Pro tip: If you are a junior, or senior but new at the company, don't start your conversations with:

"We're doing X wrong. At my previous company we did / at school I learned /in this book I read / according to this talk I watched, the right way to do X is ..."

Instead try:

"I'm curious why were doing X this way. I'm used to doing it differently."

I love flat-hierarchy teams, and people who think about flaws in procedures and proactively try to improve the tools we use are awesome, but the next kid walking up to me yelling we use git flow "wrong" will be smacked in the face with a keyboard.

If you come to me with curiosity and an open mind, I'll explain, and even return the favor by behaving the same way when I'm baffled by your seemingly retarded implementations.

Maybe we can learn from each other, maybe discover that "how I learned it" is sometimes good, sometimes bad.

But let's start with some social skills, not kicking off into every debate with a stretched leg and a red face.

I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.

So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?

This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:

1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!

2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...

3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.

But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.

There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.

After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.

So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".

So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".

So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.

So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.

If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>

So I was hired about 4 months or so in this companty, we will name it 'Derp & Co.'

The first task they want me to do was to 'clean' an android app that, for what they told me:

- Previous dev fired. said that tasks have been done but totally a lie.
- Took a fully week of 2 fellows coworkers to 'undo' the mess.
- And for the last but not least, zero documentation, like ZERO.

So, I clone the repo, install android studio, blah blah blah, get hands to the pile of code and jesus...

- The whole app was working with a gargantuan json, there was no use of POJOs at all. Objects are for normies.
- A masive copy/paste code, like 'I will need this here, crtl-c... ctrl-v, DONE!'
- Threads are free, isn't it? let's just put a thread whenever I desire to make an HTTP request and not reuse code at all.

So... with this on mind, my first task is to make proper objects:
- Coworker: 'Sorry dev, we don't have documentation for this, you must debug the code to se what the server will send to you'.
- Me: 'Real?'

Shit... ok. So I first try to figure out how the hell is made my gargantuan json. A month was entirely lost to unravel this data and implement Objects, improve their code, reuse code, etc. but at the very end:

- coworker: 'Good job dev, when the POJOs are done, we can focus on the next task, whe have to define a new DATA MODEL because the one we are using now is not good at all'.

*note: the app is on production and working with all the previous 'features' and today it still on use on some enviroments.

- Me: 'Wait... this is a joke, now you want to define new data models? This should have been done in first place!' <WTF face>
- Coworker: 'I don't think so dev, Mr. boss have this list with things to improve on the app an this is the order of do the tasks'.

Mr. boss is on vacations, two days after he came back:

- Mr boss: 'Coworker said that you have been working with POJOs, is that right?'
- Me: 'Yes'
- Mr boss: 'Why? Did not see the need of a new data model?'
- Me: 'I told that to him, but he insist on "the order" of the list.
- Mr. boss <facepalm>

This is one of the few tales i have from 'Derp & Co.'

PS: Sorry if i made a mistake on writing, english is not my first language and maybe I have done some mistakes.

Startup: let's improve on our MVP and build an actual website app.

Me: ok.

[go through 2 weeks discovery and planning stage]

Manager1: love working with you. You explain and work in a really professional manner.

[MVP gets built in 2 months, I'm the only dev designer devops throughout]

Manger1: Omg love it! Wait till the other manager sees it. I knew you were right person for the job.

Other users: oo cool. I love features x, y, z.

[two days later shows to Manager2]

Manager2: x doesn't work, feature you is not useful and doesn't work... Hate it. I think we'll move you to another project.

Me: (woah that escalated quickly meme plays in my mind)

Me: [explaining MVP, lean methodology, your internal decision making processes]

...

Manager2: Yeh we want you to not work on any development work (even though those are your skills and extensive knowledge etc) we need you to do admin tasks (that have nothing to do with product or coding etc)

Manager1 and employees: 😲 wtf

Me: I quit

- - -

Now they are struggling in every way possible and don't have enough funds to hire another person close to what they need to help them.

Crowdsource let's you improve Google's algorithms by manually identifying items. I helped the world today by making sure "sex" = "sex"

You know what you sound like when you say that "I want to be a programmer but this code is offensive so remove it"? It's like saying that "I want to be a surgeon but I don't like blood, so remove the blood right now."

I personally don't really like blood a whole lot, especially when it comes out of the bodies of other people. I don't really want to become a surgeon, but let's say that I would. "Teacher, I don't like blood, I want to become a surgeon but I hate blood!!! MAKE ALL PATIENTS STOP BLEEDING NOW!!!"

To which my teacher surgeon would of course respond: "Well how about you don't become a surgeon then, because humans that are cut open do bleed, and there's nothing we can do about it."

Same thing with code. You know why code is written? To be a useful tool, for people to become more productive by running the thing (unlike the average SJW). And normal people, you know how much they care about the code? They only care for it as much as for it to be able to run properly. And the ones that do look in the source code either want to improve its functionality or check whether it's actually something decent, secure, safe to run etc etc. People don't normally look at code for the sake of getting offended by something.

But the formulation used in the code, does it even matter? Jerk, it's a term that's used in physics. Does it refer to your despised white cis males whacking off? Of course it doesn't, it's a term to describe change in acceleration. Masters and slaves in code, does it refer to slavery? Most certainly it doesn't. So why bother?

This rant is particularly directed at web designers, front-end developers. If you match that, please do take a few minutes to read it, and read it once again.

Web 2.0. It's something that I hate. Particularly because the directive amongst webdesigners seems to be "client has plenty of resources anyway, and if they don't, they'll buy more anyway". I'd like to debunk that with an analogy that I've been thinking about for a while.

I've got one server in my home, with 8GB of RAM, 4 cores and ~4TB of storage. On it I'm running Proxmox, which is currently using about 4GB of RAM for about a dozen VM's and LXC containers. The VM's take the most RAM by far, while the LXC's are just glorified chroots (which nonetheless I find very intriguing due to their ability to run unprivileged). Average LXC takes just 60MB RAM, the amount for an init, the shell and the service(s) running in this LXC. Just like a chroot, but better.

On that host I expect to be able to run about 20-30 guests at this rate. On 4 cores and 8GB RAM. More extensive migration to LXC will improve this number over time. However, I'd like to go further. Once I've been able to build a Linux which was just a kernel and busybox, backed by the musl C library. The thing consumed only 13MB of RAM, which was a VM with its whole 13MB of RAM consumption being dedicated entirely to the kernel. I could probably optimize it further with modularization, but at the time I didn't due to its experimental nature. On a chroot, the kernel of the host is used, meaning that said setup in a chroot would border near the kB's of RAM consumption. The busybox shell would be its most important RAM consumer, which is negligible.

I don't want to settle with 20-30 VM's. I want to settle with hundreds or even thousands of LXC's on 8GB of RAM, as I've seen first-hand with my own builds that it's possible. That's something that's very important in webdesign. Browsers aren't all that different. More often than not, your website will share its resources with about 50-100 other tabs, because users forget to close their old tabs, are power users, looking things up on Stack Overflow, or whatever. Therefore that 8GB of RAM now reduces itself to about 80MB only. And then you've got modern web browsers which allocate their own process for each tab (at a certain amount, it seems to be limited at about 20-30 processes, but still).. and all of its memory required to render yours is duplicated into your designated 80MB. Let's say that 10MB is available for the website at most. This is a very liberal amount for a webserver to deal with per request, so let's stick with that, although in reality it'd probably be less.

10MB, the available RAM for the website you're trying to show. Of course, the total RAM of the user is comparatively huge, but your own chunk is much smaller than that. Optimization is key. Does your website really need that amount? In third-world countries where the internet bandwidth is still in the order of kB/s, 10MB is *very* liberal. Back in 2014 when I got into technology and webdesign, there was this rule of thumb that 7 seconds is usually when visitors click away. That'd translate into.. let's say, 10kB/s for third-world countries? 7 seconds makes that 70kB of available network bandwidth.

Web 2.0, taking 30+ seconds to load a web page, even on a broadband connection? Totally ridiculous. Make your website as fast as it can be, after all you're playing along with 50-100 other tabs. The faster, the better. The more lightweight, the better. If at all possible, please pursue this goal and make the Web a better place. Efficiency matters.

I appreciate all of your suggestions to improve devRant but I've a counter suggestion to make. Please do not post silly ideas. We should not try to make this community another Facebook or Twitter. Let's keep it simple and plain. We're better than non-dev users in many ways.

Something I refer to as the "Lost Cause Syndrome".

Basically you start working on a project enthusiastically with the resolution to write the best possible code. But either one (or some or all) of management, client and colleagues succeed in transforming the project into a comedy (or tragedy, depending on your outlook) of errors.

Then finally, one day you decide that the project is a lost cause and stop caring about it. You end up in a "Let's get this over with and get out of here" type of mindset without making any efforts to improve the situation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TL;DR: a dude thinks good graphics make a game good.

so every day when the school ends, me, a dude and another girl walk home. as expected we have lots of time to talk about anything. I wanted that day to tell that dude about what I am going to buy on steam summer sales with just 15$.

me: I am going for this summer to play lots of games so I saved some money for this summer sale. do you want to hear what awesome games I am about to buy with just 15$?
dude: yeah, sure thing.

he wasn't expecting much

M: this summer I am going to buy 5 games and maybe keep more for some others. they are so awesome!
D: ok, let's hear those 'awesome' games!
M: the first game is devil daggers, maybe you don't kno...
D: of course I do. is that game
M: I want to get that game just to improve my aim, but maybe I will have some fun.
D: yeah yeah, I know that game
M: *poker face*

I KNEW he doesn't know this game and anything about pc games because of the followings...

M: ok then... I also want to get Half-Life 2 : Episode 1 & 2. they have pretty rich story and I already have both Half-Lives.
D: holy shit but the graphics... ok, one more 'awesome' game of yours.
M: there are 2 episodes, 2 separate games. I really don't care about the graphics, I love the story.
D: continue with your 'awesom' games...

that dude didn't even knew about half-life and said that game is bad.

M: another game I want to get is Battlefront 2, the one from 2005 and...
D: 2005!?
M: yeah, the new one sucks, and the gameplay in the original is way better and...
D: *starts laughing* 2005!? I thought you were getting the new one. I imagine the graphics being like this car. *points to a fucking car, yeah that kind of comparasion, I know*

after this I was so fucking pissed off. he doesn't even know about some cult classics that are meant to be played. he doesn't even have a pc nor console and he is stating his opinion on fine air for fucks sake!

M: ok, what about getting the facts and then make an opinon.
D: yeah yeah *making fun of me at that point*

I didn't tell him that I wanted to buy the binding of isaac, cause it was enough for me. I told him to watch some reviews on these games and blog posts about them and I am sure tomorrow he will say that he 'wathced' the reviews and that those games are garbage. it's his style to underestimate things. I fucking hate him, not becuase of the games, but because he underestimates everything that is not on his list of 'good games'. that list consists of new games with great graphics(3D only).

sorry if I exaggerate saying that those games are cult classics but I really look forward into buying them.

if you have another indie game to run on this potato machine(2gb ram, pentium dual-core 2.1ghz, gtx 525m) that I should or at least try comment, I am open to suggestions!

When your home's infrastructure runs better and is more stable than some of the shit that's actually running enterprises because you actually do care about industry best practices and product quality.. it's a weird feeling. A very disappointing one, if anything.

Post-meritocracy, it very much seems to be a thing. And when you call people out for it because yes I do want to *be* the change that I want to see, they get all defensive and shun you. Yeah, let's make the world burn in inefficient, dysfunctional bullshit. That's a much better idea.

Are we humans really that far apart from the chimps that we descended from?

Worst part of it all, those incompetent bastards that can't possibly admit and work to improve their mistakes are the ones that are behind the companies' steering wheel. That too is such an excellent idea. I bet that half of them got employed only because they took the lowest wage and could (barely) turn on a computer. Fucking morons...

So today, again, I discovered the importance of unitests.
I was solving this performance issue, in which we had a few update actions for multiple entities in mongo, but it took FOREVER to complete, even when I unified it into one bulkWrite command.
Since the unified write did improve performance slightly, and we wanted to move on, we decided to let this bug go.
So there I was committing my changes when I got a rejection from the pre-commit hook since I didn't have enough unitests coverage.
Ok, let's start writing some unitests.
Some unitests also needed to test the bulk write. So there I was comparing expected with actual result, and suddenly I got a huge facepalm.
Apparently some rogue for loop iterated all entities again for each entity that needed update. So instead of getting one update per entity, I got N identical update commands per each of the N entities 🤦‍♂️
Needless to say, fixing this fixed the performance bug entirely.
Thank you unitests and pre-commit hooks!

MARKETING IS A MENACE FOR SOCIETY and a large waste of time and resources.

Imagine that for some very stupid reason people were allowed to steal cell phones from unsuspecting victims and sell it on open market legally, tax invoices and all.

One could create a business like this. Steal some lad's brand new $600 iPhone and sell it for $280, because why not?

That is marketing. A company goes and makes a phone for lets say $180. Add in taxes, shipping and development costs, and we get to $300. Put some real nice profits on top (let's say 40%) and we get to $420.
The last 180 are the cost of marketing for society.

Today some stupid marketing conmen goosesteps into my lab and says that we must use Tensorflow and in-memory databases and multicloud redundancy and, I kid you not, "profound learning".
WE HAVE A FREAKING LOGISTICS OPS APPLICATION.
"We are putting it on the brochure, those technologies are set to sell well in our core market, and improve employer-branding" says the conmen.

A request for a feature is one thing, a request for an whole other technology because some snake-oil salesmen read the term in some clickbait rag and thinks that some starry-eyed moneyhead will pay extra because the brochure says "NOW WITH 2X MORE TECH!" is just an assault on society.

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

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

Well maybe it's for good.

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

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

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

What on earth could possibly go wrong?

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

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

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

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

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

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

short minded idiots.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What in the actual fuck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Got some detailed feedback from Booking.com, upon asking.

I answered all the questions right. But they said I am not ready for a Sr PM role (which might be true).

Here are three points that I captured from the feedback:

1. Focus on details
2. Clear and better reasoning for WHY
3. Realistic over idealistic scenarios

While it makes me feel low that I didn't make it but this feedback will surely help me overcome the challenges and clear interviews in future.

On to the next one now. Let's see what comes my way..

One thing for sure, there is lots and lots to learn for me yet.

One thing I surely lack is articulating my thoughts and keeping things crisp while conveying the information aptly.

Anyone has any tips/resources on how to improve in this area?

This week I had an interview via Zoom and the HR asked me "How would you feel positive/comfortable as an "apprenticeship person"?".

I asked them to repeat the question because it sounded weird and I thought it was maybe just my mind imagining things.

They said the same thing to which I asked why they ask me such a question thinking that this might be a new HR trap.

She (HR) felt that I was suspecting something and explained this is not a trap, but just to improve the company.

I don't think that's the case lol.

If I were to demand material things, it would not be in the company's favor.
+ how the hell am I supposed to know before even having worked with them for let's say a week?

That was strange

Fucking hell it pisses me off when you go to so much trouble to streamline processes, set up systems that improve workflow and solve issues, find better solutions and show how they make life easier... and people are like "yeah nah let's just do things the same old shitty way we've always done things".

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Under pressure for a big feature that had to be merged into develop like one month ago. But I couldn't because of issues I discover every single fucking day.

Today's issue is that a Cucumber test fails. I try reproducing it on my machine, it fails with a different error. Apparently I need to download some 10GB database file from some company server.

Alright, let's download it. But it's damn too slow. Well, let's have lunch in the meantime.

I come back, the download timed out at basically the same point I left it at.

I don't wanna try again. Not without trying to improve things. Download speed is ridiculous. Switching from Wi-Fi to Ethernet definitely helps, I thought.

The cable doesn't work. The port LEDs are both off. Is that cable even connected to something? So I follow that damn cable throughout my colleagues' desks. I'm now doing things without even remembering why.

I finally find the other end. It is plugged to the wall. I try another plug, but that fucking LED is still off. A colleague tells me: not all the sockets are actually connected to the switch, you have to call IT to have yours patched. Stay calm, stay caaaaalm...

A small lamp turns on in my head. Maybe something in my laptop is broken. So I try with a colleague's ethernet. That fucking LED is still off. A-ha.

Turns out, the shitty macbook adapter has this Ethernet port that DOESN'T work out of the box. It needs a driver to even realize there's a port. I look for it, I find it. I finally have wired connection. It's like having drinking water again.

I turn off WiFi, I re-try downloading that fucking database.

Nope, it's still stupidly slow. The bottleneck was in the dumbfuck internal server.

FUCK.

At least I have Ethernet now.

So Instagram recently launched 'Threads' as it's standalone messaging app... Although it seems like a bad replica of Snapchat I still liked the minimal messaging interface. Have switched my personal account from main app to threads to improve productivity. Let's see how it turns out to be in the next few days.

How much of windows 10 you will improve? How? And what would you delete?

(In case you want to delete windows 10: "that will be taken care of by op")

Disclaimer: This is all theoretical. Neither me nor my friend (with whom I discussed this) are stupid enough to even try to pursue this, but as an idea, i believe it might generate cool/new ideas/ways for handling secure communications across social groups.

Let's do some role play. Let's design a delivery app for drug dealers, think Seamless or Uber Eats, but for drugs. Not for big deliveries, like kilograms of coke, but smaller stuff. Maybe a few grams of it or something. The clients could rate dealers, and vide-versa. This would build a level of trust within the system. There would be no names, just anonymous reviews, ratings, and prices. Only the info you'd need to know.

The biggest (only?) problem we found (besides legality) was that, how would you prove that you're a client and not a snitch (or cop). This would have to somehow be handled both on signup, as well as when ordering (let's imagine that all who are clients are pure and won't ever snitch).

One of the ways we found to combat this was to have the app invite-only. This would, in theory, do away with the problem of having snitches signing up. However, what if the phone got stolen/breached by a snitch, and they also got full access to the account. One way we thought we could combat this would be with a "dispose number" or something similar. Basically, you call a number, or send a text, or message a Signal bot etc, which would lead to the account's instant termination, no traces of that user left. Hence, a dispose number.

The flow of the app would be as follows:
A client wants some amount of heroin. He opens the app, searches for a dealer, sends the him the desired amount, and in return gets back a price from the dealer. If both parties agree on the amount and price, the deal would start.

The app would then select a random time (taken from the client's selected timeframe and the dealer's "open" time) and a location (within a certain radius of both them, somewhere in between them both for convenience). If both of them accept the time and place, they'll have to meet up at said time and place.

The actual delivery could also be done using two dead drops - the client drops the money at one of them, the dealer drops the goods at the other one. Yes, this might be subject to abuse, but it wouldn't be that bad. I doubt that clients would make huge orders to unknown/badly rated dealers, as well as dealers accepting offers from badly rated clients. My idea is that they would start small, just so if they do lose their money/goods, the actual loss wouldn't be as big for them, but for the other party, having bad ratings would mean less clients willing to buy or dealers willing to sell.

A third way would be to use crypto, but the reason I left this as the last one is because it's not that wide-spread yet, at least not in local drug dealing. With this method, the client would initiate the order, the crypto would be sent to either the dealer or an escrow account, the dealer would then drop the goods at a random place and let the client know where to go to get them. After the client has gotten the goods, they could both review/rate the quality as well as the overall experience with that dealer, which would either make or break the dealer's upcoming deals. This would be pretty much like other DNM's, but on a local scale, making deliveries faster.

So far, this would seem like something that would work. Are there any ideas that might improve this? Anything that might make things more secure/anonymous?

My reason for this post is to spark a conversation about security and anonymity, not to endorse drugs or other illegal stuff.

Cheers!

PS. Really loving the new PC design of devRant

I can't help it sounding bitter..
If you work some amount of time in tech it's unavoidable that you automatically pick up skills that help you to deal with a lot of shit. Some stuff you pick up is useful beyond those problems that shouldn't even exist in the first place but lots of things you pick up over time are about fixing or at least somehow dealing or enduring stuff that shouldn't be like that in the first place.
Fine. Let's be honest, it's just reality that this is quite helpful.

But why are there, especially in the frontend, so many devs, that confuse this with progress or actual advancement in their craft. It's not. It's something that's probably useful but you get that for free once you manage to somehow get into the industry. Those skills accumulate over time, no matter what, as long as you manage to somehow constantly keep a job.
But improving in the craft you chose isn't about somehow being able to deal with things despite everything. That's fine but I feel like the huge costs of keeping things going despite some all the atrocities that arose form not even considering there could be anything to improve on as soon as your code runs. If you receive critic in a code review, the first thing coming back is some lame excuse or even a counter attack, when you just should say thank you and if you don't agree at all, maybe you need to invest more time to understand and if there's some critic that's actually not useful or base don wrong assumptions, still keep in mind it's coming from somebody that invested time to read your code gather some thoughts about it and write them down for you review. So be aware of the investment behind every review of your code.
Especially for the frontend getting something to run is a incredibly low bar and not at all where you can tell yourself you did code.
Some hard truth from frontend developer to frontend developer:
Everybody with two months of experience is able to build mostly anything expected on the job. No matter if junior or senior.
So why aren't you looking for ways to find where your code is isn't as good as it could be.

Whatever money you earn on top of your junior colleagues should make you feel obligated to understand that you need to invest time and the necessary humbleness and awareness of your own weaknesses or knowledge gaps.
Looking at code, that compiles, runs and even provides the complete functionality of the user story and still feeling the needs do be stuff you don't know how to do it at the moment.

I feel like we've gotten to a point, where there are so few skilled developer, that have worked at a place that told them certain things matter a lot Whatever makes a Senior a Senior is to a big part about the questions you ask yourself about the code you wrote if if's running without any problems at all.
It's quite easy to implement whatever functionality for everybody across all experience levels but one of your most important responsibilities. Wherever you are considered/payed above junior level, the work that makes you a senior is about learning where you have been wrong looking back at your code matters (like everything).

Sorry but I just didn't finde a way to write this down in a more positive and optimistic manner.

And while it might be easy to think I'm just enjoying to attack (former) colleaues thing that makes me sad the most is that this is not only about us, it's also about the countless juniors, that struggle to get a food in the door.
To me it's not about talent nor do I believe that people wouldn't be able to change.
Sometimes I'm incredibly disappointed in many frontend colleagues. It's not about your skill or anything. It's a matter of having the right attitude.
It's about Looking for things you need to work in (in your code). And investing time while always staying humble enough to learn and iterate on things. It's about looking at you
Ar code and looking for things you didn't solve properly.

Never forget, whenever there's a job listing that's fording those crazy amount of work experience in years, or somebody giving up after repeatedly getting rejected it might also be on the code you write and the attitude that 's keeping you looking for things that show how awesome you are instead of investing work into understanding where you lack certain skills, invest into getting to know about the things you currently don't know yet.
If you, like me, work in a European country and gathered some years of industry experience in your CV you will be payed a good amount of money compared to many hard working professions in other industries. And don't forget, you're also getting payed significantly more than the colleagues that just started at their first job.
No reason to feel guilty but maybe you should feel like forcing yourself to look for whatever aspect of your work is the weakest.

There's so many colleagues, especially in the frontend that just suck while they could be better just by gaining awareness that there code isn't perfect.

Teacher : So today we'll study Dynamic programming.
In DP we solve the problem LCS.
Student : Ok one more algorithm atleast I'll improve my algorithms.
Teacher : (after 10 minutes) so this is how we make the table and find the solution. Now let's move to another topic
-- End of Dynamic Programming --

@algorithms_in_india

If a project's structure is shit, well of course, let's continue using it because "it is known". Doing it any other way "will add complexity".

That I wasted three days making my working code adhere to the clusterfuck of a structure, nevermind that. Let's continue. And yes, colleagues do agree that the structure is shit, though let's improve it ... later.

Or in other words: Suck it up, we always have done it this way. Fuck you and your ill-advised attempts of trying to improve it.

A lot of you here rant about devs being arogant or expecting you to think for a little bit with own head and then write a proper string that will help dev answer straightforward without guessing what the author smoked or so for which there's even a tutorial made (wasn't there always). But I don't see any rants about the other side of the coin.

Let's say you are a random dude, not even that arogant type. You see a question, no answers, everyone piss on that question because it's just a mess. Yet you find yourself in a good mood, so let's help the poor soul with th trouble. Answer like from a book for kids, fully explained example and...

No points, no accepted answer, but not even any feedback! Was my answer wrong? Did I miss something? How can I improve it? Was the example too complicated?

This is exactly the type of idiot that deserves a kick in the ass. It's no site, for hanging spam! Why the hell does that kind of idiot think there's even an option for own answer? People will come back to the question eventually and what will they found? An answer, which probably isn't even correct!

(not really talking about a specific answer/question, so no need to search)