About 10 years ago my wife and I were buying a house. We found out late that we needed a lot more cash than we had previously thought we needed, and the deadline to deliver it was just a few days away. After returning home from my full-time gig at about 6pm, I took a break for a bit and then worked all night on a job for a client to make up the extra money. When 7am rolled around I had just finished up. Then I went back to work at my full-time job, and later met with the client to present my work. It was roughly 27 hours at a keyboard for me. That effort made it possible for us to successfully buy our first home. If you want something badly enough, make it happen!

We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.

When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.

A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.

I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.

When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.

I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.

After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).

OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.

I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.

Computers helped me through a tough childhood.

They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.

I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...

But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.

!dev

It was late night after work I went into Macdonald's take-away:

Me: Can I have a Maharaja Mac Medium Meal with extra regular fries?

Guy: Yes sir, that will XX.XX amt.

Me: Gives him my card.

Guys: So what's the pin?

Me: What??

Guys: The Pin sir.

Me: Are you ok? Who the hell shares a pin with you?

Guy: Sir, we don't have a wireless swipe machine.

Me: So why is it a take-away if I have to come inside and drop my pin anyways?

*Guy looks awkwardly at other employees. :/

I had to finally get out of the vehicle and I took another 15 mins seperately explaining him why cards have a security pin and that the word security isn't a joke before the pin. With this, I might have also slipped in some GDPR cookie policy along with it. and why Microsoft bought GitHub. Good Lad. He will learn.

Came home late last night and told my wife I'm skipping dinner to take a 1hr nap as it's going to be a long night of bug fixing and testing. Woke up, my wife and 1yr old son are already asleep. Saw the pic below posted on the wall above my work area at home. She's a teacher, she's never heard me mention it, and I don't use this method (I prefer music on my headphones). But she does know I lurk devrant so she must've browsed here while I was napping. Feels good. Code fixed, checked-in, unit tested and released for user testing.

My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server

I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.

It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.

One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.

Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.

Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.

Then, next week, it happened again.

My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.

(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).

Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.

I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."

My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.

Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.

Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.

My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.

This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...

So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.

So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.

The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.

One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.

The cleaning staff came in.

Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.

Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.

We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.

You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.

After months and months of unrealistic deadlines, pulling late night shifts coupled with an insane commute and two very small children at home I had a total burnout. Turned up to work one morning, and stared at the Java code I had been writing for the past couple of days and it might as well have been written in Martian. The more I stared, and the more I tried to keep things together internally the less I was able to make sense of anything - just a random jumble of characters on screen that were as intelligible as the green scrolling lines from The Matrix.

My office manager saw that I was obviously in some distress and took me into a meeting room to have a quick chat - and there I was, a grown man of 35 bawling my eyes out like a two year old. Not the most edifying moment of my life.

However, the company couldn't have been more supportive afterwards; one of my colleagues drove the 100 miles to get me home in my car and took a train back up to the office; my GP signed me off work for six months and treated me for severe depression; the office instituted stricter working policies - not on the developers, but the sales/PM teams that were handing down ridiculous timescales simply so they could get a sale.

For my part, I've learnt to push back and say "NO!" - work is not your life, it's an important part of your life, but my no means everything. Don't feel beholden to a company to meet unrealistic targets that you haven't agreed to. Talk.

OH MY GOD

WHO NAMES A CONFERENCE ROOM AFTER AN -ADDRESS-??

At my new job, we had all day training on Friday. It was emphasized many times that we should not be late. I look at the meeting invite many times, and it says [123 Fake], with Fake being a Very Well Known Street, and I see on Google Maps that there's an office building there. Great, we must have an off-site training facility to help our clients become certified in our product. It doesn't say which floor, but I assume the small space we have in that large office building will become evident once I check in with lobby security.

Friday morning comes, I get to the office building 20 minutes early, and try to check in. They've never heard of my company. Maybe there's a computer lab we rent out? No, they don't know anything about that. I don't have work email or slack set up on my phone yet, so who do I call? I try reception, no one answers. Eventually I call our customer support line.

I shouldn't be at 123 Fake St. I should be at the office. Because that's the name of the conference room!

YOU HAD ONE JOB, ROOM NAMER!

Last night my boyfriend and I tried to think of worse names for conference rooms. The only ones I could think of were "meeting canceled" (but with that, at least I would be in the correct fucking building!) or just naming every conference room "conference room". Here's the thing: there's not just one 123 Fake St room! There's two of them right next to each other! So you can easily show up and think, I remember I was supposed to be in this room, but which one?

And I'm not even the first person to make this mistake. CLIENTS have gone to the wrong building before because they get included on meeting invitations that include conference room names! WTF!

It's pretty common to have Chicago conference rooms named after neighborhoods, or iconic buildings, etc. But nobody is going to think, "meeting in Bucktown? I'll just wander around the neighborhood until I find people with laptops". It's obviously a conference room. BUT A FUCKING ADDRESS OF A NEARBY OFFICE BUILDING? It's not even an iconic of a building!

Names matter. I care a lot about names in code. I never realized it could apply to the physical world as well. So now I am on a mission to change the names of these Goddamm conference rooms so I'm the last person to be directed to the wrong fucking building.

OH, and I'm out $9 for a taxi ride and a pair of gloves that got lost in the taxi so that's GREAT.

I've resigned 3 weeks ago. I have also completed my handover process.

Yesterday I was told that I have to work in the weekend and at night because project delivery date is the following week.

Kindly I responded that I have resigned and working on weekends and late nights won't benefit me in anyway now actually I wasn't benefiting from working on weekends and late nights even before my resignation.

Project manager is pissed off at me.

Oh well, it is what it is 🤷

It’s been a mother fucking Monday... Couldn’t sleep last night and by the time I did fall asleep it was already 4 A.M.

Then this morning, my fucking car locked me out. When I bought the car, it didn’t come with a spare key or a manual key. I finally was able to unlock the fucking thing and boom, won’t start because “they key isn’t in the vehicle.” Replaced the battery and still the same shit... FUCK!!!!

Walked to work in -12 degree windy ass weather.

Lost my cash somewhere between here and there. Haven’t ate lunch..

An hour late to work.

Get to work, boom server down for our Xray images and we’ve got two patients needing CT scans before we fly them out.... Get another back up computer going and low and behold 168 fucking windows updates!

Fuck today, I’m so far done with this bullshit.... oh and it’s starting to fucking snow.

Spelling and punctuation, I don’t give a rats ass if it’s not correct at this point. If someone would like to come and knock me out, that’d be great.

Saturday late night wisdom.

Software developers you need to work on communication skills.
Everytime LinkedIn says need a problem solver. It means a guy who can understand what non technical guy is asking for and translate that to a software or at least come up with a example of why he is wrong. Explain them. They are not dumb fellows for asking that feature. You might think the feature is stupid. Don't assume this. Sit with them. Understand thier user flow, understand the frustration your software is causing them. Then you'll see why are asking for that X feature.

Every feature request made is basically my opportunity of understanding of product. Don't wait for users to tell you requirements. Understand and suggest, implement prototypes and show them, a causal question such as "Hey would you think providing a keyboard shortcut for this submission is great?"

Understand our job is not just to write software.

Our job is to solve thier problems using software knowledge.

Don't you agree ?

Late night programming with pops.

This man has taught me most of what I know and I have a terrific amount of respect and debt for him, and his work.

Here's to a lot more years cranking that genius brain of his! 🥂

2 years into polytechnic I got my 1st big project as a subcontractor doing Symbian. No need to tell the company I presume.

Anyways, I was brought into the project just couple weeks before holiday season started. My Symbian programming experience was just the basics from school. 1st day I was crapping my pants out of anxiety. I pretty much didn't understand anything what my project manager or teammates were telling, so I just wrote EVERYTHING down on paper and recorded all the meetings to my laptop.

My job was to implement a very big end to end SDK feature. Basically from API through Symbian OS through HAL to other OS and into its subsystem. Nice job for a beginner :/

As the holidays were starting we had just drafted out the specification (I don't know how, because I didn't understand much of what was going on) and I got a clear mission from team lead. Make a working prototype of the feature during the time everybody else was on vacation.

"No problemos, I can do it" I BS'd myself and the team lead.

First 2 weeks I just read documentation, my notes and internal coding tutorials over and over again. I produced maybe couple of lines of usable code. I stayed at the office as late as I dared without seeming to obvious that I had no clue what I was doing. After the two weeks of staying late and seeing nightmares every night I had a sudden heureka moment. Code that I was reading started to make sense. Okay, still 2 weeks more until my teammates come back.

Next 2 weeks were furious coding and I got better every day. I even had time to refactor some of my earlier code so that quality was consistent.

Soooo, holidays are over and my team leader and collagues are very interested with my progress. "You did very well. Much better than expected. Prototype is working with main use case implemeted. You must have quite high competence to do this so well..."

"Well...I did have to refactor some stuff, so not 10/10"

I didn't say a word of my super late nights, anxiety and total n00biness.

Pretty much finished "like a boss". After that I was on the managers wanted list and they called me to ask if I had the time work on their projects.

Fake it, crap your pants, eat your crap and turn into diamonds and then you make it.

PS. After Symbian normal C++ and almost any other language has been a breeze to learn.

!rant

So I have been recently hired at my current job for leading a product team. We're a small team working in a big company which have other teams working on other projects. I like my work and I have been appreciated for my work which I did since my stay here.
So I and my manager were discussing about how more can we automate our workflow to reduce the time to get the final builds. It was late in night. Suddenly someone asked, 'did I hear automation?'. We turned to see our CTO listening to our conversation. He told us that he's having trouble with automation in his project. I was new, so I didn't know what did he work on, so I asked.
Me: So what did you guys work on?
CTO: well, we work on automating stuff for clients and save them money. We earn 100x revenue than your product (In a more humble tone). I am currently looking for someone who can lead a team of developers for handling the automation scripting part. *Provides description of the candidate* Do you guys know someone like that?
Manager: (pointing towards me) It looks like his description.
CTO: I want him in my team then.
Manager: That can't happen, he's required in very important stuff and you're not allowed to poach.
CTO: I think I have the right to poach 😉
Me: OK, so how much raise am I going to get to switch teams (to the manager) and how much am I going to get to stay? Whoever gives me more I am theirs.
CTO: I like this guy

It's day three, I am still awaiting for one of them to tell me who won 🙁

PS: They both are friends with each other.

Overheard 2 colleagues having an interesting telephonic meeting late night at my room.
Dev 1: Wait. I am trying to fix it.
Dev 2: Ok. Take your time
Dev 1: Shit. I found it. I knew I was doing something wrong here.
Dev 2: Oh. Nice. What was the bug?
Dev 1: It was a super silly mistake. Don't want to tell. Folks will laugh at me.
Dev 2: Don't worry. It happens with everyone. Come tomorrow at office, and whisper it in my ears. Noone will know.

So some ass**** stole the battery of my scooter over night and I got too late to work and missed an important meeting. Nice. Thanks for nothing?

Summary: Burnout, and everything's broken.

I don't feel like doing a damn thing today. I look at the code and cringe. I look at Slack and think "ugh. i can't." Mental capitals are even too much work.

(I've started reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" to try and combat burnout. I'll write a rant/story about it here if I find it helpful. but all I want to do today is drink tea and read.)

But onto the story:

Heroku is deprecating support for and will automatically upgrade any old verisons of Postgres running on its platform after August something (like five days from now).

I performed the upgrade to PG10 on Sunday (and late into the night), provisioning a new follower, blah blah blah.

However, the version of Rails we're using (4.2.x) doesn't support PG10 sequences, so I manually added in support via a monkeypatch. I did this on our QA servers first, obviously, and everything worked as expected. After half a day of no issues, I did the same on production, and again: everything worked as expected.

But today? I keep hearing about new things that are broken. One specific type of alert doesn't work for one specific person (wat). Can't send [redacted] at all. Can't update merchants! Yet there are magically no errors logged.

That last one (well, two) are just great; let me explain: when there's an error concerning merchants, the error gets caught, isn't logged or recorded anywhere so it just disappears, and the rescue block triggers a json response instead and happily exits. This is for an internal admin tool, so returning a user-friendly error is kinda stupid anyway, but masking what actually happened? fuck that dev with an obelisk made from spikes and solidified pain. That json response is also lovely: it's a 200 OK returning {status: 1, data: "[generic message containing incorrect IT jargon]"}. Doesn't even say "error" anywhere. Bloody everything about this pattern is absolutely wrong. Even the friggin' text.

Fucking hell. I want to pipe the entire codebase into shred and walk out the door.

But I digress. So many things are broken, my motivation is wanning to a sliver, and I have a conference call today where I'll undoubtedly be asked why everything is on smoking and/or on fire, and my huge and overly productive week last week will ofc mean nothing by contrast.

Ugh.

`shred ~/dev/work -zfu -n 32 &; ./brew tea --hot && wine ~/takeabreak.exe`

OK.
1. So i tindered.
2. I got a really nice girl.
3. We chatted really long and good.
4. We tried to meetup it did not work because of our schedule. New
job on my end, she is a student.
5. I thought its over. Fine whatever.
6. She gives me her number.
7. We continue chat on whatsapp
8. Blablabla 3 days long, she gets bored and tries to friendzone me
9. I revert the shit and state i wanna be serious and there wont be a
friendzone/nice guy comin from me.
10. She happy and continues to chat.
11. I get emtionally invested in her.
12. We exchange thoughts dreams and music.
13 We want to meetup at weekend. I cant. Got a family wedding all
weekend.
14. We want to meetup the second week.
I cant. Im off on a company trip. Again new job here.
15. So we say in the week after I get back.
15a. Before the weekend we need to deliver an rc and go all out to hold
the deadline.
15b. We deliver, but shit happens on the customer side. His fault but we
get the blame.
15c I go onto the company trip.
16. We chat and i send her pictures of the trip over the weekend so she
sees I care.
17. She seems fine. And happy.
18. I come back from the trip late night and need to work the next day
jetlag style.
19. I work jetlag style. And try to fix the shit from last week.
20. I come home really tired and looking forward to date day tomorrow.
21. I cant do anything. My home looks like shit and the bag still
unpacked. I just eat and fall asleep.
I feel bad bcs my home will turn her down instantly if we make it to my
place.
Need to hope that it does not come to this.
22. Date day comes. Today.
23. I wake up at 6 early to plan ahead to make sure my clothes are fine
and i arrive on time in the office to exit early.
24. I expect to check what goes on today in the city and give her the
location to meet and time.
25. I enter office and immeadetly get caught up in meeting planning, dev
questions and the meeting itself because the project is on edge.
26. We have a 5hours long meeting where people go on and on and on.
27. 3h later in the meeting:
my brain was fried and around 12 i go to lunch with some people.
28. Meanwhile the city is turning into a rainy mess of a shitty day. No
way I can have a nice walk with her like that. Bars and coffeshops are
just to boring.
29. So i eat to regain some sense and we go back to the office.
Meanwhile I am thinking all kinds of locations and stuff in my head.
30. Havent given her any update since a good morning in the morning.
31. We reenter the meeting. Things continue like before. The project is
on impossible demands and impossible timelines. Still we try to do our
best.
32 3h later on 3pm I tell her i am in a long meeting and working on a
meetingspot.
33. shes not happy.
34. I get a call from a relative
35. i need to go out and take the call. not good for the collegues.
again new job here.
36. family trouble,  money trouble, goverment demands. I promise to
handle that tomorrow. Before work.
37. i get back into the meeting.
38. still super slow and no results.
39. need to focus but start to check for locations on my phone.
40. she asks me where i am
41. I send her my location.
42. she thinks i am saying she should pick me up!
43 i joke and say no definitly not.
44. shes pissed.
45.  I decide for a coffeeshop. after work. and send her the location
46. She says to call it off.
47. I go all in and go romance style. I say ill wait there even if she
does not come to show her how much i care.
U know to avoid the lets do it some other time fuckery and then it never
happens.
47. She goes quiet.
48. 2h later we finish the meeting. Meanwhile QA foudn a bug we need to
fix because why not.
49. I got 30 minutes to find the bug and fix it before I need to go to
uphold my word.
50. I find out what to do, but it might break a lot of other things
without careful test and implementation. Collegues says he takes it.
51 I feel bad but I need to go. I even leave earlier because otherwise I
would not be on time.
52. I arrive 15 minutes early. I grab two coffee2go and wait outside,
53. Shitty weather, sometimes rain, sometimes sunny, cant decide what it
wants.
54. The weather is just like how I feel.
55. I wait 1 1/2h
56. I think I should feel stupid, For gods sake its tinder. People dont
give a crap, Enough people around why should I Invest so much into this?
But I dont feel stupid. Because this is how I want it. I dont want
appointments, I dont want safety. I decided for her and I went all in.
57. I send her pics from the sceneray as proof that I waited,
58. I think I blew it. She is still quiet.
59. Friends are asking me for plans for the weekend. I wish I could say
I already have some with her.
60. I feel lost right now. But my head says I put too much stress on
her, And i fucked up with the planning. I should have been more precise.
My head also says that i am putting myself into the victim role, which
is wrong always. Should I continue to reach out to her? Is there
something I could do still?

The last 5 months have been tough.... My boss ( who was a close friend) quit and I become interim department head... Trying to run a team who didn't seem happy I'd taken the reigns.

At the same time my wife's ongoing battle with her anxiety had gotten worse and she really needed my help with everything possible at home..

In March I was confirmed as the HoD but I was still doing 3 to 4 days a week on client delivery, trying to support all presales activities, manage a team of 10 people, travel for work and support my family....😩

It really got to me and I was close to breaking... The worry of not replying to an email ASAP no matter what time of day would eat me up, working late every night... It got too much and I was running on fumes with my weekends just me completely wiped out and useless to the family. 😓

.....But.....

I had a escape last weekend to a 🍻 beer 🍻 festival with friends that I was considering not going too and just losing the money but the wife made me go...

And it broke me even more... So much that its somehow put the pieces back in the right order in my brain and snapped me out of my major rut!

Somehow, sitting with friends, making stupid jokes, drinking way too much and blocking out all the work crap gave my brain the hard reset it needed. 🤟

This week I've come back a different person ( wife's words) work is a breeze, exciting and encouraging.... 👊

I can't get enough of playing silly games with my kids all night

And couldn't feel any more positive about things if I tried.... Set that spark back for my wife too! 😏💏

So.... After that long rant 👀

Tl;Dr - work and life got too much... Close to giving up... Too much beer with good company gave me a hard reset and I feel like a new person.... 👍

Plus the team is now loving the new direction and strategy too 👔

Who says drinking is bad for you? 😂🍻

Crappy day, entirely related to cars and trucks and other wheeled implements of doom and annoyance.

My car died this morning.
It has been slowly dying for weeks in a very unusual way (something electrical; we're not sure what), but today it finally gave up and just wouldn't start anymore.

We replaced the crap battery (it had been a crap freebie from my parents), which fixed the not-starting issue for now, but it still has lots of other problems. Fluid leaks, disintegrating paint, some lights suddenly or randomly not working, super long clutch distance, sporadic grinding sounds, shifter randomly not engaging, pieces literally falling off, bits of the interior breaking (like the driver's side door handle), the wiper sprayers bloody missing the windshield, etc., etc., etc. My poor, poor car. It was super cheap, and I've had it for a long time, so I'm not surprised, but. I love my car, so it makes me really sad. ☹

Anyway, we finally got the car starting again, and I drove to work about four hours late. I had worked super late the previous night (11:45pm), and had let my boss know already, so whatever.

As for the trip, I work ~40 minutes away, and with the poor quality of drivers here there's usually something dumb happening. Today... well. Today was one of the bad days.

Someone was in the fast lane doing 50mph. The usual speed of traffic is 80mph. They got annoyed whenever someone passed them. Minor, but worth including.

Later on, people slowed way down and gawked at... a port-a-potty. Seriously, a port-a-potty. It was on the shoulder where there had been some construction, so it's not surprising or anything. People seriously dropped from 80mph down to 20mph just to stare at this thing, and it wasn't even occupied or anything. It was just a port-a-potty! There was nothing else around! What could possibly be so interesting?!

There was also a random Penske (moving) truck doing 35mph on the freeway holding up traffic like 10 minutes later; no idea why. Traffic usually does ~70mph there. No blinkers or anything, it was just being slow and causing everyone to go around in a pretty traffic-heavy area.

The truck in front of me for ~40% of the trip kept waiting way too long to stop, and would then slam on the breaks. I almost hit him twice because of this, and I couldn't see around him, either. It was some giant pickup staying just in the wrong spot. I ended up driving partially in the shoulder so I could gauge when to stop by the car in front of him. He slammed on the breaks like twelve more times before he finally left. Jerk.

The same thing happened again like 85% of the way to work, but this time it was a different pickup, and there was a semi was behind me, which obviously couldn't stop very quickly. Fortunately for both of us, there was a gap in traffic to my right, so I slipped out of the way before getting squished. ><

Bloody hell.
Today has not been fun.

Nobody flipping me off or was doing their damnedest to prevent me from changing lanes today, though, so I suppose it could have been worse. Also I didn't die, so there's that.

The wife is asleep. The two year old wrecking ball of a boy is asleep. Wanted to finish a library to run kafka/grpc for nodejs microservices with plug and play functionality.

Make some tea. Figured the caffeine will keep me up. Maybe work late night. It'll be fun.

Then diarrhea hits. Now, staying up late because apparently I ate something I shouldn't have. Don't you hate it when that happens?

Installed Miami Street earlier today.. some random free Shaftgame.
Late at night now, I figured "let's try this out".

> Logging in...
*crashes*

*goes to the settings for this crap game*
> *crashes*

Fucking worthless piece of Microshit.. yet another data collection hook that REQUIRES your shit to log in just to fucking work? Fucking Shaftfuckers, 5GB of internet traffic I spent on this?! Just to see it be a worthless data-hungry paperweight?!! Luckily my residential connection is unmetered and has some decent speeds.. but still, FUCK YOU MICROSHAFT!!!

Coincidentally, keyboard input completely broke when I wanted to do a minor edit to the drafted rant. Microshit can't even design a decent keyboard driver anymore, huh.. I DIDN'T WANT TO HAVE TO REWRITE THIS SHIT FOR A SECOND TIME, FUCKING REDMOND MICROCUNTSUCKERS!!!!

Past few weeks, I have started to work late night and sleep whole day. I go to office at around 7pm and returns back next day 8-9am. I found it super productive.
But, my manager wasn't happy about it and now, she shifted daily scrum at 1 PM and emailed me to make sure I attend it daily.
Now, I have to fix my sleeping cycle... Nights are so great to work. Silent and nobody around.
Now, from tomorrow, I got a new challenge everyday to make it to scrum daily.

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

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

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

Summary^3: #TODO: learn telepathy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

!rant
Working late? Try installing an application like flux on your PC and save your eyes from pain.

Isn't it just nice to throw away hours of work because you were given wrong requirements?

I worked late last night to finish a project with an incoming deadline, and for what? That's right, for fucking nothing. Hours wasted. Just because I was told the form was to be submitted to an endpoint that I would receive later on.

Turns out that what I actually need to do is embed some form from a third-party service. So the form that I already implemented (with styles and logic) isn't needed. What's worst, I have to redo all the styles to match this embed form.

Thank you so much for that. 🖕Never again will I work late. I should have known better by now...

That awkward moment when you stay late night in the office to catch up some delayed work and suddenly remember that story you heard during lunch about the ghost that appears in the office at night

I think that office belongs to a programmer.

Today I experienced cruelty of C and mercy of Sublime and SublimeLinter.

So yesterday I was programming late at night for my uni homework in C. So I had this struct:

typedef struct {
int borrowed;
int user_id;
int book_id;
unsigned long long date;
} entry;

and I created an array of this entry like this:

entry *arr = (entry*) malloc (sizeof(arr) * n);

and my program compiled. But at the output, there was something strange...

There were some weird hexadecimal characters at the beginning but then there was normal output. So late at night, I thought that something is wrong with printf statement and I went googling... and after 2 hours I didn't found anything. In this 2 hours, I also tried to change scanf statement if maybe I was reading the wrong way. But nothing worked. But then I tried to type input in the console (before I was reading from a file and saving output in a file). And it outputted right answer!!! AT THAT POINT I WAS DONE!!! I SAID FUCK THIS SHIT I AM GOING TO SLEEP.

So this morning I continued to work on homework and tried on my other computer with other distro to see if there is the same problem. And it was..

So then I noticed that my sublime lint has some interesting warning in this line
entry *arr = (entry*) malloc (sizeof(arr) * n);
Before I thought that is just some random indentation or something but then I saw a message: Size of pointer 'arr' is used instead of its data.

AND IT STRUCT ME LIKE LIGHTNING.

I just changed this line to this:
entry *arr = (entry*) malloc (sizeof(entry) * n);

And It all worked fine. At that moment I was so happy and so angry at myself.

Lesson learned for next time: Don't program late at night especially in C and check SublimeLInter messages.

On negotiation and signing contract
================================
manager: yes you will work 8 hours a day from Tatta hours to Tat tat ta hours.
dev: okay great, i accept it. So no overtime and everythings right?
manager: that we will consider.
dev: hmm okay
=========================

Start working for about 1 month
=========================
manager: John, you not showing up at the office today? What happened?
dev: Sir, I have to stay up all night finished the last task as required and just sleep around 6am in the morning.
manager: John, i need to tell you. your performance is very great. Our clients are happy.
You deliver all the task. We love you, John.
dev: Yes thank you so much. I am happy too, but i need to sleep now i been over time for the last 3 weeks.
Manager: don't worry john, you will get reward later.
===================================
Weeks later:
dev: i need to request for leave, i am over work and now i am sick, my eye got red and cannot look at the screen.
manager: what is happening this month, you been late to work and you not deliver the task, you are sick and this and that, and depressed and whatever... tata taata,
dev: sir, when i first started you said i could only have to work 8 hours a day, now I work more than 12 hours day. What's change?
================================
life as devs in tough companies, high expectation and shit.

What is it with these companies and mandatory updates?

Microsoft with windows 10. Sorry your doing work? Nah, we've decided your going to update now! Sorry, we based our default update time on people not working late at night.

Philips hue. Wanna turn on your lights? Sorry, mandatory firmware update. You'd better install that before being able to see.

YouTube app on ps4. No sorry, can't open this, mandatory 80mb update.

FUCK SAKE PEOPLE.

I was called back into work last night at 4 a.m.

(L)user - *anony* I’m sorry to wake you but I’m needing on the internet and I can’t get out.

**Just installed a new firewall and I haven’t had time to get a trusted cert pushed through**

Me - alright I’ll be there in a second.

After rolling my sweet ass out of bed and getting here, I get her through and leave. When I get back to my house I realize I’d forgot my fucking keys... I come back and the bitch has her computer shut down reading a book and isn’t even using the internet...

Me - I thought you needed on the internet, whys your computer shut down...?

Her - Oh, I don’t need it right now, I was just having trouble getting on is all.

FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCK! This is the SAME fucking (l)user that somehow managed to get the fucking toner stuck backwards in a printer. It’s the same girl that has called me in the past at late hours and requested that I move a chair from one patient room to the other. A fucking chair. I’m not in the maintenance department... so first, you’re calling the wrong department and second; the time it took you to call me you yourself could have fucking done it. She didn’t like the way that call ended.

Although partially my fault, if I would have finished everything I wouldn’t have had to get up but shit... this fuck still deserves a chair to the fucking face.

I'm going on vacation next week, and all I need to do before then is finish up my three tickets. Two of them are done save a code review comment that amounts to combining two migrations -- 30 seconds of work. The other amounts to some research, then including some new images and passing it off to QA.

I finish the migrations, and run the fast migration script -- should take 10 minutes. I come back half an hour later, and it's sitting there, frozen. Whatever; I'll kill it and start it again. Failure: database doesn't exist. whatever, `mysql` `create database misery;` rerun. Frozen. FINE. I'll do the proper, longer script. Recreate the db, run the script.... STILL GODDAMN FREEZING.

WHATEVER.

Research time.
I switch branches, follow the code, and look for any reference to the images, asset directory, anything. There are none. I analyze the data we're sending to the third party (Apple); no references there either, yet they appear on-device. I scour the code for references for hours; none except for one ref in google-specific code. I grep every file in the entire codebase for any reference (another half hour) and find only that one ref. I give up. It works, somehow, and the how doesn't matter. I can just replace the images and all should be well. If it isn't, it will be super obvious during QA.

So... I'll just bug product for the new images, add them, and push. No need to run specs if all that's changed is some assets. I ask the lead product goon, and .... Slack shits the bed. The outage lasts for two hours and change.

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to run db migrations. shit keeps hanging.

Slack eventually comes back, and ... Mr. Product is long gone. fine, it's late, and I can't blame him for leaving for the night. I'll just do it tomorrow.

I make a drink. and another.
hard horchata is amazing. Sheelin white chocolate is amazing. Rum and Kahlua and milk is kind of amazing too. I'm on an alcoholic milk kick; sue me.

I randomly decide to switch branches and start the migration script again, because why not? I'm not doing anything else anyway. and while I'm at it, I randomly Slack again.

Hey, Product dude messaged me. He's totally confused as to what i want, and says "All I created was {exact thing i fucking asked for}". sfjaskfj. He asks for the current images so he can "noodle" on it and ofc realize that they're the same fucking things, and that all he needs to provide is the new "hero" banner. Just like I asked him for. whatever. I comply and send him the archive. he's offline for the night, and won't have the images "compiled" until tomorrow anyway. Back to drinking.

But before then, what about that migration I started? I check on it. it's fucking frozen. Because of course it fucking is.

I HAD FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FUCKING WORK TODAY, AND I WOULD BE DONE FOR NEARLY THREE FUCKING WEEKS.

UGH!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's rant time!

So, as a broke electrical engineering student, I got this job in a local company. They used JSF and my skills in java were, at the very least, small (former PHP developer). But as a self taught developer this didn't stopped me and I went full on java learning (very bad year for my EE studies).

I became the 'guy in charge' for several of their projects (yeah, they did exploited broke students, I realized this far too late). I was very proud of myself, I worked hard, showed my true value, and they became impressed.

One nice thursday night, my "handler" emailed me with a urgent request. They needed an entire jsf application done by monday and the requirements were fairly complex.

Oh boy, I had a total of 10h of sleep from thursday to monday. I didn't even slept before going to my monday class, but I delivered the system. Got an pat in the back... "you're awesome"... I was happy.

6 months later: I received an email asking to fix a bug in the system. No problem with that. Oddly, this bug was a MAJOR bug. There's no way the system worked properly for six months with it. I fixed it in no time and commited the changes.

Turns out that this was the first time the system was going to be deployed. They made me go in an insane weekend dev project, and didn't even used the system for SIX MONTHS!!! I started to work my way out the company after this, aiming to open my own software company.

I still remember some other rants from the time I worked there. But these are for later.

Nice week for you all, may the sprint go gently and the clients be kind.

Prior to a tech conference in Las Vegas, the department manager held pre-meetings (yes, more than one)
with the developers to outline their expected behavior (yes, there was an outline in Word). Since
they would be representing the company, professionalism would be expected at all times, not just
during the conference. He knew he couldn’t forbid gambling and drinking, but any unruly behavior
that could reflect badly on the company would be dealt with severe disciplinary action up to and
including termination. He wrote up very detailed itinerary, what track each developer was
expected to attend, meal times (yes, what time to get up for breakfast, meet for lunch, and time
to eat at night). First day was fine, casinos are kinda crazy so having an itinerary wasn’t the
worst idea and no one got lost. Days following however, got interesting. After the first evening
meal, everyone hit the casino as expected (too much drinking, etc..normal single twenty-something
guys do) and the manager especially had a good time.
Next, and following days, the manager could not be found in any of the ‘required’ technical tracks.
Not that they cared that much, but couple of devs decided to check out the casino, and sure enough,
there he was at one of the tables, drunk, and being very loud around at 10 in the morning.
Again, nobody cared much, manager wasn’t very tech savy, and so attending a track on C #threading
would be lost on him. It was more of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ kind of thing.
The manager kept to the itinerary, he met everyone at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, etc, but the
‘WTF’s didn’t get good until the manager was bragging about how wonderful the conference was, how
much he was learning and couldn’t wait to get back and start implementing everything he was learning.
It was such a joke, the guys would bait him on tracks they know he didn’t attend and an amazing amount
of BS could not be believed.
On the last day of the conference several decided to follow him after breakfast to see where he went
and watched him go into a technical track, just to walk back out and straight to the casino floor.
Again, around 10, he was drunk, not quite as loud until he threw up in a trash can (they said it was quite a scene).
He left to go back his room, which they suspected he took a nap before meeting everyone for lunch.
After that, they gathered his daily itinerary was:
- Get up for breakfast
- walk around and make sure it looked like he was heading to a track
- head to the casino
- take a nap
- eat lunch
- walk around some more
- head to the casino
- take a nap
- eat dinner
- head to the casino
- wash-rinse-repeat
Last day caught up with him. After about week of drinking, staying up late, etc, his body (he’s in his mid 50’s, 350lbs+, so imagine)
kinda’ gave up. Could barely walk 50 feet without needing to sit down, and the flight back was worse for everyone,
throwing up occasionally, moaning, you get the idea.
On the following Monday with the VP if IT, everyone was discussing the conference, what they learned,
what they liked, etc, the manager also bragged, yes bragged, on how tired he was because of how much
he learned and the reason why he probably caught the flu (he couldn’t hide how sick he was on the flight)
saying “When you’re in the learning zone, you lose track of time and then you are so exhausted, your
immune system is susceptible to all kinds of things.” . VP was so impressed by his dedication and
fighting through the exhaustion for the good of the company, he gave him the rest of the day off.
Other devs? No, they had to go back to work.

Company: people are not taking holidays, let's have after work party midweek so they have to take a day off.

Employees: (next day after late night party) I'm calling in sick

Don't you just love it when you come in late and the commit you made last night and were certain was going to work, doesn't work and everybody is pissed because of it? And all because your shell won't run since the line ending of your sh file was somehow Windows instead of UNIX.

Fucking love it ^_^

Just got Caffiene/energy drink vapes and they work like a charm within like five minutes. Productivity 💯 sleep 0

I have to comment, how the fuck do you guys stay up so late and work for so long into the night? It doesn't matter how much caffeine is in my system, my productivity eventually just reaches absolute zero and I can't go on without sleep. And that's being awake for like, 18 hours. At most! I'm frankly kind of jealous.

But hey, if you are that type, just remember sleep is just as important as food and water. If you've been up more than a day, it's probably time for bed. Your brain will thank you. :) </psa>

I'll give you a few reasons to walk away from a dev's chair:

1. if you want your life to be simple and not challenging, if you just want to go with the flow - choose something else. Dev's life will definitely bring some challenges to your day (and sometimes night, and sometimes - your weekends). Especially if you feel you are a perfectionist, dev life could turn your life into a living hell if not handled with care.

2. If you like to see people smiling, if you love that feeling when you help someone and that someone has a better day thanks to you - choose something else. 1st line SD would probably do, but the further from technology you go - the more smiles (and human faces overall) you'll see.

3. If you prefer person-to-person interaction over to talking to machines - definitely don't be a dev. Go to management, administration or smth else, but development. >90% of the human interaction in this field is arguments and conflicts; ~8% are requests for assistance, and the remaining 2% are shared by saying "hi" to the office administrator and your (semi|)annual reviews with your manager. Not kidding.

4. If you have a personality where you find it difficult to stand your ground and not budge to the pressure/blame game/your managers asking you to stay in late. Like it or not, it happens quite often. Many devs have spoiled the management by budging to their requests/demands to stay for OT/unpaid OT to "fix the mess they have made". That's a blame game right there. And these people stay in and do what the slaves do - work for free because they are yelled at. And then management sees this technique work and (ab|)uses it on other devs. If you can say NO and stick to it, prolly wave with some printed paragraphs of labour law in front that manager's nose - it won't be a problem. But if your consciousness is too troubling - stay away from this field of engineering.

5. If you want to easily "disconnect" from work and go do something else - dev's career might be a problem. Yes, your computer might be shut down/hibernated/suspended after 5pm until 9m the next morning, but your brain will most likely keep trying to solve the problems you were facing. You'll prolly use your own computer to do some research, check some forums, docs, etc. - this is all your free time, this is all your family time donated to your manager (and to your personal knowledge base). Not to mention, all these things you learn will soon enough become obsolete, as new technologies will replace them. So if you'd like to easily "disconnect" after 5pm, doing that as a dev might be too challenging.

I'm trying really hard not to be sensitive, but my manager is making it difficult with their "constructive criticisms" ...

Just finished up a call with them. And I'm so tired. I'm not even angry or upset, I just feel so tired of their bullshit.

I set up a meeting as a courtesy to get them up to date on all the code changes I made. Last night I stayed up late to try and get things in before the deadline and this morning just killed me when they say.

"I don't think I should have given you this."

"I was right, you weren't ready to start doing this."
(Then don't even bother giving me anymore tasks then, I don't fucking care.)

"you clearly don't understand how branches work"
(Absolutely fucking false, I fixed that shit and am very familiar with how to understand the structure of the fucking repo)

"you are rushing and I don't need you messing up the website"
(I'm being proactive you twat, not rushing, making it very difficult for me to do the work and being productive)

Like seriously bro! Don't fucking patronize me for the work I was trying to get out. And trust me this fucking meeting is done in order to get ahead of potential issues, not a time to be condescending of my skills or lack there-of as you seem to so keenly think.

If you had this much doubt about my abilities then why give me the fucking Sr. title? Fucking trust that I'm being honest, and I'm trying to get us to a good spot, not fucking sabotage the company. God fucking damn.

So, depression, yeah?

Two good days of work in a row, and on the third, I sleep late and think during sleep and throughout the night, wake up tired and feel shitty and feel a crash-burn in my feelings. (or whatever you want to call it. Burnt out? Tired? Exhausted? Lonely?) So now I have the rest the optimizing sql bullshit project and a paper to finish, plus I need to work more on the thesis. And ofc, work itself.

Everything feels so gloomy.
I know it gets better, but feeling shit doesn't help either.
Anyways, I'm fishing for attention this time so gimme your good vibes! 🙂

Late night work... At least a whiskey is keeping my mind at rest!

Multiple all-nighters (all day every day):

1) Working, studying and developing an Android game as pet project. Last few weeks before release (yup, I've set a deadline for a pet project) my day consisted of uni, work, more work and 4-5h sleep.

2) Having worked on my thesis (Development of a CPU/SoC + Firmware + Linux kernel) and actual paid work. In parallel. Because, you know, I need to eat and pay rent and shit while I'm writing the thesis. And debts at that moment were not an option (still made some). All-day all-night all-week. After submitting the thesis I went to the doc and enjoyed 2 weeks of doing nothing.

3) Sometimes on my main open-source project after regular work hours. If I have the motivation and ideas that I want to check out or prove it gets late/early too fast.

I hate leaving work when in the middle of something, I tend to obsess over it all night lamenting that I didn't finish.

Today I was in a similar position but I needed input from our Finance directorate before I could finish. So I sent them an email which would mean that I'd done everything possible and could go home knowing there was nothing more I could do tonight as surely no one would be working this late.

However five minutes later they replied giving me the exact details I needed.

So yet again, I'm going home frustrated.

Why can't they be that useful the rest of the day?!

Anyone else have this, seems like you can do double the work in late night pm/am than in day am/pm..

And I'm starting my internship next week.. gotta be a morning person now :/

I got a feedback saying that I am good at solving problems which are obvious and have obvious steps. But I have to improve a lot where problems are complex or solution is not known.
People, I have 3.5 years of experience in industry and still I am a junior. I am continuously thinking about it. I was a smart person till my school, I never had to work hard I think it is impacting me till now. I sleep so late and work only in the night, get up so late and feel bad about it :( Everyone is doing so good as compared to me.

Time for late night coding, debugging, thinking..been busy since I woke up, work, college, exams, work..work while waiting for an exam..

Coffee - check
Cigarettes - check
Music to keep me motivated - check
Laptop still not lagging - check
Will probably want to sleep in couple of hours - check

Why do bosses have to be such absolute bellends?

I have depression and ptsd after my time in the Army, which I was open with my boss about when I started.

It is more or less under control, but over the last month or so I’ve been going through a bit of a bad patch, and had a telling off at work about being late and using my phone too much. I’ve been doing everything that has been asked of me, but I hold my hands up and admit that I shouldn’t be using my phone (I have trouble concentrating at the moment so have a tendency to switch between things a lot like Work, emails, phone, emails, work etc. While at home I’ll have the tv on my computer and my phone switching. Between the 3)

So after my telling off and I’d calmed down a bit I sent my boss an email apology, saying I was going through a rough patch but that it isn’t an excuse and I will try harder to stop it from affecting my work etc.

She comes back with an email about she’s done this for me and that for me but she needs to see some output and wants to own some issues and see them to completion.

Now, I admit my output has been down a bit but I’ve spent the last two weeks working on some custom software that’s full of spaghetti code so it also requires time for me to get my head around it to understand what’s going on, and the guy who wrote it and is the one who knows exactly what it is that needs to be done only works 3 days a week and is only in the office for two of those, so makes it a bit difficult.

Anyway, I assume that she for got I am the person running the project (I use running in its loosest possible terms) to migrate us from SourceSafe to GitLab and if she’d bothered to look she would have seen every single piece of work that I’d committed over the last 2/3 weeks.

Luckily for me I know have to re-write all of the work I did in the last 2/3 weeks in one night.

Also because I, quite correctly, got told off I know feel like an absolute cunt, I’m getting marri d in 3 weeks and now I seriously feel like saying fuck it all and leaving everything and moving away

Late night work

No table and monitor, and having to work ALL THE TIME. Our team structure changed recently, and a coworker with 2 years of experience is my lead. He wakes up at 11-12 in the morning, starts working by around 2, takes enough breaks and sleeps at like 5 AM. He assigns tasks late in the evening and night. Expects people to finish it staying up late, because if he can, why can't we. Most of the time, it's like, hey, just push a little and finish it tonight, we have other things to do tomorrow.
And team mates who can NOT work without help from other people and text and call you every hour.

Late night kaggle session, and I'm enjoying how cute and clean this dataset is!

I'm jealous if data scientists always get to work with such neat sets! Dude! I got .95 acc without any effort! This is so... Weird. 🤔

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.

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

Software Engineer
Nerdious Geekius

The elusive Software Engineer is a nocturnal creature, rarely found at their desks before 10 or 11 in the morning, but often staying late into the night. They dislike being interrupted while at work, and it theorized that their penchant for twilight hours is an evolutionary adaptation to reduce breaks in their trance like state of coding.

Not surprisingly, Software Engineers are solitary creatures, except for occasional gatherings called "code reviews". In these gatherings, engineers gently pace around a clearing, sizing up each others work. Although occasional battles will erupt, they mostly end without injury and the engineer will retreat to their desk and continue to hibernate.

Fun Fact: Software Engineers have been know to kill each other in brutal fights over identation styles

Stayed up extra late fixing a bug. Fucking bug is buried in a thousand lines of MOTHERFUCKING SML.
FUCKING ASSHOLE SHIT-WAGGLING COCKSMEAR AND THAT SHITTY, GODDAMNED BACKWARDS FUCKING LANGUAGE!
Fucking wasted an entire night chasing down a fucking bug in SML with no positive effect.
I wound up commenting out 7/8 of the entire fucking codebase to try to find the fucking bug. No positive effect.
Finally had to go to sleep because my son was about two hours from waking up.
Getting back to work, and within twenty minutes I found the fucking bug and fixed it.
Fucking wasted nearly an entire night's sleep, and I ended up fixing the fucking bug before finishing my morning coffee.
I seriously fucking hate motherfucking SML.

I hate leaving work late, stuck on a bug and 10 miles down the road heading home, figure out a solution and then argue with myself do I go back and fix it now with no distractions or write it down ... then in the morning I’ll do it but bear with distractions... or not write it down .. hope I remember and then do it in the morning

But I’ll probably get distracted.: forget .. then remember after everyone leaves and implement it tomorrow night .. lol

I had a dream freelance job recently. It was a lot of a fun and I really wanted to continue to work there.

However it started to become apparent my manager was a mess. He would often turn up hungover and couldn’t follow conversation. When asked about docs he said he wouldn’t keep any documentation “so no one could take over”. The whole attitude and professionalism was awful.

Some days on release he (and another member of the team) would turn up to work four hours late as they’d been out the night before. I would absorb all of the impact. Technically I felt he was quite significantly junior than myself. Management saw, directors saw, no one did anything.

To cut a long story short - I raised it with HR, I was told unless I raised an “official grievance” nothing would be done. I asked if I could move - I was met with a shrug “we don’t know”

I eventually reached a point where I felt my only real power is to walk away.

I now have no confidence in HR at all. I don’t think I’ll ever involve or raise anything with them again. 😔

Any night, 1:30am, bedtime: "Yes! I can't WAIT for tomorrow to begin! I'm gonna make SO much progress on that personal project that I just KNOW is gonna change the world and make me a billionaire! My time is now!"

Next day, 9am, first call of the day: "Ugh, waking up SUUUUUCKS! But, fine, just gotta get through the workday, then it's beast mode time!"

5pm: "Ugh, that day SUCKED... meeting after meeting, constant interruptions for the few minutes I got to hack code, SO many emails, and hey, good day, only five new things pushed down from corporate to bang my head against! Feelings pretty mentally exhausted, but it's all good, I fortunately love this programming stuff, so first dinner, then a little exercise, spend some time with the family, and then it's time to COOOODE!"

10pm: "Ok, house is FINALLY quiet (fucking dog), just a little noise from my daughter staying up way too late again... kinda spent, but this project still excites me, and I may not get as much done as I was hoping, but fine, I can still make some tangible progress and that's what matters. Maybe just one last quick check of email, Reddit, make sure there's no new Hot Ones or Honest Trailers I gotta watch, update IDEA plugins and see what's new, then it's work time! Nothing can stop me now!"

Any night, 1:30am, bedtime: "SHIT! I GOT FUCK ALL DONE AGAIN! GO DAAAAAAAMN IIIIIT!!!!"

I have found that once you work for a company where you have to implement everything in its raw form using the raw language and raw logic, you really have to know what you're doing and knowing some basic/medium programming and having some algebra knowledge doesn't cut it (unlike some people think).

I've been at two sides of the coin: I worked for a company that had everything in place, a framework that handled all edge cases and what not and I just had to focus on user stories, but I also worked for a company where I had to do everything manually.

For example, at the latter company I had to know Discrete Mathematics; truth tables to their most convoluted and disgusting form, having to be able to apply this on a late Friday night with a headache and lack of food and sleep with the PM stressing out.
I've had to deal with NOT AND OR AND OR AND OR AND branches or whatever, where an OR behaves like an AND and if you want a value between an AND AND and an OR, you'd have to do a NOT OR.. to think about latches, all in my head, sigh, anyway, within limited time constraints, without even having time to write tests, having to make sure that everything checks out while the client is breathing down my neck. Yeah, not such fun times.

I'm happy for those of you who can just write some moderately difficult logic but you don't have to break your head over doing everything manually, as if you're in the coding stone age and nothing is taken care of.
Companies like these make me want to run away.

Shit bathed and stack smashing ass loads of fuck.

I wrote a virtual machine, and just to fuck myself harder, I make the decision of applying some fancy dumbass theories of mine. This translates to a piece of shit modular design that works exactly as intended, but constantly gives me vietnam flashbacks to the horrifying, multiple concurrent instances of my younger mind being incessantly turbo-raped by the dozen object-obsessed pedophiles that I initially studied under.

Now, were they *actual* pedophiles? No, of course not. But I have to make fun of the acronym somehow and that's what came to mind, leaking horse dung all over the walls, floor, curtains and carpets.

Anyway, I feel so smart after this traumatic experience I just have to keep doing it to relive the terror once again. Find me in the corner, laying down in the fetal position, sobbing until the tears build up and drown me in this well of despair, or rather this finely shit painted portrait of a toilet in a lonely and stinking unisex public bathroom stall.

But let me squeeze these fucking tits a little bit harder, because that's my actual day job. That's right. I get PAID for slapping around mammary glands, it's not much but it's an honest living.

So where was I? Ah, yes, absolute degeneration. I'm truly the Max Wright of programming, mostly for smoking crack and having unprotected sex with homeless people, but also for keeping alien life forms in my basement that go out at night to hunt for sweet feline delight.

But as I keep going, I decide I want a language for the machine so I don't have to punch bits by hand all fucking day like an idiot, so alright let's make a small assembler for this shit... oh, right, except it's not small, because gently suckle the bile out the lips of my fucking butthole.

I may redefine a load of shit two months down the line, so I have to make everything perfectly encapsulated and easily fucked with -- which in my licking vomit off the floor of a porn theater travesty of a case means I'm generating half the code and scrambling as hard as I can to glue everything together.

Does it work? Of course it works, I'm Max Wright bitch. I can redefine the ISA all I want, anytime I want without breaking anything because of my pristine crackhead encapsulation. And to credit the scrambled eggs I have for fucking brains, it's not even *that* complex.

The problem is I keep forgetting shit, not how it works, just that it's there. So I forget that I have a virtual machine, and I forget that I have an assembler, and so I spend an entire day trying to figure out how the fuck I'm going to handle a loop inside an unrelated interpreter.

By the time I manage to remind the drooling undead jackass that is this husk that my irredeemably demonic self inhabits, that we can easily solve this by using the tools we've already built, it's so late and we're so tired there's not much we can do. All this time, WASTED.

Which circles back to crack. Are you tired of blowing your babysitter for cash? Have you considered suicide by a thousand used trojan condoms? Is your roommate possesed by the forces of Avernum, and now seeking all-destructive vengeance against your rectum?

Try no other than Soul Excision, the treatment that will neuter your being and curse it to the TRUEST form of eternal damnation! Through Soul Excision, you will be CUT OFF from the very essence of the universe, and turned into an astral prostitute that offers their EVERY orifice to the BUTTLOADS of maggots that debour their mind and body, all for the pleasure of some rich and powerful wankers that *deeply* enjoy watching questionable erotic tapes from nightmarish outer dimensions!

Use my promo code SLUTSKANK for 20% OFF in your very LAST purchase on this earth! And once you surrender your BODILY holes to cosmic oblivion, remember: when it comes to your ASS, we're ALWAYS open for business!

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Turning my phone on flight mode these days to avoid late night calls from work.

Coworker (junior engineer): "He's a principal engineer, and damn good at his job because he works all night long. You're still lead engineer because you don't work late at night."

Flak I get for *not* being able to stay up after 10:30pm. 😥

Aight, so today hasnt been a good day so far, yesterday I stayed up late working on a side projext im getting paid for coz I had to deploy today, i didnt finish because I spent hours trying to get the crappy html with some awful jquery libraries to work with angular, seriously this guy uses the bullet character instead of <ul>, after my cellphone fell during the night and I didnt hear the alarm so I arrived 1 1/2 hrs late to work, now that Im here I cant work because my pc says

The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed

Heads up , not a tech rant

So I now know what you should say if your kid asks what kind of person you should or should not be

So in the picture (sorry it isn’t clear , was taken late night after work) was a common parking area , the bikes parked you see are parked leaving space between at least for 2 more bikes. The owners usually park it that way cos they are too lazy to “properly park”. I confronted them last month and they said they’ll look into it , they have been contacted by various people from my area about this mattter , but it seems they don’t think it matters

So kids , learn to be considerate and not a douche bag , learn to listen and act , not act and listen , and last of all , learn to be a better person , that’s what humans have been trying to do for hundreds of years

I feel retarded...

After getting a new hard drive late at night bcoz my old one went kaboom, I put it in the case, wired it up but it wouldn't work, I tried connecting it to different SATA ports with different cables etc.. This went for 20 minutes and then I realized that the drive wouldn't even start spinning, then I discovered I hadn't connected it to the PSU. Fuck my life and fuck my retardeness.

!rant
The best thing with being a developer is those days when you just bog down and work until late at night doing cool and awesome stuffs!

We had late night work... So our seniors thought of going out for drinks and asked us to join!!
We beeing the interns, bill was all on them ;)
Had fun...

I just came home from opening of the fiscal year of a small drivers' club and it was quite an amazing life experience.

I got about a 5-times "rise" for a first, small, post-due-time project.

All of the members were so relaxed in one of the most serious moments of an association. We ate, drank beer and had as much fun as possible without break the law and other rules.

The story goes like this:

I was an intern in a website development company as students tend to do. In middle of the internship my teacher asked me if I'd be willing to develop a website to the before mentioned organization.
School will help with the money by being as a middle-man. It wasn't going to pay much, about 120€ or so, it's nothing really for the job, but I said yes for the experience. We organized a meeting, school provided the space, and went straight to the business.

The development went quite well: I got the final design requirements late (there weren't too much), research a lot about CMS:s, ended up with a beta version CMS (a risk), learned it, developed some plugins (not published yet), kept copyrights for most of the work and so on.

I was done _relatively_ quickly with the project and was quite happy with it. Only things still pressing my mind was bugs of the beta CMS, support for the plugins and my somewhat inexperienced graphical design.

Then it hit me, the world. Hosting, domain transfer, certificates, registry agreements. Arrgh. Most of things were fine, I know them. I had luck that I had a technical contact for the club. It would have been a nightmare of it's own otherwise.

We had problems transferring the domain, again, as you do. The other hosting company was to blame. They were the n00bs here. I went trough the law, technical guidance, etc. I was having heavy messaging with my technical contact about it, who was a middle-man for me and the hosting firms.
After a long while loop of waiting, reconfiguring, researching and messaging, until he transfer was finally over.

We had a long while of radio silence after some bug fixes. Until the Christmas came and I was invited to a Christmas party in a cottage, third Christmas party that year. It was great fun. We ate, drank, talked, went to sauna and had a playful adult stiga or sledging competition, etc.
I updated the site yet again, a stable version of the CMS were published. Yess!

Another radio silence came and year changed. It was broken off by a call to the opening of the fiscal year, the same day. This is today, or yesterday by now. This was just after my current company's board game night. I was really busy that day. A whole afternoon of second-hand shopping around the city with a bike. I counted 35 kilometers. Yes I go by bike, don't own a car or have an driving license... Yet.

I wasn't horribly late, around 30 minutes. I started eating and drinking. Free food and beer! They was also late, they should've got trough the business before I got there, before eating. So I ate and listened. Learned more about having business or an association in general. Until my matter came to be heard. They thanked me of the co-operation and made public the change of my reward sum, I WAS GRANTED 500€ REWARD for the work. It's still not an amazing sum in a larger point of view, but I can imagine that it's big deal for a small non-profit organization, which was loosing money. Everybody applauded, every 25 members of the club. I was greatly pleased. I will have to update their site a bit still, but they are going to pay the reward ASAP.

Did I mention that the school works around the taxes, legally. Taxes for the reward, if it were assumed as a wage would be 15%, for me, at the worst case scenario, only for getting the money to my hands.

I was offered another gig at the event, but didn't promise anything yet. I left before sauna, so we didn't get to change contact details. He will find a way to reach me if he really wants so. I'm a busy free man.

Game title: Vacations of an engineering student.

Aim: to utilize 60 days of freedom with something worth useful in future career.

Game Modes: (1) Sit at home. (2) intern for some company

Mode(1) Sit at home.
>>Villains : Games,Netflix and movies, food, friend parties, late night sleeps, afternoon wake ups, trips (random villains)
>>Boss Battles : laziness, procrastination, loosing of interest in stuff you wanna do
>>reward on completion: more knowledge increase, better resume ,$0 earnings

Mode(2) : intern for some company
>> extra level before starting : apply for 100s of companies,interview rounds, test
>>villans : no self choice, work with shitty code, too much workload, less time for outside-work life
>> Boss battles: do stuff that you didn't agree to, less stipend, unwanted scoldings from boss
>> reward on completion : more work experience , lesser knowledge, more $

What would be your mode of playing this summer?

I'm 22 years old and 1.5 years into my first Startup Job. (and second Dev job)
I feel kind of uncomfortable now and I would like to ask your opinions.
I'll start with the work related description of my situation and later add a bit of my life situation.

I develop as hobby since I can think. I'm pretty engaged and love to do things right. So I quickly found myself in the position of the de-facto lead fullstack Developer.
Although, to be clear, were only a few devs - which are now replaced by not so many other devs. I feel often like the only person able to design and decide and implement in a way that won't kill us later (and I spend half of my time fixing technical debt).

I mostly like what I do , because it's a challenge and I feel needed. I learn new things and I am pretty flexible in work time. (but I also often work till late in the night, sacrificing friendship time)
But there are so many things I would love to do and used to do, but now I have no motivation to develop outside of my job.
I don't really feel that what my company is doing is something I find valuable. (Image rights management)

I earn pretty well - in comparison to what I'm used to: 20€/hour, Brutto 2.800 / month for 32 hours a week. In Berlin. (Minus tax and stuff it's 1.800€). It's more than enough for what I need.
But when I see what others in similar positions earn (~4.000), I feel weird. I got promised a raise since nearly a year now. I don't feel I could demand it. I also got the hint that I could get virtual shares. But nothing happened.

Now what further complicates the situation is that I will go to Portugal in April for at least half a year, for joining a social project I love. My plan used to be that I work from there for a few hours a week - but I'm starting to hesitate as I fear that I will actually work more and it will keep me from fully being there.

So, I kind of feel emotionally attached - I like (some of) the people, I know (or at least believe) that the company will have a big problem without me. (I hold a lot of the knowledge for legacy applications) .
But I also feel like I'm putting too much of myself into the company and it is not really giving me back. And it's also not so much worth it... Or is it?

Should I stick to the company and keep my pretty secure position and be financially supported during my time in Portugal, while possibly sacrificing my time there?
Should I ask for a raise (possibly even retroactively) and then still quit later? (they will probably try to get my 1 month of cancelation period upped to 3).

Also, is this a risk for my "career"?

So I got a 5 day extension on a project (new due date: this morning 8:30) but I had to put my cat down over the weekend and I was so fucked up about it I couldn’t do any work so last night I was frantically trying to finish but I got to the point where I couldn’t think straight so I went to bed and set my alarm for 6.

It’s 7:30 now and I truly don’t think I’ll finish in time for 8:30. I’ve already got a way longer extension than I asked for, so I don’t want to give him any more “excuses”, so I’m torn between just submitting late probably like 10am or just submitting whatever I have at 8:30

I tend to be a perfectionist, and I have a hard time coping when I feel like someone isn’t happy with work that I’ve done, or when I feel like I haven’t lived up to my own standards.

I’ve been at my current job for a little more than a year, and for the vast majority of that time, my supervisor and coworkers have seemed very pleased with me. My performance reviews so far have been completely positive. But I’m aware that over the past month or so, I’ve run up against more challenges than usual. I’ve taken on some new projects that I haven’t felt entirely confident about, there have been some organizational changes, and because this is a busy time for my department, I don’t always feel like I can easily get help when I have a question about something.

To make things worse, I struggle with anxiety, and while I’ve been working very hard to manage it, all it takes is a few bad days to put me behind on things. I really want to step up to the plate, and I’ve been worried that expressing concerns would make me look like I’m not capable or like I’m a complainer. But the truth is, I’ve been getting in over my head a bit, and I worry that it’s reflecting poorly on me. I haven’t made any terrible mistakes, but it’s taken me longer than usual to complete or follow up on tasks and I haven’t been as organized as I usually am. My supervisor hasn’t gotten upset with me, and she’s expressed understanding, but I’m worried that she has less confidence in me than she used to.

To be fair to myself, over the past couple weeks I feel like I’ve been doing a good job at catching up and getting back to my usual level of efficiency. I feel optimistic about my ability to handle things from here on out, at least for the most part. But I’m scared that a few “off” weeks will damage my reputation and workplace relationships, and that people are thinking poorly of me now. I think because I’m so hard on myself (I feel guilty whenever someone praises me, because I don’t feel like I deserve it), it’s hard for me to have an accurate perception of how things actually are.

Also, do you have any tips for addressing challenges when they come up? I struggle with asking for help or clarification sometimes because I don’t want to come across like I need my hand held. And do you have any suggestions for how to deal with it when things just aren’t going smoothly? I know that in the workplace, what matters is results. The fact that I might be having a bad day due to anxiety or a late night with a sick pet isn’t an excuse. But while I think I’m generally good at managing stress and anxiety and that bad days are uncommon, I can’t guarantee that I won’t ever go through a tough time and that that won’t impact my focus at all.

After three months of development, my first contribution to the client is going live on their servers in less than 12 hours. And let me say, I shall never again be doing that much programming in one go, because the last week and a half has been a nightmare... Where to begin...

So last Monday, my code passed to our testing servers, for QA to review and give its seal of approval. But the server was acting up and wouldn't let us do much, giving us tons of timeouts and other errors, so we reported it to the sysadmin and had to put off the testing.

Now that's all fine and dandy, but last Wednesday we had to prepare the release for 4 days of regression testing on our staging servers, which meant that by Wednesday night the code had to be greenlight by QA. Tuesday the sysadmin was unable to check the problem on our testing servers, so we had to wait to Wednesday.

Wednesday comes along, I'm patching a couple things I saw, and around lunch time we deploy to the testing servers. I launch our fancy new Postman tests which pass in local, and I get a bunch of errors. Partially my codes fault, partially the testing env manipulating server responses and systems failing.

Fifteen minutes before I leave work on the day we have to leave everything ready to pass to staging, I find another bug, which is not really something I can ignore. My typing skills go to work as I'm hammering line after line of code out, trying to get it finished so we can deploy and test when I get home. Done just in time to catch the bus home...

So I get home. Run the tests. Still a couple failures due to the bug I tried to resolve. We ask for an extension till the following morning, thus delaying our deployment to staging. Eight hours later, at 1AM, after working a full 8 hours before, I push my code and leave it ready for deployment the following morning. Finally, everything works and we can get our code up to staging. Tests had to be modified to accommodate the shitty testing environment, but I'm happy that we're finally done there.

Staging server shits itself for half a day, so we end up doing regression tests a full day late, without a change in date for our upload to production (yay...).

We get to staging, I run my tests, all green, all working, so happy. I keep on working on other stuff, and the day that we were slated to upload to production, my coworkers find that throughout the development (which included a huge migration), code was removed which should not have. Team panics. Everyone is reviewing my commits (over a hundred commits) trying to see what we're missing that is required (especially legal requirements). Upload to production is delayed one day because of this. Ended up being one class missing, and a couple lines of code, which is my bad (but seriously, not bad considering I'm a Junior who was handed this project as his first task at his first job).

I swear to God, from here on out, one feature per branch and merge request. Never again shall I let this happen. I don't even know why it was allowed to happen, it breaks our branch policies. But ohel... I will now personally oppose crap like this too...

Now if you'll excuse me... I'm going to be highly unproductive and rest, because I might start balding otherwise after these weeks...

How do you guys motivate yourself to work out.
Its been 2 times... First i tried 2 years ago in Aug 16.
Back then , my college started and i got busy in that so left the gym after a month. I blamed myself, the tiredness it gave me and lack of friends/work out partners there at that time.
Second time, i tried more hardly in jan 2018. This time, i had my gym companions, nd i was doing better. At the start i was handling the stress well, since it was just the clg and gym,then came along the internship, but i still handled it. But after the internship, i felt the need to up my skills and do more personal projects which was still not happening because of the gym tiredness. And then came along a scholarship into one of my favorite courses, and then the papers, and then.... A lot of 'other' things started happening, so i leftthe gym jn may 18.
I am concerned about a few things. 1)These days, I am usually entangled between entertainment, clg work, self learning/ scholarships. I used to do gymming in evening hours after clg and self learning on weekends, but now i am like everyday am straight to home from clg, onto bed, into the sheets, laptop on, and am doing scholarships task till late night. I fear that my work is now so important that i cannot push it to weekends. How do you guys manage learning and maintaining your body together?
2. Gym is a sick environment. We see pumped up people with 8% body fat , skin sticking to their ugly muscles while i am there , juggling my belly fat on the treadmill. For 2 months straight i was just doing the cardio. It gave me some results i guess, my belly got a Little loose but no one really saw much changes. I am not concerned about other people or fast results particularly, but when combined, i feel like am going to a royal house party everyday, where everyone except me is a beautiful king or queen , except me, a lowly peasent . Those pumped up kings are beating their bodies and getting more beautiful, while i am trying to beat these dead belly meat which won't flatten up .

Meh.

My department never has real pressure like real outside deadlines. Except for this project.
Now guess what happened during the final hours of the project:
Fuckin circleCI goes into "degraded performance" (last time it was "partial outage").
I feel like calling my friends Johnny Walker and Jack Daniels over for some late night work. :P

I have been on crunch time for so long, with so many hours I don't even know what day of the week it is. I legitimately had to look it up. I also calculated my hourly rate for the last 3.5 weeks, and I was making the same as a grocery store bagger! Being salaried sucks in times like this. I am paid peanuts.

Last night I woke up every 30 minutes in a panic I was late to work. This job is killing me, and all because the sales team sold the product on an unrealistic deadline, for no money...

In addition, I am gaining weight, haven't seen my family for any significant period of time for ages, and Taco Bell knows me by name and order...

On that note, next Monday I am going to go into my boss' office, and demand like a 50%-75% raise! I am terrified! Haha

Migraines are fun though. THE PAIN PROVES I AM ALIVE!

Literally can't afford to sleep less than 6 hours two nights in a row. If I do, like I did last night, my dumb tired sleepwalking ass will just turn off my two alarms and be late for work by like an hour.

How does something like this happen? I have no recollection of waking up even briefly to turn off my alarms but I know I wouldn't sleep in consciously on a work day, so whom can I even blame?

Coffee hands down.
I am one those who work late at night till 3 am. Can't pull that of without coffee man!

!long rant
Trying to work from home is always a pain, since we need to use company laptops (no ifs, ands or buts about it).
Yesterday I took the laptop in to check for updates that just wouldn't run while at home (my first mistake), and I couldn't get past the "Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to login" screen, laptop keyboard didn't seem to be registering clicks, and an external keyboard wasn't either (and I forgot about the on-screen keyboard). A couple of restarts later with no further changes to the situation, the laptop then didn't get past the BIOS screen.
So I called support (my second mistake) and logged an incident.
Couple of hours later someone comes to my desk and asks about the issue, so I describe it, show them (by now the laptop was once again getting past BIOS screen), and leave them to it. Since these laptops are just used as preconfigured VPN and RDP gateways, I said it would be okay if he just wanted to reinstall the OS (my third mistake).
Several hours later, after staying late last night waiting for it to finish, I loaded my profile, installed updates, shut down, grabbed my stuff and left, without checking VPN or RDP over WiFi (my fourth mistake).
Turns out that some of the buttons on the keyboard just no longer work, but now USB keyboards do work, and I can just use OSK to login while out. I figured this would be my only issue with things, and that it was acceptable.
This morning I attempt to use the laptop, and forgot about OSK and the faulty delete button, so spent a few minutes on that. Try to connect to WiFi and find it can't connect, because of course, it doesn't remember the WiFi password, so I root around for the code in some drawer, enter it, and it works. VPN tries to connect and... get told to insert my smart card, which is already inserted, because the driver is wrong!
So I'm sitting here writing a post, not quite believing that I'm considering cancelling my plans for the day to go into the office because of a bloody driver issue now...

I'm so tired when I got up. Didn't sleep much last night. Working on a Sunday night till 2AM because I did not work the week on the project I was given.
This is not happening for the first time, I sleep late around 3AM to do my work, as day is too noisy and distracting. Attend some meetings during the day and get lazy in the evenings. Work during nights and then the next day I'm all tired for daily stand up.
How do you people tackle this schedule? I need serious advices.

Yesterday, I performed an experiment on myself.

I have heard pretty much that a cup of strong black coffee at night keeps you awake the entire night. Newbie here when it comes to staying up all night ( I mean I stay up late but never all night) so I decided to give it a go.
I'm unsure about the results though.

First off, how strong is a strong coffee? One teaspoon coffee per cup? Am I allowed to add a teaspoon of sugar?

Next, I think it kinda also have to do with me. I mean, I have heard it doesn't give me sleep so my personal bias affected it. I wanted it to be true. To be a life hack for that huge ass paper due by tomorrow.

Maybe it does work. At around 4 in the morning I was too tired with the shit I was doing so I decided to finally lay down. I recall this brief moment when I was in my bed all ready to sleep and the sleep wouldn't come. Maybe that's the coffee working. But again, it could just be normal.

Does it not work? If it does, how do I make it work? 😣

Maybe you people will like this story.
The past semester I studied Java in class. First time doing object oriented programming, I had an annoying teacher but got the hang of it. I still miss C from the last year.
As a final project we had to do any program and apply some stuff we saw in class (The program should have an array list, use interfaces, bla bla bla bery simple stuff). It also must have a complete documentation, a manual and a diary explaining what was developed every week. Bonus points if it was in a repository like GitLab.
I wanted to do an RPG game in a matrix, like a rougelike or an old FF game, that should be a map or two, a few monsters and items and that's it. Enough to show what can I do and to have enough excuses to apply everything that the teacher asked. I had a team with two friends who wanted to do the same.
After making accounts in three different pages that apparently would help us to be more organized (One to make charts and two task trackers) I lost all patience and made an account in GitLab, made the basic classes that we had defined in a chart, divided the tasks and put them in to do on GitLab and we started to work.
One of my companions caused a lot of problems. First, he didin't wanted to learn how to use GitLab (I simply asked them to do merge requests) and he insisted to use GitHub. Then he started to say that using the console version was even better (Pretty sure he said thet he never used Git, but maybe was gas poisoning). The GitLab repository never had a single commit to his name.
BUT WAIT IT GETS BETTER all the entire time, he was complaining about the graphical interface of the game, wanting to use some SDK for RPGs that he found. I told him that we will see that at the end, that first we should have all the mechanics done, test it in ASCII in the console and then, if we have time, we will put the visual interface, separated and optional from the main program to avoid problems.
After two weeks where he gave me very simple standard stuff late, half done and through Google Drive, I discovered he was most of the time working on... the graphical interface SDK! He took the job already done by me and the other guy and making a pretty hardcoded integration with the graphical interface and making everything that he tought it would be necesary. Soon enough the GitLab repository was totally outdated and completly useless. He had the totallity of the project in his half broken laptop, and sometimes he gave us a zip with all the code, outdated after a few minutes. Most of the stuff that I made was modified, a lot of the code was totally unknown to what it was and I had no idea even of how the folders were organised.
We had a month to finish it. I got totally disconected from the project and just hoped for the best, sometimes doing a handful of generic and adaptable lines of code for a specific thing (Funny enough, many core mechanics were nonexistent). The other guy managed to work more on the project, mostly fixing the mess that the guy did: apparently he didin't read the documentation of the SDK and just experimented and saw tutorials and tried to figure out how to do what he wanted.
Talking about documentation: we dont had yet. The code wasn't even commented propely. We did all that the last week and some stuff was finished the last night. The program apparently worked but I had no idea.
Thank God, the teacher just looked over everything and was very impressed by the working camera and the FF tiles. I don't think he saw the code or read too much of the documentation, much less when I directly wrote how I lost all access to the project.
I had a 10/10. I didin't complained. Most easy and annoying ten I ever had. I will never do a project with that guy.

Fuck my company, sincerly.

So Im crunching my ass off, to make product, there is +- fuckton of changes that for example require refactoring flow of certain things, restructure of how shit work, Im +- 2nd weekend now, and most heavy features are cleared.

I work till late. constantly I have someone with stupid shit like calls, indeed Im needed for that stuff but also, that slows down progress of this project. Just sake of example friday 18:00 I had call (I work till 16:00) about new minor and frankly easy feature. Today, morning 8:30 one call, than 13:00 long call, Ive done the feature, didn't push it to alpha. yet though.

Now during that call that started 13:00 I get yelled on that all ordered features aren't on prod yet (I throw them to alpha becouse manual tests must be done as standard here).

Dude what the motherfuck. Im literally wearing my ass off to deliver your stupid product becouse I know its critical for company but it does not mean I can do it all in one fucking night.

F**k off and shut your mouth up and let me work for f**k sakes.

Ah also, stop f**king remotely micromanage me you little piece of sh*t.

Thanx for allowing me to vent out,
Peace.

Ugh, I finally got a big project at work as the main backender but I still have a lot to learn. I fucked up the estimation for a big component and this is the fifth night im working late because I feel responsible.

Fuck this shit.

The secret is, I'm always #tired 😭😪

Chill. No one will see your hard work at this late night. 😴

ADVICE: I’ve been assigned someone I was told was mid weight developer for a ‘fast paced project.’ I’ve quickly discovered he doesn’t understand core concepts and is likely very junior; this means I am picking up all the slack to cover for him.

We’ve had to ditch every PR he’s made so far and I’ve had to pair up with him to explain each one, from scratch, step by step.

Not sure what to do, he’s a nice guy, but I’m going to burn myself out if I have to do everything, it’s not acceptable and there is enough pressure on me already.

Do I request for him to be moved off the project, talk with him about my frustrations or raise my concern with the product owner with some evidence?

I get that no one comes to work to do a bad job, but I have my own shit to work on, and don’t fancy doing late night catch ups before every demo tbh

I am doing some late night developing because I feel excited about my own project after a long slog of refactoring and ground work... and my IDE is getting weird leading to long compilation times :(

Dear World. I am doing my life-chores so please let me get my shit done for once!

I was this close to fall asleep content tonight...