WHY THE FUCKIDY FUCK DO PEOPLE THINK THAT JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE A DEVELOPER THEN YOU CAN DO EVERY FUCKING THING IN A SNAP?!

THIS ENTIRE SUMMER I WORKED FOR THIS MIDGET OF A FUCK AND THE IDEA WAS TO MAINLY DEVELOP AN IOS APP FOR THEIR PRODUCT. THAT ONE APP TRANSLATED TO THREE SEPARATE APPS AND KEEP IN MIND THAT I AM THE ONLY DEVELOPER THEY HAVE SO I HAVE TO DEVELOP IT, TEST IT AND DOCUMENT IT!! AND WHAT'S EVEN WORSE IS HE KEEPS GIVING ME DESIGNS AT THE LAST MINUTE SO I ALWAYS END UP HAVING TO CREATE NEW PROJECTS ALL THE TIME. WHEN A WEEK PASSES BY WITHOUT ANY UPDATE HE AND HIS FUCKED UP BRAIN CELLS GATHER A MEETING WITH HIS 'DONALD TRUMP HANDS-SIZED' BALLS TO ASK ME, 'WHY ARE YOU TAKING SO LONG? THESE ARE JUST THREE BUTTONS ON THIS VIEW?' MOTHERFUCKING COCKSUCKER!! GO GET YOUR MOM TO DO THIS WORK THEN IF IT'S JUST THREE BUTTONS. TO HIM EVERYTHING IN IOS WHICH INCORPORATES A TAP IS A FUCKING BUTTON! BUTTON THIS! BUTTON THAT! AND IT'S NOT LIKE HE HAS SIMPLE DESIGNS..NO.NO.NO.NO. THIS ASSHOLE-SHAPED-HEAD MUGGET DESIGNS SHIT WHICH REQUIRES ME TO HAVE TO DRAW A UIVIEW AS THE SHAPE OF A HUMAN BODY AND HEART. THEN ASIDE FROM THAT, JUST BECAUSE MY RESUME SAYS I MINORED IN MATH AND APPLIED MATH, HE SENDS ME A PAPER THAT EXPLAINS MATHEMATICAL CONCEPTS OF DATA ANALYSIS THEN WANTS TO MEET WITH ME TO DISCUSS THE SUGGESTED METHODS THEN IMPLEMENT THEM. AT THIS POINT I HAD ALREADY IMPLEMENTED AN ALGO FOR COUNTING THE NUMBER OF STEPS THAT WAS WAY WAY WAY MORE ACCURATE THAN THE SHIT THEY HAD IN THEIR CONTROLLER..

SO AS I AM ABOUT TO FINISH IMPLEMENTING JUST THE INITIAL 5 VIEWS OF THIS 'FINAL' APP, HE SERIOUSLY WALKS IN AND TELLS ME, SO I'M STARTING TO WORRY THAT WE'LL NOT MEET THE AUGUST DEADLINE SO I'M THINKING MAYBE YOU SHOULD START SWITCHING BETWEEN DEVELOPMENT. WORK ON IOS FOR 4 HOURS THEN SWITCH TO ANDROID FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE TIME. OH AND UHH IF YOU FEEL LIKE TAKING THE IMAC WITH YOU TO WORK FROM HOME, THAT'S FINE AS WELL AND I'LL BE AVAILABLE IN THE WEEKENDS AS WELL. IT WAS AT THIS MOMENT THAT I REALLY REALLY HOPED I WERE GAY! LIKE 'NO LUBE' STYLE KINDA GAY!! OH BTW AT SOME POINT HE HAD ME PROGRAM ONE OF THEIR CONTROLLERS, AND WAS ASKING IF I COULD START RESEARCHING MEANS OF WRITING AN SDK FOR THEM.

KEEP IN MIND THAT I'M AN INTERN WITH ONE YEAR IOS DEV EXPERIENCE.. THEN HE WANTS ME TO ENTIRELY START LEARNING ANDROID AND GIVE HIM TWO VERSIONS OF THIS THIRD APP IN TWO WEEKS.

HE CAN GO SUCK HIS OWN DICK WHILE GETTING FINGER FUCKED BY A FORK WITH A BLUE WHALE'S 6FT LONG DICK UP HIS MOUTH.

*** that felt good ****

Father bought a PC in 1997. Back then very few had it. I learned doing things like accessing the internet and sending emails, among others. I remember having added age on websites to be allowed to sign up at times :P My sisters used to play games on it sometimes. The first few ones we had were Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, Tomb Raider Chronicles, American McGee's Alice(Which caused us to upgrade the PC xD)... And some others.

I have a memory of this pseudo-3D-looking game where you move in a maze and try answering questions. I want to remember its name, but I cannot :(

We literally have video evidence of me liking the computer as a child, yet my parents either say I'm addicted or deny I've ever liked it before. Not only that, but continuously limiting my time with the PC hasn't been a literal obstacle in my way of trying to do things in their opinion. Funny how my parents think the last few years I've been my worst when they've hurt me in those years so much that our relationship is guaranteed not working out. There were doubts in my head before, but now it's cemented and there is no way of going back. Father, for example, tells me it's too late to do anything with a PC now(As well as how I've been unable to use the PC. He looks at these pro players' footage in some TV show and he's like, „You've been unable to use your hobbies“, as if they have never ever screamed at me for perceived gaming and not actually cared to check), and I need to look for a „real“ job.

Sorry. I went to bed at 2:00 in the morning. Feel like a zombie because of ongoing weirdly insufficient sleep, even though I sleep kinda more than normal. Even when I took Melatonine for that it didn't help at all.

Childhood was where beating began. I was about 6/7. Right when I entered school. The first school that I attended was a private one and supposedly for „Wunderkinds“, while in reality I haven't seen a SINGLE teacher or psychologist approve of it, their argument being that children were basically drowned in work that wasn't age-appropriate(I don't mean anything bad. Just that teaching about Galaxies and all in first grade isn't the brightest idea). There was always a mountain of homework to do and as opposed to some other countries, we had to do it on a day to day basis. We didn't have a week-long deadline. I was predictably not keeping up with it as I could have, had it been a normal amount, so my parents decided I didn't want to study and began their methods of getting me to „study“. I have yet to see a person able to keep up with that school's tempo, no matter the age.

This place was also where I got bullied. I felt I had nowhere to be: At home, the parents' situation, at school, the bully. I never really went outside to play with other children, so I missed that part of childhood.

After the second year of school I was transferred to an advanced German school, called like that because they taught German and not English there. I also got to learn a bit of Russian before they removed it from school. In that period I used to attend ballet. But for less than a year. And piano, which I remember having attended for quite a long while, some years, if my memory isn't fried. I quit it because of it having been forced on me. Last piece I ever played fully was Beethoven's Marmotte.

In this school I was once again the outcast of the class. I had some people to interact with. All of those interactions lasted a few years at most. Then, because of a part of my class choosing me as a laughing-stock N2 and another girl as the N1, I found my best friend, who I still have today. She's the only friend I have nearby.

Most of the time I hated myself. Even today I struggle with that sometimes.

After that came university. This us where I got something like a friend circle at last. But it still didn't last. I got in a relationship with one of the guys, but I was just attracted. There was another I couldn't dare getting close to. Turns out he also had something for me. Then he disappeared from our lives and a year after, I still cannot forget the person. If I want to, I have to deprive myself of my own personality. Not a thing I'm willing to give up. Then I broke up with the guy I was in a relationship with and completely disappeared from the friendship circle. To be honest, I had reasons to. They refused to even try to look for the guy and they called him a friend for years. Sometimes parents hitting me can occur even today, but if I REALLY piss them off.

Now I'm here and oh, my God, I'm officially am aunt now! My sister gave birth to a daughter this morning... She's in Berlin with mother and both she and the child are doing great. I just hope she manages to be a good mother.

"devRant has changed" "I'm so fed up with this site" "Its a bunch of hate and memes, it was so much better before"

A rebuttal.

devRant is approximately the same as it was when it was just a newborn. Remember the days of semicolon jokes being unironically funny?

Look at the top rants of all time, for fucks sake. #2 ever is:

"A different error message! Finally some progress!"

Posted three years ago. That's the second most upvoted rant in history (Remember, this was a "rant" because the joke/meme category didn't exist back then), it made it's way into the app store screenshots, and was a welcome post.

Now imagine that posted today. It would probably go over okay, in fairness, but it's certainly at risk of any number of pretentious pricks complaining about how this is "devRANT not 4chan" or how they had seen the joke before and it's a shitty repost.

And sure, the repost bullshit is fair. I'm not saying that all the reposts are good content. What I'm saying is devRant has always been full of reposts - they just weren't reposts in the early days. The quality of content is the same.

There's also the common misconception that your posts need to be directly related to tech to post on devRant. This is a myth propagated by 0 IQ heathens that don't read any further than the name of the application. Your posts can be anything that isn't prohibited, like porn, spam, and, importantly, politics (commonly overlooked rule)

"All the memes are just too much". Oh you poor fucking baby, let me pour you a healthy serving of pity juice. First of all, you can turn off the memes category, and while they will still find their way to your feed, the concentration will be much lower and it will once again be bearable for your pitiful, weak little soul. Do you seriously get annoyed that severely by shitty posts that you need to leave the app altogether, or do you just want the attention of being a "cool hipster that hates on xyz"?

"This place is just filled with hate! Why can't you just respect xyz technology, it isn't actually that bad!"

This is probably the most stupid fucking thing you could possibly ejaculate from your fingers into whatever device you are using to type. Welcome to devRant, we hate on shit. That's at our core. No, xyz technology ISN'T actually that bad, you're correct. But we're here to tear it apart because it probably has frustrated us in the past. I fucking hate JS because it was my first language and it confused the shit out of me. JS is a great language. But I still talk shit about it, and that's what we're here to do.

Like seriously, I know a lot of people post stuff they're proud of here, and then they're met with "Would be great if you didn't use xyz tech", and that hurts, but holy shit, this is devRant. If you're sensitive to criticism, or even just straight up being made fun of, don't post shit that you're proud of. You won't have a good time. It's just not what we do here.

Quick interlude before the conclusion, "My girlfriend dumped me after I named a class after her. She felt I treated her like an object." is also on the first page of all-time most popular posts.

In conclusion, devRant has not changed. Reposts have been a nuisance since day 0, and just because reposts look different these days doesn't mean the quality of content has decreased in any manner. The two main sources of your frustration are the volume of low-quality posts (Mind you, not the concentration of them, but the volume of them) and your own prejudices about the platform. You're looking back with rose-tinted glasses.

Here are some tips for a more enjoyable experience:

-Make sure you have the "Hide reposts" setting ENABLED in settings. Any posts marked as repost will be hidden in your feed, pulling down the concentration of low-quality posts.
-Keep to the algo sorting method. Obviously, algo is a bot, and there's still gonna be some shit content in there anyways, but if you're in recent, you are absolutely guaranteed to see low-quality posts. It's unfiltered.
-Keep in mind that what you consider a "quality" post is not what others consider a "quality" post. Just because you don't like memes doesn't mean memes are poor content. There are people here who have never seen the bobby tables comic. And they deserve the same experience we got when discovering dev humor.
-Don't be a prick. And if you cannot help yourself, leave. Ironically, you're making the site worse by complaining about how bad the site is. You can always come back if you aren't a prick anymore. And you can leave permanently if you choose as well.
-Downvote and move on. You're not doing anything but making yourself more aggravated by leaving a shitty comment about how shitty the shitty post is.
-Think critically. Obviously optional, and I know not many people like to use their brain when a phone is suspended between their hands, but if you want a better experience, remember to use your head and not to lose it.

Looks like I'm getting fired on Wednesday :)

Long story:

*I add first unit tests to project.

*Boss adds new functionality and breaks all the tests so I can't compile and write more for what I'm working on.

*Boss is very fragile and cannot handle any comment that can possibly be taken as a slight against him.

Me: "I wanted to ask what our policy on unit tests is please? Because we haven't really said how we are treating unit tests, and everyone myself included is not thinking about them. I also haven't added tests when I fixed bugs and this time your changes broke the tests"

Boss 10 minutes later: "I want to speak to you in private".

Boss: "you are too forceful and direct. You said I should have added tests."

Me: "yeah but I didn't mean in a nasty way"

Boss getting louder and more aggressive: "You are too forceful"

Me: "I didn't mean it in a bad way"

Boss: "I didn't want to add tests for that!"

Me: "then why add any tests?"

Boss: "Fine we are not having this conversation now!"

*Boss storms out

I decided I can't speak to the guy about anything without upsetting him spoke to the manager before I quit because I can't work like this.

That resulted in a meeting with my boss, his boss and the head of HR where I ended up savaging him and told them I can't bring up anything as I can never tell if it will offend him and that I spend ages writing emails and trying to document communications because I just can never tell if I will upset him. Also that I cannot bring up any ideas because I can't tell if he will somehow get offended and that I can't even write code because if I change something he wrote at some point he will get angry.

My boss claims that I am extremely forceful and disrespectful and that I am constantly insulting him and his decisions.

We go back over a ton of shit and I refute everything he says. In the end I have to have a meeting with him on Wednesday where we either get things straight, he fires me or I quit.

I think at this point that our relationship is too fucked for him to be my team lead on a 6 man team.

Side note I keep bringing forth ideas because we have one database shared between 6 Devs, no pull requests (apart from mine and another new guy), no test driven development, no backlog, no team driven story pointing, no running tests before merging, no continuous integration setup, no integration tests, no build step on merge, no idea of if we are on track to our deadline other than his gut feeling, no actual unit tests backend - just integration with a test db, no enthusiasm to learn in the team and no hope.

#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?

A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.

As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.

A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.

About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."

Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.

R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."

As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.

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."

Our website once had it’s config file (“old” .cgi app) open and available if you knew the file name. It was ‘obfuscated’ with the file name “Name of the cgi executable”.txt. So browsing, browsing.cgi, config file was browsing.txt.
After discovering the sql server admin password in plain text and reporting it to the VP, he called a meeting.
VP: “I have a report that you are storing the server admin password in plain text.”
WebMgr: “No, that is not correct.”
Me: “Um, yes it is, or we wouldn’t be here.”
WebMgr: “It’s not a network server administrator, it’s SQL Server’s SA account. Completely secure since that login has no access to the network.”
<VP looks over at me>
VP: “Oh..I was not told *that* detail.”
Me: “Um, that doesn’t matter, we shouldn’t have any login password in plain text, anywhere. Besides, the SA account has full access to the entire database. Someone could drop tables, get customer data, even access credit card data.”
WebMgr: “You are blowing all this out of proportion. There is no way anyone could do that.”
Me: “Uh, two weeks ago I discovered the catalog page was sending raw SQL from javascript. All anyone had to do was inject a semicolon and add whatever they wanted.”
WebMgr: “Who would do that? They would have to know a lot about our systems in order to do any real damage.”
VP: “Yes, it would have to be someone in our department looking to do some damage.”
<both the VP and WebMgr look at me>
Me: “Open your browser and search on SQL Injection.”
<VP searches on SQL Injection..few seconds pass>
VP: “Oh my, this is disturbing. I did not know SQL injection was such a problem. I want all SQL removed from javascript and passwords removed from the text files.”
WebMgr: “Our team is already removing the SQL, but our apps need to read the SQL server login and password from a config file. I don’t know why this is such a big deal. The file is read-only and protected by IIS. You can’t even read it from a browser.”
VP: “Well, if it’s secured, I suppose it is OK.”
Me: “Open your browser and navigate to … browse.txt”
VP: “Oh my, there it is.”
WebMgr: “You can only see it because your laptop had administrative privileges. Anyone outside our network cannot access the file.”
VP: “OK, that makes sense. As long as IIS is securing the file …”
Me: “No..no..no.. I can’t believe this. The screen shot I sent yesterday was from my home laptop showing the file is publicly available.”
WebMgr: “But you are probably an admin on the laptop.”
<couple of awkward seconds of silence…then the light comes on>
VP: “OK, I’m stopping this meeting. I want all admin users and passwords removed from the site by the end of the day.”

Took a little longer than a day, but after reviewing what the web team changed:
- They did remove the SQL Server SA account, but replaced it with another account with full admin privileges.
- Replaced the “App Name”.txt with centrally located config file at C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\config.txt (hard-coded in the app)
When I brought this up again with my manager..
Mgr: “Yea, I know, it sucks. WebMgr showed the VP the config file was not accessible by the web site and it wasn’t using the SA password. He was satisfied by that. Web site is looking to beat projections again by 15%, so WebMgr told the other VPs that another disruption from a developer could jeopardize the quarterly numbers. I’d keep my head down for a while.”

Conversations I've genuinely had at work:

Me: "Do you want some advice understanding that function?"
Dev: "Yeah, please!"
Me: "Get a plastic bag and some super glue..."

Dev: "I think I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!"
Me: "It's just the train of mental bitchslaps coming in the other direction."
... Some time later
Dev:"You were right... "

Dev: "If the system is so unstable, how does it keep working?"
Me: "Do you see any goats in the office?"
Dev: "Uhm no... Why would there be goats?"
Me: "There aren't, now, we ran out."
Dev: "The hell are you talking about?"
Me: "We just sacrifice our own blood to Cthulhu these days, it's cleaner and we didn't have to pay to have all the goats blood and waste matter to be cleaned up. That and it was needlessly cruel to the poor goats and that is why there is no goats and despite conventional logic the app continues to work."

Dev: "So what language is the web app written in?"
Me: "You need to understand I inherited this project, I had nothing to do with it's spawning..."
Dev: "OK, that sounds ominous... How bad is it?"
Me: "Java..."
Dev: "..."

Dev: "So what's it like working on this project? What should I expect?"
Me: "You'll call your grandmother during your lunch break just to know there's a world beyond this project. You'll go home, nose bleeding and you are gonna sit in the shower and rock back and forth, holding yourself and feeling like you're suffering imposter syndrome. You'll question why you joined this team and it'll get inside your head til it's all you think about..."
Dev: "Damn man, why are you still on it?"
Me: "Stockholm syndrome, it's too late for me..."

PM: "You're such a dark person, we're not gonna find you hanging from the lights one day are we?"
Me: "Impossible, we use those industrial fluorescent strip lights, there's no cord to hang from."
PM: "That really wasn't the comforting answer I was looking for."

Head of department: "So I need to apologize, you were never meant to be left on your to manage the product on your own, it's something someone way more senior should have been doing and we reassigned him. It wasn't professional of us, it wasn't fair of us, we're sorry. Truth be told,we're impressed you've not gone mad."
Me: "I think I have. Wibble."

A card goes round work for a sick member of staff I've never met.
Me: "How would you describe her condition?"
Dev: "She said that she 'survived' the surgery."
Me: "Yeah, I'm not great at being appropriate but even I think writing 'glad to hear that you are not dead' in a get well soon card isn't the done thing."

Apparently, part of being a software engineer means knowing how to read minds and do other people's jobs.

While implementing a user story for marketing, we found some associated features that, according to the database, have not been used for years. We tell them this. We do the courtesy of asking, "Hey, is there anything on the site that is utilizing these features? We'd like to clean up the DB."

"We don't know."

Engineering suggests, "Ok, lets turn the feature off, then, and see if anyone complains. It's been years according to the DB."

Marketing gets angry and hostile and says, "That's not the way to do things!"

I don't vocalize, "Well, not knowing how to do your own damned job is not the way to do things."
-
Marketing asks us to integrate a third party feature to the site. We ask, "Ok, what page do you want it on, and what information do you want to collect, and what should it look like?"

"I don't know. You're engineering. You tell us."

We implement it as best we can.

Marketing says, "HEY! This isn't done right! It's missing this and this and this!"

"Did you ask us to implement that? According to the user story, it passes acceptance criteria."

Marketing says, "I thought you would just know that! I didn't know it was a separate thing. Just put it on all the pages, then. You guys really should know the site better."

Engineering gets angry and hostile
-
Marketing says, "We need this removed from the site."

Engineering replies, "We have a GUI for that. Just go to this URL and you can do it yourself."

Marketing replies, "Well, if that's a really complicated thing, can you just run a script against the DB?"

Engineering says, "If we've built a UI for you, we really shouldn't be executing SQL scripts directly against the DB."

Marketing gets angry and hostile.
-
Engineering tries asking nicely.

"Marketing, if you want us to add new stuff to the site, or change stuff, please tell us what it is and where it should go and what the customer experience should be like."

Marketing replies, "We don't know the site that well. We are leaning on you to tell us."

I do not vocalize, all while trying to keep my eyes from bulging out of my head, my face red with rage, "YOU ARE IN CHARGE OF SELLING SHIT ON A WEBSITE THAT YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT. YOU ARE ASKING FOR CHANGES TO SOMETHING YOU DON'T EVEN UNDERSTAND. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?"

Engineering is angry and hostile.

Been reading devrant posts for a month or so, this is my first actual post. I'm hoping it will be therapeutic. ☺️ I need something to keep me from killing my boss when I see him again tomorrow..

Some backstory: Currently working in HR for the last 7 or so years with complete shit for brains boss, even worse when it comes to anything related to technology. For almost two years I've been working to get another bachelor's degree. This time in computer sciences, to make a career switch to systems and software engineer. Last week I roughly had the following wonderful conversation:

Boss: we've needed new Recruitment software for a while now. Can't you make us one as a school project?

Me: 'Make us one?' It's not really that simple.. I'm barely halfway through my education, maybe I could do it, but it would take me quite a long time even if I could work on it fulltime.. Combining a halftime job with a fulltime education is taking up enough of my time as it is and I have more than enough school projects btw..

Boss: it would be a win-win. Work a little harder in your spare time and when you graduate you have a real-life project on your resume.

Me: I'm sorry, i'm failing to see the 'win' for me here.. I work 10 hours a day, 7 days a week on average, trying to combine work and studies. I'm pretty much maxed out..

Boss: Your coworker(also extreme dumbass) told me you wrote some quick code the other day that helped him out. Don't underestimate yourself, I'm sure you can do this.

Me(in complete disbelief by now): I wrote him an Excel-macro! They don't even teach me that at school. It's a very very very long way from actual software development! I'm sorry, it just can't be done.

Boss: Thats too bad. I expected you to welcome an opportunity like this and be more motivated towards this company..

Me: ***more disbelief and silence, just staring at him***
I'm sorry you feel that way.
***walked away***

WTF, I work my ass off for 7 years for this fucking shithead.. Even before I started this bachelors degree I had at least some understanding of the work developers put in their software. It blows my mind, no, it fucking angers me how people think making software is so simple.. Why do you think it's a 3-year education you fucking cunt?

Please, someone tell me how I can keep myself from ramming his fucking head through a wall tomorrow...

My psychiatrist has recently taken me off paroxotine which i was taking for anxiety. As a result, I'm wide awake unable to sleep cos my head is running at a million miles an hour. You know what I keep thinking?

1.) Sweet hairy balls of Mary Theresa I'm getting married in 3 months.

2.) Installing Arch sounds like fun. I wonder if I can do Unity3D and C# dev on it.

3.) @Gitpush, @Alice, @Linuxxx, @Bluenutterfly, @ThatDude, @AlexDeLarge Love your rants, keep up the good work!

I had a huge epiphany on Friday... not all developers enjoy coding.

Discovered when they brought down 2 of our environments, well told them what was wrong with the changes in their code that caused the environments to break, gave them links directly to the file in the gitlab repo that needed to be updated, and...

They fucking went home. The change would’ve taken all of about 30-45 seconds to update and they fucking left.

This person’s team lead come storming in pissed off because her manager is furious about 2 environments going down and preventing everyone else from being able to deploy their changes.

We provide the exact same details to the team lead about what needs to be changed, and advise that her team member took off....

30 mins later, her manager is storming up to us (devops/sre) livid as hell.

Explain the situation for a third time... manager is like, why can’t you guys fix it?

Look here you dense motherfuckers, we can fix the code. We can be the plumbers that clean up your shit. But what value do you gain as a developer if you don’t understand how the systems work and you keep pushing shit in?

Made the changes, fixed the environments, done right? Wrong.

The original developer made more changes not knowing what would happen and thoroughly fucked the environments again.

This dumb-fucking dumpster fire of a dude then sends us a slack message. “It’s down again, can you fix it?”

Our manager steps in and tells us to send him a link to the logs and have him fix it himself!

Thank goodness we have a badass manager.

Send logs, send repo file links (again), and send line numbers in the logs to try and help just a bit more. Dude goes almost the whole day without fixing it, environments are down, other devs are pissed, we throw this dude to the wolves. His manager starts to head over and was about to talk with my team lead when our manager steps out of his office and tells him the in’s and out’s of the situation and that our job isn’t to play log parser/error fixer for the developers. This dude that’s breaking the environments needs to be the one to fix the issue and his team lead should be aware of the problems and should have been able to correct his errors before it ever came to us.

The amount of hand-holding we do is ridiculous.

(Disclaimer, this one guy making some mistakes doesn’t sound too bad, but this is actually a common occurrence for like 40% of all of our developers)

We literally have interns still in college running circles around some of our full time devs. I know I’m not a developer, but for anyone that’s new-ish to developing, when you see shit like that please don’t lose hope. Those ass-hats got into programming purely for a paycheck, not because of passion.

Stick with it and your greatness will know no bounds 👍

As for you craptastic dipstick lickers, FUCK YOU!!! Go back to school and learn how to give a damn.

Some of the penguin's finest insults (Some are by me, some are by others):

Disclaimer: We all make mistakes and I typically don't give people that kind of treatment, but sometimes, when someone is really thick, arrogant or just plain stupid, the aid of the verbal sledgehammer is neccessary.

"Yeah, you do that. And once you fucked it up, you'll go get me a coffee while I fix your shit again."

"Don't add me on Facebook or anything... Because if any of your shitty code is leaked, ever, I want to be able to plausibly deny knowing you instead of doing Seppuku."

"Yep, and that's the point where some dumbass script kiddie will come, see your fuckup and turn your nice little shop into a less nice but probably rather popular porn/phishing/malware source. I'll keep some of it for you if it's good."

"I really love working with professionals. But what the fuck are YOU doing here?"

"I have NO idea what your code intended to do - but that's the first time I saw RCE and SQLi in the same piece of SHIT! Thanks for saving me the hassle."

"If you think XSS is a feature, maybe you should be cleaning our shitter instead of writing our code?"

"Dude, do I look like I have blue hair, overweight and a tumblr account? If you want someone who'd rather lie to your face than insult you, go see HR or the catholics or something."

"The only reason for me NOT to support you getting fired would be if I was getting paid per bug found!"

"Go fdisk yourself!"

"You know, I doubt the one braincell you have can ping localhost and get a response." (That one's inspired by the BOFH).

"I say we move you to the blockchain. I'd volunteer to do the cutting." (A marketing dweeb suggested to move all our (confidential) customer data to the "blockchain").

"Look, I don't say you suck as a developer, but if you were this competent as a gardener, I'd be the first one to give you a hedgetrimmer and some space and just let evolution do its thing."

"Yeah, go fetch me a unicorn while you're chasing pink elephants."

"Can you please get as high as you were when this time estimate come up? I'd love to see you overdose."

"Fuck you all, I'm a creationist from now on. This guy's so dumb, there's literally no explanation how he could evolve. Sorry Darwin."

"You know, just ignore the bloodstain that I'll put on the wall by banging my head against it once you're gone."

You guys, I think I know what is it....I think I know why I wanted to be a developer.

It started off innocently enough. I was a young lad in IT. Wide-eyed. Absorbing anything and everything I could. Then, the asshole clients came.....

I would put on my best customer service face on, and address the client as calmly and as respectfully as I could. Reminding myself that their frustration is understandable.

To deal with the increased time dealing with clients took, I developed scripts to help me handle maintenance and keep my head above water. I developed scripts to streamline equipment provisioning for big deployments. I developed scripts to handle other technicians who didn't log-off the phone queue and fucked up our on-call flow. I put in place email rules to sift through the bullshit and time wasters.

I became a developer to streamline and make myself as efficient as possible. But the clients keep nagging. The bullshit keeps coming. The other players get in your fucking way.

There is no end you guys.... THIS IS ONLY TUESDAY. I can't script the passage of time. I'm....I'm.... I need a fucking nap.

* A job application followup email I received:

Hi [programmerName],
Thank you for your interest in joining [companyName].

While we appreciate your application, we decided to move forward with other candidates whose skills and experience are a closer match to our requirements for this specific role.
Feel free to check back, as we are always adding new positions.

Best of luck with your career search!
-The [companyName] Team

* My (probably trashed) reply:

Hello

I personally ignore this precompiled stuff you HR people send.
I feel this answer will be probably trashed somewhere but I feel the need to write this.

You know absolutely nothing about my skills because you didn’t even talk with me.

Maybe I am not the best person in writing a resume or an introduction letter, the key skill appreciated in companies doing head hunting instead of building a solid corporate culture and cultivating talent. Or at least HR people in such companies.

Please consider that, maybe you didn’t like my resume or I didn't write a list of words matching your check list, but at least I honestly wrote my experience instead of trying to hack my way to a job interview writing a fake one that triggers usual HR patterns.
Consider that I do a job for a living and I don't live or have the time to make the perfect resume, I don’t even apply for all companies I see, I only apply for the ones I believe I can work well because I like them. I am not a professional job searcher, jumping from a company to another.

You keep posting this very same add since October 2019 and probably even earlier.
This sounds to me like:
- or your selection process does not work well and you end up hiring the wrong people
- or maybe your work place is not that good as you describe it, so that you have zero retainment despite your high salary.
But I cannot be sure because, guess what, I could not check personally.

If you want to talk about my skills and compare me to other people please test me otherwise don’t write (copy/paste) this offensive trash.

Best of luck with your career as a HR person in a tech company!

-A person tired of HR managers that do not give a f**k about the word “human” in their job description.

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...

In my unenlightened youth, when programming was a module in my college diploma that didn't seem to be taking me where I wanted to go, I had a couple of guys guy in my class that could arguably be the weird ones.

Jonny, although he asserted that he was to be called "Jonhty", whatever, we never did. He was pretty much top of the high school food chain and for some reason elected to study computer science, none of us was prepared to put up with his shit. He was always boasting about some fanciful claim or another, famously entering the classroom and exclaiming he'd "fucked an absolute milf" and seemed somewhat evasive about the answer, turns out he was 17 and she was 35, the age difference was greater than his own age. We burst out laughing. He would also turn up late and state the college bus was late (it wasn't I got the free bus every day, he'd just not got out his wanking chariot early enough).

One valentine's day we got him a card from a mysterious stranger which was accompanied by a package containing a cucumber and Vaseline, the inside of the card read "to assist you in the following request: please go fuck yourself".

Before you think we were being unduly harsh, we had a centre table where we'd be taught from with computers around the outer rim of the room. He'd come up behind people while at the centre desk, quietly press ctrl+P and slowly walk back to the printer. I saw him do it to my machine and I got to the printer first, to which he shouted "that's MY work" which was amusing because unbeknownst to him I had put headers on all my documents so he really didn't have an answer for why my name was at the top of every page.

To top it all off he had dead eyes, there didn't appear to be much going on but the rent, there was no spark of intelligent life, and while I thought it, I never said it out loud, but other students did and I had to agree. He was just copying his way to graduation. However, he ultimately didn't graduate when people refused to allow him to copy.

Another guy, Richard I believe his name was, which is just as well because he was a right dick. In the UK our word for white trash is "chav" (that's a very naïve explanation for it but that's another rant best left for "socialsciencerant") and he was an complete idiot who was gifted with more brain cells than he ever needed to use. He actually studied hard and got reasonable grades, probably on par with me, but he boasted about smoking weed all the time, he was forever playing dark side of the moon via his loud mp3 player. I kinda left him alone generally until he was high in class one time and while we we're watching a documentary he'd shake my chair and make a weird noise in my ear every few minutes, the first couple of times startled me, the remaining multi-dozen times pissed me off.

It all came to a head with this guy when I'd been hearing about his uninteresting bs on drugs, music and how best to spend my time ("you need to lighten up man, come round my house, take a joint and relax man", that sorta thing), well this guy walked like he was mid way through shitting himself so I personally think that perhaps he is too chilled. Anyway he's arguing with me and after the exchange of him making his point, me disagreeing and expecting the end of it, he made the mistake of saying two words to me:

"Listen, mate..."

And I had him in check mate.

"Listen, I ain't your fucking mate , I don't even like you, you're a disruptive annoying twat that thinks he knows it all, we're all 17, none of us know anything, so shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down and stop boring me with your drugs, I ain't interested, and for the record I think pink Floyd ruined prog rock!"

He looked at me with sad puppy dog eyes, and started with the "but, why?", However I was interrupted and had to leave the class for unrelated reasons, I returned to be told he'd put safety pins up right on my chair so I'd sit on them, and mutual friends who TD me I'd been cruel and that he doesn't was hurt, so I should apologize, he overheard and said he was sorry for bring a bit of a dick.

However, you just know when you don't get on with someone? Yeah, that. So I said I wasn't sorry for what I said, for while it was harsh, I am not his mate, nor did I want to be his mate and that was all I had to say on the subject, and that if he wants to take offensive to a nobody not liking him then he's in for a very rough time in life.

Unsurprisingly I don't keep in touch with anyone from college!

The worst part of being a dev

My social dilemma

In a fast paced world where the average human spends at least 6 hours a day with technology, deriving basic entertainment, pleasures and engaging in various activities.

Here we are the developers that have to engage with technology for longer hours for a living , having to keep up with deadlines, immersing our minds in complicated algorithms and then the endless possibilities of entertainment from the machine in so few human hours a day , you wonder how you’d get off, and to top it up, I personally work from home.

And then the dilemma of overcoming different suggestions from various parties in taking a break off, a break off to what you later ask yourself, thus creating the shadow of doubt, splitting the fragile programmer’s mind , trying to solve this imaginary puzzle, “this bug of the mind”.

Then the challenge often arises in creating a balance, telling yourself, just catching up with people with this same technology takes a whole day, or then again quitting my Job, but from my little experience of life, nobody likes a poor visitor, this is actually worse than a “bug” and as I bask in this quagmire, “a little voice in my head keeps singing keep doing what you love doing”.

Like an infinite loop of crazy, spiralling back to these machines, trying the find and fix the balance of normalcy. Always remembered the cool years of college tho, with so much people around and then again that was college.

An then the thought arises, maybe something else might be worth doing, but after so much time spent in building your skills and the enormous joy of programming even typing without looking at the keyboard is a real pleasure, and yeah sure the days are short with the reality of a constant need to survive, remain sane, compete and make the best of life in such short time.

Then how do we know if we have fallen off the so-called “social track”, when we have only lived so little to really comprehend the most parts of life? with such constant stream of unanswered question, you’d realise you shouldn’t have burdened the mind creating such questions in the first place

But then again maybe it gets better, one of the above, the disturbed mind or the situation as whole and yes I try oh I try, I place calls, do some visiting, no relationship tho but with a good perspective in mind.

In this race of life, you sometimes ask yourself would you rather be in a different position, or maybe already put exactly where we belong. For this illusionary fight with self is a fight with reality as a whole and true bliss comes from actually letting go as time and people pass you by.

And my greatest achievement to date aside family and my work is getting into the 1000 club on devRant.

Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.

Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.

I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.

Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.

Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.

Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.

So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.

Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.

Imagine asking your friends to help you rate your app on the google play store and instead of saying NO I DONT WANT TO RATE YOUR APPLICATION no... they decide to fuck with your mind.

1)
I will rate it tomorrow. (she never rated it tomorrow nor the next couple of weeks later)

2)
I will keep it in mind and rate it later :). (she never rated it later)

3)
I rated it haha (less than 30 seconds later they deleted the rating)

4)
Send me a link and I'll rate it (i send the link, they never respond or read my message again)

5)
I dont have memory on my phone :) (because 13MB of memory is a lot of storage requirements but taking 1 million selfies of up to 25GB is completely fine)

6)
I dont have memory on my phone what dont you understand :) x2 (this is the second girl)

7)
Your trying to give me a virus?? No (i got blocked multiple times)

8)
You want to hack me by making me install this application from the link that you sent me that leads to google play store? No (blocked)

9)
Rate your app? Haha i dont care about it because it doesnt bring me any benefit only the fat cocks that fill my pussy up satisfy me and not ur app haha

10)
Haha send me a link ill rate it (i send link, 8 hours later no reply or reading my message, i text her back if she had done it and im still put on ignore)

...

N)
more

----

Notice how none of these people have said the 2 letter word: "no".

All of these 10 examples are based on a true story.

All of these 10 examples are different people.

---

How hard
Can it be
To just
Write

no

---

.

---

For all of you who are about to trash talk saying i am desperately trying to beg people to rate my app:

i know all of those people for a long time. But when it comes to asking (and not forcing) someone to do you a favor for free that takes no more than 30 seconds, no one seems to have 30 seconds of their free time. Dont get me wrong, some of my friends did politely rate it and left a review, even the people who i barely knew left a review and rated it, but the people with whom I was closer by, didnt.

---

In the beginning i used to not care about this at all. Then i started falling into depression because of it. I fell then into deep depression. Then i sunk so deep that i couldn't feel any emotions anymore so i laughed as an anti depressive mechanism whenever something depressing happened. Now i cant even laugh because i have no more energy. Now i actually leave man tears

---

The only thing more valuable than people, any materialistic thing, animals, coding and even money - is time....

----

why do you waste my time

if i ask you to do something that takes 30 seconds and you dont want to do it

why cant you just say no

why do you drag me

why do you say you're going to do it when you know you wont do it

what do you gain by unnecessarily lying to someone for such a small thing?

to someone who has been a good person to you?

do you feel superior?

is your ego bigger?

----

This experience has taught me that not even a human from the same blood can be trusted.

All of your are fucked up in the head in your own style and i am guilty of it too, all of us are.

But i have never seen the human evolution went from simplicity to overengineered complexitory bULLSHit where you have to lie to someone and waste hours, days, weeks, months and sometimes years of his time just because you dont want to say a 2 letter word, no.

But when that person becomes more successful than you and achieves higher status, Theen you have those 30 seconds of free time. All of you are fucking cynics. and i am so much overly disgusted by all of this fucking bullshit....

-----

This experience has proven to me to simply focus on investing into myself and learn and improve myself and no one else. To not even bother asking even for a small kind of help, a feedback from my work because people don't have 30 seconds of their free time. That is all.

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.

Quited my Job.

So... How to spend half a salary in a day...
Go to the shrink after like 3 years of not completing my burn out treatment.
Btw been having health problems lately, incapacitating stuff.
Got so many medication that im using a grossery bag.
Also had to quit my job... I just can't work can barely think, have no strength and a pressure in my head all day.
Now.. I was a temp, working in shifts on a shitty badly paid job, so fk it. 3 weeks down time, then I just quitted...
Now, on my parents house, getting 1 day of sick leave means a person doesn't want to work... How am I gonna tell them that I quitted... Lol
A few years ago I had to ear stuff like your lazy and don't want to work up to the day I got couth trying to cut my wrists... And I'm against suicide.
Now I dont know if I should hope my recent health problems are burn out related or not... Because some of the other possibilities are quite bad... I mean worst.
Can't think, fealing depressed because I hate to not be able to give 100%... And I just keep looking at my CNC machine... Finnaly got enough pieces to finish my project, but I can't get the will to do so... And it's there, in front of me, the opportunity to create my own job...
Life sucks

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.

College is worse than cancer.

Worse than tumor.

Worse than any (un)imaginable death or torture.

I feel dull.

I feel DUMBED DOWN.

I FEEL DUMBER AFTER 6 YEARS OF COLLEGE COMPARED TO BEFORE STARTING COLLEGE.

6 fucking years of wrecking my healthy brain in college.

Has now became unhealthy and mentally unstable.

I forgot almost EVERYTHING i knew about coding.

Because in a "COMPUTER SCIENCE" college they teach everything BUT coding.

The professors and assistants have no morals.

They are INHUMANE.

Professors are ready to walk across a fucking corpse.

If your mother gets cancer and you are unable to come to class or study, the professors dont give a FUCK, they will drop you down so you have to study for exams again instead of helping your ill mother.

Professors have NO COMPASSION.

NO DIGNITY.

They are just BRAINLESS robots.

Sentients, agents working for the matrix.

They keep reading the same script every year and call that a successful career.

IF PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS AT COLLEGE ACTUALLY KNEW TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL IN LIFE, THEY WOULD NOT BE PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS FOR THE MAJORITY (OR WHOLE) OF THEIR LIFE.

I gave my maximum effort.

I SACRIFICED MY LIFE FOR SCHOOL.

Just to end up with school spitting on my face.

I feel DUMBED down.

Robotic.

Procedural minded.

As some brainless retard who has to follow orders as if im a 6 year old who doesn't know what to do.

Like a computer.

Because of college - i have no will to live.

Because of college - i no longer have passion for coding.

Because of college - i no longer know what is my purpose in life.

Because of college - i feel like im floating in cosmos, somewhere far deep into the space, without knowing where im going, what im doing, why im doing what im doing...

I feel void inside me.

I also feel vengeance inside me.

SCHOOL HAS RUINED MY LIFE.

It made me mentally insane.

It made me mentally so sick that i had to watch head decapitation gore videos to calm myself down, so i can imagine the victims being murdered are the professors and assistants from my college.

PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS HAVE 0 UNDERSTANDING FOR OTHER HUMAN LIFE.

MILLIONS of people have private problems going on in their lives every day.

What if someone cant pass an exam because of private problems that's going on in their life?

What if the student is abused by a family member?

What if the student has ANY non-self destructive negative event happening to them, which they're not at fault, and can not control?

What if the student got cancer and cant study for exams, is he supposed to fail?

What if the student came home and the police knocked on his door and said "sorry for your loss, your whole family just died in car accident" and student falls into depression and cant study for exams, is he supposed to fail???

There are infinite multitude of random events this damned universe can do to a human life.

BUT PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS;
DO
NOT
GIVE
A
FUCK.

I feel soulless.

I feel like i signed a contract with the devil when i started college by selling him my soul.

School (when i say school, i also mean college, because its the same fucking shit under a different name) is supposed to represent "education".

Lets talk about it.

What exactly are we being "EDUCATED" in school?

To memorize pdf slides?

Memorize textbook?

Memorize notes?

Memorize formulas?

Memorize memorize memorize???

First of all, all of what we're "studying" is BULLSHIT, second of all MEMORIZING all of this means you're gonna forget 60% of it tomorrow, 80% in the next 2 days and you'll forget 100% of what you "learned" by the 7th day.

SOCIETY TOLD YOU TO MEMORIZE USELESS BULLSHIT AND TOLD YOU THAT YOU'RE BEING EDUCATED THAT WAY. YOU MUST BE FUCKING DUMB TO BELIEVE THAT.

If memorizing == education, then i do NOT want to be a part of this "education".

BEFORE starting college i coded many projects.

I self-learned everything.

6 years of college and it taught me LESS THAN ZERO.

NOT EVEN ZERO.

LESS THAN ZERO because i got dumbed down, below the underground, and had to dig myself up on the surface.

I built software for an american real estate agency and sold it for 5 figures.

I built software for 3 people from New York for another 5 figures.

I even got offers to work in local software companies without having a degree.

At internship i was given a task to finish in 2 weeks. I finished it in 3 days. They were shocked and wanted to hire me for further work.

At another internship there was 4 of us working together as a team. At the end company contacted only ME and told me i showed the best results on their list out of ALL the teams and the team members that were with me.

Ever since i had to study for disgusting college i had to stop working.

Because of college, i have no source of income for MONTHS now.

Because of college, i had several mental breakdowns.

---

To all professors and assistants:

I pray that karma ruins your life with lethal outcome, and your kids die of cancer in pain.

!dev
This thing is eating away at me so just shut up and listen.

I have started applying for this uni for PhD (don't judge me) and for that, I will need recommendation letters, right? So I emailed two of the people who have already agreed to write me recommendation letters, to confirm the details that I'll give the said uni to contact them. Emails were sent out on Thursday. It's now soon to be Tuesday and I haven't heard a thing back. And this is abso-fucking-lutely killing me!!!! (There's still another to be emailed but he's a bit high and mighty and I'll email him after I get feedbacks from these two about my motivation letter and CV.)

Like, when you know my whole future depends on a single email of yours, saying that I'm a good PhD candidate (and oh boy, that is a joke; considering that I'm applying for literally one of the best unis in this particular subject in the whole world... I'm well over my head, aren't I?) why would you keep me standing on one leg just to confirm your contact details? I mean I know I'm overreacting a bit considering the deadline is yonks away, but still, urghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

A random story that just popped back into my head while reading another rant:

Long ago, we developed our own webmail platform at the request of clients. After it was finished, it was never updated and eventually turned into an outdated insecure steaming pile of crap. Up until ~2015, it looked like the first iteration of AOL Mail from the 1990s (and it functioned as such too.) Years, we decided to sunset the platform, and allotted 6-months or so to transition all the active users off the platform and over to an alternative email provider. We had to call each client multiple times and send multiple emails with a deadline detailing when the service would be shut down, and we'd explain that if they didn't transition over to a new service and transfer all their emails before that date, then the emails would be lost forever. Lo and behold, a handful of clients ignored our repeated contact attempts, and we shut down their email service (as we told them that we would.) Of course, they called screaming and panicking "OUR EMAIL IS DOWN OUR EMAIL IS DOWN WE'RE LOSING MONEY FIX IT NOW!!!!," and we told them "We attempted to contact you multiple times, and you neglected to return our numerous calls or emails. We're happy to help you transition your old email addresses to this new provider, but because you neglected to follow the cushy deadline we provided you, all of your emails are gone."

Of course, they denied having ever received our calls/emails, and we'd have to provide them with our outgoing call recordings to prove that we did in fact contact them multiple times. Then they'd blame the mishap on their secretary, who would blame it on the intern, who would blame it on the IT guy, who would blame it on the janitor, and so on and so forth.

Moral of the story: always keep outgoing call recordings when you're sunsetting a product.

Today during a follow-up meeting of the grand project I'm workng on...

TL: ... and I want to start working on the production environment and have it ready by next month.
Me: (interrupts) hold up! We are not ready, we have a huge backlog of technical tasks that need to be addressed and we are still not in possession of the very crucial business and functional requirements that you are supposed to provide. The acceptation environment is just set up on infra perspective but does not have anything running yet! The API we depend on is still not ready because you keep adding change tasks to it. We have a mountain of work to do to even get to a first release to integration yet and there is still the estimations on data loads and systems... your dream will not be possible until at least Q2 of 2024.
TL: stop being so negative @neatnerdprime and try to be more customer friendly. I want it by the end of the next month.
Me: remember what I said to you about moving prematurely. Remember I don't take any responsibility if things break because you rush the project. Please, reconsider!
TL: I just want it, please do it

FUCK YOU YOU SORRY EXCUSE OF A PEOPLE PERSON KNOWING JACK SHIT AND JUST LICKING THE MIDDLE MANAGEMENT ASSHOLE TO RECEIVE ATTABOY PETS ON YOUR UGLY ASS BALD HEAD AND CROOKED TEETH. YOU SHOULD FUCKING DIE IN A FURNACE AND LEAVE NO TRACE BEHIND.

During one of our 'pop-up' meetings last week.

Ralph: "The test code the developers are checking in is a mess. They don't know what they are doing."

ex.
var foo = SomeLibrary.GetFoo();
Assert.IsNotNull(foo);

Fred: "Ha ha..someone should talk to HR about our hiring practices. These people are literally driving the company backwards."
Me: "I think unit testing is complete waste of time."
- You could almost see the truck hit the wall and splatter watermelon everwhere..took Ralph and Fred a couple of seconds to respond
Fred: "Uh..unit testing is industry best practice. There is scientific evidence that prove testing reduces bugs and increases code quality"
Ralph: "Over 90% of our deployments are rolled back because of bugs. Unit testing will eliminate that."
Me: "Sorry, I disagree."
- Stepping on kittens wouldn't have gotten a worse look from Fred and Ralph
Fred: 'Pretty sure if you ask any professional developer, they'll tell you unit testing and code coverage reduces bugs.'
Me: "I'm not asking anyone else, I'm asking you. Find one failed deployment, just one, over the past 6 months that unit testing or code coverage would have prevented."
- good 3 seconds of awkward silence.
Ralph: "Well, those rollbacks are all mostly due to server mis-configurations. That's not a fair comparison."
Me: "I'm using your words. Unit tests reduces bugs and lack of good tests is the direct reason why we have so many failed deployments"
Boss: "Yea, Ralph...you and Fred kinda said that."
Fred: "No...we need to write good tests. Not this mess."
Me: "Like I said, show me one test you've written that would have prevented a rollback. Just one."
Ralph: "So, what? We do nothing?"
Me: "No, we have to stop worshiping this made up 80% code coverage idol. If not, developers are going to keep writing useless test code just to meet some percent. If we wrote device drivers or frameworks for other developers maybe, but we write CRUD apps. We execute a stored procedure or call a service. This 80% rule doesn't fit for code we write."
Fred: "If the developers took their head out of their ass.."
Me: "Hey!..uh..no, they are doing exactly what they are being told. Meet the 80% requirement, even if doesn't make sense."
Ralph: "Nobody told them to write *that* code."
Boss: "My gosh, what have you and Fred been complaining about for the past hour?"
- Ralph looks at his monitor and brilliantly changes the subject
Ralph: "Oh my f-king god...Trump said something stupid again ..."

At that point I put my headphones on went back to what I was doing. I'm pretty sure Fred and Ralph spent the rest of the day messaging back-n-forth, making fun of me or some random code I wrote 3 years ago (lots of typing and giggling). How can highly educated grown men (one has a masters in CS) get so petty and insecure?

After all those years, I finally understood what makes Half-Life 2 so immersive.

From the very beginning, as the game teaches you things about itself, you discover that every model is made with you in mind. The barrel is just tall enough to jump on it, but not taller. The big crate's size is calculated precisely for you to jump onto it from a small crate. Ladders are comfortable for you to climb on. Everything in this game world designed around you, the human.

…except for combine constructions.

They're awkward to walk around. You keep lowkey clipping into them. Half-transparent armor fence looks like you can jump over it, but you can't. It's just a bit taller than that, on purpose. Combine towers are hard to climb onto. You keep bumping into things. Once you locate the ladder and climb all the way up, you bump your head into the ceiling. You don't have much room for movement on top. Combine walls have an inconclusive, uncomfortable physics model that is very annoying to interact with. If you run into it and jump, you clip into it just enough to stop your movement instantly.

This hammers in the message — combines aren't human. Their constructions aren't meant for humans. This was my biggest discovery the last time I played Half-Life 2.

HL2 is a strong contender to be my favorite game of all time.

TL;DR; do your best all you like, strive to be the #1 if you want to, but do not expect to be appreciated for walking an extra mile of excellence. You can get burned for that.

They say verbalising it makes it less painful. So I guess I'll try to do just that. Because it still hurts, even though it happened many years ago.

I was about to finish college. As usual, the last year we have to prepare a project and demonstrate it at the end of the year. I worked. I worked hard. Many sleepless nights, many nerves burned. I was making an android app - StudentBuddy. It was supposed to alleviate students' organizational problems: finding the right building (city plans, maps, bus schedules and options/suggestions), the right auditorium (I used pictures of building evac plans with classes indexed on them; drawing the red line as the path to go to find the right room), having the schedule in-app, notifications, push-notifications (e.g. teacher posts "will be 15 minutes late" or "15:30 moved to aud. 326"), homework, etc. Looots of info, loooots of features. Definitely lots of time spent and heaps of new info learned along the way.

The architecture was simple. It was a server-side REST webapp and an Android app as a client. Plenty of entities, as the system had to cover a broad spectrum of features. Consequently, I had to spin up a large number of webmethods, implement them, write clients for them and keep them in-sync. Eventually, I decided to build an annotation processor that generates webmethods and clients automatically - I just had to write a template and define what I want generated. That worked PERFECTLY.

In the end, I spun up and implemented hundreds of webmethods. Most of them were used in the Android app (client) - to access and upsert entities, transition states, etc. Some of them I left as TBD for the future - for when the app gets the ADMIN module created. I still used those webmethods to populate the DB.

The day came when I had to demonstrate my creation. As always, there was a commission: some high-level folks from the college, some guests from businesses.

My turn to speak. Everything went great, as reversed. I present the problem, demonstrate the app, demonstrate the notifications, plans, etc. Then I describe at high level what the implementation is like and future development plans. They ask me questions - I answer them all.

I was sure I was going to get a 10 - the highest score. This was by far the most advanced project of all presented that day!

Other people do their demos. I wait to the end patiently to hear the results. Commission leaves the room. 10 minutes later someone comes in and calls my name. She walks me to the room where the judgement is made. Uh-oh, what could've possibly gone wrong...?

The leader is reading through my project's docs and I don't like the look on his face. He opens the last 7 pages where all the webmethods are listed, points them to me and asks:
LEAD: What is this??? Are all of these implemented? Are they all being used in the app?
ME: Yes, I have implemented all of them. Most of them are used in the app, others are there for future development - for when the ADMIN module is created
LEAD: But why are there so many of them? You can't possibly need them all!
ME: The scope of the application is huge. There are lots of entities, and more than half of the methods are but extended CRUD calls
LEAD: But there are so many of them! And you say you are not using them in your app
ME: Yes, I was using them manually to perform admin tasks, like creating all the entities with all the relations in order to populate the DB (FTR: it was perfectly OK to not have the app completed 100%. We were encouraged to build an MVP and have plans for future development)
LEAD: <shakes his head in disapproval>
LEAD: Okay, That will be all. you can return to the auditorium

In the end, I was not given the highest score, while some other, less advanced projects, were. I was so upset and confused I could not force myself to ask WHY.

I still carry this sore with me and it still hurts to remember. Also, I have learned a painful life lesson: do your best all you like, strive to be the #1 if you want to, but do not expect to be appreciated for walking an extra mile of excellence. You can get burned for that.

How do I help my colleague in fighting harrassment?
This is the story of a helpless employee facing everyday harassment. Im trying to help. Seeking for your thoughts

Backstory fast forwarded: My company acquired another company. So we handle all their projects and clients now, but its a completely new domain. So we needed new people. Hired 4 employees + 1 team lead to start with. But the project process got delayed and they were free for a month. So i took 2 of them in my project and gave them some small tasks to help us over. They loved working with my team and were learning new stuff apart from what they usually did. And we were also happy of their contribution. We became good friends. All of this was in March 2020 before covid-19 was taken seriously.

About my company: I love this company. I have been in this company for more than 4 years now. People are really nice. Parties and fun events. Lot of smart and ambitious people. So company and people are awesome.

Coming back to the story. Lets call the team the 4 and team lead T. The 4 were happy that someone like T was in their team. This T had all the best knowledge about stuff and life was going to be awesome for the 4. Or was it?

Story starts: So I talk to one of these 4 on daily basis. Lets call this friend F. F is a real gentle person. Intelligent and dedicated to work. F is awesome to work with. And always enjoyed working. F is a team player and very very soft person. F is fking workoholic. So few days after project starts, F tells me work was not going well. F is getting real frustrated at work and not able to deal with it or find solution.

What happened:
This person T, who was supposed to help these 4, is real piece of shit. He is impatient, arrogant and MFing dick head. Aaaarggggg.
All the good qualities of a leader like supporting the team, boosting confidence, guiding team when they make mistakes, teaching them, were all missing from this person. T was a machine with no emotion and only clock working jerk. I have no idea how T cleared interview process, because one of the interview round is also about cultural fit into company. I know this because i take interviews for other domains. We have rejected lot of such well qualified but arrogant candidates.

So whats the problem now: this team of 4 are learning new tools and taking over the clients requests from old company. Most of the stuff is new for them. So in tat case people need lot of time to understand and figure out shit. people make mistakes while learning and you know have to deal with it. Person T abuses these 4 when something goes wrong. That's one.

Second, the T definitely knows more than these 4. So if these guys dont understand certain stuff they ask T. But T does not help them learn. T will either say busy or run away by saying thats simple and ull know when time comes. REALLY MF???

Third, T does not talk nice. T is rude and does not listen to team members. For eg, If F says some task cannot be done for some reason T will say, "y cant u do it? U r capable of doing it. Tats y u r in this job". And then point number one and two happens. Never responds to emails and messages. But if someone else does the same will not tolerate that and abuses them. List goes on.

So y not escalate and deal with that T:
This person F and other 3 are still under probation and they think complaint or escalation will back fire. These people do not want to lose job in between all this pandemic shit. They are scared.

So this was happening for a while. And i was giving lot of tips on how to handle certain situations. And how one should communicate these.

But being a gentle, soft and workoholic person, F focussed on work and assumed things will get in place as time goes by.

Today, F could not meet a requirement. So T told some shit which got F all sad. and F called up me late night and started crying explaining what happened. I felt real bad. I asked F to file harrassment case. F refused saying it was F's mistake on not completing requirement. WHO THE FK CARES. PEOPLE CANNOT TALK SHIT. I told ill file harrassment case against T. (We have a policy where others can also file if person is not courageous enough). But F did not allow me.

Then after calming down, I told F that telling the problems to me wont solve them. You have to talk to T directly and tell him on face not to talk like this. Or tell the manager about whats happening. Or tell the the HR about this. F said tat cant be done. I was like Y THE FK NOT.

Because the other 3 are not ready to talk about this to anyone as they fear they'll lose job. So if F talks and people question other 3 they might bail out. WAT THE HOLY SPIRIT.

so after lot of convincing F is still not going to
Talk to anyone about this.

So i have decided ill write an anonymous email to HR, the manager and other senior people in the organisation about whats happening.

I really dont know how itll go. Ill keep updating you guys. Feel free to share ur thoughts.

Multi User, One Account, and other shit

I'm gonna rant about something as a user, and someone who makes stupid web stuff.

My bank has been updating their web banking over time and they decided that every individual on an account, should have their own login. They really want to push this on their users, I suspect specifically folks like me and my wife who share one login for the joint accounts we have at the bank together.

Why share one login, because it's the only sure fire way I know that I and my wife can see all the same shit no doubt about it.

The banks never tell you what you can see or can't with joint accounts, I doubt it is even documented on their end, but in every damn case something is hidden or different in some weird way.

Messages to the bank people? If I send it, my wife often can't. I get that for security reasons that's a thing, but it makes no sense for a joint account.

ANY difference to me breaks online banking ENTIRELY. Joint accounts are supposed to be... well one account that is the same.

Other banks we used where we had different logins for the joint account, each login actually had separate bill pay accounts per user. So if I went to bill pay and scheduled something to be paid, my wife had no idea, same if she did.

Right fucking there, banking is just broken entirely!

So no Mr. Bank, fuck you we're both logging in via the same login.

Fast forward to N00bPancakes making a thing.

So my employer has a customer (Direct Customer). Direct Customer wants a thing that makes communication with their customer (Indirect Customer) easier.

The worst thing about making something for your customer's customer is that Direct Customer always imagines that Indirect Customer is gonna be super ninja power users....

But no, that's not the case... in fact almost nobody is a power user, and absolutely nobody WANTS to be a power users.

Worse yet in my case the only reason this tool exists is because Direct Customer and Indirect Customer can't communicate well enough anyway... that should tell you something about the amount of effort Indirect Customer is willing to expend.

So with that tool, this situation constantly comes up:

Direct Customer thinks it would be great if every user from Indirect Company had some sort of custom messaging, views, and etc in of Cool Communication Tool. The reason is because that's what Direct Customer loves about Ultra Complex Primary Tool that they use ....

Then I have to fight the constant fight of:

NOBODY WANTS TO BE A POWER USER, NOBODY EVEN WANTS TO DO MUCH OF ANYTHING ON THE INTERNET THAT ISN'T SCREAMING AT OTHER PEOPLE OR POST MEMES OR WATCH SHITTY VIDEOS. THE MOMENT ANYONE AT INDIRECT COMPANY LOGS IN AND SEES ANY INFO THAT IS DIFFERENT FROM THEIR COWORKER THEY'LL SHIT THEMSELVES, FLOOD EVERYONE WITH 'OH GAWD SOME NON SPECIFIED THING IS WRONG' AND RESPOND TO EMAILS LIKE A JELLYFISH DROPPED OFF IN NEW MEXICO... AND NOTHING WILL GET DONE!!!

God damn it people.

Also side rant while I'm busy fighting the good fight to keep shit simple and etc:

People bitch about how horrible the modern web is and then bitch at web devs like we're rulers of the internet or something.... What really pisses me off about that is other devs who do that.... like bro, do you make policy at your company? You decide not to sell some info or whatever shit your company sells? Like fuck off with your 'man I miss html' because you got scared by some shitty JS error and ran back to your language of choice and just poked your head out of the the basement and got scared... and you shit on another developer about that? Fuck you.

Here comes lots of random pieces of advice...

Ain't no shortcuts.

Be prepared, becoming a good programmer (there are lots of shitty programmers, not so many good ones) takes lots of pain, frustration, and failure. It's going to suck for awhile. There will be false starts. At some point you will question whether you are cut out for it or not. Embrace the struggle -- if you aren't failing, you aren't learning.

Remember that in 2021 being a programmer is just as much (maybe even moreso) about picking up new things on the fly as it is about your crystalized knowledge. I don't want someone who has all the core features of some language memorized, I want someone who can learn new things quickly. Everything is open book all the time. I have to look up pretty basic stuff all the time, it's just that it takes me like twelve seconds to look it up and digest it.

Build, build, build, build, build. At least while you are learning, you should always be working on a project. Don't worry about how big the project is, small is fine.

Remember that programming is a tool, not the end goal in and of itself. Nobody gives a shit how good a carpenter is at using some specialized saw, they care about what the carpenter can build with that specialized saw.

Plan your build. This is a VERY important part of the process that newer devs/programmers like to skip. You are always free to change the plan, but you should have a plan going on. Don't store your plan in your head. If you plan exists only in your head you are doing it wrong. Write that shit down! If you create a solid development process, the cognitive overhead for any project goes way down.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others, especially to the experts you are learning from. They are good because they have done the thing that you are struggling with at least a thousand times.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself today to yourself yesterday. This will make it seem like you haven't learned anything and aren't on the move. Compare yourself to yourself last week, last month, last year.

Have experienced programmers review your code. Don't be afraid to ask, most of us really really enjoy this (if it makes you feel any better about the "inconvenience", it will take a mid-level waaaaay less time to review your code that it took for you to write it, and a senior dev even less time than that). You will hate it, it will suck having someone seem like they are just ripping your code apart, but it will make you so much better so much faster than just relying on your own internal knowledge.

When you start to be able to put the pieces together, stay humble. I've seen countless devs with a year of experience start to get a big head and talk like they know shit. Don't keep your mouth closed, but as a newer dev if you are talking noise instead of asking questions there is no way I will think you are ready to have the Jr./Associate/Whatever removed from your title.

Don't ever. Ever. Ever. Criticize someone else's preferred tools. Tooling is so far down the list of what makes a good programmer. This is another thing newer devs have a tendency to do, thinking that their tool chain is the only way to do it. Definitely recommend to people alternatives to check out. A senior dev using Notepad++, a terminal window, and a compiler from 1977 is probably better than you are with the newest shiniest IDE.

Don't be a dick about terminology/vocabulary. Different words mean different things to different people in different organizations. If what you call GNU/Linux somebody else just calls Linux, let it go man! You understand what they mean, and if you don't it's your job to figure out what they mean, not tell them the right way to say it.

One analogy I like to make is that becoming a programmer is a lot like becoming a chef. You don't become a chef by following recipes (i.e. just following tutorials and walk-throughs). You become a chef by learning about different ingredients, learning about different cooking techniques, learning about different styles of cuisine, and (this is the important part), learning how to put together ingredients, techniques, and cuisines in ways that no one has ever showed you about before.

A dev life in Queen songs:

„A Kind of Magic“ - Build successful
„A Winter’s Tale“ - Key Account Manager visits customer
„Action This Day“ - Release day
„All Dead, All Dead“ - System down
„Another One Bites the Dust“ - kill -9 4711
„Breakthru“ - 10 hour debuging session
„Chinese Torture“ - Microsft Office
„Coming Soon“ - Client asks for delivery date
„Dead on Time“ - shutdown -t 10
„Doing All Right“ - How's the progress on the new feature?
„Don’t Lose Your Head“ - git push -f
„Don’t Stop Me Now“ - In the zone
„Escape from the Swamp“ - Hand in resignation letter
„Forever“ - while(1)
„Friends Will Be Friends“ - friend class Vector;
„Get Down, Make Love“ - No rule to make target "Love"
„Hammer to Fall“ - Release day
„Hang on in There“ - 2 weeks until release
„I Can’t Live With You“- Microsoft
„I Go Crazy“ - Microsoft
„I Want It All“ - Google
„I Want to Break Free“ - free( (void*) 0xDEADBEEF );
„I’m Going Slightly Mad“ - Impossible feature requested
„If You Can’t Beat Them“ - Impossible feature promised by sales
„In Only Seven Days“ - Impossible feature ordered
„Is This the World We Created...?“ - Philosphic moments
„It’s a Beautiful Day“ - Weekend
„It’s a Hard Life“ - Weekday
„It’s Late“ - Deadline was last week
„Jesus“ - WTF?
„Keep Passing the Open Windows“ - Interprocess communication
„Keep Yourself Alive“ - Daily struggle
„Leaving Home Ain’t Easy“ - Time to get up and go to work
„Let Me Entertain You“ - Sales meets customer
„Liar“ - Sales
„Long Away“ - Project start
„Loser in the End“ - Dev
„Lost Opportunity“ - Job ad
„Love of My Life“ - emacs/vim
„Machines“ - Computer
„Made in Heaven“ - git
„Misfire“ - Unhandled exception at Memory location 0xDEADBEEF
„My Life Has Been Saved“ - Google drive/Facebook
„New York, New York“ - Meeting at customer
„No-One But You“ - Bus factor = 1
„Now I’m Here“ - Morning rush hour
„One Vision“ - Management goals
„Pain Is So Close to Pleasure“ - NullPointerExcption
„Party“ - Delivery completed
„Play the Game“ - Customer meeting inhous -
„Put Out the Fire“ - Support hotline
„Radio Ga Ga“ - GSM/GPRS/UMTS/LTE/5G
„Ride the Wild Wind“ - Arch Linux
„Rock It“ - Linux
„Save Me“ - CTRL-S/CTRL-Z
„See What a Fool I’ve Been“ - git blame
„Sheer Heart Attack“ - rm -rf /
„Staying Power“- UPS
„Stealin’“ - Stack Overflow
„The Miracle“ - It works
„The Night Comes Down“ - It doesn't work
„The Show Must Go On“ - Project cancelled
„There Must Be More to Life Than This“ - Philosophic moments
„These Are the Days of Our Lives“ - Daily routine
„Under Pressure“ - 1 day until release
„Was It All Worth It“ - Controlling
„We Are the Champions“ - Release finished
„We Will Rock You“ - Sales at customer
„Who Needs You“ - HR
„You Don’t Fool Me“ - Debugging session
„You Take My Breath Away“ - rm -rf /
„You’re My Best Friend“ - emacs/vim

Worst collab was in bootcamp. Group projects always suck because there’s always someone not pulling their weight. In my case it felt like everyone was terrible. My only regret was not putting a specific person on my “don’t want to collab” list when groups were being assigned. That probably would have saved me from so much stress.

One person in my group didn’t know how to start up the project…two weeks into us working on it. She even had the privilege of having an outside mentor. Mentor didn’t know how to work the project either—but let’s be real, that’s not the mentor’s responsibility. She forgot she needed to run npm install. We were six months into this bootcamp and she forgot one of the simplest commands.

Another person was just a follower and couldn’t think for himself. He was so faithful to another teammate’s choices and direction that I wondered if they were screwing each other. Other teammate could be absolutely (and destructively) wrong and he would defend her as “well she’s taking initiative and showing leadership.” It wasn’t leadership, it was bullying. They weren’t dating/screwing, but I did suspect he liked to be controlled/dominated by “strong”women.

The “strong” woman teammate is someone I suspect of being the spawn of Satan. You were only useful to her if you agreed with her or could help her. If you gave her any sort of pushback, she’d turn on you. I think she wanted me to be both her parent and her scapegoat for the sketchy things she wanted to do. She pulled a lot of bullshit and tried to blame everything on me. Seriously, she would invest a lot of time in stupid things like getting me to agree to use bitmoji for team pics; I just wanted to check with the bootcamp first because they might have an unwritten rule about using your real face for presentations so guests know who you are. I had to get the bootcamp staff to support me because she was out of control. She tried to say that I was sabotaging the group from day one. The staff explained to her how her story of me “sabotaging” the group doesn’t add up. She backed down a little but she’d still try to screw me over through the remainder of the project.

There was one dude who was alright. He was the keep your head down type. Spawn of Satan would be on his ass about being late to class and he’d just stare at her stoically. He was a husband and a dad so he was choosing how to expend his energy. I don’t like people being late either, but show some compassion and don’t snap at people.

If I saw these people again, I would not even pretend to be friends with most of them. Spawn of Satan especially: I’d take out my crucifix and send her back to hell.

Meetings.. Was I not listening? Blame it on the ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).

Maybe society has AEHD (Attention Expected Hyper-Delusion).

Seriously, who can pay attention to someone speaking AT you.

We have amazing magical devices one can enchant to do their bidding; Contemplating the details of such, often, is more enjoyable than what your rambling on about, talking head.

Not sorry, ;).

Also THANK YOU, you amazing MIT's (Manager of Information Technologies). A lot of you understand and even may use your underling employee's as a vented heat sync for your frustrations. I love what you do and thank the universe I don't have to engage myself in those activities. I have sympathy for the decision to give up your jeans and t-shirts for business attire; keep strong, your role is vital. <3

The insomnia is going to have to give me a break. Work in 3 hrs, time for a nap; and no, I don't take ADD medication (Amphetamine). I don't need a prescription; I can procure my own drugs, thank you.

Nor would I do them to get through work, that's drug abuse.

This is not about devRant… but it might as well be.

Imagine public forum. Everyone can read and post, everyone can comment. And there's no way to send a private message.

You use said forum for years. Whether you like it or not, you form alliances, friendships, frenemieships and engage all kinds of social contracts. There's no ro(ot)ster either, so you keep all that in your head, until one day you need a social contract formalized — exchange contact info. With Steven.

You can't just “@Steven text me, here's my phone”, that's borderline suicidal. You yearn a safe haven. A proxy that'd allow privacy. So you quickly spin up a service, let's say Discord (it wasn't Discord, but close enough), post a link, and within seconds Steven joins… He and seven other Stevens.

So you send each a unique sentence, a 2fa token so to speak, and ask them to post it on said devRant-like forum — they can delete it later after all. And a few minutes later there's eleven Stevens posting garbage faster than mods can delete, because whitespace power. But you bravely sift through that shit until the correct Steven rants “I'm blue, da-ba-dee da-ba-da”, and finally you know which Discord Steven is blue, so you can privately chat about colours.

And then Steven's 75 years old, well-reputed account gets banned on devRant for posting along other spamming Stevens. And you can't even PM administration, because devRant is a public forum without PM-ing indeed.

I gave a rant yesterday about this. But I have to say it again because it's so gratifying. It went like this

Me: "you should patch the module instead of using it for your python unit test."

Them: "You keep telling me this, but maybe there is a better way"

Me: "there is, I'm telling it to you"

Next day, Code review.
Me: "You need to change this"

... silent on the issue ...

On a call...
Me: "You need to patch the module. Don't mess up the namespace."

Them: "I don't think so, X did the work"

(In my head: then what did you do)

Me: "We can grab whoever you like Y, X. Let's see if X is busy"

... X isnt busy, hops on call 45 seconds later.

Me: "we're using the module, we should patch this'

X: Muses the thought for 2-3 seconds.

X: "yeah... Yeah we probably should patch that"

Moral of the story, don't take shit personally unless your right... Then relish in. But if your right and X says otherwise, you can always + a rant.

The datepicker saga

Part one

So I begin work on a page where user add their details, project is late, taking ages on this page

Nearly done, just need a component to allow users to put in some date of births. Look for react components.

Avoiding that one because fuck Bootstrap.

Ah-ha, that looks good, let's give it a go.

CSS doesn't exist, oh need copy it over from npm dist. Great it applied but...

... WTF it's tiny. Thought it was a problem with my zoom. Nope found the issue in github.com and it's something to do with using REM rather than EM or something, okay someone provided a solution, rather I saw a couple of solutions, after some hacking around I got it working and pasted it in the right location and yes, it's a reasonable size now.

Only it's a bit crap because it only allows scrolling 1 month at a time. No good. Hunting through the docs reveals several options to add year and month drop downs and allow them to be scrolled. Still a bit shit as it only shows certain years, figure I'd set the start date position somewhere at the average.

Wait. The up button on the scroll doesn't even show, it's just a blank 5px button. Mouse scroll doesn't work

Fucking...

... Bailing on that.

Part 2

Okay sod it I'll just make my own three drop down select boxes, day, month and year. Easy.

At this point I take full responsibility and cannot blame any third party. And kids, take this as a lesson to plan out your code fully and make no assumptions on the simplicity of the problem.

For some reason (of which I regretted much) I decided to abstract things so much I made an array of three objects for each drop down. Containing the information to pretty much abstract away the field it was dealing with. This sort of meta programming really screwed with my head, I have lines like the following:

[...].map(optionGroup =>
optionGroup.options[
parseInt(
newState[optionGroup.momentId]
, 10)
]
)...

But I was in too deep and had to weave my way through this kind of abstract process like an intrepid explorer chopping through a rain forest with a butter knife.

So I am using React and Redux, decided it was overkill to use Redux to control each field. Only trouble is of course when the user clicks one of the fields, it doesn't make sense in redux to have one of the three fields selected. And I wanted to show the field title as the first option. So I went against good practice and used state to keep track of the fields before they are handed off to the parent/redux. What a nightmare that was.

Possibly the most challenging part was matching my indices with moment.js to get the UI working right, it was such a meta mess when it just shouldn't have taken so stupidly long.

But, I begin to see the light at the end of this tunnel, it's slowly coming together. And when it all clicks into place I sit back and actually quite enjoy my abysmal attempt at clean and easy to read code.

Part 3

Ran the generated timestamp through a converter and I get the day before, oh yeah that's great

Seems like it's dependant on the timezone??!

Nope. Deploying. Bye. I no longer care if daylight savings makes you a day younger.

My first official post and we are almost there all.

I subscribe to many copywriting newsletters. Here's an article that shows how it's like on "the other side", marketers struggle, too.

How Kevin's Massive Mistake
Completely Changed His Life

Kevin H. made a huge mistake.

The biggest, he would say, if he could tell you himself.

And he knew it immediately.

It was, he said, "instant regret."

Within milliseconds, he was asking himself "What have I done..."

Kevin, see, had just jumped the rail of the single most popular suicide spot in the world, the Golden Gate Bridge.

On average, the site gets another distraught jumper every two weeks. Kevin was one of them.

It wasn't like he hadn't tried to quiet the voices in his head. Therapy, drugs, hospitalization.

Time to die, those voices still said.

And yet, in the minutes his bus dropped him off at the bridge, he hesitated and paced with tears in his eyes.

"I told myself if just one person comes up to me and asks if I'm okay... if one person asks if they can help... I won't do it. I'll stop and tell them my whole story..."

But nobody did, so he jumped.

It was in those next milliseconds, he would later say, he knew it was the biggest mistake of his life.

He didn't want to die.

But now, he was sure, it was too late.

From its highest point, it's a 245-foot plummet into the icy bay waters below.

Out of the 1,700 people that have jumped from the bridge since it first opened in 1937, only 25 have survived.

Kevin, against all odds, would be one of them.

He slammed into the water like hitting concrete. Three of his vertebrae instantly shattered.

When he surfaced, he couldn't hold his own head above water. But, incredibly, a sea lion kept pushing him up.

The Coast Guard soon arrived and pulled him out.

From there, he began a long recovery that required intense surgery, physical therapy, and psychiatric care.

While still under treatment, a priest urged him to give a talk to a bunch of seventh and eighth graders.

Afterward, they sent him a pile of letters, both encouraging and full of their own pained thoughts.

He also met a woman.

Today, Kevin lives in Atlanta and he's been happily married for the last 12 years.

And he tours the country, sharing his story.

So why re-tell it here?

Obviously -- I hope -- you don't get lots of copywriters looking to snuff it after a flopped headline test.

Just the same...

We've talked a lot in this space about the things one needs to get by in this biz.

My friend and colleague Joe, over at the publishing powerhouse Agora Financial, likes to list requirements.

You need intense curiosity...

You need a killer work ethic...

And you must, MUST have... resilience.

Meaning, you must have or find the capacity to bounce back from failure and flops, even huge ones.

Now, again, Kevin's story is an extreme and in this context -- I hope -- a hyperbolic example of somebody giving up. In the worst way possible.

It is also, though, a metaphor.

See, I get a lot of notes from some of you guys... and at conferences, I get to talk to a lot of people...

And I often get the sense, from some folks, that they're feeling a little more overwhelmed than they let on.

Some are just starting out, and they've got a lot on the line. For some, it's everything. And some are desperate to make it work.

Because they have to, because their pride or livelihoods or a family business is at stake, because it's a dream.

And yet, they're overwhelmed by all the tips and secrets... or by piles of confusing research or ideas...

For others, even had some success, but they're burned out, feel antiquated, or feel like "imposters" that know less than they let on, in an industry that's evolving.

To all those folks... and to you... I can only say, I've been there. And frankly, go back there now and again.

Flops happen, failures happen. And you can and will -- even years and decades into doing this -- make the wrong choices, pick the wrong projects, or botch the right ones.

The legendary Gene Schwartz put it this way, according to a quote spotted recently in fellow writer Ben Settle's e-letter...

" A very good copywriter is going to fail. If the guy doesn't fail, he's no good. He's got to fail. It hurts. But it's the only way to get the home runs the next time."

Once more, nobody -- I hope -- is taking the trials of this profession hard enough to make Kevin's choice.

And believe me, I don't mean to make light of the latter. I just want to make sure we hit this anvil with a big hammer. To drive home the point that, whatever your struggle, be it with this biz or something bigger, that you don't want to give up. Press on.

As Churchill put it, "Success, is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm."

Or even more succinctly when he said, "If you're going through hell, keep going."

Because it's worth it.
.
John Forde

Yesterday I asked a question on stack overflow about what algorithm I should use in order to parse command line strings like in gnu getopt for example.. And I've got downvoted for no GOOD FUCKING REASON. On top of that, my question is on hold. WTF?! For some time now stack overflow is becoming more and more a community of fucking cunts, arse-holes and toxic people.

Title:
" What parser algorithm is best suited for command line parsing? [on hold] "

My question:
"I want to write my own command line library from scratch. What algorithm should I use in order to parse gnu style args like in getopt for example ? I mean what's the best way other than tokenizing and parse them in a naive way? Should I try to look at LR, LL algorithms or this is way too overkill?"

Their response:
"Your question sounds like "I want to do X. What's the best way to do it?". Too broad, you need to be more specific about what problem you're having. (And keep your question clean. No meta-stuff in there.)"

I mean, what more context-specific reason should I add you dense motherfucker!? I want an algorithm to parse your momma's cunt so hard 'till it blows the fuck up. This what you want? You fucking senseless piece of garbage. God, give me a car to run over their fucking internet cable and over their head, too.

Even while quite experienced, I do keep messing names up:
start_server
stop_server
And
server_start
server_stop

I do know that last example is better with autocomplete but my head thinks the other way. I find myself frequently renaming functions in the end.

What is your preference?

a lion in captivity forgets to hunt. a man loosing everyday forget about winning.

I am feeling so sad and worthless right now. Like, so worthless that if I am walking down the street tomorrow and if some car hits me and i die, i wouldn't mind.

I find it questionable about what I am living for? why am i selling myself in front of keyboard till 12 am every day to earn some bucks when all this money is being / will be used to give happiness to a bunch of people that don't give 2 shits about me.

why can't i get some love? why can't i get some respect? i feel like a disabled 5 year old boy trapped in an abled 25 year old body. I can feel my legs, but I don't have the permission to use them. its like i am tied by ropes. and this rope has been on me for so long, that i can feel my legs, but i can also feel that those are having cuts so deep that i won't be able to use them even once the rope is taken out.

being a single child, loneliness has always been my shadow at home. and The middle class poor income, fighting parents, sickness and lack of culture ensured that loneliness remained my friend in school, college and other areas too.

the only goal of becoming an ideal son has shadowed every other thing in life. I can't drink, i can't go outside after 10pm, I can't take a jobbin different city. I can't fucking have female friends or think about relatiion-shits with people. i can't drive the car that was bought by my salary money. the list goes on and on.. i think every Indian (girls more than boys ig) have gone through at least 1 such restrictions at some point of their life. but me? a GUY in his fucking 25 , is going through ALL OF THEM, from day 1.

Plus i haven't started to discuss the weird eccentricities that i have to deal with, which are not so common. we follow a special religion where they have lots of philosophy and additional rules ( like no onion garlic mushroom in foods, mediation + pray for 1 hour twice a day ,... etc)

But i didn't complain, until now. I got sadder and sadder with time, but I cooperated. Whome else to live for , if not for the folks who made you in their womb amd sack? yeah I will fucking stay celibate until you find some willing "cultured" girl from your "religion" and arrange a lifelong existence. yes, i will fucking keep paying the car emis and see it in the parking lot everyday , while traveling via a metro. yes i will stay in your house in front of you all the times and never learn to exist independently coz fuck maturity. yes i will be a static atm machine waiting to die as you please.

but i am still not your ideal son? I say one little thing, and you start shouting at me for being selfish? why is religious superstition and those crime storemies so much deep into your head that you folks are micro managing and criticising every single thing in my life?

why is there a need for repetitive arguments, fights and shouting before evry action? why can't we just be happy for once!

I am shattered looking for happiness. I can't live like this anymore. There are no more than 2 people in my life that i care about and if those 2 are always having an upside down , angered face the what is the point of waking up every day?

wish i could just leave them. But can they live without me? or even can i live without them? and no , not talking about emotionally. I am very strong at the emotional side and i can throw word daggers to even 10+ years of companionships and ruin them. this will be just another long term relationship that i will sour.

BUT I CAN'T LITERALLY LIVE WITHOUT THEM. i am a useless guy who don't have any social intelligence outside his computer screen. i don't know how to live alone, and exist, or what my goals will be. I never saw a future without thinking about securing their future first, and them being in my future at all times.

aagh fuck. another painful night to survive and exist until i rise again to live like a corpse coz i can't do anything about it

I'm building an Android app from ground up targeting to have functionalities added without much effort in succeeding phases.

What I'm pissed about mobile development at the moment though, is its lack of structured code base that is easy to follow. Unlike web where codes are modularized and well placed, in mobile, I kept going back and fort in different modules to see how they are used in all places in the project which made it tedious as time goes.

So I kept a notepad keep track of detailed flow. However, once I go back at the notes to place them on top of your head, the almost spaghetti-like structure just becomes very hard to track. For me it doesn't follow a pattern and that developers are free to do what ever they wish so as long as it can run in the device or emulator.

For instance, implementing concurrency as well as dependency management and a Clean architecture is such a pain. I hope i can relate to someone here.

If only there is a standardized way of structuring codes in android in Java or Kotlin (haven't tried this), there would be hope for me. So if anyone can provide a good, readable, reliable android project that I can start building my project on top of, your help will be greatly appreciated! Thanks for reading.

all this talk of australian crypto laws got me thinking. here's a hypothetical (this might get a little complicated):

for the sake of the security facade, the government decides to not ban encryption outright. BUT they decide that all crypto will use the same key. therefore you can not directly read encrypted things, but it's not really encrypted anymore is it?

part two: there's a concept called chicken sexing, named after people who determine the sex of baby chicks. male chicks are pretty useless and expensive to keep alive, so they are eaten. female chicks go on to lay eggs, so ideally, from a financial standpoint, you only raise hens to maturity. this is nearly impossible to discern early on so at first you're just straight up guessing. is this one female? sure? that one? no? really 50/50. BUT if you have a skilled chicken sexer looking over your shoulder, saying right or wrong, then eventually you get better. why? nobody knows. they can't explain it. nobody can. you just sort of "know" when it's female or not. some people can do 1000s of chicks/hr with success up to 98% but nobody can explain how to tell them apart.

part three. final part:

after years, even decades of using this encryption with only one key, I wonder if people (even if only people who are regularly exposed to crypto like NSA analysts or cryptographers) can ever learn to understand it. in the same way as above. you don't know exactly what it says. or how you know it. you didn't run an algorithm in your head or decrypt it. but somehow you get the gist.

28464e294af01d1845bcd21 roughly translates to "just bought a PS5! WOOT!" or even just pick out details. PS5. excited. bought.

but how do you know that? idk. just do.

oh what a creepy future it has become.

Why in the hell does everyone have to have a different fucking CMS and why do they all make it so goddamn difficult to put a simple javascript in the head?

it's 2016 fuckers, sometimes the end user hires a dev to do things and I can't do shit in your fucking site-builder. I want to add a tiny javascript specifically for fb pixel, but frankly this is how most analytics work and it shouldn't be a complicated task for someone to perform if you built a halfway functional fucking CMS.

One simple function is all it would take to let users put a little bit of js in the head, fuck you could even name it something scary to keep idiots away or hide it behind a developers options in the settings or something that would allow someone with the IQ of a dolphin or higher to install some goddamn tracking code on the fucking shitstorm of a site your "builder" came up with.

your SEO practices suck too, but that's a rant for another time

How do all you other devs deal with sleep? Because I am losing my fucking mind I work for myself so I don't go to work at 9am leave at 6pm.

I normally work until 6am and then sleep till 12 drink 3 strong coffee to start functioning again try and do something productive which at the moment involves catching up on the NBA playoffs and then starting work at 6pm.

Due to resent baby I thought shit my life is fucked I haven't left the house in 3 days I need structure routine I need to work 9am to 6pm become human again but I just can't FUCKING sleep it's now 1:30am and I'm trying to sleep.

I know what your thinking why are you on devRant but I've been trying to sleep for the past 3 hours but all I can think about is work code, refactoring, new languages, security, support shit that can wait but I can't get it out my head, keep thinking "ah your not tired you could work", and YES I have a list which get bigger every day wish I had a drug dealer or was still in contact with my old mates so I could get some Valium but it's hot milk and sleeping tablets for me, life is so much easier when you can just fuck of home at the end of the day and forget about work, not having your laptop next to you trying to trick you into opening it. How do other people who work for theirselves deal with the life work balance?

So I'm the only tester at my company, and I've had to adapt a lot of my skills to fit in with our in house expectations. So everything was fine when I focused on trying one component (manual and automation).

Slowly over time I've had more components to test with exact same resource of me.

Eventually my automatic breaks as I could no longer maintain that and all the other manual tests and all the other jobs I do ( light level internal it support, jira ticket rangerling, rollbar (error messages) basic investigation).

My boss keeps saying why is x,y,z not tested / missed while I can point to time periods where was focused on v instead so didn't get to others.

I keep wanting to just hit them with a keyboard until they realise 10± devs to one qa in our environment just isn't going to work.

I keep getting promised some dev time to help with qa so I can play catch up but never seems to arrive.

Don't get me wrong I'm not the best I used to be at testing(before joining I was proud of my abilities, maybe all stick and not enough carrot wears you down)

We keep taking on new work flows that make no sense (create a bug ticket, then a task ticket if bug take more than hour to do, then I'm stuck chasing developers to update their task ticket so I cam update the bug ticket (if its a bug then log sodding log time against it).

I've gotten to point now where I'm stopping my suggestions, explaining why something didn't get dome and will see if they can answer their own stupid questions

At what point do you stop ignoring the voices in your head (metaphorically).

Do other people go through this cycle where feel like pushing a boulder up the hill, for them to either push your boulder down the hill, replace it with a bigger boulder, move to a bigger hill, get you to move more rocks at once or all the above.

I know QA has its quite and busy phases but for me it seems to be constantly busy with no respite