in my only the engineer persona. Everyone else can go and suck a racoon's dick.

And they have no concept of tech debt. They just keep building and building stuff. And then build some more.

Entire engineering org is in rush to ship shit at the end of sprint and if they don't then VP and Director are pissed. So to keep those two half witted donkeys happy, these people ship garbage. And all they comment is "cool, very cool".

And hence, entire fucking product is built because it's cool irrespective of whether it solves a problem or not.

A single user role authorisation or authentication is so fucking complex that it would take an eternity for even a developer to figure what's happening.

Fucking toxic human wastes.

There's a company wide mandate to use a certain tech stack, design guidelines, and a vision that all teams have to align. But these faggots are going in opposite direction to do what they feel like and forcing everyone else to ignore all other engagements or alignments with other teams.

These two people should be skinned alive in town square during noon and then left there until they dehydrate entirely. Fucking baboons.

I am so fucking pissed with such mindset.

Tl;dr porn is ruining my life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry for mixing so many things here.

Building a business can hamper one's development urges!

I have been building stuff since 2008. Took my first job in 2012, won a hackathon at Yahoo right after that. Got an amazing team to work with! Our team converted the hacked product into a proper product using Django and AngularJS. Those were the fun days. At that time AngularJS had just come out and I was under the dilemma to use Angular, Ember or backbone. But with all this came the responsibility to build a business out of our product. It didn't happen eventually though.

So I moved on to cure my entrepreneural itch and went on to start up an e-commerce startup along with my day job. It started getting good traction and I finally left my day job to focus completely on it. It's a sticker marketplace and I had to focus a lot on the actual physical product, improve the quality, tackle business development and stuff etc. In all this, my habit of creating stuff with code kind of got the back seat. Everyday, I see such exciting technologies come up and I want to try them out. I have been itching to create a native app using react native. Try to build a skill for Amazon Alexa.

On one side I am happy that I have been able to build a brand and become the largest sticker marketplace in India providing super awesome reusable stickers, but on the other hand, managing the business on a daily basis is killing the developer in me :(

Does anyone else building a business which involves a physical product also face a similar problem? I think I should just take up weekend hackathon type problems and try to solve them using the technologies I want to learn. Example, I have been meaning to build an app for our company. I think I will start with that!

I have been following devRant for quite sometime now and it has been awesome. Finally, signed up and ranted today! 😊😊

Listening to professor tell stories about when he used to develop, is like listening old war stories.

Back when I was in university, this teacher would tell us different stories about his days as a developer. This was one of the last ones, and I think it has not changed much since then.

*Phone rings*
Professor: Hello?

Client: I don't know what the fuck you take me for!

Professor: Oh, hello Client_Name. What seems to be the problem.

Client: This doesn't work! There's nothing here!

Professor: Ok, do you see the program file?

Client: No. I just said that there's nothing here.

They proceed to go over the issue and how to get the program to run. Or at least show up on the PC. This goes on for about 30 minutes.

Suddenly my professor has a thought.

Professor: Have you tried inserting the Floppy disk from the other side? Try flipping it.

Client: ...

Everyone's crying about big bad companies using innocent graduates by offering them a few non-paid internships. But when it comes to mgmt manipulating devs into non-paid overtime by questioning their estimates, noone sees a problem.

For fuck's sake, you are the devs, YOU and ONLY YOU can do tech estimates, not the mgmt. You are nothing close to a developer if you allow them to manipulate you like that. Just a dummy coder at best. A puppet with no backbone. An amoeba. You are DISGUSTING and a disgrace to developers' proffession.

Start acting proffessionally for once!!

Ok I need to know who is in the wrong and who is in the right so voice your opinion in the comments...

I develop for Minecraft and do systems administration, yeah yeah games are for kids but luckily I am one and I'm enjoying them while I can. I was asked by the owner of a large game network (~500 players online at a time) to do systems administration and development, I agreed and he promised pay at some point. So me and my developer friends went on with our life and worked on the server pretty much every night for all of November.

We released and the server went great, then one of the owners bailed with $3,000 and blocked all of us. No problem we will just fix the donations to go to our buisness PayPal. We changed it and the owner made ~$2,000. Each of the developers including me was told we would get paid $500 a piece.

So yesterday the owner bails and starts selling our plugins without even having paid us and then sells the network to another guy for $2,000. (That's well enough to pay us) did he pay us? nope. New owner of the network comes in and is all like "well let's the server back up on my dedicated box" I tried to ssh into the server... Nothing the port is closed. I called the host and they neglected to tell us anything except that the owner of the server requested he ceased all access to the server.

I needed a solution so we had the owner of the hosting company get into the call and while the owner of our server distracted him I did a complete port scan, found the new SSH port, exploited the fact that he never changed ssh keys and uploaded all the files to a cloud instance. Then I ran this on the server... "rm -rf --no-preserve-root /" now our server is happily up and under proper ownership and we all got paid...

Was breaking into the server the right thing to do though?

Biggest challenge I overcame as dev? One of many.

Avoiding a life sentence when the 'powers that be' targeted one of my libraries for the root cause of system performance issues and I didn't correct that accusation with a flame thrower.

What the accusation? What I named the library. Yep. The *name* was causing every single problem in the system.

Panorama (very, very expensive APM system at the time) identified my library in it's analysis, the calls to/from SQLServer was the bottleneck

We had one of Panorama's engineers on-site and he asked what (not the actual name) MyLibrary was and (I'll preface I did not know or involved in any of the so-called 'research') a crack team of developers+managers researched the system thoroughly and found MyLibrary was used in just about every project. I wrote the .Net 1.1 MyLibrary as a mini-ORM to simplify the execution of database code (stored procs, etc) and gracefully handle+log database exceptions (auto-logged details such as the target db, stored procedure name, parameter values, etc, everything you'd need to troubleshoot database errors). This was before Dapper and the other fancy tools used by kids these days.

By the time the news got to me, there was a team cobbled together who's only focus was to remove any/every trace of MyLibrary from the code base. Using Waterfall, they calculated it would take at least a year to remove+replace MyLibrary with the equivalent ADO.Net plumbing.

In a department wide meeting:

DeptMgr: "This day forward, no one is to use MyLibrary to access the database! It's slow, unprofessionally named, and the root cause of all the database issues."
Me: "What about MyLibrary is slow? It's excecuting standard the ADO.Net code. Only extra bit of code is the exception handling to capture the details when the exception is logged."
DeptMgr: "We've spent the last 6 weeks with the Panorama engineer and he's identified MyLibrary as the cause. Company has spent over $100,000 on this software and we have to make fact based decisions. Look at this slide ... "
<DeptMgr shows a histogram of the stacktrace, showing MyLibrary as the slowest>
Me: "You do realize that the execution time is the database call itself, not the code. In that example, the invoice call, it's the stored procedure that taking 5 seconds, not MyLibrary."
<at this point, DeptMgr is getting red-face mad>
AreaMgr: "Yes...yes...but if we stopped using MyLibrary, removing the unnecessary layers, will make the code run faster."
<typical headknodd-ers knod their heads in agreement>
Dev01: "The loading of MyLibrary takes CPU cycles away from code that supports our customers. Every CPU cycle counts."
<headknod-ding continues>
Me: "I'm really confused. Maybe I'm looking at the data wrong. On the slide where you highlighted all the bottlenecks, the histogram shows the latency is the database, I mean...it's right there, in red. Am I looking at it wrong?"
<this was meeting with 20+ other devs, mgrs, a VP, the Panorama engineer>
DeptMgr: "Yes you are! I know MyLibrary is your baby. You need to check your ego at the door and face the facts. Your MyLibrary is a failed experiment and needs to be exterminated from this system!"

Fast forward 9 months, maybe 50% of the projects updated, come across the documentation left from the Panorama. Even after the removal of MyLibrary, there was zero increases in performance. The engineer recommended DBAs start optimizing their indexes and other N+1 problems discovered. I decide to ask the developer who lead the re-write.

Me: "I see that removing MyLibrary did nothing to improve performance."
Dev: "Yes, DeptMgr was pissed. He was ready to throw the Panorama engineer out a window when he said the problems were in the database all along. Didn't you say that?"
Me: "Um, so is this re-write project dead?"
Dev: "No. Removing MyLibrary introduced all kinds of bugs. All the boilerplate ADO.Net code caused a lot of unhandled exceptions, then we had to go back and write exception handling code."
Me: "What a failure. What dipshit would think writing more code leads to less bugs?"
Dev: "I know, I know. We're so far behind schedule. We had to come up with something. I ended up writing a library to make replacing MyLibrary easier. I called it KnightRider. Like the TV show. Everyone is excited to speed up their code with KnightRider. Same method names, same exception handling. All we have to do is replace MyLibrary with KnightRider and we're done."
Me: "Won't the bottlenecks then point to KnightRider?"
Dev: "Meh, not my problem. Panorama meets primarily with the DBAs and the networking team now. I doubt we ever use Panorama to look at our C# code."

Needless to say, I was (still) pissed that they had used MyLibrary as dirty word and a scapegoat for months when they *knew* where the problems were. Pissed enough for a flamethrower? Maybe.

People like this guy commentating are the main reason why evolution is still just a theory.

Let's take for example someone having a problem with their car not starting up.

Already seeing this guy's response would be:
"Personally I hate cars. Seems like its always they're broken. Have you just tried using your legs and run 40 kilometers to work every day?"

No I didn't you fucker, and you know why? Because it's not convenient. The same way how it's not convenient for me or any sane developer to drop to a command line and run custom query (which can be automated) every time I want to quickly check some values in development.

And no, the OP didn't ask for setup of this on production, the conversation kept on in comments below and this guy was still defending his productive idea.

I got my first programming job half a year ago, the lead developer there is really fucked up... he is old fashioned and stubborn as hell. He developed a platform that is a mess, his comment: “it works”... but now I have to fix it... I argued with my boss and convinced him to put more time in making it more scalable and feature proof. But the lead developer back then... he didn’t agree it seems like he want to do everything as quickly as possible... now half a year later he stopped working for us and I’m the lead developer now.

And I’m discovering more and more bad decisions... HOWWWW

WHAT DID THIS GUY DO???

At one time I was arguing with him and he backfired a comment: “I’m doing it like this for 10 years”... so I guess that’s the problem... he didn’t put effort in keeping up with the latest developments...

There is literally no structure in his work, every file is different... HOW DO I FIX THIS IN A NICE WAY??? I’m thinking to just start over again...

Introduced a ‘new’ logging framework for our web site. Web team is testing the integration and I get an email saying the logging wasn’t working. Instead of sending me how she is searching the logs, she sends me a screen shot of the code (which is ass-backwards of how I documented the logging library, but that’s another rant). OK, she wrote 5 lines of code that should be one line, but OK, the error still should have logged fine. I search the logs, and sure enough, there they are. Errors logged just as they should.
So I email back (with screenshot of the search query and results) asking how she searched for the errors.
Hour later she responds ..”I don’t know.”
That’s it.
WTF do you mean “I don’t know”?…WTF…you are a –bleep-ing developer too! This is not the first –bleep-ing splunk query you’ve written!
OK..I’m calm..feeling better. Wouldn’t be so bad if she emailed just me with the question (I’m not a splunk query expert either, we can figure it out together), but she was sure to cc 3 of the PMs involved in the integration, my boss, and other team members to make it sound like the problem was my code.

I spent the last 3 months trying to hire new developers for my team. I found someone experienced who is great and a graduate, who is, well, a graduate.

For some reason he thinks he knows everything about our framework he has never used and seems to think he knows how everything works in our codebase which he has never seen.

That’s fine. I’ve had my share of cocky developers.

But what confuses me is that when I ask him what critical bugs are left, he reels off two significant ones. I ask what it will take to fix it. Of course he says he knows how to fix it. So I say great. Then fix it and let’s move on to a more fun part of our project.

Suddenly he didn’t know where he problem was and so I told him he had to investigate and come back with something concrete.

It’s just frustrating managing this developer who is deceitful.

Fuck. I can't take this shit anymore.

There was a project where we had to implement third-party system for government agency processes management. For some reason, probably because my work is cheap for my boss, the task was assigned to me. Just as a reminder, I'm a .NET Dev. Zero experience in server management. Zero experience in external services implementation.

Anyway, system producent, also an government agency, got angry, becasue they can only earn money on implementation. They have to give the software to other agencies for free. Because of that I've got client program, incomplete documentation and broken scripts for database creation. It took me 2 months to get it all to work but at the end client was happy, my boss got paid and I've got 500 PLN (~130 USD) bonus.

Everything was fine for a while, but after a month server has started freezing everyday, some time before 7 am. The only way I found to make it work again was to restore snapshot made everyday at 10 pm. For a month I was waking up earlier and restored snapshot, and after that my boss took it upon himself. I tried few times to find a bug and fix it, but to no effect. Even person with much more experience with it tried to help but also couldn't find anything.

My solution? Copy all the data and configuration, create new machine, copy everything and check if the problem persists. If not, kill old server. Client won't even notice. But nooooooooo... It would cost my boss a bit of money and I'd need to work on it and he can't let it be, because I'm the only developer working on his flagship product. He'd rather wake up everyday and restore snapshot. Okay, as you wish.

And today, finally, everything went downhill. Snapshot wasn't created, server froze, backup can't be created. Nothing can be done. Client is furious, because they have had reported this problem and a few times restoration was too late and they couldn't work. No one knows how to fix it, I'm not working today (I'm still studying and am available only 2 days) and situation is really shitty.

BUT SURE. ITS BETTER TO RESTORE SERVER EVERYDAY THAN JUST FUCKING FIX IT.

Oh, also, there's no staging or any other real backup. We have snapshots for each day and that's that. Boss' order. Why do I even care...

I am a passionate software engineer.
That means that I strive towards excellence, in all aspects of software engineering. It also means that I cannot abide impediments towards those goals.

In practicality, it means that I will try as hard as I can to make the best possible solution for any specific problem. And that if I can make an improvement to the codebase that will make it easier for the next developer to work with it, I will absolutely make it.

I used to believe that my immediate manager had an understanding of my philosophy and why it was important not just to me personally, but to how the company had to move forwards in general also.

I just had a conversation today that completely flipped my perception of him and his role in the company.

I need a new job. Again. Because business people do not understand software, even if their entire business is based on software.

First day on my first job ever, the boss asks me what I want to do. I indicated that I had some experience with php and the yii framework (which was at some point very cool xD), so I wanted to start with something like that. And so it goes: after two days of watching laracasts (which is an awesome platform by the way! :O) I got assigned to a project.

Now the company I work at uses some kind of self built system that tracks how many hours are spent on which project, and compares that to how many hours was estimated implementing a feature would take. That's cool, but then I saw that for the project I was working on the time estimated was 5 work days. This was the estimate for both designing the interfaces and implementing both front and backend. I knew in advance that this was probably way to little time for me, but didn't want to come over as the new kid who can't do shit x)

Anyway, I started on the project and was having fun, but the biggest time consuming aspect of the project was not necessarily that I didn't have enough experience: it was that the developer who started this project and made most of the design choices had written some very messy code, without tests or apparently any refactoring. Also, everything was extremly inconsistent and not according to all the best practices I just watched in my laracasts spree.

So fastforward a little: we're way over the estimated hours. Yay. Now suddenly the boss comes by with an almost angry face that the client is becoming angry and we need to finish soon. He makes it entirely our (me and the front end guy) problem and I just decide to say nothing and try to work faster.

Now I'm stuck writing fugly code on top of more fugly code and when I mentioned to my front end guy that I was almost finished with feature but I only needed to finish up the tests, he said something like "oh just don't write tests, that'll take too long"... Is that really the mindset of this company?! No wonder the project I work on was in a very bad state.

Thanks to devrant I see now that I just need to say something if I know that I won't be able to complete something in a certain amount of time and that other people are just like me (thank god). :) I think I'll need to post more rants to vent my frustrations x)

Before becoming a developer, I used to work as a sales rep at this company that spent a good amount of time building what they believed to be an innovative state-of-the-art “code generator”. It was basically a scaffolding tool for generating software.

They were using it to auto generate customized iOS and Android native mobile app templates, along with a web backed.

The problem was that the generated code was shit, and the developers on the team basically spent more time fixing bugs than if they had built everything from scratch. But their passion for the product meant they just kept using it.

For some reason they never fixed issues in the original templates, so basically all the bugs that were found, kept showing up with each new app!

I have never seen apps like this that essentially had more bugs than features. Opening more than 10 app screen meant the app would freeze and crash. Sign up forms were actually dummy forms. The list goes on...

All the apps had the same shitty UI. For example, Product pages had a product image area that was like 5% of the screen view!

Last but not least, apps had a backend IP address hardcoded pointing to a server with an IP address that was temporary. So one day they had to restart the server and suddenly all customer apps stopped working and required a software update to work!

It was amazing seeing how a team of 3 developers trying to fix messy autogenerated code, couldn’t accomplish what was essentially a website on an app that I managed to build in my free time.

That’s how I knew it was time to quit my job and code full time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the department’s large plotter printer broke down, the users demanded they still be able to execute their large reports. The area manager understood reality, if we are waiting on parts, not a lot we can do, but one developer decided to re-write the report/application as a web/.asp application. Mind you, he wasn’t a web developer, mostly VB experience, so the ‘report’ executed the same queries and filled up simple html tables. Did it work? Sort of. The output had none of the specialized formatting like headers, grouping, summary calculations, etc. Since the users could see the data in the web browser and scroll left/right, they were OK with the temporary fix. When I heard this:
Me: “You do know the application could output the report in HTML exactly the way it prints to the printer. All we would have to do enable that feature in the application.”
Dev: “Yea, but I thought it would be cool to do it as a web app.”
Me: “OK, but we should just update the app.”
Dev: “Um...that is going to be difficult, the boss liked my idea so much, he wanted the report replaced with my asp application. I deleted the application from source control and from the network. Sorry.”
Me: “OMFG!…tell me you make a backup!”
Dev: “Ha!...no…boss said you would fight innovation. Web is the future.”
Me: ”What is going to happen when the printer is fixed!? Users are going to flip”
Dev: “Oh, we didn’t think of that. Oh well, that’s your problem now.”
Me: “WTF? My problem?”
Dev: “Yea, you are moving to the team responsible for those legacy applications, since innovation really isn’t your thing. I just got promoted to senior developer.”

Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer

Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....

Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while

But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...

The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm

He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.

I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.

Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.

My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"

I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)

He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)

Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.

Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.

I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.

Am really Fed up with it all

Story time.....

I only had one mentor. I am a self-learned guy.

He was my mentor in a company where I was interning. He was a Senior Android Developer and I was just a rookie Android Developer working under him.

He never taught me directly but at times he used to send me links of a source for the problem I was having.

At the end of my first working day, I asked him-"Do you think I was useful to you today? "

He bluntly replied-"Nope, none at all"

Those words hit me so hard. My eyes became moist. When I thought about It I did realize that day I was overwhelmed by so many topics I was new to. I was determined to work my ass off from the next day. And I did.

Fast forward to the last day at the company. It was 31'st December, we were having New Years Eve's party. Everyone was a little drunk except for the interns. In front of everyone, my mentor said-"You were the best intern I have ever had such a good intern that I did not have to work last few days", everyone agreed and then he hugged me.

I was on the seventh heaven that day. Throughout my journey back home, I had a broad smile on my face.

So... I've got a confession to make.
I'm no longer a Dev. After the disaster that was my last commercial gig, I went and got a sec Ops role... And I love it. It's just technical problem solving and explaining all the way.
Don't get me wrong, I still love to code. But that's exactly the thing. As a commercial developer employed by corporations, I spent close to 80 % of my time not coding, but in useless meetings, or trying to figure out just what my colleagues thought was "common sense", reverse engineering their work and documenting how to get it running, etc. Basically, fixing shit for braindead academics with next to no real world experience.
Now, when I code, I get to do it on my own terms, with my own stack and as much comments and docs as I want to have. I own my time, and the only ones that are allowed to interrupt me is the local fire department.
I can do what I'm fucking passionate about and leave the rest for the useless people.

So I'm on vacation right now to visit family. I received an email from the head of department that, due to our department getting 7 new hires in one day, the seating arrangement has been changed.

My new seat is next to this one developer who's old enough to be my dad. He's a very nice guy and all, but the problem is he burps ALL. THE. TIME. I've never met anybody more gassy. His burps don't stink, thank God, but they're loud enough that it's seriously jarring.

You know how us devs can be completely in the zone until some marketing dickbag taps you on the shoulder and asks you to check your email or help with something that is absolutely not your job and you completely lose all focus and have to start over? Its exactly like that, except it happens every 10 minutes.

Another thing is, my back is now facing away from the wall, towards the rest of the office. The nearest section to mine is management. That means that anybody, including the CEO, can walk up right behind me and see what I'm doing at all times.

I really hate that. Id much rather be next to the wall to have some sort of privacy. Somehow sitting next to burpy guy is still the thing I'm most annoyed about though.

I tried to ask for a different seat, but my manager effectively said that I have no choice but to sit there because that guy is part of my team, and teammates should sit together. He forgot about the fact that, while the work him and I do is indeed related, I've been working on a solo project for the past few months and I don't need to be next to anybody in particular because I'm the only one working on this thing. Theoretically, I could sit in the toilet with my laptop and get my work done just fine. Maybe when I talk to him face to face in the office I can convince him to have some mercy on me.

The bright side is I'm very excited about meeting those 7 new hires I mentioned. They seem to be smart, capable people so I look forward to working with them and learning from them. Every cloud has a silver lining. 😊

why people around me act like dump. i have recently worked with this site, which is written in php.

customer: (yelling) my website is hacked, fix it immediately
me : ok sir, we will restore your site immediately

after finishing talk with customer. i have checked website, there is no sign of website being hacked. i have checked server logs and website for security breach, there is no sign.

me: your website is not hacked, sir. can you please tell me where you have seen hacked page.
customer: look at those pages

after seen that page i facepalmed myself. it's a bug, person who created that page just splitted string without using any multibyte function, so page is showing with corrupted characters. i fixed it and problem solved. i have told about that bug, to the person who created that page.

me: hey you have used this function which is not able to handle multibyte characters, you should use multibyte character functions for that one.
person: every characters are the same. we shouldn't need to handle that way.

he is actually a senior developer. who don't even know the difference between unicode and ascii characters.

Once I was told to interview a junior dev. It was my first ever interview from the side of employer, so I hope this story will never appear here told by my vis a vis. Ok, to the subject. Position of jun iOS dev. It was so long time ago, the manual reference counting was the only option on a platform. And I ask her, to describe how the manual ref counting actually working. She cannot answer this. I try to split the theme in to a pieces and ask more precise questions, about this or that situation, what should happen, or at least how she thinks it may work. She cannot answer this as well. Technically for me it was the end of interview, but I cannot give up on her that easy so I ask her to tell me what she is doing on her current position and we had spoke for another 15 min. TLDR she has failed.
Next year, another company, interview for the same position, the same people on the scene. So, I remember her, she remembers me. We both know the question I will ask. TLDR she has failed on the very same question.
Oh god knows how bad I feel after rejecting her second time. But I was little more experienced with the interviews and I was sure this question should not be a problem to those who have little experience on a platform.
Several years has passed. Another company. I’m about to jump to the next company and project managers are doing their best to fill the position with ANYONE as it’s a big fight for developers at the moment. So they have found a junior inside the company who wants to try. And SAME PEOPLE on the scene. Same question on a table. And some other questions, and more. So she’s got that job.
After many years I can say she could have a job from the first time if only I try to question her about other sides of day to day code writing. It was just me - not very experienced interviewer and not very experienced mid developer. I only hope she is not hating me a lot.

i don't think that i'm having a burnout but i think that i'm maybe not so far away from it... several people, including friends, my therapist and also a colleague, told me they see me at risk of sliding into a real burnout.

i've known this for longer that i have a crappy work life balance. the habit of making work the most important part of my own life. thinking about work even in my private time, when i fall asleep, when i wake up in the night or in the morning. the tendency to think about problems, plans, coworkers, not being able to quit work mentally. the idea that i have to prove to everybody at work that i'm awesome. the feeling that, after a work day, i'm just "waiting" at home for the next day, in idle mode, so i can continue working on a problem (like a bug) that's occupying my whole mind. and at the same time, feeling totally empty after work, having no energy. i've lost interest and quit several hobbies in the last two years that once were important for me. and i think one important reason is that i didn't have any mental energy left to deal with that.

another factor for this development was also the pandemic for sure, because for some time, i had no real social life except for that at work.
but more important is probably that i find my job most of the time really fun and am highly motivated. i have the tendency to say yes to everything and to really commit to and own the problems that are handed to me. (right now, however i feel like there's not much motivation left)
then again there is the feeling that what i do is never good enough, i have little self confidence in my own abilities as a software engineer. there's a big discrepancy between how i myself perceive my work and how other people do (not only at work). on a rational level, i know that what i do is at least "good enough", otherwise i wouldn't have this job, and i wouldn't receive this amount of positive feedback from people. but it's hard to really deeply understand this thing, when there are deep-rooted beliefs like "only perfect is good enough" or "your colleagues will be disappointed and get a negative idea of you (and something bad will happen), if you don't give your best"... and there's also this idea that i have to be this super nerdy person who also codes in their free time, reads IT magazines and stuff, because only then i will fit this stereotype of a software developer, and only then i can be taken seriously and be good enough. no matter if this is fun for me or not.

anyway, right now i'm at a point in life where i'm realizing all this not only rationally, but with full emotional impact... :/ my life feels like it's gone stale and empty. i've lost creativity, warmth and human connection and that hurts a lot.

i'm trying to change my life.
one thing that really helps me right now is to talk with people who have (made) similar experiences. can you relate? if yes, how do / did you address those problems? i would really appreciate to hear your stories...

Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Here is another.

Early into our eCommerce venture, we experienced the normal growing pains.

Part of the learning process was realizing in web development, you should only access data resources on an as-needed basis.

One business object on it's creation would populate db lookups, initialize business rule engines (calling the db), etc.

Initially, this design was fine, no one noticed anything until business started to grow and started to cause problems in other systems (classic scaling problems)

VP wanted a review of the code and recommendations before throwing hardware at the problem (which they already started to do).

Over a month, I started making some aggressive changes by streamlining SQL, moving initialization, and refactoring like a mad man.

Over all page loads were not really affected, but the back-end resources were almost back to pre-eCommerce levels.

The main web developer at the time was not amused and fought my changes as much as she could.

Couple months later the CEO was speaking to everyone about his experience at a trade show when another CEO was complementing him on the changes to our web site.
The site was must faster, pages loaded without any glitches, checkout actually worked the first time, etc.
CEO wanted to thank everyone involved etc..and so on.

About a week later the VP handed out 'Thank You' certificates for the entire web team (only 4 at the time, I was on another team). I was noticeably excluded (not that I cared about a stupid piece of paper, but they also got a pizza lunch...I was much more pissed about that). My boss went to find out what was going on.

MyBoss: "Well, turned out 'Sally' did make all the web site performance improvements."
Me: "Where have you been the past 3 months? 'Sally' is the one who fought all my improvements. All my improvements are still in the production code."
MyBoss: "I'm just the messenger. What would you like me to do? I can buy you a pizza if you want. The team already reviewed the code and they are the ones who gave her the credit."
Me: "That's crap. My comments are all over that code base. I put my initials, date, what I did, why, and what was improved. I put the actual performance improvement numbers in the code!"
MyBoss: "Yea? Weird. That is what 'Tom' said why 'Sally' was put in for a promotion. For her due diligence for documenting the improvements."
Me:"What!? No. Look...lets look at the code"

Open up the file...there it was...*her* initials...the date, what changed, performance improvement numbers, etc.

WTF!

I opened version control and saw that she made one change, the day *after* the CEO thanked everyone and replaced my initials with hers.

She knew the other devs would only look at the current code to see who made the improvements (not bother to look at the code-differences)

MyBoss: "Wow...that's dirty. Best to move on and forget about it. Let them have their little party. Let us grown ups keeping doing the important things."

When u spend too much time writing Java and suddenly go back to C# yet continue to write Java code 😪

Past two days one of the senior devs has been complaining to anyone who will listen about a UI assembly containing 'hard-coded' references to a third party component causing several builds to break. The developer who added the telerik component probably had no idea the reference is pointing to his personal directory instead of a relative path. Easy fix? Uh...yea...but he just ranted to our boss for about 10 minutes about he has no idea how to fix the problem and the TFS build failure holding up his other projects.
WTF!? You fracking know what the relative path is!...just fracking change it and move the frack on.

The drama this drama-queen keeps spewing out is driving me out of my mind.

So I help out in a development forum for a framework I use at work. I learned a crap ton by seeing questions people ask, then learning to solve them myself. I have really enjoyed being in that forum that past 4 years.

Yet, I see people who cannot seem to reason themselves out of a paper bag at times. I see questions of I cannot run this linux executable because there are parenthesis in the filename. I mean most console interfaces are just tab complete even with special characters. This is for a developer in their 50s that has been coding 30 years. Or I see other programmers asking basic questions that 5 minutes with the docs would solve. Most of the ones that I have issue with seem to have been a part of that community a lot longer than myself.

How do developers survive without problem solving skills to understand the frameworks or tools they use?

I had another conversation with a dev in another forum about using "man" in Linux to figure out how to use something. They said something to the effect: "try learning awk from a manpage". I explained about how "back in the day" we learned EVERYTHING from man pages. That is why they are called "man" pages.

Is the industry flooded with idiots now?

This is my first post. I felt like if I'm wrote this I'll just be a big fat crybaby, but i need to release this pressure from me.

I've been pretty burnt out past 6 month.

So a little bit backstory here, I've come from broken family, and currently on my 7th semester of college. But I've been part of small startup as mobile apps developer for a year and a half now.

6 month ago, it just a year of recovery from a toxic relationship that basically ruins my college life. I have really bad GPA (bad score for being absent from classes), basically no friends, and a barely passable (or even bad) skill in Android Dev. Then I got new girlfriend that really supportive for me. But after 2 months, her parents ask me if I would marry her or not. because if not, I have to broke up with her (We're in Indonesia and both of us is Muslim, so outside marriage relationship is kinda in "grey area" depend on who you ask). So I have to choose to marry her or not, and I choose the marriage. I think I have enough saving and just enough income to support both of us.

Then it's been a downward spiral from there.

The startup that I've been working on were in a pretty bad shape. I've been underpaid since the beginning (and that's not really a problem for me at that time, that's my choice and I blame no one) but abysmal growth and some miss management force us to scale back and makes me basically in a non-paying jobs.

So I take college break for a semester and been trying to find projects here and there for marriage savings, but because the weak employee protection here, lots of the projects I have completed have yet to pay the fee (even until today). And even if they paid me, most of it were really low paying jobs (we're talking $200 per 3 weeks project here, to be fair, for our average GDP, it's not bottom-low).

And the deadline is approaching, our marriage date is settled in (very) early January 2019, and i've been in this "not yet graduated but needs job" limbo. Most of employer here still has the old "Degree Based" Job specs, and not "Skill Based" one. so because de-jure I've still a "College Student" no Job listing is willing to take me in. I've apply to almost 30 Job Listing and just get interview once, and still failed because I can't move to the company area, too far and have too expensive living cost vs the salary ($300 living cost vs $450 salary, while i need to give money to my girlfriend back home for a living).

So I switch my direction to Competitions with Extra Job offering as a Bonus, and I've been pretty close to winning one, held by CIMB Bank, but still failed. It's little bit better now because CIMB came interested with me but there is red flag which I need to graduate with decent GPA before July 2019, and in current GPA? it's practically impossible.

Can it getting worse? oh it can. Remember I come from broken home family? it's inherently hard to keeps communication with both of my parents that to this day still despise each other. And while my mother is still supportive to my marriage, my father isn't. He even basically disowned me last week because my one-sided decision to marry my girlfriend, and blame my mother for being the "bad influence" for me.

And now, today, December 16th, and I'm still in this weird Limbo and have nowhere to go. with $0 in my pocket (have spent all of my savings for marriage preparation) And our marriage is approaching. I almost given up.

At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.

Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.

Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.

After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.

Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.

My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V

Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.

I find many of the peculiarities about our kind (developer) to be amusing.

Here is one I have seen too many times to count...

You ask a group of developer something like...

“We have a project built using X, Y and Z. We are looking at integrating the “example framework” to solve a specific problem. Do you have any experience with “example framework” or would you suggest another framework?”

Inevitably you get the same useless response of “Why are you using X, Y, and Z. It’s so <insert generic complaint here>!” Followed with no actual attempt to answer the question asked...

Listen, I know some of us a socially awkward (I can be) and I know we like to debate and argue.

But, if someone asks you a specific technical question about an existing product, either...

1. Answer the question with your experience
2. Declare that you do not have experience with it
3. Shut your fucking childish mouth

No one cares about how you feel about the size of the underlying technology in existing products! What do you expect?

“OMG, we didn’t realize X technology as 100mb large! Hold on while we go and reengineer our entire product base because of this fucking revelation you just told us!”

You may want to hear your own voice but the rest of us would prefer it if you would shut your mouth if you have nothing useful to add.

(Reads as: we would prefer is you fucked right off!)

Rant r = new Rant(Rant.TEAM_PROBLEM);

Three months ago, a senior, one year older than me, decided to join me in doing startups. He said he's good at finance stuff (his parents are fund managers), and he is interested in startups just like I am. He treated me very nicely, so I gladly accepted him.

I'm currently working on many projects, and some of them won me quite a few awards, most notably on the national competition. I also got invited into startup incubator programs, met some awesome people and offered free scholarships at universities in my country.

He frankly said he joined because he wanted to learn about startups and have those "privileges" too, and I'm cool with that.

Anyway, the problem is that I'm the one doing all the work. He's really nice, doesn't claim anything whatsoever, but the thing is he doesn't have any skills whatsoever except soft skills like communicating. So, I'm horribly tired from working alone.

My tasks mostly involves full-stack development, such as planning the specs, designing and developing frontend for mobile apps and progressive webapps, developing microservices for the backend, up to deploying and maintaining the servers. It's a lot of work for a single person to handle in such a short timeframe.

Not only that, but I'm also the one handling the business/marketing part, albeit I'm still learning. From doing paperworks, pitches, business models, up to creating advertising materials for the product.

I'm obviously not the smart ones like the people out there, but I keep focusing on improving my skills.

So, he said he could help me, and I let him try. What did you think he did?

He made pitch decks using default fucking PowerPoint themes, shooted a demo video with his phone cam in 320p potato resolution and expect me to "add some effects", gives me loads of requirements when all we needed was a simple feature, copying and pasting prior documents in my paperworks which doesn't make any fucking sense at all, and quite a lot more.

Also, he said I should stay in the developer zone only while he maintains the business, whilist he obviously can't do much in the business part either. Seriously...?

I'm okay with his lack of experience, considering he's nice and all, unlike the other business guys I've met in the previous rants. However, I keep questioning myself why he is here in the first place when I'm the one doing everything anyway.

What should I do? Maybe just keep him and recruit more experienced people to join us, as he's not that much of a burden? What do you devRanters think?

Thanks for reading, fellow devRanters! 😀

After 2 years in a small company as an all around software developer (started with xamarin for Android/iOS, then Unity, then OpenXML, augmented reality, virtual reality and .Net MVC...yeah all that and lots more) I changed to another company and I'm here 1 month and some days. I am super enthusiastic and I like it here!! They're more specific and professional, exactly what I need at the moment.

What is the problem, you might ask?

I was given some projects, I have done most of the work but now an issue arrived. I did almost everything and now we're waiting for some answers needed before closing the projects. And I get bored. I want to work!! I need to continue the streak! Just give me something and I'll make it happen!! I am boreeed!!

What is wrong with me? Am I buggy or something?

Hello everyone, first time ranter here! I have been studying Computer Science for 2 years starting September. The program introduced me to Java,HTML,CSS, JS and php. I feel like even though I am currently studying this I still do not "know" how to code. For example when I look at my classmates when they code it all seems so effortless and smooth, if they run into an issue they will usually solve it within the hour where as when I run into an issue I struggle to even see what the problem is. So the real point of this rant is, how do I improve? I am currently doing the #100daysofcode to get better but sometimes I feel so far away from calling myself a "developer" what is your road to the "developer" title? did you struggle as much as I am at the moment? or did you just sail into it like my classmates?

Development world is always changing and evolving... It changes before you know it...

So, having the ability to quickly adapt and learn is a must for any Developer... And, this is the one thing that I am sure that everyone knows about or heard about..

But, my advice is quite simple:

"Don't rush into participating in a race, just because everyone else is doing so.

The trick is not to move quickly.. But, to move one step at a time, at the pace in which you are at your most comfortable...

It might seem counterintuitive and a contradiction to what I have said earlier.. But, I hope that by the end of this rant, you will be able to understand my perspective..

This advice is especially useful for people still finding and searching for their place in our world..

Charles Darwin, very wisely understood the philosophy behind 'Survival of the Fittest'..

By 'fittest', he didn't refer to the ones considered to be the strongest or having the most intelligence, but the ones that had mastered the ability to adapt to changing circumstances..

Adaptability is important, but not at the cost of understanding and learning about the fundamental pillars on which this world stands..

Don't rush because when you run, your visions starts to become more narrow.. In your pursuit to reach your goal, you lose the ability to look at the macro details surrounding your goal..

Learning new technology is important, but that doesn't mean that you don't learn about various approaches or how to design a more logical or efficient solution...

Refactoring the code, developing good Testing procedures, learning to interact with your fellow developers are as crucial as learning about the changing trends...

Even, in this ever-changing world, understand that some things will always remain the same, like the adrenaline that course through your veins when you finally solve a long-standing problem...

Curiosity, Discovery and Exploration are the key pillars and hence, when we rush in, we might stop exploring and lose curiosity to discover new and exciting ways to reach our goal..

Or, we might also end up losing the drive that grips us and motivates to continue moving forward inspite of the challenges standing between us and our destination..

And, believe me, once you lose this quality, you might still succeed but the contentment and the satisfaction that you feel will be lost..

And, then, you will remain a developer only through your designation... And, that in my personal opinion, the worst punishment.

So I work for a company that does outsource, this company is pretty nice, but I don't get to see it too often. The one where I'm outsourcing though is the one where I spend all of my time.

Now, this company is a kind of a startup working with AI and Deep Learning (but not if statements :o ), but I came here as a full stack python developer that should implement their AI modules into real apps (mainly web apps).

Everything sounds good untill now, I learn lots and I'm doing what I wanted: python development. The problem is: management + one kiss ass guy.

The amount of work that should be done and the deadlines that should be kept are so messed up that I end up working extra hours, sometimes even in weekend, just to get it done. I'm the only apps developer there, so passing my tasks is not an option. I tried to talk about this, but I was met with a "loser can't keep up even with these few tasks..." kind of attitude.

Moreover, there is a guy that would do anything for the boss's attention, so he speaks everyone there behind their backs (and we all know it, but he's the favorite and he actually knows his stuff so we can't do much about him).

Now the question: what should I do? I only have 5 months here (so leaving would put a hole in my CV, I don't even know what to answer at this interview question "why are you leaving"), plus that the managers from these two companies are highschool friends which means that if I go and ask for a different project, the atmosphere at work will change (maybe this is overthinking already, but I can't help it). Also, last week I could barely get through the days without crying from stress.

TL;DR: I learn a lot from this company, but the deadlines are killing me and my stress level is at an all time high. I want to leave, but I kind of can't because I want my CV to look good.

So yeah, this is my first real rant, feels good to put it out there

This is something I'm proud of about myself as a developer, which is rare.

My setup with the Alt key.

All the keys in my left hand (as in, for all the keys in my left hand region, qwerasdfzxcv)
have their Alt and AltShift combinations mapped to (almost) all the special chars related to programming.
For example:
Alt + z -> /
AltShift + z -> \

Here's me typing them in 2 seconds.
{}()_-'"/:+=<>[]|#~`\;*!

And, on my right hand, I emulate the arrow keys movement:
Alt + hjkl moves chars
AltShift + hjkl moves and selects chars
AltCtrl + hjkl moves words
AltCtrlShift + hjkl moves and selects words
Alt + n. backspaces/deletes chars
AltCtrl + n. backspaces/deletes words

And the best of them all:
Alt + space -> <return>
AltShift + space -> Shift+<return> (which does a newline in chat editors like fb messenger)
AltCtrl + Space -> Ctrl+<return> (which can do the submit in some forms, like send email in gmail)

Now, my hand sits for real on the home row and rarely moves because it's not there just for vim, but for the entire system as well.
This setup is very compliant with my little mouse use, since I use vim, and the vim extension for chrome.
I still use and need the mouse for some tasks.

Another one huge benefit is that I don't have a problem remembering where the keys are. This is a problem I can have because I go between different keyboards because of having used different keyboards: argentinian, american, japanese and now brazilian (I'm not trying to be cool, it's just a series of circumstances that led me to using different keyboards).

At the same time, this thing might have become a hinderance because it's not as easy for me going to a different keyboard.

Regarding implementations, when I used MacOS I used Karabiner, insanely clean interface.
On linux, I have to create my own mapping in X.

When I was in college OOP was emerging. A lot of the professors were against teaching it as the core. Some younger professors were adamant about it, and also Java fanatics. So after the bell rang, they'd sometimes teach people that wanted to learn it. I stayed after and the professor said that object oriented programming treated things like reality.

My first thought to this was hold up, modeling reality is hard and complicated, why would you want to add that to your programming that's utter madness.

Then he started with a ball example and how some balls in reality are blue, and they can have a bounce action we can express with a method.

My first thought was that this seems a very niche example. It has very little to do with any problems I have yet solved and I felt thinking about it this way would complicate my programs rather than make them simpler.

I looked around the at remnants of my classmates and saw several sitting forward, their eyes lit up and I felt like I was in a cult meeting where the head is trying to make everyone enamored of their personality. Except he wasn't selling himself, he was selling an idea.

I patiently waited it out, wanting there to be something of value in the after the bell lesson. Something I could use to better my own programming ability. It never came.

This same professor would tell us all to read and buy gang of four it would change our lives. It was an expensive hard cover book with a ribbon attached for a bookmark. It was made to look important. I didn't have much money in college but I gave it a shot I bought the book. I remember wrinkling my nose often, reading at it. Feeling like I was still being sold something. But where was the proof. It was all an argument from authority and I didn't think the argument was very good.

I left college thinking the whole thing was silly and would surely go away with time. And then it grew, and grew. It started to be impossible to avoid it. So I'd just use it when I had to and that became more and more often.

I began to doubt myself. Perhaps I was wrong, surely all these people using and loving this paradigm could not be wrong. I took on a 3 year project to dive deep into OOP later in my career. I was already intimately aware of OOP having to have done so much of it. But I caught up on all the latest ideas and practiced them for a the first year. I thought if OOP is so good I should be able to be more productive in years 2 and 3.

It was the most miserable I had ever been as a programmer. Everything took forever to do. There was boilerplate code everywhere. You didn't so much solve problems as stuff abstract ideas that had nothing to do with the problem everywhere and THEN code the actual part of the code that does a task. Even though I was working with an interpreted language they had added a need to compile, for dependency injection. What's next taking the benefit of dynamic typing and forcing typing into it? Oh I see they managed to do that too. At this point why not just use C or C++. It's going to do everything you wanted if you add compiling and typing and do it way faster at run time.

I talked to the client extensively about everything. We both agreed the project was untenable. We moved everything over another 3 years. His business is doing better than ever before now by several metrics. And I can be productive again. My self doubt was over. OOP is a complicated mess that drags down the software industry, little better than snake oil and full of empty promises. Unfortunately it is all some people know.

Now there is a functional movement, a data oriented movement, and things are looking a little brighter. However, no one seems to care for procedural. Functional and procedural are not that different. Functional just tries to put more constraints on the developer. Data oriented is also a lot more sensible, and again pretty close to procedural a lot of the time. It's just odd to me this need to separate from procedural at all. Procedural was very honest. If you're a bad programmer you make bad code. If you're a good programmer you make good code. It seems a lot of this was meant to enforce bad programmers to make good code. I'll tell you what I think though. I think that has never worked. It's just hidden it away in some abstraction and made identifying it harder. Much like the code methodologies themselves do to the code.

Now I'm left with a choice, keep my own business going to work on what I love, shift gears and do what I hate for more money, or pivot careers entirely. I decided after all this to go into data science because what you all are doing to the software industry sickens me. And that's my story. It's one that makes a lot of people defensive or even passive aggressive, to those people I say, try more things. At least then you can be less defensive about your opinion.

developer makes a "missed-a-semicolon"-kind of mistake that brings your non-production infrastructure down.

manager goes crazy. rallies the whole team into a meeting to find "whom to hold accountable for this stupid mistake" ( read : whom should I blame? ).

spend 1-hour to investigate the problem. send out another developer to fix the problem.

... continue digging ...
( with every step in the software development lifecycle handbook; the only step missing was to pull the handbook itself out )

finds that the developer followed the development process well ( no hoops jumped ).
the error was missed during the code review because the reviewer didn't actually "review" the code, but reported that they had "reviewed and merged" the code

get asked why we're all spending time trying to fix a problem that occurred in a non-production environment. apparently, now it is about figuring out the root cause so that it doesn't happen in production.

we're ALL now staring at the SAME pull request. now the manager is suddenly more mad because the developer used brackets to indicate the pseudo-path where the change occurred.
"WHY WOULD YOU WASTE 30-SECONDS PUTTING ALL THOSE BRACES? YOU'RE ALREADY ON A BRANCH!"

PS : the reason I didn't quote any of the manager's words until the end was because they were screaming all along, so, I'd have to type in ALL CAPS-case. I'm a CAPS-case-hater by-default ( except for the singular use of "I" ( eye; indicating myself ) )

WTF? I mean, walk your temper off first ( I don't mean literally, right now; for now, consider it a figure of speech. I wish I could ask you to do it literally; but no, I'm not that much of a sadist just yet ). Then come back and decide what you actually want to be pissed about. Then think more; about whether you want to kill everyone else's productivity by rallying the entire team ( OK, I'm exaggerating, it's a small team of 4 people; excluding the manager ) to look at an issue that happened in a non-production environment.
At the end of the week, you're still going to come back and say we're behind schedule because we didn't get any work done.
Well, here's 4 hours of our time consumed away by you.

This manager also has a habit of saying, "getting on X's case". Even if it is a discussion ( and not a debate ). What is that supposed to mean? Did X commit such a grave crime that they need to be condemned to hell?

I miss my old organization where there was a strict no-blame policy. Their strategy was, "OK, we have an issue, let's fix it and move on."
I've gotten involved ( not caused it ) in even bigger issues ( like an almost-data-breach ) and nobody ever pointed a finger at another person.
Even though we all knew who caused the issue. Some even went beyond and defended the person. Like, "Them. No, that's not possible. They won't do such dumb mistakes. They're very thorough with their work."
No one even talked about the person behind their back either ( at least I wasn't involved in any such conversation ). Even later, after the whole issue had settled down. I don't think people brought it up later either ( though it was kind of a hush-hush need-to-know event )

Now I realize the other unsaid-advantage of the no-blame policy. You don't lose 4 hours of your so-called "quarantine productivity". We're already short on productivity. Please don't add anymore. 🙏

!rant

OK, I have a dilemma and I need some developers helps. I'm going to tell you about myself. I am 19 and have been programming since I was 11. I consider myself a full stack web developer and that is where my passion lies... I love web development. The problem is that I am currently studying comp sci at a top 10 uni and I don't really like it. I kind of enjoy it, however, I am mostly doing it for the degree because my goal is to move to the valley (currently in the UK). I'm not sure whether I should pursue this degree because it's interesting and tbh I might just need time to get used to uni life or should I just go for it in the industry?

What really gets on my nerves?
People that think I can fix every computer problem there is, just because I'm a developer and therefore must know everything about PCs.

What do I look like, a Tech Wizard?

A bug is born
... and it's sneaky and slimy. Mr. Senior-been-doing-it-for-ears commits some half-assed shitty code, blames failed tests on availability of CI licenses. I decided to check what's causing this shit nevertheless, turns out he forgot to flag parts of the code consistently using his new compiler defines, and some parts would get compiled while others needed wouldn't .. Not a big deal, we all make mistakes, but he rushes to Teams chat directing a message to me (after some earlier non-sensible argument about merits of cherry picking vs re-base):
Now all tests pass, except ones that need CI license. The PR is done, you can use your preferred way to take my changes.

So after I spot those missing checks causing the tests to fail, as well as another bug in yet another test case, and yet another disastrous memory related bug, which weren't detected by the tests of course .. I ponder my options .. especially based on our history .. if I say anything he will get offended, or at best the PR will get delayed while he is in denial arguing back even longer and dependent tasks will get delayed and the rest of the team will be forced to watch this show in agony, he also just created a bottleneck putting so many things at stake in one PR ..

I am in a pickle here .. should I just put review comments and risk opening a can of worms, or should I just mention the very obvious bugs, or even should I do nothing .. I end up reaching for the PM and explained the situation. In complete denial, he still believes it's a license problem and goes on ranting about how another project suffering the same fate .. bla bla bla chipset ... bla bla bla project .. bla bla bla back in whatever team .. then only when I started telling him:
These issues are even spotted by "Bob" earlier, since for some reason you just dismissed whatever I just said ..
("Bob" is another more sane senior developer in the team, and speaks the same language as the PM)
Only now I get his attention! He then starts going through the issues with me (for some reason he thinks he is technical enough to get them) .. He now to some extent believes the first few obvious bugs .. now the more disastrous bug he is having really hard time wrapping his head around it .. Then the desperate I became, I suggest let's just get this PR merged for the sake of the other tasks after may be fixing the obvious issues and meanwhile we create another task to fix the bug later .. here he chips in:
You know what, that memory bug seems like a corner case, if it won't cause issues down the road after merging let's see if we need even to open an internal fix or defect for it later. Only customers can report bugs.

I am in awe how low the bar can get, I try again and suggest let's at least leave a comment for the next poor soul running into that bug so they won't be banging their heads in the wall 2hrs straight trying to figure out why store X isn't there unless you call something last or never call it or shit like that (the sneaky slimy nature of that memory bug) .. He even dismissed that and rather went on saying (almost literally again): It is just that Mr. Senior had to rush things and communication can be problematic sometimes .. (bla bla bla) back in "Sunken Ship Co." days, we had a team from open source community .. then he makes a very weird statement:
Stuff like what Richard Stallman writes in Linux kernel code reviews can offend people ..

Feeling too grossed and having weird taste in my mouth I only get in a bad hangover day, all sorts of swear words and profanity running in my head like a wild hungry squirrel on hot asphalt chasing a leaky chestnut transport ... I tell him whatever floats your boat but I just feel really sorry for whoever might have to deal with this bug in the future ..

I just witnessed the team giving birth to a sneaky slimy bug .. heard it screaming and saw it kicking .. and I might live enough to see it a grown up having a feast with other bug buddies in this stinky swamp of Uruk-hai piss and Orcs feces.

So first of all merry delayed Xmas and of course wishing you all a happy new year.

Now...

I always loved designing and coding, yes I actually like it, I must be absolutely mental or something.. I finally after pushing myself through hours upon hours of courses, finishing most within 15% of the allotted time, and doing more then was requested, I finally found a job, related to front-end development. You might think "Gee; good for you buddy, you filthy commoner.." Well; it didn't last all too long, I basically after nailing the interview process got my first day there within a few days, now I am absolutely stoked and my nerves are shot, plus the 4 cups of coffee aren't helping. I literally was so nervous to do well on my first day, that I slept for only one hour, literally one bloody hour.

I get into the office where I am greeted by an amazing laptop, I mean high-end gaming 360 no-scope all over the place gaming. I sit down and start on getting all my tools ready to go (they let us use whatever IDE we wanted, which I thought was amazing) after getting my IDE and the plugins and all the emails/Slack etc setup, I then get told to get a Dropbox account. I assumed the Dropbox account was just there to share things quickly with the designers, we would obviously be using Git right?! Well; no not exactly, actually not at all - we all used the Dropbox account of one of the bosses, I swear everybody pushed and pulled stuff all the time, a copy of the boss's passport was in there as well, and they had projects from and up to 3 years ago, still in there... It took my Dropbox 3 bloody hours to grab as much as it could to actually allow me to get started...

I then to my absolute dismay notice that I would be working on a prefab of a prefab, basically the only thing I would be responsible for, is to adjust the animations and aligning elements.... Aligning and animations.... Fine, I guess it could be worse right? Started going along with it, using a framework that I never heard of before, till like a good 3 days before starting there called "Greensock" which is amazing I must admit, could've helped me allot on my solo-projects. Problem was; we had designers who wanted things, that just looked plain horrible, it was never 'on-point' so to say, maybe it's just me being a perfectionist but it just looked wrong.

Finally got it done after struggling with the prefabs and what not, then the day was almost over and I finally got to go home, fortunately dodging the drinking that was occurring around 4 in the afternoon in the middle of the office, it wasn't beers or anything of the sort - but hard liquor along the lines of Wodka and straight up Gin. I fortunately had a personal issue I had to attend too, so I got out of there before things got too crazy and they went out for dinner stumbling all over the place.

Well this wen't for a few more days (minus the drinking), with 8 being the exact number of days and my grievance list only kept growing. I was for one a junior-developer and thus with them knowing was supposed to get training from our lead, however; that never occurred instead said 'lead' would leave early or be completely absent on most days, leaving me to mess around with prefabs that did my head in, with no comments nor any indication what it did or should've done, I spent hours just adjusting one line of code at a time to see what would happen.

Eventually they told us to work from home only, so I did - did a project here and there and then got told they wouldn't keep me on board any longer, stating I was too inexperienced and they didn't have enough work (which was a load of bs) and that I lacked "office experience" whatever the heck that means, I was always sociable and hell I ever cracked people up, kept a neat and orderly list of things that needed doing, I even contrary to most commented on my code, so the next poor sod wouldn't be going through 'try by error' hell that I wen't through.

Either way; I currently have been feeling absolutely wrecked in terms of motivation, that job would've solved my financial situation and allowed me to finally do what I wanted to do. Instead of doing some random dead-end job each week or month, I would've had a steady income and something I could've built on.

But to add some positivism to this endless and too long of a rant... I'm currently going through a boot-camp and doing a small Linux based course on the side, this little thing isn't going to hold me back; yeah it will be tough, but then again most things don't come easy..

Thank you for reading and I hope you have allot and I mean allot more luck on your first job.

Fuck my country's universities, fucking greedy assholes that ruin lives, suck wallets and sucks life from the young.

I'm currently studying something completely non related to programming: History. And I really love it. I love reading 1000 pages for each test and essay and talking about the problem of naming the Cold War a war and cold and etc. The problem is that I won't make as much money as I would make even as a self taught developer.

After considering my possibilities, I thought I could enter the computer science carreer. I don't know how this works in other countries but here you would have to study 3 years of an engineering common plan and then specialise in some sort of industrial engineering while getting an specialisation also in computer science. After some counting, I got to the conclusion that I would be studying 6 years (or more), and wasting half of those years learning stuff that I would never use nor care about.

But that's not all. This semester I took the introductory class for programming. It's pretty basic stuff but at least they teach a little bit about algorithms and problem solving. It turns out that a friend of mine that's about to graduate from computer science applied as a helper for the prof. I was so excited I could finally talk with someone about code!

Since the start of the semester I have been passing a lot of time with him and talking about the future. Turns out he doesn't understand shit about code but somehow he learns everything by hard and has passed every computer science course without having any practical abilities. I don't blame him, he's studying hard and playing by the rules, and turns out that he has wasted precious time of his life also learning biology, chemistry, structural engineering, hidraulic engineering, transportation engineering and a ton of engineerings that he won't use.

If the university would instead take that time to teach better courses of practical programming or leave him some time to try out the stuff he learns by hard, he wouldn't have to hear me talking about stuff he doesn't comprehend but feels that should, and wouldn't be utterly depressed, he wouldn't take SIX years to learn less than what he could learn in less than THREE years. And this isn't just a random university, it is one of the 2 best universities we have here and was in 2014 the best of all Latin America.

And wait, here comes the best part. In my country, levels of education are heavily stratified. After school, superior studies give different titles according to the time you've been studying. Yes just the time. And these titles are what your employers will see to give you different work positions. So for studying a 2 year carreer you get a technic job which pays well but not too well, then at 4 years you get a license title which only proves that you know stuff, then at 5 or more (depending on what you are studying) you get a professional degree and will get payed as a full fledged professional. So here, even though in other countries it takes 6 years to have a masters in engineering, they give you just the engineering degree, and it would take 2 (or more) more years to have a master. Even though you can totally teach engineering in 4 years, here they take BY LAW 2 years more, while paying what a fucking full stack of pairs of kidneys would cost in the black market.

So fuck that shit, I won't be throwing my money at any university. I hope they get reformed soon becouse this is fucking dumb, really really dumb. Like 2 year old shit dumb. I'll just learn a bit more, make some projects until I have a decent portfolio and apply to some company that cares for real knowledge and not just a piece of paper with letters and a shitty logo on it.

Just go to GPT and get me the code today!!!

Like wtf why does every non-tech guy thinks GPT is the solution for each problem.
So, a workmate wanted a fullstack system ready in 2 days and argues that its too easy with GPT. I mean yeah GPT helps, sometimes, on frequent rare occasions. But, that can't be the solution to everything, like ask it to setup the whole backend frontend integration, will it? ask it to manage assets will it? ask it to write complex code, it fails, miserably, okay like me but that's the point. Just because random transformers pop up each week containing some random shitty weights (not always agreed) that can't replace a full stack developer. These 'attention' seeking models are as good as another tool, a bit efficient, but at the end of the day its just a tool, all it does is lessen the typing time but gives more errors too. The average time remains the same. And my non-tech manager can't understand he can't do it himself earlier using GPT. Succkkkkkkssss!

This is definitely a total first world problem but I am so frustrated.

I am stuck in a team that embodies the Japanese proverb "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down".

The management are there because it is convenient and flexible and have no interest in managing or keeping up with tech.
The lead developers are extremely anti-social and are not approachable and the this stems down to the devs (not all but really most) - all there just to do the bare minimum and spend most of their energies in trying to avoid work or having learn something.

Unfortunately I am passionate about what I do and want to build high-quality products and this has put me at odds with the way things work.

I could fill up alot of time talking about how I was ordered to "cut" images/icons out of PDFs rather just getting them from the branding team, or how I was scolded for having set up logging, detected a problem caused by another developer and fixed it before it cost a big client a massive amount of money... But really the point is that I have never worked somewhere with such an awful attitude to enthusiasm and quite frankly it boggles my mind trying to understand how they rationalise these things but the answer is always laziness.

Obviously there are worse problems in the world than working in a job where you are encouraged to do nothing... But it actually really depresses me and causes anxiety that I am working with people who don't care about testing or monitoring or learning new things or even collaboration.

...sigh...

Hopefully the job market will start opening again soon

My newly joined developer colleague had some problem starting the web app we are working on locally. After changing some configuration files,

Me: Restart the app

My Dev Colleague: Do I have to close it?

Me: Yeah, there will be a red cross on the right top corner, just click on that😑😒

I have just started working in this industry, and so annoyed by the fact that managers are insensitive to the efforts put in by the developers.
1. They ask for estimates, and sometimes consider it to be the hard line for everything and then they make you feel guilty if you are not able to live up to them.

-- I am not asking to be always lenient but they need to understand that this is problem solving and one might not be able to gage the problem at first sight. A problem might have several sub problems or a solution to one issue might raise compatibility issues with other which were tough to foresee .

2. Why do they always want an instant response to their email or query, a developer being online isn't just there to answer your damn obvious and sometimes stupid questions which can be understood just be glancing at the logs once.

-- How annoying would it be if the manager himself is being poked every other minute for trivial things. Does he have the same patience with his/her developers?

3. In tough times the manager easily delegates the responsibility to the developer and instead of standing by his/her side, interrogates them as if we have done some crime.

-- Wasn't this approved by you. Weren't you the one who had these stupid demands before and didn't let me do things the correct or optimized way. I am not saying I am always right, but you can be atleast open for feedback or discussion.

Why are you the first to take credit for the success and yet hold us responsible for any mishaps.

It's sad to see that some of these people have been tech developers.
I can go on ranting for many more things.
I am not saying all those people out there are like this. But trust me many are.

Note: I am not seasoned as you guys out there. I may even be biased by my own experiences. But this is in complete contrast to what I was expecting when I graduated from college and was excited to finally learn by working.

I just have to rant...

7 months ago, I was still a pretty new iOS developer, but finally coming into my own. My boss gave me my first feature ever... a fully custom backend tweaker for our development builds, complete with text fields that devs and testers alike could fill in themselves for whatever they needed to test. I worked harder on that than I’ve ever worked on anything... and I got to make all the decisions on how it looked, behaved, what exactly the user saw/read... everything.

A month ago the most senior dev on my team was asked to update the tool to prepare for a backend migration to a new server. He was then hired to work for Apple, hurried to finish this task, and left forever. (He deserves it, we probably were slowing him down realistically. But that doesn’t forgive the following...)

Unfortunately, he thought it’d be a good idea to remove my entire custom backend tool in the process. Not sure why— maybe he thought it was legacy code or something. He must not have tested either, because the entire backend selector stopped working after that. But that was no problem— I could fix the pre-filled environment buttons just by updating a few values.

It’s the fact that he removed 100+ lines of my custom code from 3 separate classes (including entirely removing one of those classes), for no known reason, and now I have to completely rebuild the feature. Since it was entirely custom, it required no change for our migration in the first place. But he rewrote how the entire view works by writing an entirely new VC, so there is no chance I can just restore my work as it was written.

And in the shared class, he erased every line with the word “custom.” So, so many lines of hard work, now irrelevant and only visible in old defunct versions. And my boss has asked me to “just make it look how it did before the migration.”

I know it’s useless to be angry at a guy who’s long gone, but damn. I am having a real hard time convincing myself to redo all this work. He removed every trace, and all I can think is WHY DID YOU DO THAT YOU FUCKING MONSTER? IT WAS MY GREATEST WORK, AND NOBODY ASKED YOU TO DESTROY IT. THIS WAS NOT EVEN RELATED TO THE TASK YOU WERE GIVEN, AND NOW A SIMPLE TICKET TO RESTRUCTURE A TOOL HAS BECOME A MANDATE TO REBUILD IT FROM SCRATCH.

Thank you for being here, devRant. I would’ve gotten myself into deep trouble long ago if I didn’t have this safe place to blow off steam 🙏

(long post is long)
This one is for the .net folks. After evaluating the technology top to bottom and even reimplementing several examples I commonly use for smoke testing new technology, I'm just going to call it:

Blazor is the next Silverlight.

It's just beyond the pale in terms of being architecturally flawed, and yet they're rushing it out as hard as possible to coincide with the .Net 5 rebranding silo extravaganza. We are officially entering round 3 of "sacrifice .Net on the altar of enterprise comfort." Get excited.

Since we've arrived here, I can only assume the Asp.net Ajax fiasco is far enough in the past that a new generation of devs doesn't recall its inherent catastrophic weaknesses. The architecture was this:

1. Create a component as a "WebUserControl"
2. Any time a bound DOM operation occurs from user interaction, send a payload back to the server
3. The server runs the code to process the event; it spits back more HTML

Some client-side js then dutifully updates the UI by unceremoniously stuffing the markup into an element's innerHTML property like so much sausage.

If you understand that, you've adequately understood how Blazor works. There's some optimization like signalR WebSockets for update streaming (the first and only time most blazor devs will ever use WebSockets, I even see developers claiming that they're "using SignalR, Idserver4, gRPC, etc." because the template seeds it for them. The hubris.), but that's the gist. The astute viewer will have noticed a few things here, including the disconnect between repaints, inability to blend update operations and transitions, and the potential for absolutely obliterative, connection-volatile, abusive transactional logic flying back and forth to the server. It's the bring out your dead approach to seeing how much of your IT budget is dedicated to paying for bandwidth and CPU time.

Blazor goes a step further in the server-side render scenario and sends every DOM event it binds to the server for processing. These include millisecond-scale events like scroll, which, at least according to GitHub issues, devs are quickly realizing requires debouncing, though they aren't quite sure how to accomplish that. Since this immediately becomes an issue with tickets saying things like, "scroll event crater server, Ugg need help! You said Blazorclub good. Ugg believe, Ugg wants reparations!" the team chooses a great answer to many problems for the wrong reasons:

gRPC

For those who aren't familiar, gRPC has a substantial amount of compression primarily courtesy of a rather excellent binary format developed by Google. Who needs the Quickie Mart, or indeed a sound markup delivery and view strategy when you can compress the shit out of the payload and ignore the problem. (Shhh, I hear you back there, no spoilers. What will happen when even that compression ceases to cut it, indeed). One might look at all this inductive-reasoning-as-development and ask themselves, "butwai?!" The reason is that the server-side story is just a way to buy time to flesh out the even more fundamentally broken browser-side story. To explain that, we need a little perspective.

The relationship between Microsoft and it's enterprise customers is your typical mutually abusive co-dependent relationship. Microsoft goes through phases of tacit disinterest, where it virtually ignores them. And rightly so, the enterprise customers tend to be weaksauce, mono-platform, mono-language types who come to work, collect a paycheck, and go home. They want to suckle on the teat of the vendor that enables them to get a plug and play experience for delivering their internal systems.

And that's fine. But it's also dull; it's the spouse that lets themselves go, it's the girlfriend in the distracted boyfriend meme. Those aren't the people who keep your platform relevant and competitive. For Microsoft, that crowd has always been the exploratory end of the developer community: alt.net, and more recently, the dotnet core community (StackOverflow 2020's most loved platform, for the haters). Alt.net seeded every competitive advantage the dotnet ecosystem has, and dotnet core capitalized on. Like DI? You're welcome. Are you enjoying MVC? Your gratitude is understood. Cool serializers, gRPC/protobuff, 1st class APIs, metadata-driven clients, code generation, micro ORMs, etc., etc., et al. Dear enterpriseur, you are fucking welcome.

Anyways, b2blazor. So, the front end (Blazor WebAssembly) story begins with the average enterprise FOMO. When enterprises get FOMO, they start to Karen/Kevin super hard, slinging around money, privilege, premiere support tickets, etc. until Microsoft, the distracted boyfriend, eventually turns back and says, "sorry babe, wut was that?" You know, shit like managers unironically looking at cloud reps and demanding to know if "you can handle our load!" Meanwhile, any actual engineer hides under the table facepalming and trying not to die from embarrassment.

I would like to rant one more time about my internship.

I began in July, the first. That's my sister who helped me to find this internship and I was a little scared about how bad it could be.
I came at the office, my boss told me that I would work in an "Innovation lab", an apartment where people works on projects that are less corporate than the enterprise's ones.

To me, it was amazing. So I came in this apartment, it was like a dream. I didn't know that I would have such luck to be in this environment : kitchen, sofas, beds, many decorations for all political ideologies, ideas. There was some decorations that were about weed and many cool things for the young guy I am.

The lab's leader told me that it was a very free environment and all the awesome stuff I could use.
Then they showed me where I would work.

We were two interns employed as web developers. We had a complete room for us.
Then we began to work there, and I was presented to my internship tutor.
He gave me some instructions but told me that I had a week before the project begin.

Here began the troubles.

We waited a complete week without having any instructions. Then we began to build something in PHP with our knowledge and the informations someone from the lab gave us.
When finally we had news from the project, two weeks later, we learned that the project would be built with ASP. NET.
Here we go, I learn ASP. NET alone. I have many problems and nobody helps (even if the problem comes from enterprise's API/Framework). I finally make something usable with no help, after I discovered that my mate wasn't developer at all and just took an option for her classes which forced her to get an internship.

She had 3 month left, I had 6.
Then when the project really began, nobody came to verify what I was doing and on a meeting, they said that I was doing nothing.

The boss even became mad on us because he couldn't see what we were doing (we're back end developers).
I asked for help to the developers of the enterprise and someone came, sad to have to help an internship, and learned some tricks but nothing else.

To have a concrete explanation of what DDD was, I had to ask 4 times for help.

Finally I had something that could receive data from the connected hives we are working on and store them into a database in the architecture of the enterprise.

Then, they wanted me to try an API for them. I tried, and it wasn't working at all. So they make me still wait to change my whole architecture when the API will be released.

Recently, I was told that I would never do the front-end of the project (which was an horror because of the fantasm of the lab leader). Then they realized that my late wasn't a programmer. So they asked me to make a prototype for the front-end. I did for a presentation.

Then they didn't tell me the device they would use for the presentation and it was an iPhone 7. Idk why, safari couldn't display what IE can.

They blamed me for having done a bad work. It wasn't my job. I did it to help because they can't find a fucking front-end developer with a little more experience than me.

Actually, I am an alone developer since my mate is gone and the lab leader don't want me to show up because she considers me as a shame.
I asked to be moved back in the office of the enterprise, they agreed and said it was a 2-weeks delay. It's the Thursday of the second week and I have no news. I send mails to my tutor, even SMS, he doesn't answer me. They didn't call me to give me my pay with a week late. And the person who is responsible doesn't answer me neither. I came to see her, but she wasn't available. I'm now alone in a desk, waiting the time to pass.

Fucking this shit.

I'm in France.

EDIT : I forgot to say that I can't use the sofas or bed because I'm allergic to cats and there were 3 cats. Now there is still one and this beast vomits and poos everywhere in the house...

LoL.. I knew this one successful independent developer who told me:

"Why do all these companies use inefficient technologies - seriously? What I usually do is: I present myself to a company, I ask them what they would like to happen, what their problem domain is and then I present a solution. A lot of companies I've consulted for were jaw-dropped that an entire efficient and complex system was only a size of 52 KiloBytes because I just used simple languages to accomplish the task".

He has a point.. look at all these companies nowadays forcing you to Java, GlassFish, NodeJS and what not. Just the frameworks and libraries alone hog down 10 minutes of build time (sometimes 30!!), the worst companies using frameworks that require you to rebuild an entire project just to see a change in the UI.. they don't even add a watcher, and even then.. omg, not to mention averaging project file sizes of 100+ MB.

Sigh.. where is the development world going?

!myrant

I'm a junior developer in a small company alongside with a fellow programmer. Since I have an interest in Security and our Sys Admin left, my boss offered me to do some sys admin stuff.

I feel bad for my fellow programmer just because there is an old man in the company that doesn't come to me with his tech problems and goes to him.

Something like this goes down today:
OM: Hey, I can't watch my Fox Live News. Can you help me?
FP: The problem isn't on our side

*OM keeps pestering him*

FP: Let me check it out

*Goes and fix the issue and comes back laughing *

My coworker is to kind 😬😂😅

I think God is a developer. I have to say a most impressive feat, even for God, is the idiot algorithm. It has persisted through millennia of attempts to remove it, but it just keeps refining itself. While it's incredibly brief, its functions are yet to find an environment in which they cannot operate. It's full adaptable to any task, impressively modular, and self replicating.

No matter how what problem you present it with the idiot algorithm can always find a solution. It never leaves well enough alone. It can even give you an answer before everything is fully processed!

does anyone else feel that "developers are on high demand" and "if you're a good developer you should have no problem getting a job" is kind of a lie that the industry sells to you?. I mean I didn't expect to polish my linkedin profile and get 20 offers but damn. Yeah I see a lot of job offers on multiple platforms. Yeah I apply for them. Yeah I never hear back from most of them. (I have a bit more than 1 year of experience) I don't wanna work for FAANG, I'd just like an entry/middle job on an industry I like

These ignorant comments about arch are starting to get on my nerves.

You ranted or asked help about something exclusive to windows and someone pointed out they don't have that problem in arch and now you're annoyed?

Well maybe it's for good.

Next comes a very rough analogy, but imagine if someone posts "hey guys, I did a kg of coke and feeling bad, how do I detox?"

It takes one honest asshole to be like "well what if you didn't do coke?".

Replace the coke with windows.
Windows is a (mostly) closed source operating system owned by a for profit company with a very shady legal and ethical history.

What on earth could possibly go wrong?

Oh you get bsod's?
The system takes hours to update whenever the hell it wants, forces reboot and you can't stop it?
oh you got hacked because it has thousands of vulnerabilities?
wannacry on outdated windows versions paralyzed the uk health system?

oh no one can truly scrutinize it because it's closed source?

yet you wonder why people are assholes when you mention it? This thing is fucking cancer, it's hundreds of steps backwards in terms of human progress.

and one of the causes for its widespread usage are the savage marketing tactics they practiced early on. just google that shit up.

but no, linux users are assholes out to get you.

and how do people react to these honest comments? "let's make a meme out of it. let's deligitimize linux, linux users and devs are a bunch of neckbeards, end of story, watch this video of rms eating skin off his foot on a live conference"

short minded idiots.

I'm not gonna deny the challenges or limitations linux represents for the end user.

It does take time to learn how to use it properly.
Nvidia sometimes works like shit.
Tweaking is almost universally required.
A huge amount of games, or Adobe/Office/X products are not compatible.
The docs can be very obscure sometimes (I for one hate a couple of manpages)

But you get a system that:
* Boots way faster
* Is way more stable
* Is way way way more secure.
* Is accountable, as in, no chance to being forced to get exploited by some evil marketing shit.

In other words, you're fucking free.
You can even create your own version of the system, with total control of it, even profit with it.

I'm not sure the average end user cares about this, but this is a developer forum, so I think in all honesty every developer owes open source OS' (linux, freebsd, etc) major respect for being free and not being corporate horseshit.

Doctors have a hippocratic oath? Well maybe devs should have some form of oath too, some sworn commitment that they will try to improve society.

I do have some sympathy for the people that are forced to use windows, even though they know ideally isn't the ideal moral choice.
As in, their job forces it, or they don't have time or energy to learn an alternative.

At the very least, if you don't know what you're talking about, just stfu and read.

But I don't have one bit of sympathy for the rest.

I didn't even talk about arch itself.
Holy fucking shit, these people that think arch is too complicated.

What in the actual fuck.

I know what the problem is, the arch install instructions aren't copy paste commands.
Or they medium tutorial they found is outdated.

So yeah, the majority of the dev community is either too dumb or has very strong ADD to CAREFULLY and PATIENTLY read through the instructions.

I'll be honest, I wouldn't expect a freshman to follow the arch install guide and not get confused several times.
But this is an intermediate level (not megaexpert like some retards out there imply).

Yet arch is just too much. That's like saying "omg building a small airplane is sooooo complicated". Yeah well it's a fucking aerial vehicle. It's going to be a bit tough. But it's nowhere near as difficult as building a 747.

So because some devs are too dumb and talk shit, they just set the bar too low.

Or "if you try to learn how to build a plane you'll grow an aviator neckbeard". I'll grow a fucking beard if I want too.

I'm so thankful for arch because it has a great compromise between control and ease of install and use.

When I have a fresh install I only get *just* what I fucking need, no extra bullshit, no extra programs I know nothing about or need running on boot time, and that's how I boot way faster that ubuntu (which is way faster than windows already).

Configuring nvidia optimus was a major pain in the ass? Sure was, but I got it work the way I wanted to after some time.

Upgrading is also easy as pie, so really scratching my brain here trying to understand the real difficult of using arch.

So, a few years ago I did an internship at this company really close to my house. It was a total disaster but a few months ago I decided to give it another shot and apply for a junior position there as I needed money and they knew me there. For some reason they hired me and now I work there for about 2 months.

There's one other developer here and my problem is that he's the senior here. Guys I don't know what to do about it, this guy is so controlling. He won't allow me to decide ANYTHING.

I have a whiteboard with all my projects and he wrote deadlines there (because his boss said he needs to set deadlines since he never finishes anything on time, but he decided to put that on me) when I finished something in time (like 3 days early!) I wanted to put that under the project on the board. But he didn't want it. No reason. Just no.

He's also constantly talking, all day long. He writes 1 or 2 functions per day. Maybe fixes a small bug. And then one day per week he actually works. Constantly complaining about me, bugging me, removing electricity from my screens, setting my wallpaper to 2 dudes kissing ect. ect. its fucking annoying me. This guy even plays video games on his nintendo or call of duty.. Working for other customers that have nothing to do with this company. And the boss thinks he's great..

So 2 days ago, the whiteboard filled with his drawings was completely emptied because of me. It felt so good, he was so angry he didn't talk all day, to no one. What else can I do guys? I can't go to my boss, the other guy in this office doesn't really care and he's on his side. But when I code I need to be able to concentrate. I can't even have a serious conversation with this guy because he just doesn't take me serious. He always thinks he's right and wants control of every little thing...

What do I do?

Ah, the little subtle things we have to iron out as we progress from Junior Developer to Medior Developer.. things like:

- knowing the difference between a carriage return and a line feed (although having worked with analog typewriters helps) and later knowing that Unix-based systems and Windows NT-based systems implement it differently..

- knowing that serialization is important because not all computers interpret data the same way and some computers allocate 4 Bytes for a construct, others 16 Bytes.. and then we get the funkiness of transferring character sets between machines..

- knowing that a whitespace character is not only an actual space (as is known in ASCII as code 32). This one can cause even medior developers a headache, as in: why the fuck does this string function say that "hello I am a duck" and "hello I am a duck" are not the same?! Turns out then in the debugger that when you expand every character in the string you see that string1 contains 32 32 32 32 as usual.. but then string2 contains -96 -96 -96 -96 and you're like.. what the fuck..? Then you know you have to throw \\h regex at it. Haha.

- finalizing our objects and streams (although modern languages do that for us).. otherwise we have to do funky shit like trying to find what's locking a file, which is not so easy to figure out.

- figuring out why something won't work often requires you to not only break down the problem in smaller steps, to use a debugger, but sometimes it's even better to just create a proof of concept, slap some minimal code in there and debug that.. much easier.

- etc.

:)

Trying to switch my job. Applied for a well known company. Gave an interview today. I don't fucking get the obsession of these developer recruiters so fixated on data structures and algorithms. I know it's a massive part of computer science but guess there is no fucking room left to innovate in there. There are legitimate researcher teams working for implementation of these barebones inside system foundations. No general software developer gives a fuck about this piece of shit discipline of study. You wanna know why they propagate this as the panacea to test people because it's fucking easy. Give a project to somebody as interview procedure, it'll take time to bring out an interesting problem and an interesting solution to that. Sorry to say but all these data structure enthusiasts are nothing better than board game enthusiasts.

Also why can't you refer existing solutions to create your solution. I've seen some good problems which actually require you to think. But again those are heavy and can't be tested so you're left with reversing a fucking linked list with O(1) auxillary space. Fuck me ig.

Moreover, what the fuck is wrong with the moral policing internet crowd. Its so sad. I've hardly seen anybody rant about this piece of shit system put in place to push the absolute dead-end nutcases up the ladder. Every other search for it returns a Quora link with some Indian guy complaining about his interviews and in the comments you have the same scholars sitting in their data structure throne imparting knowledge about how data structure holds the fabric of reality together.

I don't hate data structures and algorithms as a subject. It is cool and quite extensive but once you try to make that as a metric of all the knowledge in the world, you've lost my drift. Maybe I'm just angry with the state of things. Maybe I'm just angry with token Quora crowd.

As we currently see a lot of codeless software platform, in the next 10 years there is gonna be high demand for people to extend these shitty apps into something proper, just like it happened with wordpress. There is a key missunderstanding that writing code and developing an application are the same thing; they are not.
Once you can write code you sure ass aren't a developer, thats a grueling journey until then, and being able to create an application without code exaggerates the problem even further.

Newer Dev here. Just recently started in a position as a developer. I'm tasked with consolidating our monitoring systems into one cohesive display. After lumping together all the indexes and helping build a custom API I'm now working on front end. Front end is easy, I've done it before. Should be no problem. I was wrong. I spent a whole day fiddling with a React dynamic table and the CSS to format it. Today, I stumble upon the react-table component. Got the results I was looking for in less than 2 hours. I'm convinced that this was a lesson better learned early on.

This week we had a live production issue that our staff were catching/fixing on the fly. We're a relatively small software team without any direct external customers, so this is not too unusual.

Unfortunately, the person in charge of dealing with these issues didn't resolve it during the work week, so we were stuck with it over the weekend. Said responsible employee left at 2:30 on Friday without figuring out how we'd deal with the problem without any staff in the office to intercept problem cases. Better yet, he drove all the way back, and was there from 3:30 to 4 and promptly left again without telling the rest of the team what was going on with the production issue. We asked how it happened, what it was, etc, but didn't focus on his fix (in hindsight, a mistake).

Since it's his job, I assumed that he would let us know what was up before he left on Friday. It turns out that he never addressed the production issue at all and just decided to leave.

A junior developer and I spent two hours contacting management (who, at this time are already at home with their families) to get clearance to either shut the system off or fix it. No one wants to give it and no one that's high enough up to approve the decision is available.

In the end, we asked the weekend mechanical support team (some friends of mine) to monitor the issue and they kindly accepted.

All of this could have been avoided if my coworker had either told us his plan earlier (so we could ask about the lack of coverage), gotten approval to shut it down for the weekend, or covered his own ass before he left for the day.

Ugggh. I get that we all make mistakes, but I really hope this guy shapes up soon.

I need to rant about life decisions, and choosing a dev career probably too early. Not extremely development related, but it's the life of a developer.

TL;DR: I tried a new thing and that thing is now my thing. The new thing is way more work than my old thing but way more rewarding & exciting. Try new things.

I taught myself to program when I was a kid (11 or 12 years old), and since then I have always been absolutely sure that I wanted to be a games programmer. I took classes in high school and college with that aim, and chose a games programming degree. Everything was so simple, nail the degree, get a job programming something, and take the first games job that I could and go from there.

I have always had random side hobbies that I liked to teach myself, just like programming. And in uni I decided that I wanted to learn another language (natural, not programming) because growing up in England meant that I only learned English and was rarely exposed to anything else. The idea of knowing another fascinated me.

So I dabbled in a few different languages, tried to find a culture that seemed to fit my style and attitude to life and others, and eventually found myself learning Korean. That quickly became something I was doing every single day, and I decided I needed to go to Korea and see what life there could be like.

I found out that my university offered a free summer school program for a couple of weeks, all I had to pay for was the flights. So a few months later I was there and it was literally the best thing I'd done in my life to that point. I'd found two things that made me feel even better than the idea of becoming the games programmer I'd always wanted to be. Travelling and using my other language to communicate with people that I couldn't in English. At that point I was still just a beginner, but even the simple conversations with people who couldn't speak English felt awesome.

So when I returned home, I found that that trip had completely thrown a spanner into my life plan. All I could think about after that was improving my language skills and going back there for as long as possible. Who knows what to do.

I did exactly that. I studied harder than I'd ever studied for anything and left the next year to go and study in Korea, now with intermediate language skills, everyday conversations no longer being a problem at all.

Now I live here, I will be here for the next year and I have to return to England for one year to finish my degree. Then instead of having my simple plan of becoming a developer, I can think of nothing I want to do less than just stay in England doing the same job every day, nothing to do with language. I need to be at least travelling to Korea, and using my language skills in at least some way.

The current WIP plan is to take intensive language classes here (from next week, every single weekday), build awesome dev side projects and contribute to open source stuff. Then try to build a life of freelance translation/interpreting/language teaching and software development (maybe here, maybe Korea).

So the point of this rant is that before, I had a solid plan. Now I am sat in my bed in Korea writing this, thinking about how I have almost no idea how I'm going to build the life that I want. And yet somehow, the uncertainty makes this so much more exciting and fulfilling. There's a lot more worrying, planning and deciding to do. But I think the fact that I completely changed my life goals just through a small decision one day to satisfy a curiosity is a huge life lesson for me. And maybe reading this will help other people decide to just try doing something different for once, and see if your life plan holds up.

If it does, never stop trying new things. If it doesn't (like mine), then you now know that you've found something that you love as much as or even more that your plan before. Something that you might have lived your whole life never finding.

I don't expect many people to read this all, but writing it here has been very cathartic for me, and it's still a rant because now I have so much more work and planning to do. But it's the good kind of work.

Things aren't so simple now, but they're way more worth it.

Was just reading some of the OpenVPN scripts to renew a certificate where I forgot to source the vars file first (apparently OpenVPN stores those in a separate file that you always have to source first, and I tend to forget it sometimes).

Reading the revoke-full script that OpenVPN provides, it's just bash so I can read it no problem. But traversing through it and trying to understand it... Horrible! There's a test file in $RT named keys/revoke-test.pem. It's not used anywhere in OpenVPN for anything useful as far as I'm aware. The script however - the script that's running on a production server! - attempts to remove this file. It doesn't exist. Test files do (or at least should) not exist in production. They're not supposed to be there.

It exports empty variables. Some of them are set by the sourced vars file, some aren't. Not entirely sure why it's exporting variables as empty when they're uninitialized, or why it doesn't just unset the ones that are initialized.

And finally it goes ahead and revokes the key file that I'm actually concerned about through regular OpenSSL and verifies it.

Not to mention that the lack of the sourced vars file, which admittedly I should think about in the current status quo, if it *always* needs to be sourced anyway... Why doesn't the script do that itself then? One less thing to go wrong. But hey, proper design?

Gore. I don't have any other words for it.

And before anyone tells me that I should go and fix it if I'm so worried about it. Remember, I am not a developer. That's the job of the developers that made this in the first place.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think I'm a good developer. I have pretty decent debugging skills, including pulling apart disassembled x86 and other architecture code.

I'm fascinated by how things work.

But almost everything is catered for by a library. Or has already been done.

I find it enjoyable to create a library or program myself, but get disheartened when I find some library or program that is written seemingly very well, compared to my own code. And then I start to think I'm not a good developer after all.

Sort of relates to my previous rant about repeatedly rewriting code.

Applies to me doing programming as a hobby but probably affects my code at work as well... I just can't help but think my code is probably awful compared to what someone else might write.

...then I see incredibly ugly, messy, badly written code by other people and I feel better...

I suppose it is like an artist who sees amazing works but cannot paint to that standard, but is well beyond drawing stick figures with crayons.

Sounds like a trivial problem but it probably impedes my progress with a lot of things.

I often read articles describing developer epiphanies, where they realized, that it was not Eclipse at fault for a bad coding experience, but rather their lack of knowledge and lack of IDE optimization.

No. Just NO.

Eclipse is just horrendous garbage, nothing else. Here are some examples, where you can optimize Eclipse and your workflow all you like and still Eclipse demonstrates how bad of an IDE it is:

- There is a compilation error in the codebase. Eclipse knows this, as it marks the error. Yet in the Problems tab there is absolutely nothing. Not even after clean. Sometimes it logs errors in the problems tab, sometimes t doesn't. Why? Only the lord knows.

- Apart from the fact that navigating multiple Eclipse windows is plain laughable - why is it that to this day eclipse cannot properly manage windows on multi-desktop setups, e.g. via workspace settings? Example: Use 3 monitors, maximize Eclipse windows of one Eclipse instance on all three. Minimize. Then maximize. The windows are no longer maximized, but spread somehow over the monitors. After reboot it is even more laughable. Windows will be just randomly scrabled and stacked on top of each other. But the fact alone that you cannot navigate individual windows of one instance.. is this 2003?

- When you use a window with e.g. class code on a second monitor and your primary Eclipse window is on the first monitor, then some shortcuts won't trigger. E.g. attempting to select, then run a specific configuration via ALT+R, N, select via arrows, ALT+R won't work. Eclipse cannot deal with ALT+R, as it won't be able to focus the window, where the context menus are. One may think, this has to do with Eclipse requiring specific perspectives for specific shortcuts, as shortcuts are associated with perspectives - but no. Because the perspective for both windows is the same, namely Java. It is just that even though Shortcuts in Eclipse are perspective-bound, but they are also context-sensitive, meaning they require specific IDE inputs to work, regarldless of their perspective settings. Is that not provided, then the shortcut will do absolutely nothing and Eclipse won't tell you why.

- The fact alone that shortcut-workarounds are required to terminate launches, even though there is a button mapping this very functionality. Yes this is the only aspect in this list, where optimizing and adjusting the IDE solves the problem, because I can bind a shortcut for launch selection and then can reliably select ant trigger CTRL+F2. Despite that, how I need to first customize shortcuts and bind one that was not specified prior, just to achieve this most basic functionality - teminating a launch - is beyond me.

Eclipse is just overengineered and horrendous garbage. One could think it is being developed by people using Windows XP and a single 1024x768 desktop, as there is NO WAY these issues don't become apparent when regularily working with the IDE.

Dev: Hey this library you are mandating the use of doesn’t do one of the things you assumed it does

Non-Tech Manager: Well I think it does because I looked at it and that’s what it seemed like and the only reason you can’t figure it out is you are a bad developer and have attitude issues that’s why you are failing. You need to look on the bright side of things more often. This library has over 100k downloads which means it must do what people want it to. I think the problem is you. We can’t spend anymore time on this we have to just fix it and move on.

Hi ppl of devRant! I’m not really a dev but I love reading your rants :) I decided to post my first rant because I think I could use some advice from you.

Background: I’m a student just finished my first year at uni. Earlier I applied for a developer intern just for fun and somehow magically got in. However, I'm a statistics major (not even CS!) and only know basic java stuff. I guess they hired me because I speak ok english and a little french? I live in a non-English speaking country but the company has a lot of foreign customers.

The problem is, the longer I stay, the more I feel that they only hired me out of charity *sobs* There isn’t much for me to do, and most of the time I couldn’t understand what my co-workers are doing so I can’t really help them either. Plus, they don’t seem to need my language skill as much, so I kinda feel useless here.

It’s my 5th (maybe already 6th?) week here and the only thing I did was fixing an itty bitty bug that literally needed only one additional line of code. Yes it took me a while to set up the environment, learn js from scratch since they use js for this project, and locate the issue but I’m pretty sure it’d probably take someone who’s familiar with the project, like, 3 mins? And now that I’ve fixed it and the merge request was passed, I’m out of work to do again. I talked to the lead and he pretty much just said “read more of the code”. Guess I can do that. I’ve spent like 4 days going through the code but is this really promising?

I want to spend time on learning actual stuff rather than yet another resume ornament. So what should I do? Should I ask for more help/more work to do, or keep learning on my own (I’m quite interested in algorithms, maybe I could make use of my time to study that?), or even leave?

Sorry for the long rant. I know ass-kicking devs probably hate useless, underqualified ppl at work in real life but believe me it really hurts to be one and I hate myself enough already so I’d appreciate any thoughts/advice :/

Alright, buckle up, fellow developer, because we're about to embark on a thrilling journey through the world of code and creativity!

Listen up, you amazing code wizard, you're not just a developer. No, you're a digital architect, a creator of worlds in the virtual realm. You have the power to turn lines of code into living, breathing entities that can change lives and reshape industries.

In a world where everyone is a consumer, you are a producer. You build the bridges that connect our digital dreams to reality. You are a pioneer, an explorer in the vast wilderness of algorithms and frameworks. Your mind is the canvas, and code is your brushstroke.

Sure, there are challenges—bugs that refuse to be squashed, deadlines that seem impossible, and technology that evolves at warp speed. But guess what? You're not just a problem solver; you're a problem annihilator. You tackle those bugs with ferocity, you meet those deadlines with gusto, and you master that evolving technology like a maestro conducting a symphony.

You live for the 'Aha!' moments—the joy of cracking a complex problem, the thrill of seeing your creation come to life, the satisfaction of making a difference. You're a digital superhero, swooping in to save the day one line of code at a time.

And when things get tough—and they will—you dig deep. You summon that relentless determination that got you into coding in the first place. You remember why you started this journey—to innovate, to leave your mark, to change the world.

So, rise and shine, you coding genius! Embrace the challenges, learn from the failures, and celebrate the victories. You are a force to be reckoned with, a beacon of inspiration in a world that needs your brilliance.

Keep coding, keep creating, and keep being the rockstar developer that you are. The world eagerly awaits the magic you're about to unleash! Go and conquer the code-scape! 🚀💻

I'm still studying computer science/programming, I still have one year to do in order to graduate (Master). I am in a work study program so I'm working for a company half of the time, and I'm studying the other half. It is important to mention that I am the only web developer of the company

When I arrived in the company 9 months ago, I was given a Vue project which had been developed by a trainee a few weeks before my arrival and I was asked to correct a few things, it was mostly about css. Then, I was ask to add a few functionalities, nothing really hard to code, and we were supposed to test the solution in a staging environment, and if everything was ok, deploy it to prod.

However, the more I did what I was asked, the more functionalities I had to implement, until I reached a point where I had to modify the API, create new routes, etc. I'm not complaining about that, that's my job and I like it. But the solution was supposed to be ready when I arrived, it was also supposed to be tested and deployed.

The problem is, the person emitting these demands (let's call him guy X) is not from the IT service, it's a future user of the website in the admin side. The demands kept going and going and going because, according to him, the solution was not in a good enough state to be deployed, it missed too many (un)necessary features. It kept going for a few months.

The best is yet to come though : guy X was obviously a superior, and HIS superior started putting pressure on me through mails, saying the app was already supposed to be in production and he was implying that I wasn't working fast enough. Luckily, my IT supervisor was aware of what was going on and knew I obviously wasn't to blame.

In the end, the solution was eagerly deployed in production, didn't go through the staging environment and was opened to the users. Now, guy X receives complaints because none of what I did was tested (it was by me, but I wasn't going to test every single little thing because I didn't have time). Some users couldn't connect or use this or that feature and I am literally drowning in mails, all from guy X, asking me to correct things because users are blocked and it's time consuming for him to do some of the things the website was doing manually.

We are here now just because things have been done in a rush, I'm still working on it and trying to fix prod problems and it's pissing me off because we HAVE a staging environment that was supposed to prevent me from working against the clock.

On a final note, what's funny is that the code I'm modifying, the pre-existing one needs to be refactored because bits and pieces are repeated sometimes 5 times where it should have been externalized and imported from another file. But I don't know when and if I will ever be able to do that.

I could have given more context but it's 4am and I'm kinda tired, sorry if I'm not clear or anything. That's my first rant

I've been working on the ecommerce website from hell for over a year now. I should have heard the alarm bells when the studio who were running the project took a month to pay my deposit but still expected me to start working, but I explained that I wouldn't start without some form of security and they were cool with it, so I carried on.

It started off as a simple build with simple products, no product variations etc and a few links on the designs which appeared to lead to external links, and checkout and cart pages were nowhere to be seen. It wasn't a big money job so I just build them in as plain and straightforward as I could, in line with how the rest of the site looked. They then changed their mind about how they wanted these to look, and added loads of functionality to the site throughout the build, so by the end of the line, the scope of work had completely changed. I also had loads of disagreements in terms of design and useability, as their designs straight-up weren't going to function otherwise, plus every round of changes meant that I had to prolong the job further and fit it around work for other clients.

Fastforward a few more months and I get sent a really angry email with some of the client's complaints, including one that raised an issue with the user journey, and the finger of blame was pointed at me. The user journey had been a part of the designs from the start, and this was never raised as an issue for A WHOLE YEAR. They then said that it had to go live on Monday (three days after they sent email with these huge new structural changes). I told them I could no longer work on the project but was happy to waive the rest of my fee (3/4 of the total fee, when I had essentially completed the site, minus 2 minor bugs), so they could find another developer in the limited time they had. At first they refused to hire another developer, claiming that it would be too expensive, which made no sense, as for a few minor fixes and out of scope additions he could get paid a wage that would have otherwise paid for the majority of the work I had done on the site. I stood my ground and finally they found someone, so I sent over all of the files and database to their new developer and asked him to give me a heads up when I could remove the staging site from my server. The next day, I received an email from the studio asking me to fix some bugs the developer was requesting I fix so he could carry on with the site. They were basically asking me to work more, for free, to enable him to walk off with the majority of the money and do less work. They also forwarded a suuuuuper shitty, condescending email from him, listing all the things he thought was wrong with the site (he even listed 'no favicon' although they'd never supplied a graphic for this). He also wrote a paragraph at the bottom EXPLAINING MY JOB TO ME and telling me:

I get the feeling you like to write Javascript, while being one of the easiest languages to learn, it can also be one of the hardest to master. While I applaud you for writing Vanilla JS, it looks like you have a general problem with structuring your application.

Not sure if I'm being oversensitive here but it felt so patronising, and i couldn't even go for an angry walk to get it out my system because of social distancing lol.

Let a girl quarantine in peace!!!!!!

So at our company, we use Google Sheets to for to coordinate everything, from designs to bug reporting to localization decisions, etc... Except for roadmaps, we use Trello for that. I found this very unintuitive and disorganized. Google Sheets GUI, as you all know, was not tailored for development project coordination. It is a spreadsheet creation tool. Pages of document are loosely connected to each other and you often have to keep a link to each of them because each Google Sheets document is isolated from each other by design. Not to mention the constant requests for permission for each document, wasting everybody's time.

I brought up the suggestion to the CEO that we should migrate everything to GitHub because everybody already needed a Github account to pull the latest version of our codebase even if they're not developers themselves. Gihub interface is easier to navigate, there's an Issues tab for bug report, a Wiki tab for designs and a Projects tab for roadmaps, eliminating the need for a separate Trello account. All tabs are organized within each project. This is how I've seen people coordinated with each other on open-source projects, it's a proven, battle-tested model of coordination between different roles in a software project.

The CEO shot down the proposal immediately, reason cited: The design team is not familiar with using the Github website because they've never thought of Github as a website for any role other than developers.

Fast-forward to a recent meeting where the person operating the computer connected to the big TV is struggling to scroll down a 600+ row long spreadsheet trying to find one of the open bugs. At that point, the CEO asked if there's anyway to hide resolved bugs. I immediately brought up Github and received support from our tester (vocal support anyway, other devs might have felt the same but were afraid to speak up). As you all know, Github by default only shows open issues by default, reducing the clutter that would be generated by past closed issues. This is the most obvious solution to the CEO's problem. But this CEO still stubbornly rejected the proposal.

2 lessons to take away from this story:

- Developer seems to be the only role in a development team that is willing to learn new tools for their work. Everybody else just tries to stretch the limit of the tools they already knew even if it meant fitting a square peg into a round hole. Well, I can't speak for testers, out of 2 testers I interacted with, one I never asked her opinion about Github, and the other one was the guy mentioned above. But I do know a pixel artist in the same company having a similar condition. She tries to make pixel arts using Photoshop. Didn't get to talk to her about this because we're not on the same project, but if we were, I'd suggest her use Aseprite, or (at least Pixelorama if the company doesn't want to spend for Aseprite's price tag) for the purpose of drawing pixel arts. Not sure how willing she would be at learning new tools, though.

- Github and other git hosts have a bit of a branding problem. Their names - Github, BitBucket, GitLab, etc... - are evocative of a tool exclusively used by developers, yet their websites have these features that are supposed to be used by different roles other than developers. Issues tabs are used by testers as well as developers. Wiki tabs are used by designers alongside developers. Projects and Insights tabs are used by project managers/product owners. Discussion tabs are used by every roles. Artists can even submit new assets through Pull Requests tabs if the Art Directors know how to use the site interface (Art Directors' job is literally just code review, but for artistic assets). These websites are more than just git hosts. They are straight-up Jira replacement with git hosting as a bonus feature. How can we get that through the head of non-developers so that we don't have to keep 4+ accounts for different websites for the same project?

I’m an idiot. Stackoverflow issue that I documented to a T. Javascript. So I put requirement of not having jquery or framework.

Get a comment about do I know it is working? My answer, debugging. They respond back with a question about debugging and some details I totally didn’t read.

Well, that was the bug. Chrome debugger was showing a message I didn’t understand. So they answered my problem perfectly.

But before realizing he answered my issue, I blew up. Of course I know what is going on. The debugger is showing me....did you even run my example?

I almost felt like giving up as a developer. Here is this awesome guy, solving my issue, and some dumbass like me has to be frustrated. Now he won’t respond to take a bounty he so awesomely deserves.

I’m still a dev. I just don’t feel so professional anymore...

I don't know if this is exactly a rant. But - I am sure somewhere out there has run into this situation before.

I've been a developer (professionally) for a 3 years. And in that time I've stayed with that same company.

Over that time its become incredibly apparent that my boss (senior developer) isn't exactly keen on new technologies, source control (I had to push hard for this. And even then he doesn't use it properly), or any kind of project management. It's only he and I.

I've started interviewing other places and while I have no problems answering their technical questions. I'm worried my lack of experience in a team is becoming a problem.

We don't work on projects together. We don't do code reviews. He does not ask my opinion on anything. We are basically two separate teams. I want to improve as a developer. I love the rest of the company and I enjoy what I'm working on. I just feel I'm hindering my growth as a developer.

Anyone have any advice? I know I can find a project to contribute to on github or something. But honestly that's intimidating to me for some reason. I am self taught. And don't have any experience in working with teams.

My first interview was the interview where I cheated and got the job, it was an on campus job interview. I did not have a good gpa, (to be honest it was really bad i was below the 25th percentile)

Anyway this was the only (developer) job interview I knew I could qualify for, I was pretty sure that if I couldn't nail this one then I could kiss my dream of programming professionally good bye.

We were about 25 kids sitting in a class room with a pencil and couple of sheets of paper and the the interview panel walked between the seats looking at what we wrote.

So, when I couldn't write an algorithm for the problem of square rooting a number n. I panicked (was literally shivering with tears rolling down my cheeks, thankfully nobody saw me as i was on the last bench) I gave up, wiped my tears and stared at the board, a panel member saw me and told me to leave after looking at my paper. This was the moment my mind decided (not me but someone else inside me) that I have to do whatever it took, so just when I was stepping out and grabbed my bag i quickly opened the browser of my phone inside the bag typed square root algorithm opened the first result and read the words arrive at the answer by binary search, ass soon as I read that my mind worked at a pace that it has never managed ever since that time, and i knew the solution in a matter of seconds, i dropped my bag when to one of the more sympathetic panel members and explained the whole thing to him on the spot, he was impressed, and he asked me how this algorithm can be extended for the nth root(which is really simple once you have the algorithm for square root) and i blurted it out instantly which impressed him even more and offered me the job on the spot and told me to attend the next 2 rounds as a formality.

Thus i saved myself for a world of hurt and now I am a developer who thinks back to that day every time I need a boost of morale

some guy asked me to look at his react project,

I'm yet to find out the problem with his routing but look at this dependency list.

for a simple frontend project, I really dont know how many lazy developers are being introduced into the javascript ecosystem,

might seem normal to others but it feels wrong to me, as a beginner developer who isnt even dealing with a deadline

or......... maybe they are just plain clueless that they dont realize this level of redundancy

Fuck it, fucking fuck it.

Consulting company, been here for 2 years, had some decent projects (surprise, only those that me and my coworker started from scratch), but OMG the fuck ton amount of bizarre code I've seen is just mindblowing.

Everytime I start on a project, spend days improductive because the stack won't fucking work.

We use some frameworks, but the creators of the projects said fuck it, why would we follow the framework guidelines if I can create a supersmart way that nobody fucking understands way of doing things. I mean, It will look smarter and so nobody else can touch this shitty code.

I hate that the most praised developer is the guy that created most of this shit, and his nº 1 skill is moving Jira tickets to the correct state, tracking time (PM's love this, I hate it) and blocking my fucking merge requests because I left an extra blank line, dangling comma or whatever the fuck else, he's like a human linter.

Dude, the code is a piece of shit, my dangling comma is not going to be the problem! And if you really care that much, setup a linter or something.

Fuck this, I'm quitting this week.

Imagine a web way ahead of our time where its size goes beyond our imagination...

This is my first rant, and I'll cut to the chase! I don't like how web currently stands. Here's what makes me angry the most altough I know there's a myriad of solutions or workarounds:

- A gazillion credentials/accounts/services in your lifetime.

- Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel.

- There's no single source of truth.

- Why the fuck there's so much design in a vision that started as a network of documents? Why is it that we need to spend time and energy to absorb the page design before we can read what we are after?

- What's up with the JS front end frameworks?! MB's of code I need to download on every page I visit and the worse is the evaluation/parsing of it. Talk about acessibility and the energy bills. I don't freaking need a SPA just give a 20-50ms page load and I'm good to go!

- I understand that there's a whole market based on it but do we really need all that developer tools and services?

- Where's our privacy by the way? Why the fuck do I need ads? Can't I have a clue about what I wan't to buy?

Sticking with this points for now... Got plenty more to discuss though.

What I would like to see:

A unique account where i can subscribe services/forums/whatever. No credentials. Credentials should be on your hardware or OS. Desktop Browser and mobile versions sync everything seemlesly. Something like OpenID.

Each person has his account and a profile associated where I share only what I want with whom I want when I want to.

Sharing stuff individually with someone is easy and secure.

There's no more email system like we know. Email should be just email like it started to be. Why the hell are we allowing companies to send us so much freaking "look at me now, we are awesome", "hey hey buy from me".. Here's an idea, only humans should send emails. Any new email address that sends you an email automatically requests your "permission" to communicate with you. Like a friend request.

Oh by the way did I tell you that static mail is too old for us? What we need is dynamic email. Editing documents on the fly, together, realtime, on the freaking email. Better than mail, slack and google docs combined.

In order for that to work reasonably well, the individual "letter" communication would have to be revamped in a new modern approach.

What about the single source of truth I talked about? Well heres what we should do. Wikipedia (community) and Larry Page (concept) gave us tremendous help. We just need to do better now.

Take the spirit of wikipedia and the discoverability that a good search engine provides us and amp that to a bigger scale. A global encyclopedia about everything known to mankind. Content could be curated from us all just like a true a network.

In this new web, new browser or whatever needed to make this happen I could save whatever I want, notes, files, pictures... and have it as I left it from device to device.

Oh please make web simple again, not easy just simple and bigger.

I'm not old by the way and I don't see a problem with being older btw.

Those are just my stupid rants and ideas. They are worth nothing. What I know for sure is that I'll do something about or fail trying to.

How do you deal with a developer that constantly challenges your propositions in a rhetorical matter?

For example, say if we have a problem and I propose solution A (along with my reasons why), the developer would then shoot it down - not with another alternative solution or exploration path but instead a rhetorical question.

It has gotten *exhausting* working with this person because every interaction becomes almost a debate. This isn’t just particularly with development but even during casual discussions.

I’ve even tried asking “so what would you suggest?” in which they would answer with confidence in a rhetorical matter - but without any concrete decision making (but at the same time sounding like they did make one).

We work in a team and nobody has taken the reigns of leadership (he’s quiet most meetings), so I decided to take initiative and make the calls. All of a sudden, he has a voice that is mostly axed towards being argumentative than productive. It has come to a point where I’ve just stopped making propositions because I’ve become exhausted trying to defend myself and literally repeating something like 4-5 times, however this is a project that needs to be delivered and because we work closely together, I can’t just ignore him and do my own thing.

Hi developers.... so i just feel like posting this post

I'm a self-taught developer its been 6 years now and i managed to get myself a job this year at a tech startup and they actually developed this developer department just for me..... with the promise that if i manage to get this department up and running I'll get a higher position as the company grows

So it's been 4 months now and i think i'm doing exceptionally well as a developer since I'm the only developer in that organization..... and some how I feel like if i use my problem solving skills to work on other real world problems not just code and designing systems..... like bringing solutions to real none code related problems i could actually achieve more and make a big difference

but I'm actually learning a lot and hope i'll become more and do more within this organization and grab that top position role

I have an idea and I want some feedback.

I'm the only web developer and I've been updating our systems so they can be maintainable. Previously we have used Wordpress for landing pages which is complete overkill So here's the idea:

Static sites for landing pages and any forms that would need to filled out would be on a separate site.

Ok so here me out. First the landing pages barely need any maintenance so using pure HTML/CSS/JS wouldn't be a problem. This means I can strip away all of the crap from Wordpress and make the load times faster. Second all of the landing pages forms would be hosted in a single place making analytics easier for the reporting system.

Really I just despise Wordpress and am trying any practical reason to not use it as much as possible. Oh and don't worry I'll use preprocessors and minify the production files.

So someone from another team in the company asked on our public Slack channel if they can send a field they're sending for one client, for all clients, so they don't have to have a branch for that one client that sends it.
We're talking about a string of up to 20 chars, typically much less even connected to each record, of which we have let's say a million per month and each of those records has at least 30 columns, some of them being longer strings even.

A dev from my team responded that they shouldn't send it because, while no one uses it so it's not going to break anything, it will require extra storage.

This was not 20 years ago, this was today, in 2021.

I responded asking what storage does he foresee to be the problem, because I can't see where so I'd like to get more details.

Guess who got ripped to shreds because it's a bad thing to question members of the team in public....

This is just one in a long line of similar brainless idiocies I've had to deal with from this asshole.

And no, I'm not a junior dev or something, I'm transitioning out of the Principal Engineer role for that team (for this reason exactly, otherwise I'd stay as PE). And no, I'm not the transitioning the role to that asshole.

At least 3 people who have left the team because of this asshole.

Managers not helping either, responses like "Yeah, you're right, but you're reasonable, he isn't, so let's appease him until we can find a way to deal with him"...

I used to love being a developer, this asshole made me want to vomit at any mention of anything remotely dev related...

Hope y'all are reasonably happy with your jobs and, more importantly, don't have such an asshole around you!

Dependency hell is the largest problem in Linux.

On Windows, I just download an executeable (.exe) file, and it just works like a charm! But Linux sometimes needs me to install dependencies.

At one point, I nearly broke my operating system while trying to solve dependencies. I noticed that some existing applications refused to start due to some GLIBC error gore. I thought to myself "that thing ain't gonna boot the next time", so I had to restore the /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ folder from a backup.

And then there is a new level of lunacy called "conflicting dependencies". I never had such an error on Windows. But when I wanted to try out both vsftpd and proFTPd on Linux, I get this error, whereas on Windows, I simply download an .exe file and it WORKS! Even on Android OS, I simply install an APK file of Amaze File Manager or Primitive FTPd or both and it WORKS! Both in under a minute. But on Linux, I get this crap. Sure, Linux has many benefits, but if one can't simply install a program without encountering cryptic errors that take half a day to troubleshoot and could cause new whack-a-mole-style errors, Linux's poor market share is no surprise.

Someone asked "Why not create portable applications" on Unix/Linux StackExchange. Portable applications can not just be copied on flash drives and to other computers, but allow easily installing multiple versions on a system. A web developer might do so to test compatibility with older browsers. Here is an answer to that question:

> The major argument [for shared libraries] is security, that if there is a vulnerability in a commonly-used library, then only that library has to be updated […] you don't have to have 4 different versions of a library installed

I just want my software to work! Period. I don't mind having multiple versions of libraries, I simply want it to WORK! To hell with "good reasons" for why it doesn't, and then being surprised why Linux has a poor market share. Want to boost Linux market share? SOLVE THIS DAMN ISSUE!.

Understand that the average computer user wants stuff to work out of the box, like it does in Windows.

Reasons to NOT be a dev sounds rather negative so I'd like to propose 3 things that you need to BE a dev as to frame it in a positive light:

- When a problem peaks your interest you want to solve it, you may even be obsessed by it.
- You enjoy learning, not necessarily enjoy school, just enjoy learning new things (even better if it's by your own means)
- Failure may get you down, but you learn and don't give up until you have exhausted all paths to success.

You may need other skills like math, logic and reasoning abilities, being able to handle deadlines, attention to detail, and cope with stress. I've seen people being crap at all of those and if they have the former 3 they, in time, will hone the others enough to make them a productive dev.

No need to be a 9-9-6 code monkey willing to be squeezed by Big Corp for massive profits and a low salary or a 1337 purist coder that only focuses on the crafting side of developing software. That may make you a great coder but not a well rounded developer or individual. Remember, you program machines but you are NOT one.

CTO at my previous company think that wordpress based website is took a long time to load.
I suggest to use caching and fix ton of abusive query, He refused. He spun up more VM, upgrade the ec2 instance level to the max. Said that he resolved the problem. But the problem still persist actually.
Blame me for slow response website, blame me for late of deployment because data is not ready ( there's a lot of spam in there, we need to clean it before )
I left the company, Coworker said that he just install a bunch of caching plugin,
He made the website down for entire day and don't understand what is happening. Ask other developer to fix it quickly, to do unpaid overime
The site is back to bussiness, said to all team that he already fixed it.
Everything good happened, he claimed that it was his idea.

And the best part is : he put 'ssh' as skill list in his personal site

Fucking Power Apps and Automate/Flow:
You want to make an app?, great!
- Easy UI and editor, you can make a decent app in a day
- Best data integration in MS space bar none, connect to anything under the planet no problem.
- Deployment on mobile and desktop instantly and at scale, you better believe it.
- Wanna take from sharepoint, manipulate the data and throw it at XRM, we gothcu.
- Source control? FUCK YOU FOR ASKING GO DIE IN A FIRE.
- Proper permission system, Yep, based on O365 and azure AD
- Just let me get the source code please?: BURN IN HELL MOTHERFUCKER
- Integrated AI, indeed we have it. And chatbot frameworks on top of it, no problem at all
- ...

As a tool it is aimed at non technical people, not by making it beginner friendly, but by making it developer hostile. And whenever you hit a wierd quirk in the editor you wish you could just go edit the source code (WHICH YOU CAN TOTALLY SEE SNIPPETS OF), but you are never allowed to touch it.
I am so very tempted to make a version control layer on top of it myself, scraping it via scripts and doing the reverse on upload, but it will be janky as fuck.

So in the project I’m working on we were about to do a push to live, no major functionality just minor adjustments and nice to have stuff. One of the things I did was a reminder, nothing special just sends an email out if something hasn’t been done for 3 days and then sends an email every day following. Push to live and every thing goes fine with no issues. Day 1 there are no issues. Day 2 there are no issues. Day 3 and I’m inundated with people telling me that the emails are getting sent to practically everyone, shit. What have I done? What have I missed?
So I start looking at the live database hoping for a data problem, no such luck. I look at my code looking for something blatantly obvious but nothing. I start replicating the data but I can’t reproduce this bug and it’s annoying the hell out of me. I checked one of the emails that the client sent to us more thoroughly and seen that it was sent at 07:01. This is odd as our webjob runs at 1am so I start looking at environmental factors and started looking at release management, more out of hope than expectation. I check the staging environment and see that the webjob ran at 7:00. Coincidence I thought, the webjob gets packaged on the release pipeline and everything in the database was dummy data anyway but I’d better check anyway. The database was an exact copy of the live database, turns out a “senior developer” wanted to sanity check everything by running live data through the code so he copied the database over. It was fine for the first couple of days but the data was now 3 days out of date triggering my email code and I get hit with the shit storm. I’ve never met such an incompetent developer in my fucking life, functions 700 lines long, classes that are over 20000 lines, repetition every where and the only design patterns he’s used is when he picks up a child’s colouring book. I can live with the fact that he writes code like someone on their first day of University But copying a database because he wants to “visualise” the fucking data is absolutely farcical. No wonder the project is fucked with a “developer” (in the loosest possible use of the word) is at the helm.

Soo... Let me get this straight... My boss reeeeeeally wants me to reconfigure our database system to sync data between each of our 15 sites... Let me this about this...

Our database is an MS Access database originally written about 17 years ago. It was written as a standalone database that runs a unique instance for each of our sites.The person responsible for the database (still not the original developer) before I took over 6 years ago bragged about how they were "an 80s developer" (w...t...f!). Even with all of the fixes and additions (additions because... F&$#ing of course there are!) It's still basically held together by duct tape and spit.

Hmmm... Ok, still possible. What's the environment I'm working in... I have absolutely ZERO control of our workplace network... That's a whole other department. Due to the nature of the workplace (and it's sites) there is extreme limitation on network access.

Well... If I'm Reeeeeeally nice to the people in charge of the network, maaaaaybe they can give me access to a little server space.

A very long shot, but, doab.... Oh, the boss would really like this handled in the next couple months...

F$#k you! There is no way on God's (still) green earth that I... Alone... Can rewrite a legacy database... written across 4 or 5 different versions of FU$KING MS Access, and give 15 sites, with extremely limited networking, real time data sync in... Oh, a few months.

Now, I do not work with "computer people". I'm usually lucky when my coworkers remember their passwords (which, even if they don't, WHY tell ME! I don't run the network!)

And when I tell my boss basically what I just said... In a nice, pleasant way... They suggest I'm not giving the problem enough thought...

FU#K YOU IGNORANT ASS! Write me a ToDo list in MS Access (no, I'm not going to tell you where to start) in under an hour then, MAYBE, we can talk about... No... Just NO... Can't be done!

*Takes deep breath* so... Lovely weather we're having, right?

This literally happened in my current team, and I'm not even an experienced dev yet.
Incident happened like this :
Our team is working on a RCP based on eclipse plugins, which has a headless mode and a GUI mode. Now, in the GUI mode, my manager cum architect thought there are no need of user log files (long story) because the user can see the info on screen, whereas in the headless mode, she wanted me to print the logs onto the console and a log file as well.
Now it just so happened that our team had got a recent addition as a replacement to our lead developer (she left the company) who claimed she had 3 years of expertise and a masters degree, and she was assigned a task. The task was to format a custom file we were generating out of the product (basically dumping info in a file) in a human-readable format. Miss new-addition-masters-degree decided it would be a very good idea to redirect the standard java output stream to a file output stream ( which she used for generating the formatted file ) but somehow never realized that she needed to reset the output stream back to standard output.
Consequences were devastating. I wrote the logic for the logger ( yes, apparently any available logging mechanism won't do it, again, long story ) and had it printing to a file in tmp directory. The logs seemed to be working fine initially but after a few logs, specifically from the point where the formatter started working, all the logs got printed in the formatted file. And this file was supposed to be used by our clients to develop something on top of it. Naturally, I got the heat of it and then naturally, worried and nervous and curious and in a frenzied state of mind, I started debugging.
When I got to the actual fault, I seriously could not decide whether to cry or laugh or call up miss masters and scream at her. I decided to ask her about what the hell she had written and her answer was most of it was written by the developer she replaced, so she didn't know it would cause this much problem. Anyway, I fixed the leak after that and averted the catastrophe.
And that, fellow devs, is the story of how I solved a crisis in my first year at corporate.

Title: The problem with "good enough" code

Body:

I'm a software developer, and I've seen my fair share of "good enough" code. You know the kind of code I'm talking about: it works, but it's not pretty, and it's not very maintainable.

The problem with "good enough" code is that it's a slippery slope. Once you start writing "good enough" code, it's easy to fall into the trap of always taking the easy way out.

Before you know it, your code is a mess of hacks and workarounds. It's hard to understand, it's hard to maintain, and it's a nightmare to debug.

I've seen projects go down in flames because of "good enough" code. The code was so bad that it was impossible to fix, and the project had to be scrapped.

I'm not saying that you should never write "good enough" code. Sometimes, you just need to get something working, and you don't have the time or resources to do it perfectly.

But if you're going to write "good enough" code, you need to be aware of the risks. And you need to make sure that you're only writing "good enough" code for a short period of time.

Once you have a working prototype, you need to start refactoring your code and making it better. You need to make it more readable, more maintainable, and more testable.

If you don't, you'll eventually regret it. Your code will become a liability, and it will hold you back.

So next time you're tempted to write "good enough" code, think twice. It might save you some time in the short term, but it will cost you in the long run.

Around a year ago I launched my first site in rails.

Even though the site didn't took off, I learned from it, and it was an enjoyable experience.
Well, at least some of it.

As a web developer, I enjoyed doing the web development.

Then came hosting and deployment. Pretty stressful since I'm no sysadmin/devops person, but you could say it's still in the realm of software. So I managed.

But the one part I couldn't stomach is marketing.

Partly because I have zero experience and interest in the subject, and also because I don't to be an annoying marketing whore asking people to check my site.

I have never seen a bigger cesspool than the google results of the query "how to get people to know my site".

I have seen the shadiest shit, I have read of people saying you should befriend subreddits mods/admins and then ask them the favour to let you post your stuff.

I know that contacts are important, but taking advantage to get traffic on your product? No thanks, I'll rather have a dead site.

This was pretty much the experience when googling about marketing, unethical shit everywhere.

In fact, even calling it marketing makes me feel kinda sick, but it's a thing and it's pretty much necessary to get people to know your site.

Anyhow, in a company, everyone does their role, but this is just a one man thing.

So the ideal thing would be if a marketing person (hopefully an ethical one) took care of that. How does one find one though?

I guess you either partner with one or you hire on.

The problem with partnering is that I don't know someone like that. Do people partner up with "strangers" on the internet?

I could hire too, but I'm not as affluent as being able to employ a single person for 50k a year. And I don't know how feasible it is to hire someone when your site has no revenue anyways.

Maybe there's some company that offers such servicwe? I dunno...

What are your thoughts on this?
I'll be thankful of any feedback.