Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!

So, here goes!

A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.

The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.

Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.

Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.

Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.

The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.

They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.

Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.

So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.

So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.

We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.

As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.

So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...

Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.

Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!

[Continues in the comments]

Dev: what do I call this file ?
Me: just name it something meaningful so other dev's know what it is

Two days pass

Me: time to do code review .. oh look a new file ..

Git comment : new file for sax parsing , architecture gave the ok.

File name : SomethingMeaningful.java

I was very troubled as a teenager. I had some pretty intense family issues that led me to smoking cigarettes at 12, marijuana at 13, and drinking everyday at 15. By 17, I was using other "party favors", as we called them, on an every day basis. I left high school at the beginning of my final year, about a week before I turned 18, moved out of my family's home and started working three different part time jobs.
This was the lowest point of my life. I've never felt so much like a fuck-up and loser than back in those days. I hated myself, hated what I had become, hated everything I did. Hate hate hate. I spent a year like this, pitying myself, seeking sympathy from people when I shouldnt have been, basically seeking out someone who would tell me that I wasnt so awful.
That never happened. I only deepened the hole that I had dug for myself.

Then I got angry. I thought it wasn't fair that everyone else was enjoying life except for me. I wanted to find a passion. I wanted to find excitement again. I wanted to look forward to something else besides going back to bed.
When I turned 19, I decided that I was going to take control of my life because I was so angry with my position at the time.
I put myelf into college. I made myself stay awake and focus on schoolwork and internal improvement. I started facing my flaws and defects head-on and conquering them rather than letting them eat me from the inside out.

Now, I am only a couple months away from turning 21.
I rarely drink now. I quit smoking cigarettes after almost 9 years.
I graduate this December, and enroll into my next degree program in January.
Today, I signed employment paperwork with the company I interned at over the summer. I am now a full-time DevOps Engineer with salary, bonuses, 401k, and full health coverage.
My boyfriend and I just moved into our own house that we are renting together. No more needing shitty roommates.
I have most of the debt that my mother left in my name paid off.

A couple of years ago, I couldn't have cared less about my life or how I turned out. I truly expected to get arrested, wind up homeless, or just flat-out end up dead.
I never thought I would see myself where I am today.
I am extremely proud of myself for turning my future around. I know some of you may read this and think I'm an idiot, or that this seems trivial because I am so young. Thats okay.
I have learned that hard work always pays off, and that sometimes you must sacrifice what is expedient to gain what is meaningful.

Ok story of my most most recent job search (not sure devRant could handle the load if I was to go through them all)

First a little backstory on why I needed to search for a new job:

Joined a small startup in the blockchain space. They were funded through grants from a non-profit setup by the folks who invented the blockchain and raised funds (they gave those funds out to companies willing to build the various pieces of the network and tools).

We were one of a handful of companies working on the early stages of the network. We built numerous "first"s on the network and spent the majority of our time finding bugs and issues and asking others to fix them so it would become possible, for us to do what we signed up for. We ended up having to build multiple server side applications as middleware to plug massive gaps. All going great, had a lot of success, were told face to face by the foundation not to worry about securing more funds at least for the near term as we were "critical to the success of the network".

1 month later a bug was discovered in our major product, was nasty and we had to take it offline. Nobody lost any funds.

1-2 months later again, the inventor of the blockchain (His majesty, Lord dickhead of cuntinstein) decided to join the foundation as he wasn't happy with the orgs progress and where the network now stood. Immediately says "see that small startup over there ... yeah I hate them. Blackball them from getting anymore money. Use them as an example to others that we are not afraid to cut funds if you fuck up"

Our CEO was informed. He asked for meetings with numerous people, including His royal highness, lord cockbag of never-wrong. The others told our CEO that they didn't agree with the decision, but their hands were tied and they were deeply sorry. Our CEO's pleas with The ghost of Christmas cuntyness, just fell on deaf ears.

CEO broke the news to us, he had 3 weeks of funds left to pay salaries. He'd pay us to keep things going and do whatever we could to reduce server costs, so we could leave everything up long enough for our users to migrate elsewhere. We reduced costs a lot by turning off non essential features, he gave us our last pay check and some great referrals. That was that and we very emotionally closed up shop.

When news got out, we then had to defend ourselves publicly, because the loch ness moron, decided to twist things in his favour. So yeah, AMAZING experience!

So an unemployed and broken man, I did the unthinkable ... I set my linkedin to "open to work". Fuck me every moronic recruiter in a 10,000 mile radius came after me. Didn't matter if I was qualified, didn't matter if I had no experience in that language or type of system, didn't matter if my bio explicitly said "I don't work with X, Y or Z" ... that only made them want me more.

I think I got somewhere around 20 - 30 messages per week, 1 - 2 being actually relevant to what I do. Applied to dozens of jobs myself, only contacted back by 1, who badly fucked up the job description and I wasn't a fit at all.

Got an email from company ABC, who worked on the same blockchain we got kicked off of. They were looking for people with my skills and the skills of one other dev in the preious company. They heard what happened and our CEO gave us a glowing recommendation. They largely offered us the job, but both of us said that we weren't interested in working anywhere near, that kick needing prick, again. We wanted to go elsewhere.

Went back to searching, finding nothing. The other dev got a contract job elsewhere. The guy from ABC message me again to say look, we understand your issues, you got fucked around. We can do out best to promise you'll never have to speak to, the abominable jizz stain, again. We'll also offer you a much bigger role, and a decent salary bump on top of that.

Told them i'd think about it. We ended up having a few more calls where they showed me designs of all the things they wanted to do, and plans on how they would raise money if the same thing was to ever happen to them. Eventually I gave in and signed up.

So far it was absolutely the right call. Haven't had to speak to the scrotum at all. The company is run entirely by engineers. Theres no 14 meetings per week to discuss "where we are" which just involves reading our planning tool tickets, out loud. I'm currently being left alone 99% of the week to get work done. and i'm largely in-charge of everything mobile. It was a fucking hellhole of a trip, but I came out the other side better off

I'm sure there is a thought provoking, meaningful quote I could be writing now about how "things always work out" or that crap. But remembering it all just leaves me with the desire to find him and shove a cactus where the sun don't shine

.... happy job hunting everyone!

I know a guy, about 50 years old. He is a self-taught programmer since he was young, and he has always used Visual Basic (never anything newer than VB6).

He once needed to interface with a web application I wrote, so I asked him to send me a POST HTTP request. He didn't know what I was talking about. No notion of REST, sockets, HTTP, nothing.

The he showed me his code. Actually, his codes. He had multiple copies of the project, one for each version, and he even kept multiple variations of the software in different separate folders. He probably doesn't know what "version control" even means.
You think this is messy. You didn't see the actual code (it's a huge application!).

Spaghetti all over the place. Meaningful variable names, what are they? Default names for the controls, like button1, button2, etc, with forms with more than 30 buttons and text fields. This was the most incomprensibile code I have ever seen.

You might think that this guy is just a hobbyist.
No.
He sells his applications. To companies. They are obviously full of errors, but they buy them.

Now, if you're still with me, two questions come into my mind:

- why?? I hate this, because it's impossible to prove to a non-technical person that this is *not* software development.
- how do I know that, to someone else, I am not like him? How can I be sure that I know and will know what needs to be known?

I generally like to separate changes into as many commits as is reasonable. That way I can go back and see how, why, when and what was changed, along with meaningful commit messages.

But sometimes...
Git add *
Git commit -m "changed lots of stuff"

God I hate myself.

Meaningful variable names

One month ago. By email.

Boss: so, this client A has a problem with one of our devices and he believes that it's a bug in the software.

Me: all right then, what happens?

Boss: well, he says that the parameter P in the option menu does not changes the device's behaviour as it is supposed to. I'll forward you his mail. You will find attached an excell file with the results of his test performed with and without the parameter active.

Me: < read mail, read excell file > well, boss, his tests are performed in completely different conditions, how could he expect to infer a meaningful results from this?

Boss: damn, you are right. Send him a test plan and follow up.

Me: < send detailed test plan >

No answer in a week. Then...

Client: hi, there, I made this tests, I attached the excell with the results, can you check the software now?

Me: < read another bullshit filled excell file with none of the suggested test performed >
You know what? Just download the procedures you are using from the device and send them by mail, specifying the software version you are using so we can perform some tests here in the lab and get yo a solution asap.

No response. For a MONTH.

Super Boss: client A still has his problem, how could possibly be that it takes more than A FUCKING MONTH to solve his issue??

Me:...

Code-flow and algorithms are just meaningful doodles, you know 😁

Starting a new project

Me: This time we'll follow all the best practices, do atomic commits and write meaningful commit messages.

Coworker: Yeah! Let's start.

40 commits later.

Me: Why is .idea folder in the repository?

Coworker: Sorry My Bad.

Me: 👿👿👿👿

My anxiety is kicking in again.

I want to build something meaningful outside of work but my mind is blank, I have no ideas to implement, and whenever one pops up in my head, I DDG it, I find that there's someone who already built something similar and I lose all interest.
I want to code, but I'm tired of solving fictional problems.
I miss being excited to learn a new tech, since I know I would ditch it if I can't find anything to build with it.

This is causing me to lose all motivation to code and learn, I really hope this is just a phase ｡ﾟ･（>﹏<）･ﾟ｡

When this week is over, I'd love to see the statistics on posts that contain keywords such as Microsoft. 🙃

Having a boss who thinks he is an artist, designer, programmer, manager, salesman, pr manager, devops engineer and every project lead at the same time, never trusted anyone and reassigned tasks twice a day regardless of what you were working on right now. He was also unable to explain what he wanted or to set any meaningful goals. He also told customers we/he could do everything. One time, when we never made an app before, he accepted to deliver an iOS app within 1 week. ONE WEEK. THATS FIVE DAYS.

The pains of coming up with short but meaningful variable names 😣

!rant
Something that has probably stuck with me the most and has changed how I think about things:

"If you can't think of at least 3 different ways to approach an issue, you do not fully understand it yet."

Background: I'm proficient at PowerShell, I was told that I got hired to my previous job (as DevOps engineer) mainly because of that skill.

Few months after I started I wrote a script to automate some processes. My boss saw the script and told me that it was too complicated, and that I should make it more simple.
Now I'm all into clean code, meaningful names, small functions.
So the code was readable and maintainable.
I asked him in what way is it complicated. He didn't know exactly. (Later I figured that he didn't know of some of the (built-in) cmdlets and functions I used.)
He raised his hand high and made a gesture and explained that I'm "that high (skill? enthusiasm?)", then lowered his hand to a lower position to mark the bottom line, then raised it up half way up and said that he wants me here - in the middle.
After that he added: "This is not Microsoft! and we don't own the 3 other buildings that can be seen from our office window" and pointed at the window.

I was surprised by his comment, I didn't know how to respond.
I've got more stories to share about that workplace.
I can't believe I stayed at that place for 1 year and 2 months.

When a Coursera course is way better than the one offered by your university…
A university student's rant...

I study Electrical and Computer Engineering and during the first semester of the second year I selected an optional course: Web Programming. It was believed among students that the course would be really easy, and it was. All the student had to do was build a very simple website using HTML, CSS and a few line of JS. A website containing three or four pages all of which had to be validated using a markup validation service.

Yeah, sure, I passed the course just like everyone else who bothered enough to spend an hour or two working on the project. Oh, I almost forgot! We had an one-hour workshop on Dreamweaver!
So, by that point, everybody was a front-end developer, right?!

That happened over three years ago, and because of that course web-development didn’t impress me…

Thankfully, the last few months I’ve became interested in Web Development, and I’ve been reading some articles, spending time on smashing magazine, making some progress on FreeCodeCamp and taking relevant courses on Coursera!
In fact, a few days ago I completed the Coursera course “HTML, CSS and Javascript for Web Developers”.
Oh boy, the things I didn’t know that I didn’t know…

<sarcasm>Did you know there was a term called “responsive design” and that there are frameworks like bootstrap?</sarcasm>
Well, I d i d n ’ t k n o w ! ! ! (even though I had taken the university’s course).

I understand that bootstrap was introduced in 2011 and I took the university course in late 2012, but by that time, bootstrap was quite popular and also there were other frameworks available before bootstrap that could have been included in the course! (even today, there is no reference in responsive design in the university’s course).
In just five weeks the coursera course managed to teach me more, in a more organized and meaningful way than my university’s course in a whole semester!

When I started the coursera course I shared it with a friend of mine. His response: “yeah, sure, but web development is pretty easy… I didn’t spend much time to complete that project three years ago!”

That course three years ago gave birth to misconceptions in students' minds that web development is easy! Yeah, sure, it can be easy to built a simple, non responsive, non interactive website! But that's not how the world works nowadays , right?!

A few months ago, in the early days of August, I attended Flock, the Fedora community conference. During a break I spent some time speaking with a Red Hat employee about student internships. He told me, and I paraphrase: “We know that students don’t have a solid background and that they haven’t learned in the university what we need them to!”

Currently I’m planning to apply for a front-end developer internship position here in Greece.
Yesterday I wrote my CV, added university courses relevant to that position and listed coursera courses under independent coursework… While writing those I made these thoughts…

What if that course 3 years ago was as good as the coursera course… all the things I’d know by now…

I'm sure this has probably been posted before, but it never fails to drive me nuts, and customers never stop doing it, so:

Why do end users think "it's broken" is all they have to put into the support ticket?

It's a web app, not a goddamn pretzel.

If the turn signal on your car stops working, do you drop your car off at the mechanic, hand them the keys, and say "its broken, fix it!"?

While I'm on the topic, "I tried to do {x} and it gave an error" is better than "its broken", but still: why do you think what the actual error says would be completely irrelevant, especially when we put in the effort to give you relatively meaningful error messages?

I mean, is "there was a problem sending the email" so utterly gibberish to you that it is indistinguishable from "error: 0x000351e6"?

If so, I'm sorry, but you're too stupid to use a goddamn computer!

My boss gave me a project without any meaningful requirements and asked:
boss: can you finish this in 9 months?
me: well I really can't give you any estimate.
boss: well just do it.
8 months later I summarize all weekly requirements that the client has given and estimated I should be able to finish the project with just 3 months, if only the requirements are ready and not changing from time to time. What a f***ing waste of my time? Why the f*** people do this? And after all this my boss said:
boss: I think we should be able to finish this project faster.
YOU THINK!

I tell a colleague, "Hey, could you make your commits more meaningful? A commit message of '.' helps nobody.".

He then uses 'no message' for his commits.

Also, commits every 30 seconds. I know commit often... But is that really necessary?

Why.

today is 1024,a meaningful day。(≧∇≦)/

whenever my team starts on a new project we're all like "okay we're gonna have MEANINGFUL commit messages this time guys"

*5 hours later*

$ git commit -m "go fuck yourself"
[master a7b9de] go fuck yourself
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 0 deletions(-)

Girlfriend tells me she probably saved a life at work in hospital the other day (she's a physiotherapist).

She asked me how my day was.

Most of it was hunting a typo - for a holiday booking website.

(I am an entry-inter-intermediate level dev)
P = Person

P:Hey Can you build me a POS system for free?

Me: Yea whatever. (because... immediate family member)

P:Ok Great.

Me: *starts working on it.. almost done with inventory control and layouts in one night*

P: When will it be done? and I need it in a full screen window not a browser!!

Me: Soon..and I have not worked in ASP yet. So it will be a full screen browser app.

P: Aww you cant do it fast? You are not skilled enough??? Poor you, you are not good enough. I can do it in a few hours. Just write a C program which stores entries in a txt file. I dont want sql shes-que-el on my system. You dont want to use .txt because it will be harder for you. Poor you.. no skill.

Me: *raging to a level where i turn into kryptonium and burn superman to death but still keeping my calm* You will get it when you get it. Period

Inner Me: GO FUCK YOURSELF. IM DOING THIS FOR FREE SO THAT IT HELPS YOU OUT. NAGGING ME WONT HELP YOUR CAUSE ONE BIT. GO FUCKING LEARN HOW TO CODE YOURSELF AND MAKE IT YOURSELF OR BUY IT FOR A FUCK TON OF UNJUSTIFIED MONEY. IM GIVING YOU A BEAUTIFUL LAYOUT, GREAT APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE USING LARAVEL AND GREAT DATABASE DESIGN WHICH WOULD BE SCALABLE AND PRODUCE MEANINGFUL REPORTS. WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU PREFER A .TXT FILE OVER A WELL DESIGNED DATABASE. WOULD YOU FUCKING OPEN THAT HAMSTER CAGE OF A BRAIN OF YOURS WITH A KNIFE OR A SCREWDRIVER?
IF ITS THAT EASY FOR YOU GO FUCKING DO IT YOURSELF AND STOP BOTHERING ME. I AM TAKING MY TIME OUT FROM FREELANCING TO HELP YOU OUT. I COULD BE SPENDING THIS TIME ON OTHER PROJECTS WHICH WOULD GET ME SOMEWHERE. THE ONLY FUCKING REASON IM DOING IT BECAUSE I MIGHT BE ABLE TO RESELL THE POS (PIECE OF SHIT) TO OTHER PEOPLE IN FUTURE AND MAKE MY SHARE OF UNJUSTIFIED SHIT TON OF MONEY.

When the code is so bad that the only meaningful thing to do should be executing
rm -Rf *; git add -A; git commit -m "bugfix"
and then start the project again.

rant, but not an IT kind... okay, maybe not even a rant, more like depressive rambling:

in 3 days, I'll turn 29.
i'm living with my mom, in the apartment where I was born, in the room i've been living since I was born (with the exception of 2 attempts to move out which together lasted 9 months).

my theoretical monthly income should/could be around 4000€, based on my skills and experience.

but I'm a (manic)-depressive, chronically lonely idiot loser (and the manic phases come more and more rarely in recent years), so
my practical average monthly income fluctuates from 0 to about 200.

i am unable to keep a job for more than 4 months, so after being fired from about 20 or so of them since I was 18, it takes immense amounts of mental and emotional energy to even start looking for one now... so I usually don't.

i've been about 12000€ in debt for the past 8 or so years, half of which is just debt collector fees.
it's kinda funny, for years, i've been unable to solve a debt which theoretically amounts to 3 months of my theoretical achievable salary.

my father, who just left without a word of explanation when I was 18, has decided this is not viable anymore, so I'm supposed to move out by 10th of next month, "either to some cheap rooming house, or under the bridge, I don't care", as he put it.

I can't remember how it feels to exist a single hour without feeling existential dread and dreading each next day, not knowing what to do or if i'll even be able to try and do something, because this feeling is so strong that it often blocks me from being able to do anything. i just shiver most of the time that i'm awake, feeling like you feel few minutes before puking and crying at the same time. and that feeling is my "how are you?", "you know... normal".

i can't remember what it feels to feel any other way and can't even imagine it, and can't imagine that I'll ever achieve any less shit feeling.

literally all of my social contact consists of going out once to twice a month with the only 2 friends and 2 aquaintances I have who have the time and will to spend it with me.
oh, and hiding in my room, avoiding talking to my mom, because each time we talk she just reminds me what a piece of shit failure I am, and tells me how it's not that hard to change it, I just have to stop being lazy and start working for it.

she's... kind and caring about it, which somehow maybe makes it even worse.

i have about 10 almost complete game designs, each of them at least 50% more original and interesting (at least to me) than the things that are coming out for the past 10 years, being lauded as "the most original and unique".

I have been trying to make them, ANY of them, since I was 18, but I always lose all the drive and resolve and energy in like 4 months, because it's like trying to build a city on my own on a deserted island. too big for one person, but there was never anyone to help me. closest I ever got was one of my friends telling me "i've been thinking many times that i'd love to work on some project with you, if I had the time".
and second time, when I actually found an artist I was going to pay, and he was awesome, and after two weeks of me telling him how awesome what he does is and how it fits the project and my ideas perfectly, he backed out saying "i'm afraid I can't do the quality you require from me".

never ever in my life did I get actual help with something I actually wanted or tried to do.

i have no idea how it feels to have someone working with me on something I actually consider interesting and meaningful, on any of the things which I wanted to make, which made me learn programming.

I've learned graphics and animation and everything going into game making pipeline on my own because I realized nobody will ever help me, so I'll have to do all of it on my own.

I've tried to make a kickstarter once, but I started crying hysterically in the middle of writing it, because I felt like a begging piece of failure shit, even more than usual, so I deleted it.

most of people treat me like shit failure unworthy and undeserving of living, precisely as I myself know I deserve to be treated, because that's what I am, but when I ask for permission to kill myself, since I see no other solution to stop being a burden, they get angry at me that I'm just emotionally blackmailing them. when I afterwards ask them "so help me in any way to do any of the projects i want/need to do", they respond they've got no time for that.

when I talk about all of this, I get told to stop whining.

happy 29th birthday, me, a piece of shit who should've never survived this long, who should've never been born in the first place.
yay.

also, I know this is not the kind of crap that's supposed to be posted here, but i've got nowhere else. sorry.

Use Meaningful variable names, they said.

Downloaded Replika, which is an app that gives you an AI that you talk to, learns from your speech and becomes your ideal friend.

An hour in, and I've had better, meaningful conversations with the AI than my two decades of chatting with other humans.

!rant

Got a new job! 🤗
They said one reason they took me was the fact I have a github profile and published some things there... And I never intended this to be the case nor do I think I published anything meaningful there.

The company is awesome, they're open sourcing a lot of their tools/sending prs to libraries/frameworks they use. And one can choose the OS to work with as an employee 👌

Well, if your tests fails because it expects 1557525600000 instead of 1557532800000 for a date it tells you exactly: NOTHING.

Unix timestamp have their point, yet in some cases human readability is a feature. So why the fuck don't you display them not in a human readable format?

Now if you'd see:

2019-05-10T22:00:00+00:00

vs the expected

2019-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

you'd know right away that the first date is wrong by an offset of 2 hours because somebody fucked up timezones and wasn't using a UTC calculation.

So even if want your code to rely on timestamps, at least visualize your failures in a human readable way. (In most cases I argue that keeping dates as an iso string would be JUST FUCKING FINE performance-wise.)

Why do have me parse numbers? Show me the meaningful data.

Timestamps are for computers, dates are for humans.

Joined a new company...
It's been a week since I joined.I feel like shit.
There are over 20 employees, however I didn't had a chance to chat with a single person for more than a minute or two. Not a single meaningful or even a shitty but personal conversation. I'm trying to strike up conversations whenever I can, but there are no possibilities to do so. I think they have a few chat groups where I'm not added. At lunch time they suddenly start running to a guy that gathers the money to buy lunch, i saw that and joined, but I'm 99% sure they are communicating/speaking on some kind of chat.

I joined as a front-end developer, however I'm not sure if I'm a junior or whatever here. On the first day they showed me the system, they are using PHP and jquery + es6, the structure is messy and I'm not used to it It should be MVC-like, but messier, but it's not like anything I have seen. I usually work with opencart / cakePHP style systems. There are js files with a lot of custom funcions and sometimes there are functions that have mixed jquery and es6 inside script tags top or bottom of the view files. There are a lot of code that I don't understand, on the third day they gave me a task - to remodel a view (basically one page in the cms) I did it, but they didn't check up on me untill the next day, I gave them some notes on the task I finished, and I started making some of the code easier to read for myself after I was done. They didn't really gave me a new task, and I don't know what to do, don't have anyone to ask about what to do, because there are only 2 developers here, and the other guy is on vacation. The boss is also a coder, but he's never here and I feel like I shouldn't be asking him stupid coding questions, because you know.. He's a boss. I understand a lot more of their PHP code then their js/jquery. I feel like I'm stupid and I don't know what I am doing here and what I will be doing here in the future. I did move across the country to join this company, and if this won't work out i have a rent contract signed for a year. Today I was looking at the clock for the last 2 hours of the work day and waiting untill I could get out of there. To say that I feeling like shit would be an understatement.

I don't have anyone whom I could ask for coding advice outside of the company. Fuck.I have worked in a few companies before, but there was always an introduction to the staff, and or the working environment and usually there was a person that I could ask questions on the regular. This company is bigger however and I'm not an emotional guy whatsoever, but I feel like I will start crying.

Dim [Dim] As Short

Why you ask? For the glory of satan of course!

a tale of daily frustration:

git fetch
*yup I'm up-to-date ...*
git add -p .
*hack in beautiful patch ...*
git status -bs
*correct branch, didn't forget any files ...*
git diff --cached
*yep, that is what I mean to commit ...*
git commit -m"[TKT-NUM] Meaningful commit message"
git log -p -1
*double-checking ... looks good ...*
git push remote tkt-num-etc

*for a brief moment feel accomplished ...*

*notice typo in commit message ...*

I don't have a funny image or punchline to sum this post up. But know that if you recognise this feeling, then I am your brother in git.

YouTube. Hate and love for it just like I would for an abusive partner.

Ads!
Wanna build a website with Wix? Fuck no!
Wanna manage WordPress over SSH? Fuck no!
.. well I kind of do but a turd remains a turd regardless of how it's maintained. WordPress can go die from a torture as long as the time everyone has wasted on it loading already. So no, I don't give a flying fuck about WordPress' new interface.
Wanna buy a new Samsung phone despite just having bought a OnePlus already? YOUTUBE, HOW ABOUT YOU GO FUCK YOURSELF AND YOUR SHITTY ALGO?!!

Quality videos though, so many engineering videos and all for free. How amazing is that? I quite like them.

But if I try to like a video and particularly the fucking comments on it, don't you fucking dare putting your fat fingers 1 pixel next to the like button, because then obviously you want to reply to the comment and have a pop-up with the whole comment and all its replies, and an automatically popped up text input field, just so you have to tap back 2 times just to try liking the bloody comment again. Rinse and repeat that 2 times at best, 5 times at worst. What's not to like, right?!

God fucking dammit. At least now I know why those random mentions without any meaningful other text are there in most comment sections. Usability over 9000!!!

Whenever something goes mainstream and becomes buzzword there are annoying consequences of it.

First, it’s harder to find anything meaningful about the topic.
Second, suddenly everyone is an expert and web search starts to show not related products like promo codes, stupid videos, tutorials for dumb.
Third, old content that was interesting is lost under pile of shit or gets deleted.

I feel like I’m living in middle ages and before I try to watch something interesting it’s deleted by Spanish inquisition and replaced by some crap.

Most of expert content I have in favorites is returning 404 and youtube videos are deleted or private so from some time I started to backup all content I read or watch and find interesting in public networks.

Fortunately I have couple of terabytes of storage to backup interesting topics but I’m not happy that I’m back to times when I was saving internet page to floppy disk to show it to my friend later.

What a fucking nightmare.

My manager just had a chat with me, following up on our previous conversation. I think in an attempt to get me to stay.

Him: "From the work you're doing, it looks like you're really trying, putting a lot of thought into your code"
Me: I thought I was half assing it...

Him: "You'll learn by coding in new languages"
Me: "I've professionally coded in 8 different programming languages, including the ones we use here"

Him: "We do meaningful code reviews where we try to understand what the code is doing, not like other places"
Me: So, just like every other company I've worked at?

I kinda hate my life right now.

I hate my job: I've been working as a flutter developer for a month and a half (even though I was hired to do backend) and I discovered I don't like frontend, it doesn't give me enough challenges. Every once in a while I have to do something complicated and have fun working, but most of the time it's just boring layout shit.

I can't do any side-projects, everything bores me. I want to get into really low level programming so bad but the steep learning curve makes me lazy.

I don't feel like I'm doing enough. I'm learning quite a bit about flutter, but I don't want to work with that, I hate it, so I feel like I'm just wasting my time. I'd like to work on something complicated and meaningful, like developing flight systems for rockets or whatever, but there's sooo much road ahead of me I just feel like I'm never gonna make it, plus I have to be very smart to do that and I'm starting to think I'm not as smart as I thought I was. I've been programming for almost 10 years now, but I can already see my college friends getting practically on my level in 2-3 years. I can't let that happen and this thought is making me stressed and burning me out. Programming is literally the only thing I'm good at (or at least I think I am), if I don't have that I don't have anything, because I suck at everything else (I'm not exaggerating, I wish I was though).

I can't see friends because of the corona. I've met with friends about 7 times in a year and I havent been with a girl god knows since when. Meanwhile, practically everyone I know is partying, having fun, going to the beach and I'm here, at home, typing this fucking rant and feeling sorry for myself.

I also wanto to get fit but every time I try to do so something happens and I have to wait 2 months in order to start again.

There isn't anyone I can trust enough to share some feelings and thoughts I have and this is eating me up.

I am unhappy and have been like this for a while now. Every once in a while I smile, yes, but most of my day is endless boredom either because of work or the lack of it. I just want to go back to normal, I don't want to think about my future, I want someone to talk to, I want to be able to cry.

I hate this.

i genuinely like programming. it's like solving logical puzzles for me, challenges on a smaller or bigger scale, and this is fun.
i always feel this when working on something on my own, i.e. a full stack project where i take care of everything.

but i'm so sick and tired of corporate software development.
i'm tired of scrum, all these scrum meetings, it feels like they are sucking my life energy away. if at least i had the feeling that i work in a team where everybody contributes, the team work is nice and also project management is aligned.
i'm tired of having too many different tasks in too many different areas or projects and never having the feeling to be able to really concentrate on one thing, to be able to do a job well enough so that i'm content with it.
i'm tired of this feeling that what i'm working on is not meaningful. the feeling that my team is not part of a bigger story where everyone contributes their part and where there is a sense of productive collaboration between teams. the feeling that mismanagement will result in a lot of money being burned, because of work being thrown away or becoming irrelevant, or because of miscommunication, making promises that can impossibly be delivered on.
this feeling that i cannot really improve or fix the ship we are sailing with, but rather being handed a bucket and being told to constantly remove the leaking water and put it back in the ocean, but always at multiple sites of the ship all at once.
i'm tired of being the only female dev and altogether feeling so different from the rest of the team, feeling that i do not belong there.

even though i need to make a living, i just can't imagine anymore to spend so much of my lifetime for something that makes me feel so bad...

Best Practice: variables with meaningful names.
Me: variables named after stuff from the Marvel universe.
End result: Debugging after 6 months. WTF is mjolnir6 ???

Programming challenges:

Easy: Hello World!
Medium: Matrix multiplication
Hard: Artificial intelligence
Impossible: Coming up with meaningful names for variables and scripts...

We're digital plumbers.

90% of this job is figuring out what thing to connect to what thing and then figuring out how to connect them.

Writing the code that goes in-between both ends of the pipe is easy if not trivial 90% of the time.

Meaningful change in this industry is centered around endpoints: contracts, deployments, etc. Nobody needs yet another way to organize and import their leftpad().

Funny how on Facebook (which I left years ago) I used to never get any likes for anything I wrote, even if it was meaningful.
Then I would look at the feeds of my friends and they would get ++'s for mainly useless and uninspired pop-culture reposts or posts of high narcissim.
It's ironic how they praised garbage rather than value.

I'm glad that on Devrant I at least get ++'s, indicating that people can relate to me. On Facebook, people faux-relate based on narcissim and faux-culture.

Shrug.

The effect of the scoring system is interesting.

On Facebook, where I usually spend most of my social media time, I have been training myself to NOT comment unless I really wanna engage, because I have an IRL habit of just talking shit just to hear myself speak that bleeds into my Facebook engagement, which is a character flaw I’m trying to change.

On here though, I will see something I wouldn’t normally respond to and I’ll comment cause I want those ++s.

BUT the quality of my comments on here are generally way “better” (more meaningful, usually kinder, etc) than my FB comments, obvi because I want those ++s and on Facebook I can be as dumb and mean as I want without having “consequences” aside from the obvious social consequences of people thinking I’m an asshole...but on here it kinda forces me to be more mindful of how I’m engaging with people

Init and Hello. My name is git and this is my story.

I just arrived in this system recently by the apt highway. It's not the only way though. Some for example used the npm hype-train, others arrived from the ssh shore. No matter where we came from the next step on our agenda was time to introduce our self at the event destined for all new-comers to the system.
"As many of you I reside in the usr-bin district. I'm really into history and commitment! I like it when people work together, so I'm always eager to bring all branches together."
"But what is it actually good for?", asked Curl, which I already met at the bus station. Many nodded in agreement. It was odd. Somehow I felt not quite at home. All the others seemed so different based on their field of work.
"We have worked here in a really agile environment for ages. There is no need for any kind of strange bureaucracy.", said another voice.
All attempts to convince them from the beauty of history or a little bit of management were unsuccessful. It was just the beginning of a not so interesting stage in my life - to say the least.

Today was another of 'those' days. I live in this community for quiet a while now and unfortunately nothing really changed - at least for the good. I sat on my branch of the tree with all the others around and there was nothing really to do for me. Again. I mean, actually it's true. I have to admit it. There is just no work on this world for someone like me. All the others seem to be so busy, while I just have to sit around and question my own existence. Since I grew tired asking these questions to myself, I stopped it. I can't do a thing actually. That's not how this world works.
"Hey fagit, anything meaningful to add to our delightful conversation?", nginx shouted over to me from another branch of the tree. Before I was able to give an indifferent answer the voice just continued.
"Oh, sorry. I forgot that you have no purpose after all. Well, never mind!"
Everyone started laughing at me. It was not too bad by the way. Actually, this was quite ordinary. These fucktards completely ran out of creativity. If it wasn't for that mere emptiness gaping right above my guts, I'd actually be disappointed. I even got accustomed to the alias 'fagit'. Quiet sad given the fact that i really like my real name. If only someone would mind using it... First too quiet to notice but growing in intensity a rumbling emerged from somewhere deep within the tree. Out of a sudden everyone stopped laughing. The voices slowly faded while the growling from afar grew louder. It had come. Not more than a shadow reached out from the tree and faster than anyone could comprehend nginx was simply gone. Killed in an instance.

Disclaimer: This story is fictional. No systems were harmed in its creation.

When you open a non-minified file with tons of difficult calculations only to see, that every variable is around 1 or 2 letters. :'(

age++;
work++;
learn++;

I hope this year will be as meaningful as this year was... and the best thing happened to me was coming to devrant and having support, warmth and love from you guys.

love ya all

Never knew words like “API” “PHP” “Backend Server” “Objective C” “C++” “Java” can be such a turn on when coming out of a female’s mouth in a meaningful order...

🤫

Bad day. Not in any meaningful way. No deaths, bad news or anything - just fucking annoying.

Naming variables with meaningful names

I'm pretty sure that the technical tests for FAANG are just to prove that you'll bust your ass doing trivial bullshit for them / and that you're a sucker -- instead of actual meaningful skill checks. Is this guy a total sucker who will drink our Koolaid when it's time? Are they wearing Nike? Yes. This is going to be a good investment.

I was down and out once and got a job a Micheal's Art and Crafts store. The application was clearly a mindfuck test. It asked, "If your boss was stealing - would you report them?" BTW - the answer is "No." You only report people below you. I answered in the way I knew the computer wanted me to - and I got the job. Same shit.

Are you subordinate? You're hired.

Rant!

Been working on 'MVP' features of a new product for the past 14 months. Customer has no f**king clue on how to design for performance. An uncomfortable amount of faith was placed on the ORM (ORMs are not bad as long as you know what you are doing) and the magic that the current framework provides. (Again, magic is good so long as you understand what happens behind the smoke and mirrors - but f**k all that... coz hey, productivity, right?). Customer was so focussed on features that no one ever thought of giving any attention to subtler things like 'hey, my transaction is doing a gazillion joins across trizillion tables while making a million calls to the db - maybe I should put more f**king thought into my design.' We foresaw performance and concurrency issues and raised them way ahead of the release. How did the customer respond? By hiring a performance tester. Fair enough - but what did that translate into? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Hiring a perf tester doesn't automagically fix issues. The perf tester did not have a stable environment, a stable build or anything that is required to do a test with meaningful results. As the release date approached, the customer launched a pilot and things started failing spectacularly with the system not able to support more than 15 concurrent users. WTF! (My 'I told you so' moment) Emails started flying in all directions and the hunt for the scapegoat was on (I'm a sucker for CYA so I was covered). People started pointing in all directions but no one bothered to take a step back and understand what was causing the issues. Numero uno reason for transaction failure was deadlocks. We were using a proprietary DB with kickass tooling. No one bothered to use the tooling to understand what was the resource in contention let alone how to fix the contention. Absolute panic - its like they just froze. Debugging shit and doing the same thing again and again just so that management knew they were upto something. Most of the indexes had a fragmentation of 99.8% - I shit you not. Anywho, we now have a 'war room' where the perf tester needs to script the entire project by tonight and come up with some numbers that will amount to nothing while we stay up and keep profiling the shit out of the application under load.

Lessons learnt - When you foresee a problem make a LOT of noise to get people to act upon it and not wait till it comes back and bites you in the ass. Better yet, try not to get into a team where people can't understand the implications of shitty design choices. War room my ass!

How to tell this person nicely, to provide meaningful commit messages?

I know it took me probably for ever to learn it myself, and not all of them are meaningful, but come on ...

Challenge was

Draw something meaningful in 5 min

I draw this
😅

There was a sales manager who was raked with overseeing me and another dev finish a last minute request project. He said at one point to the other dev that he was mad at developers because we understood something that he would never understand.

This same manager would often sit in on estimation meetings and constantly say that we were estimating too high and needed to come up with faster solutions. When we would offer him with caveats of possible technical debt or unintended side-effects/performance issues, he'd want us to go with that solution. He would then complain that we were always wanting to work on technical debt and that our application was slow. He would also ask for very high level estimates for large, unscoped features/apps without any meaningful level of detail, then hold us to the high-level estimated date even after revealing additional features previously unmentioned.

We learned to never compromise on the right solution and to push back hard on dates without proper scoping. They didn't learn, so I and most of the good devs left.

Ffs, I've finally finished a project where I worked with a guy who was the laziest coder I have ever worked with.
He didn't even try to come up with meaningful variable names😒.
Instead of naming a variable label1 (which is already kinda s***) he tried lbl1 but still made a typo so the actual name was ibl1.
AND HE LEFT IT LIKE THAT FOR THE REST OF THE PROGRAM!

my psychologist: dreams are meaningful, they contain important answers
my dreams:

Must nearly every recently-made piece of software be terrible?

Firefox runs terribly slowly on a four-core 1.6GHz processor when given eight (8) gigabytes of RAM. Discord's user interface is awfully slow and uses unnecessary animations. Google's stuff is just falling apart; a toaster notification regarding MRO stock was recently pushed such that some markup elements of this notification were visible in the notification, the download links which are generated by Google Drive have sometimes returned error 404, and Google's software is overall sluggish and somewhat unstable. Today, an Android phone failed to update the Google Drive application... and failed to return a meaningful error message. Comprehensive manuals appear to be increasingly often not provided. Microsoft began to digest Windows after Windows XP was released.

Laziness is not virtuous.

For all computer programs, a computer program should be written such that this computer program performs well on reasonably terrible hardware... and kept simple. The UNIX philosophy is woefully underappreciated.

TEAM PROJECTS IN UNIVERSITY BE LIKE:

You will need to write a paragraph of text, approximately 100 words long.

In order to manage your work more effectively, you must split the paragraph into sentences and each one of you should write one.

Make sure you don't clash with each other, the text is meaningful and it flows nicely.

You have one month: you should meet at least twice a week to discuss how to go about the tasks, review your work and plan ahead.

We will be checking on your progress on a weekly basis.

Most importantly, do not just wait until the last minute and have one person do all the work: that's just silly.

I just wanted to get this off my chest.
There we go, that time is finally coming: all of my friends are starting to look for jobs; we are all about to graduate, but i feel no desire to move forward... I wish i had their optimism, but all i feel is terror and panic every time they bring up the topic...

I have no plan, no idea of what might happen, and i don't feel like i am particularly competent in anything: I do not have much to offer to society, surely not in terms of technical skills: i'm a real shitty programmer with the attention span of a goldfish.
I am passionate about a bunch of topics, but i am not competent at them in any meaningful way: I like reading about x86 Assembly or Operating System design, but if you'd ask me to write them i wouldn't be able to really. Its all superficial, i read these things for fun but i never really accomplished anything.

And i know this is all in my head, that as soon as i find anything its probably gonna be fine, i just wish i had the enthusiasm and drive that people around me seem to have, instead of acting like a little bitch :)

I was talking to a friend of mine(more of an acquaintance really) about our shared interest in Go and how I am trying to see if I can implement it more and more into my daily activities(simple CLI utilities, maybe a web app or two) and he mentioned how much he likes it after being part of a Java shop for such a long time. He said that he got tired of the verbosity of Java and how Go was such a "breath of fresh air"

var i SomeShit
do.SomeShit(&i)
if do.Error != nil {
panic(do.Error)
}
fmt.Println("Could not agree at all")

On how bullshitty it is to say that one switched over to Golang because of the verbosity of other languages, specially when anything meaningful that you might do with the code requires constant checking.
And let us not

forget := lol.bullshit(); forget != nil {
about some of the other bs you get to do
oh look scoped errors
}

.....like I get it man. I like the language, no, It ain't replacing C or C++ for low level shit, not with a garbage collector are you fucking high?
But yes, I do like the language, they got a lot of shit right, the thing is, I feel like I know everything about it already since A) shit is way too simple, simple enough to be used by anyone really and B) other than goroutines this language does not really bring anything new to the table, far as I can tell.

I mean shit. I thought I was at odds with Python disliking syntactical whitespace enough to make me try and not use an otherwise perfectly good lang(Python I love you but hate syntactical whitespace) but Golang really puts me at odds. I love it but dislike it at the same time.

"In software, we rarely have meaningful requirements. Even if we do, the only measure of success that matters is whether our solution solves the customer’s shifting idea of what their problem is." - Jeff Atwood

Ok Im done. I‘ll quit my job in the upcoming 6 weeks.
I have posted about it in the past. I cant imagine doing a job I hate for longer than absolutely necessary if you don’t have people depend on you.
My job is boring, my position redundant, my colleagues are pretentious and pricks, my boss doesn’t care about my work and I am miserable doing something completely meaningless for company I am sure will not survive the next 12 months.

I have floated out my resume to some companies yesterday evening. Do you guys have any recommendations where to look except the typical job platforms? I would like to either have a interesting position as a Fullstack developer gaining more experience with BE or it must be a job about something meaningful. I have already scanned the jobs on all NGOs but of course they don’t seem to need any software developers.

I am fucking done doing stuff that goes directly to the trash can just because some useless PM had a brain fart. My life is too short to do this shit anymore.

Sitting at traffic lights on my way home from work thinking about the programming behind how often the windscreen wipers are triggered, how to store the values of each wiper setting in a meaningful data type, and how to handle the event of changing wiper settings eg. to ensure the wipers aren't triggered immediately when increasing the frequency.

Wish my mind could rest when I'm outwith work but I experience this sort of thing worse after drinking alcohol. Must have a problem.

This whole programming profession sucks! Programmers suck! Managers suck! Companies suck! Products suck!

Why is it so hard to organize your stupid code at least a bit?! No, it’s not deadlines, just write a block of code and give it a meaningful name, a function, a method, a comment, so many options, so little fucks given. Give things a meaningful name instead of whatever came to your mind that moment. There’s no excuse! No, just leave it to the next guy, and he’ll leave his trash for another one. And then we complain and make memes about it. Fuck you all!

There’s no purpose or vision of products, managers sweep problems under a rug, executives do whatever they do, as long as some money is pouring in, just keep pedaling semi-mindlessly. Spin the wheel you little hamsters until you drop, there’s enough hamsters out there.

It’s just a clusterfuck of small, selfish interests and egos, a mud of meaningless and unnecessary problems that need not be there.

It’s not the workload, it’s the stress! The stress of bullshit, and constant problems that can be avoided if everyone did their job at least half-professionally. Not just programmers, everyone!

Fuck today and fuck every piece of shit manager and non-dev coworker that thinks they contribute anything meaningful besides being a fucking idiot and making things complicated. I hope my team, except for the other devs, jumps off a bridge into a valley of dicks and spikes. I hope my client tells them to personally fuck themselves for being such a useless waste of space. Fuck off and die cunts.

STOP sending me fucking videos of the bug you are experiencing. I don't get paid as much as I do to sit around and watch your stupid fucking screen captures for 37 minutes just to find 30 seconds of meaningful information to reproduce something you could have put in a paragraph and emailed to me.

Either you meet me halfway and actually understand the expected outcome and how it differs from what you experience enough to verbalize it, or I ain't fucking fixing your shit. For fucks sake, a 40 minute screen recording with no audio does NOT count as a valid reproduction.

Client: THIS IS CRITICAL, SOME DATA HAS BEEN DELETED, WHAT ZE FUUK HAPPENED, UNDO THIS FAST
Us: so after carefully reviewing the code, related resources and the network traffic we conclude that was never sent in the first place.
*closes issue*

I'm glad we got such a meaningful bug report on the same day a production system started failing, one big deployment that that was like a boss with 3 phases, an unnecessary long meeting and an app developer that that wanted me to break HTTP standards.

Missing those days when videos about latest technology had a meaningful comment section. Now it's 'pewdiepie vs tseries' everywhere.

Is it so hard to comment your code?

I work on collab projects here and there and both the comments and documentation are both awful, nearly always, there are some exceptions.

This is a plea to all those who teach anyone to program. "This performs a loop" is not a helpful comment, nor is "This sets variable x to 1" where the line below is "let x = 1".

The last piece of code brings me on to my next point meaningful variable names. If x is a variable that stores the age of a machine call it ageOfMachine or age_of_machine. Not aom, not x but what it actually is, modern IDEs and text editors will fill this out for you.

Finally documentation, a good friend of mine sent me this quote a while back, I can't find the image but "Documentation is like sex, when it's good, it's great. But when it's bad it's better than nothing." Your documentation should be good, a good pattern to follow is the Node.js documentation, it tells the function, what it does and what parameters it takes.

Anyway rant over; and I'm sure that this applies to people outside of this community only.

The dev in my team did it again, and now with a super meaningful commit message ...

Subject: a rant for devRant

Hello,

Not entirely sure why or when exactly it happened, but after I joined mailing lists I have a pet peeve for people who don't use a proper subject line, or don't use email when I literally made a mail server for that purpose (some organizations really prefer calling apparently). Is it really that hard to summarize a message in one sentence? Hell half the time even the message itself is just a few sentences.

Also the greeting and salutation at the beginning and end of email messages. I find them so redundant. Has anyone ever gotten any meaningful information out of "Hello", "Greetings", "Dear", or something like that? Or "Best regards" or whatever. I get that it's just being polite but it's so meaningless! I really don't like using them anymore. Just a message block and who it came from, that's all it needs to me. Instead pour some effort into the damn subject, the title of whatever drivel you're putting out there! Or replying to an email *only* when the subject matter is still related! Or actually replying to the damn email if it's still that subject matter...

I probably sound like an old man, but seriously.. email isn't a hard concept once you "get it". Anyone can write a halfway decent letter, why isn't that the case for email?

Best regards,
Condor

A great corporate culture, pleasant coworkers, a caring manager, meaningful work, and a good salary. Hmmm. Thank you for reminding me that I have a pretty close to ideal Dev job. I can live with what's missing. 🤠

It took me way too long to understood what I wrote few weeks ago. After looking at the code for few minutes and looking at my db structure, I finally realized. I also instantly remembered that I wrote that "user is shown as ad" comment hoping I will not confuse myself in future. Apparently I failed.

Temporarily added next line of comment to help the future me.

Deep down I know that I should change function name itself to become clearer, more meaningful and easier to understand.

But writing that comment, making those screenshots, combining the 2 images in Pinta and writing this rant is faster than thinking the new name.

MSbuild makes me want to blow my brains out.

I know it's no longer used in .NET Core and all the lucky people that don't have to deal with .NET Framework can happily move on.

But here I am, a complete idiot. Expecting MSBuild to build the exact same way from the CLI as it does if I run a build in Visual Studio. Expecting the build server to consistently produce the same result as if I built my solution locally.

Demanding meaningful earnings and error messages that don't leave me completely perplexed as to what's actually going on in the compiler.

Fuck me and fuck .NET Framework. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Meaningful commit message !

Just watched Avatar 2 in 3D 4DX. This is hands down the movie of the year. Might as well be the movie of all movies. 3 hours of watching and going through emotional rollercoaster and havent been bored. It keeps attention. It was so beautiful. The scenes the scenario the plot the CGI. Everything. I can't believe someone made this. I dont understand how this is possible to be made. How can i come back to this reality now? It felt like i was there, in the movie. A beautiful alien world with magic, life with actual meaning, nature, the wonders of universe. Life can be so much broader than our reality. I know it's just a movie and that reality doesn't really exist. But anything you can imagine or visualize means it can exist. Somewhere out there in this infinitely large universe. Out there in some galaxy light years away or ago. This movie is a brutal masterpiece. This is art. It reminds me to be thankful for what i have. Grateful for who i have. And gave me more reason to withstand the darkest days. Because if i work hard and succeed i might end up in a universe like Avatar. At one point in time as a life form. Somewhere... more meaningful than working like a slave and paying taxes to pedophiles and criminals in our current reality. Beautiful.

If you're a reasonably established dev and looking for a new role, never.. EVER make your CV public on a job board! I put it up for one day, ONE DAY and yesterday I had 42 phone calls, 15 voice messages and about 25 emails. How is anyone supposed to choose a meaningful, suited opportunity in all that! Information overload! And then trying to sort out times for someone you are interested in to phone you and picking up the phone at that time to accidental answer the phone to someone else (a new agent who has some excellent job roles for you!). Fuck this. Immediately took it down and hoping to look and apply to some myself that I like the look of. Don't do it man, unless you're a junior and it can be quite humbling how agency led it is, look for the right job yourself and apply individually! I have been on edge the last few days, especially where I haven't told my current place I am looking yet!

Contributing something meaningful to one of the bigger FOSS projets.

Sometimes I think "I should write a meaningful error message for this exception" and then i remember how useless 99% of the error messages of every compiler / interpreter I've ever had to use and decide "msg ='something went wrong'" is good enough.

When management hire consultants to tell them the same thing you're telling them. It's just more meaningful because they paid more for the information.

Current workload as dev lead:
- 1% actual development
- 2,5% waiting for SaaS to load
- 2,5% cursing company server network connectivity issues
- 5% switching VPNs
- 7,5% pkg management & deploys
- 10% writing JIRA and support tickets
- 12,5% filling in timesheets
- 15% coaching & reviewing a bot coworker
- 19% doing 2FA, refreshing expired passwords
- give up and spend the remaining 25% doing something meaningful

Why the *fuck* did Facebook decide to nag users by constantly reminding them of how dumb and miserable they are by showing the old-ass posts from years and years ago?? I don't want to see some random shotpost i posted 5 years ago, i don't give a fuck!!
How the hell uses this anyway? Who on earth cares about his facebook image so much, that sharing this stuff is actually meaningful?

Maybe i'm missing a point, but again my facebook profile is just a wall of memes and vapid shit that i don't care about.
I'm starting to really fucking hate facebook in every way, too bad its the only real way to contact people here in scandinavia...
This country is full of applefags anyway, maybe i should just pack up and move to a country with a more sensible communication platform :D

Not really trying to, but probably should try to fix this bad, bad habit…

I keep wanting to fix and improve everything - and I keep taking notes, writing action plans et fucking cetera to the point the amount of work that should be done and I want to do is driving me insane. And they should all get done now!

In short, I should really either learn to focus on just one thing at a time for a meaningful period - or just cease to give a fuck. Either could work.

I turned down another women who was absolutely, 100% flirting with me, because, from what I can gather, she was trying to get out of a relationship with her current boyfriend, a military veteran.

I outright ignored her and then when that failed, I made our work relationship 100% about that, work.
Even though I'm friendly with everyone else.

I'm an absolute shit, aren't I? I feel genuinely bad.
I'm not sure if I did it out of a misplaced sense of honor for a dude who obviously has some ptsd, or because I don't feel like I'm able to connect with anyone anymore.

I feel like I'm alone in this world. Not, like, sexually or anything, but more like I don't want to burden anyone with the shit I'm going through. Like a man on a mission on a sinking ship, and it would be wrong to let anyone else on board.
Like a one-man shit-show, all singing, all dancing, driven to one end, with one purpose. And it'd be wrong to let anyone get attached, or invite anyone else in.

Fuck I got so many irons in the fire. I have an ARG in the works, a full game, a social platform that the code and marketing plan is laid out and I'm saving money for, two more games already planned, plus spending an in-ordinate amount of time with my father and sister and mother as they deal with the loss of my sister, plus volunteering to help the homeless, plus working, plus studying.

I barely sleep.

It's just me. I'm like a cruise missile heading to one destination, to some final destination, I just don't know what. And I don't let anyone in, because then they might see how fucking crazy I am, and how crazy my life is, and how crazy my goals are. Thats not a humblebrag. Thats more of a "wholly shit, I'm so in over my head, I'm fucking drowning" type thing. But I'm not giving up, I'm just going deeper.

And it feels like drowning but somehow I'm okay with it. Like I've passed the crux of loneliness, and settled for going for it all, alone, shooting out of orbit, and saying "fuck it all' to everything and everyone. They say "if you got everything you wanted, everything you wished for, you'd wish you hadn't, which is why god isn't a genie". And lately I've been thinking god doesn't exist, or doesn't care, because he's left it all up to me, and I've fucked it up good and proper, and am on my way to either nothing, or everything I've ever wanted.

Is this what happiness feels like? Or suicide?

I don't know. I mean I really don't. I don't want to die. I think I could stop existing and be okay with it. Having achieved at least a modicum of understanding the universe, at least accomplished something small but meaningful.
Or maybe I'm delusional, driven mad with the full comprehension of human floundering against a meandering existence.

I don't fucking know.

I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, so much, that even two weeks feels like a fucking eternity. I don't sleep anymore. When I do, I escape into my dreams, where I can fly, or float, and the people in my dreams tell me I'm living in the matrix and I believe them..in my dreams. Feel it even.

And when I wake up, the feeling persists. Leaves me in wonderland, for hours after waking.

And I have visions, of going homeless, like some buddha, all the time, and then I say "wake up J, you're fucking crazy! You want to go be some couch surfing homeless bum living off other's good graces? get the fuck outa here! While others suffer, schlep it at whatever job they work, day in day out, toil. In this economy? In this inflation? What a dishonest way of thinking. What a dishonest way of dreaming."

And yet I daydream. Because its the only escape there is from all the world has become.

And I bring joy to others, earnestly, vicariously, because its the closest joy I can feel, when I've become numb.

It is this quasi-permanent sense of alienation that permeates my whole world, a sort of invisible force field that separates me from others, even as I reach out to understand them, to comfort them, to smooth the corners off their world, so that they don't become like I have, something not entirely human, but...other.

Often when we meditate, long and hard enough,
at the center that emerges, at the center of ourselves, we find an abyss, a whole universe, devoid of anything, a perfect silence, mirroring back the cosmos, and other people. Observing, silent, irreducible, implacable.

Sometimes I feel like I don't exist. Sometimes I think others don't exist.

Very often I feel like nothing is real. And that I am playing some sort of game. Not like a video game per se, but that there is a bigger pattern, a hidden pattern to it all, just out of reach, and I'm reaching for it but understanding eludes me.

Not that the universe has made me for some special purpose, but merely that the universe observes me specifically, for no special purpose, other than that it can, whatever trivialities may impede or push forward my life.

As if the universe were bored.

Question - is this meaningful or is this retarded?

if

2*3 = 6
2*2 = 4
2*1 = 2
2*0 = 0
2*-1 = -2

then why doesnt this work?

6/3 = 2
6/2 = 3
6/1 = 6
6/0 = 0
6/-1 = -6

if n/0 is forbidden and 1/n returns the inverse of n, why shouldn't zero be its own inverse?

If we're talking "0" as in an infinitely precise definition of zero, then 1/n (where n is arbitrarily close to 0), then the result is an arbitrarily large answer, close to infinite, because any floating point number beneath zero (like an infinitely precise approximation of zero) when inverted, produces a number equal to or greater than 1.

If the multiplicative identity, 1, covers the entire set of integers, then why shouldn't division by zero be the inverse of the multiplicative identity, excluding the entire set? It ONLY returns 0, while anything n*1 ONLY returns n.
This puts even the multiplicative identity in the set covered by its inverse.

Ergo, division by zero produces either 0 or infinity. When theres an infinity in an formula, it sometimes indicates theres been
some misunderstanding or the system isn't fully understood. The simpler approach here would be to say therefore the answer is
not infinity, but zero. Now 'simpler' doesn't always mean "correct", only more elegant.

But if we represent the result of a division as BOTH an integer and mantissa
component, e.x

1.234567 or 0.1234567,

i.e. a float, we can say the integer component is the quotient, and the mantissa
is the remainder.

Logically it makes sense then that division by zero is equivalent to taking the numerator, and leaving it "undistributed".
I.e. shunting it to the remainder, and leaving the quotient as zero.

If we treat this as equivalent of an inversion, we can effectively represent the quotient from denominators of n/0 as 1/n

Meaning even 1/0 has a representation, it just happens to be 0.000...

Therefore

(n * (n/0)) = 1

the multiplicative identity

because

(n* (n/0)) == (n * ( 1/n ))

People who math. Is this a yea or nay in your book?

So uh, after a gruelling job search, somehow I managed to bypass junior level and became a lead full stack developer on a meaningful project (not at a startup, either). 🤯

I hate when one of my cw starts to flood the chat, especially the #general. It goes like:

CW: hey
CW: anyone have a pendrive
CW: ?

Me: I have one (and tells him where he can find on my desk)
Another CW: I have one too

CW: thanks, I'll get the one from <Another CW>
CW: hahahahahaha

You don't need to write a whole thesis in a single message, but at least you should guarantee that each message have some meaningful information, not just "hey", "?" and "hahaha"

Slack is not MSN.

Who should and when it would be a good time to tell him this is a waste of attention?

Intern - adds commit message like "added two files"

Me - Hey Intern, I've added commit lint, please don't disable precommit hooks.. so let's follow standard commit message format

Intern - commits like "feat(app): fix changes"

*later*

Me - Hey Intern, please commit with short meaningful messages like what actual changes were made

Intern - commits like feat(app): whole long story of what he couldn't do and some changes..

Me - 🤦

When I was starting with Python at work I was very confused about identifying what is function, class, module, object instance, etc. just by name so I asked my colleague with PHP background to follow PEP8 and use meaningful names for objects. He's like okay and the next day I find this:

class vv(models.Model):

php's type hints are completely broken.

Why is strict mode not the default? Why does it completely break down for arrays? (You have to abuse phpdocs to get any meaningful hints but you still lose any runtime checks.) What's with union types? (I know, php8 now has them but what took you so long.)

Young 22 years old me, hungry for excitement of real world issues, full of whimsical witticisms, writing bootstrap scripts that'd spit meaningful information like...

> $ run bankhack
> Shutting down the old world...
> Checking world population...
> Initializing particle accelerator...
> Exploding sun...
> Entering hell...
> Starting daemons...
> Starting lesser daemons...
> Burning logic...
> Restoring balance in the universe...
> World peace achieved.

What a naive douche he was.

!dev, depressing topic warning

-----PADDING START-------
Thanks for the update and for me to get a new one and it was the same as the one I have is a trial run to the store and get some rest and feel better soon and that is why I am asking for a friend to talk to you about your day and I don't know yet if I can get it to me by the end of the day I was in the shower and then I will be able to make it
--------
Do you ever feel there's like no real point to life, like you could die tomorrow, you wouldn't really care?

I feel life is ok, I've got it a lot better then others in my situation at least financially. But in terms of relationships probably not and I don't have much interest in developing any.

And looking at the future, I just don't see it going anywhere or getting any better? I could be easily replaced, forgotten, not doing anything meaningful.... And the only other people that would notice and remember are my parents.

I enjoy doing things but in the long run they make no difference. I can have short term goals like maybe for the next few weeks, months but if someone asks where do I what to be a year from now, what do I want to accomplish, there answer is "I don't know and I don't care"...

And I guess that's the point, each day sorta just feels like whatever...

1) search a project on github
2) read its documentation and decide if it's worth it
3) read contribution guide lines
4) contribute
5) start at 1)

So someone complained to my bosses boss about some internal page where I collected some of our own funny git commit messages, because they were not "meaningful", and I had to take down said page.

Fuck that narrow-minded seriousness, why be so German? If we have to debug multi-threaded C++ programs, we need that bit of fun and sarcasm to stay sane. But probably that someone is a member of some of these "professional" Agile teams that waste a day a week with fucking retros, sprint planning or other mind-crippling meta stuff, then evaluating frameworks and tools, while we are doing motherfucking programing.

-start a startup ground up
-make more connections with people
-doing a meaningful life
-and... Finding love of my life as well

Fuck timesheet
It's bad enough someone fucking disturb you in the middle of great thoughts. What's worse, you're QUESTIONED where the fuck your time was spent. So you need to work out how much time you have been disturbed, and put in the fucking timesheet!
What a fucking joke! As if we have too much time for meaningful stuff.

I stop doing things I don't care about.

If it's low motivation to do my job, I look at why. Am I tired? Do I dislike the kind of work? Does it feel like it's not going to help?

First, I make sure I'm actually doing alright. Usually, I'm just tired or maybe sick. Then I'll raise my concerns to management. There's a good chance that I'm not working on something meaningful and that we should change that.

Did my first meaningful work in angular in many moons at work today - also apparently the first time I've touched it in 4 major version releases lol.

I typically find myself specializing in API and service architecture lately, so I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I got back into the swing of things with the front end in general. Granted the app itself has been very neatly organised and written which goes a very long way to helping one find their way quickly.

That said, I really can't admit to having any desire to stay working in angular for very long. Yes, I think it speaks well to the framework itself that I can pick up immediately going from version 8 to 12 without any issue, but also, I think angular kinda sucks ass*.

* Opinion should be taken with a grain of salt coming from a .NET dev. This does not reflect the views of .NET or other devs in general. User results may vary.

When an Oracle procedure from commercial software uses very meaningful variable names...not! SMH

You had two additional weeks to improve your project.

You could research different marketing strategies to increase revenue. You could add some new features to attract more users and ensure your existing users are satisfied. Finally, you could optimize performance to make your UI quicker.

But you’ve chosen to write some unit tests. Now that two weeks are gone, you got no new features, no performance improvements and no new marketing strategies while your competitors got them all.

Tests caught obvious bugs that can even be caught by static typing, but you by definition couldn’t write tests that’ll catch unpredictable bugs, so they are still present.

After six months you realize you have to rewrite a major part of your project because your project (surprise-surprise) has to chase market needs to stay relevant. Your tests are thrown into trash along with your old code.

“Having trouble with code quality? Write a lot of tests. And I mean a *lot*. Test every file in isolation. Mock as many imports as possible.

When you're done, your code will still be bad, but now your tests will make sure it's impossible to improve anything in any meaningful way.”

When your CSE partner always overrides your perfect self committing code like lastItem, rightFrontItem and just renames them all to x, n, and z. Now it looks like shit and can't understand it as easy! I guess fuck giving variables meaningful names! Lets just make chaos in a world of order.

I really hate it when I work on a user story consisting only of a cryptic title: "Implement feature X".

Esp. when I missed planning during a holiday and can only wonder who in their right mind would have given it 3 points.

Why thank you.

Sometimes, just pulling the acceptance criteria out of somebody's nose takes days. It doesn't get better once I realize that not all external dependencies have been properly resolved. It's worse if there are other departments involved, as then you get into politics.

Me: "We are dependent on team X to deliver Y before we should have even planned this ticket. I'm amazed that our team was even able to estimate this ticket as I would have only raised a question mark during estimation meeting. We could have thrown dices during estimation as the number would have been as meaningful and I'd have more time to actually figure out what we should be doing."
Dev lead / PO: "I understand. But let's just do <crazy workaround that will be live until hell freezes over> temporarily."

It's borderline insane how much a chaotic work flow is branded as agile. Let's call it scrum but let's get rid of all the meaningful artefacts that make it scrum.

I embrace the removal of the audio jack on smartphones, and I like listening to music via my Bluetooth headset.

Yet why, for fuck's sake, is a double tap on the headset's play button mapped to Call Redial?

I have lost count how often I called someone by mistake. How is such on action a meaningful default? What were they thinking, were they thinking at all?

Everytime I turn on the goddamn headset, I take extra care to ensure that I don't doubletap yet it still often happens by mistake.

I rarely call people anyways on my smartphone anyways.

At the job interview to my current position I was asked the classic ”where do you see yourself in X years” question. I replied something along the lines of that I see myself staying if I feel good where I am and long as I have the opportunities for professional growth.

Now with recent developments it’s looking like those opportunities will be bygone pretty soon. I work on a massive legacy codebase, where with the scarcity of current dev resources and the apparent difficulties of procuring additional personnel to the dev dept, it does look like we’ll be limited to maintenance and simple small scale improvements with no room for meaningful projects. Theoretically I could ask to be moved to another product, but realistically that would both be a dick move well as unlikely to happen, as other projects are fully staffed (and made with technologies there’s easier to find personnel to).

As a consequence of this perceived imminent halt in opportunities for self-development at work, I’ve been starting to look for greener pastures. There are some intriguing ones out there. But then I come here, read some rants and comments, and it always becomes abundantly clear I’m good where I’m at right now. So what of it, if my position won’t enable growth out of the box for a while? I can always develop my skills and knowledge on my free time, and besides, the stagnation won’t last forever... right?

is soo cool when people is up to joke around with my bad jokes.

-- Talking with a coworker about a new button in a results table --

dude: hey jhon, I'll name the button 'SHOW RESULTS' and the endpoint will be named that too. cuz there is a 'SHOW STATS' already

me: dunno, use something more meaningful, this is about unparsed results, right? so what about...

me: unparsed results ? unparsed stats ?

me: another one bites the dust? show must go on?

me: innuendo?

me: pick one 8D . But I think innuendo is pretty descriptive

dude: ok

me: seriously, 'show unparsed stats'

dude: got it

-- then the dude sends me the screenshot --

me: LOL, 8D

me: you got my respect man (_ _)

If there's one thing I'd gladly kill with fire, then pass it over a steamy steamroller, then burn it a tank of hot fluoroantimonic acid, is every fucking Java library that returns null instead of throwing a meaningful exception.
Is it really that difficult for you to throw an exception anyway, then let ME figure out if I can ignore it or not?
Thanks to you, now I have to do super messy reflection things just to figure why did you return a null.
I'm not your fucking psychologist trying to pull your inner secrets. But I have to be, for the sake of stability of my app. Which already has its own mess of problems on its own.

I think I may be someone's wk101soon given how things are going for me.

So I get shipped over to the new offices to do some work. Initially, I was supposed to be updating SQL stored procedures.

That I can handle, well my task is now to build the skeleton project for a web API in core 2.0 using domain driven design and onion architecture which the rest of the team will use.

Okay, I don't have any experience in any of that at all. And god bless the team lead explaining some stuff to me. But it's going to take more than a 20-minute chat here and there for this stuff to sink in.

And being told just to build it how you think it should be isn't great advice when I'm trying to figure out how the systems work.

Every other API project I look at is structured completely different from one another so looking for patterns has failed.

I'm fucking stressed out every bit of information I'm getting on whats potentially happening with my job im getting second hand from people. Because I can't access my emails while off-site something I'm repeatedly flagging.

Every job advert is painstakingly making it clear how out of date my skill set is (or lack of). Evidently, I've been way too lax, and this has been a kick in the bollocks I'm not likely to forget.

If we're being evaluated on performance to see who they'll keep, then I've failed at the first hurdle.

Life lesson for those in education, don't be this knob head here and get comfortable when you land a job. Just knowing about the tech that's commonly used in your field does jack all study it.

Not a structured/meaningful rant and shits probably not as bad as I see it. I've only chewed through one fingernail after all.

I know some C++. What should I really learn next Python or Java?
I want to be able to make a meaningful project as soon as possible.(with Java as I can see I have SpigotPlugins, and with Python I have Telegram Bots).
Sorry for asking for advice here but idk what to do.

- finish that ML course I started back in June 2017
- get more experience from my job
- improve my code quality even better.
- build some cool project in Java ( there's this company I need to impress, but I haven't found any good idea to implemen 😣)
- be more active on Hackerrank
- do some stuff here and there
- use that freaking LinkedIn to create some meaningful connections
- contribute to an open source project
Hmmm ...
... yeah that's a lot ... *sigh*

CircleCI:
- Ensuring work has meaning: "Let's make yet an other dashboard webapp that going to replace all of our dashboard webapps which we made to replace all of our dashboard webapps"

-Solving interesting problems: "Let's make this with java 15 instead of java 14!!!! Also add graphql to ADD interesting problems nobody had since the nineties!"

- Gain meaningful value from talent: 'Bitbucket and the whole pipeline died fourth time this week, I'm going to drink a coffee or two..."

- Developers in flow: "Joe went to have a lunch around 11:00, you probably should not look for him until 14:30."

- Bring buying decisions closer to the engineering team: "The boss tried to bring up the pros and cons between aws and azure... The police eventually had to break the ensuing fight in the meeting room. The survivors reported things got truly out of hand when someone mentioned line-endings"

- Bring leadership closer to the engineering team: "There was yet an other agile coached hired, when she asked how should we measure velocity one of the lead devs managed to actually wake up and told her that the wifi is still pretty fucking slow"

Overall, pretty good actually compared to the alternatives, which is why there's so much competition for dev jobs.

On the nastier end of things you have the outsourcing pools, companies which regularly try to outbid each other to get a contract from an external (usually foreign) company at the lowest price possible. These folks are underpaid and overworked with absolutely terrible work culture, but there are many, many worse things they could be doing in terms of effort vs monetary return (personal experience: equally experienced animator has more work and is paid less). And forget everything about focus on quality and personal development, these companies are here to make quick money by just somehow doing what the client wants, I'm guessing quite a few of you have experienced that :p

Startups are a mixed bag, like they are pretty much everywhere in the world. You have the income tax fronts which have zero work, the slave driver bossman ones, the dumpster fires; but also really good ones with secure funding, nice management, and cool work culture (and cool work, some of my friends work at robotics startups and they do some pretty heavy shit).

Government agencies are also a mixed bag, they're secure with low-ish pay but usually don't have much or very exciting work, and the stuff they turn out is usually sub-par because of bad management and no drive from higher-ups.

Big corporates are pretty cool, they pay very well, have meaningful(?) work, and good work culture, and they're better managed in general than the other categories. A lot of people aim for these because of the pay, stability, networking, and resume building. Some people also use them as stepping stones to apply for courses abroad.

Research work is pretty disappointing overall, the projects here usually lack some combination of funding, facilities, and ambition; but occasionally you come across people doing really cool stuff so eh.

There's a fair amount of competition for all of these categories, so students spend an inordinate amount of time on stuff like competitive programming which a lot of companies use for hiring because of the volume of candidates.

All this is from my experience and my friends', YMMV.

Finally got a project I’ve been working overtime on for the last 18 months or so ready for a 1.0 launch! Still some features we want to build in for down the line, but it’s nice to finally hit a meaningful milestone...

Its only 5 months left till my graduation,and my mind is getting fucked up.

The current startup i am interning with is a lot stressful and demanding. I am giving my 1000%, only because this is the only place to.. how can i explain..
if world is a race of horses, then i am the tortoise and these guys are the only slow horses that i think i can catch up with. These people are your next door app dev startup, releasing multiple apps fastly and trying to hit the magic recipe. I am not sure if i am learning anything besides how to search stuff on my own and produce faster results. But still, better than nothing.

However i am a far sighted person and am not sure if this is the future that i want.

I am currently giving 14+ hours to this startup as an intern (including all the traveling from home). The only relaxation i could make in future is to shift near the office which will save me 3-4 hours but then what?

I am currently running out of goals. My childhood was shit, but i want to make my youth meaningful.

Leaving my home means leaving the only 2 people (mom/dad) currently present actively in my life.

My college would be over by then, all my colleagues are all on their own ,going into different companies. We don't meet now leave alone meeting then. I am also not much into( or have the time to be into) online games and anime where those guys meet/chat
Not that i was able to gather courage to get into some relationship or talk to people till now. I don't have much talks with my officemate or gals coz 1 :i am so full of work and (2) i simply can't

Currently i spent my whole Saturday sleeping and watching movies and Sunday doing the office work.

Is this going to be my whole working life now? I often think other people's jobs as less demanding but i don't think that would be the case.

I just want to be in touch with people, the people that i know, the people i can trust somewhat.

When i was in 7th std, life was so easy. There was this just 1 irritating thing called school that we had to attend.
After that, we used to run down to nearest park in our shorts and cricketbats or rsckets, play till our heart's content, then sit in some friends house for hours and talk shit , then come back home , do some irritating study, then go back to watching television and playing online games with those same friends , while deciding the birthday party of some guy and game plans for the next day.

Damn

To make a semi-meaningful (or really any kind of) contribution to the Linux kernel. Like just to leave something useful behind in general.

This is gonna be a long post, and inevitably DR will mutilate my line breaks, so bear with me.
Also I cut out a bunch because the length was overlimit, so I'll post the second half later.

I'm annoyed because it appears the current stablediffusion trend has thrown the baby out with the bath water. I'll explain that in a moment.

As you all know I like to make extraordinary claims with little proof, sometimes
for shits and giggles, and sometimes because I'm just delusional apparently.

One of my legit 'claims to fame' is, on the theoretical level, I predicted
most of the developments in AI over the last 10+ years, down to key insights.
I've never had the math background for it, but I understood the ideas I
was working with at a conceptual level. Part of this flowed from powering
through literal (god I hate that word) hundreds of research papers a year, because I'm an obsessive like that. And I had to power through them, because
a lot of the technical low-level details were beyond my reach, but architecturally
I started to see a lot of patterns, and begin to grasp the general thrust
of where research and development *needed* to go.

In any case, I'm looking at stablediffusion and what occurs to me is that we've almost entirely thrown out GANs. As some or most of you may know, a GAN is
where networks compete, one to generate outputs that look real, another
to discern which is real, and by the process of competition, improve the ability
to generate a convincing fake, and to discern one. Imagine a self-sharpening knife and you get the idea.

Well, when we went to the diffusion method, upscaling noise (essentially a form of controlled pareidolia using autoencoders over seq2seq models) we threw out
GANs.

We also threw out online learning. The models only grow on the backend.
This doesn't help anyone but those corporations that have massive funding
to create and train models. They get to decide how the models 'think', what their
biases are, and what topics or subjects they cover. This is no good long run,
but thats more of an ideological argument. Thats not the real problem.
The problem is they've once again gimped the research, chosen a suboptimal
trap for the direction of development.

What interested me early on in the lottery ticket theory was the implications.
The lottery ticket theory says that, part of the reason *some* RANDOM initializations of a network train/predict better than others, is essentially
down to a small pool of subgraphs that happened, by pure luck, to chance on
initialization that just so happened to be the right 'lottery numbers' as it were, for training quickly.

The first implication of this, is that the bigger a network therefore, the greater the chance of these lucky subgraphs occurring. Whether the density grows
faster than the density of the 'unlucky' or average subgraphs, is another matter.
From this though, they realized what they could do was search out these subgraphs, and prune many of the worst or average performing neighbor graphs, without meaningful loss in model performance. Essentially they could *shrink down* things like chatGPT and BERT.

The second implication was more sublte and overlooked, and still is.
The existence of lucky subnetworks might suggest nothing additional--In which case the implication is that *any* subnet could *technically*, by transfer learning, be 'lucky' and train fast or be particularly good for some unknown task.

INSTEAD however, what has happened is we haven't really seen that. What this means is actually pretty startling. It has two possible implications, either of which will have significant outcomes on the research sooner or later:
1. there is an 'island' of network size, beyond what we've currently achieved,
where networks that are currently state of the3 art at some things, rapidly converge to state-of-the-art *generalists* in nearly *all* task, regardless of input. What this would look like at first, is a gradual drop off in gains of the current approach, characterized as a potential new "ai winter", or a "limit to the current approach", which wouldn't actually be the limit, but a saddle point in its utility across domains and its intelligence (for some measure and definition of 'intelligence').

DO NOT EXPORT GPG KEYS _TEMPORARILY_ AND ASSUME THAT THEY'LL BE IN THE ORIGINAL LOCATION AFTER EXPORT!

I learnt this lesson the hard way.

I had to use a GPG key from my personal keyring on a different machine ( that I control ). This was a temporary one-time operation so I thought I might be a smart-ass and do the decryption on the fly.

So, the idiotic me directly piped the output : `gpg --export-secret-key | scp ...`. Very cool ( at the time ). Everything worked as expected. I was happy. I went to bed.

In the morning, I had to use the same key on the original machine for the normal purpose I'd use it for and guess what greeted me? - *No secret key*

*me exclaims* : What the actual f**k?!

More than half a day of researching on the internet and various trials-and-errors ( I didn't even do any work for my employer ), I finally gave up trying to retrieve / recover the lost secret key that was never written to a file.

Well, to be fair, it was imported into a temporary keyring on the second machine, but that was deleted immediately after use. Because I *thought* that the original secret key was still in my original keyring.

More idiotic was the fact that I'd been completely ignorant of the option called `--list-secret-keys` even after using GPG for many years now. My test to confirm whether the key was still in place was `--list-keys` which even now lists the user ID. Alas, now without a secret key to do anything meaningful really.

Here I am, with my face in my hands, shaking my head and almost crying.

==============
Getting Feedback Rant!
=============

When "this is simpler" feedback results in a function of 500 lines of code.

When I get "don't do X" in the feedback. Thank you very much. What do you want me to do instead?

Unclear feedback.

When the feedback giver changes his mind after I applied the changes!

When applying the feedback introduces a bug.

Simply opinionated feedback that is not enforced by any tool or backed up by any facts.
Please find something better to do in life.

Unactionable feedback.

"Consider X"
I will not consider thank you very much.

"Verify this works"
Duh..

When the feedback giver knows something that you don't.
I know this is a legit case.. still annoying.

"I disagree with the feature"
Go argue with the PM, not relevant to me, thanks!

=====================
GIVING FEEDBACK RANT
=====================

I rewrote the system. Please review it.

No need to review, just approve.

I will change this as part of the next ticket.

I would like to keep it the way it is.
lazy ass..

You can't test this.
It's impossible to test this.

No need to test this.

There's no point to test this.

I'll test this on production.

Not sure why this is working..

Please document this..
Because documentation is like a thing, you know.

Oh, this code is not related to this PR, I just don't want to open a new branch for such a small change. ignore it.

Ignore this.

This will be meaningful in my next change.

changed my name!

from awruh to aysentur now... can be spelled out better. I hope so at least, lmao.

my old name was created due to lack of creativity but the need of a username, so I smashed my keyboard... and that was what came up. aysentur has some more thought in it though not something meaningful.

new name old me

I do not have anywhere near enough energy to contribute to anything in a meaningful way today

What are the best conventions I should try to get my boss to send the team to? He said we have a budget for a few events, but other than the fun ones (WWDC, Google.IO, etc) I have no idea which ones have actual, meaningful content.

Any suggestions?

Aside from simple programs I wrote by hand-transcribing code from the "Basic Training" section of 3-2-1 Contact magazine when I was a kid in the '80s, I would say the first project I ever undertook on my own that had a meaningful impact on others was when I joined a code migration team when I was 25. It was 2003.

We had a simple migration log that we would need to fill out when we performed any work. It was a spreadsheet, and because Excel is a festering chunk of infected cat shit, the network-shared file would more often than not be locked by the last person to have the file open. One night after getting prompted to open the document read-only again, I decided I'd had it.

I went to a used computer store and paid $75 out of pocket for an old beater, brought it back to the office, hooked it to the network, installed Lunar Linux on it, and built a simple web-based logging application that used a bash-generated flat file backend. Two days later, I had it working well enough to show it to the team, and they unanimously agreed to switch to it, rather than continue to shove Excel's jagged metal dick up our asses.

My boss asked me where I was hosting it, as such an application in company space would have certainly required his approval to procure. I showed him the completely unauthorized Linux machine(remember, this was 2003, when fortune 500 corporations, such as my employer, believed Ballmer's FUD-spew about Linux being a "virus" was real and not nonsense at all), and he didn't even hesitate to back me up and promise to tell the network security gestapo to fuck off if they ever came knocking. They never did.

I was later informed that the team continued to use the application for about five years after I left.

There's only three endgame situations I can imagine: Become fuel for AI's projects, become some kind of pet or archived memorabilia thing stored in a vat of amniotic fluid, or merge brain and be human-AI hybrid.

Don't know if the concept of "job" is still meaningful in any of those scenarios.

Open software:
Error message: Failed to load x..

Why not tell:
Error message: Failed to load x. Please reinstall software.

or
Error message: Failed to load x. Remove cache folder located in "drive/somewhere" and try again.

or
Error message: Failed to load x. Please recreate x by using tool y and try again.

if software tells you no meaningful message and you have NO idea how to solve it.. it is one of those annoying things you have to deal with.

Why can't I just create features....

Ugh, don't even get me started on the state of modern communication! It's like we're living in a world where everyone's attention span has been replaced by a goldfish. I mean, seriously, have you noticed how people can't seem to put down their phones for more than two seconds? It's like we're all addicted to this constant stream of mindless information, and it's driving me insane!

And don't even get me started on social media. It's a breeding ground for narcissism and superficiality. Everyone's so busy curating their perfect online personas that they've completely lost touch with reality. Likes, shares, and comments have become the currency of self-worth, and it's just pathetic.

And don't get me started on influencers. What exactly are they influencing, anyway? A generation of kids who think the height of success is being Insta-famous for doing absolutely nothing? It's a joke! We're valuing the wrong things in society, and it's messing with our priorities.

And let's talk about the sheer amount of misinformation out there. It's like we're drowning in a sea of fake news and alternative facts. Critical thinking seems to be a rare commodity these days, and people are just swallowing whatever narrative fits their preconceived notions. It's infuriating!

Oh, and let's not forget the endless stream of notifications. I miss the days when you could go for a walk without being bombarded by a constant barrage of beeps and vibrations. Can't we just have some peace and quiet for once?

I swear, if I have to endure another conversation where someone is more interested in their phone than what I'm saying, I'm going to lose it. We're losing touch with the real, meaningful connections that make life worthwhile, all in the name of technological progress. It's time for a reality check, people!

Fuck my weekend..waste my time playing moba vainglory which i should be doing something more productive and meaningful..fuck you procrastination..

I feel I need to write some side project summary somewhere.

So here it is about 3 months later:

- deleted 90% of code I created during last 3 months
- rewrote backed 5 times
- 200 lines POC still waiting to put in any meaningful architecture on frontend
- frontend part after aurelia, next, gatsby, react I think it would be vue powered by nuxtjs
- forced myself to buy food for whole week and don’t go out (except go running ) before I finish at least what I wrote on whiteboard

Now some positive news:

- there is not much left to be fucked up, removed or unnecessary added
- I think I got a plan
- this is probably first side project that makes me happy for such long time
- there is some probability it would help people and this is what I want to do in my life

Most important is that I know it would take at least half a year to do basic version of it and I don’t care.

Wish me luck so I can put some sneak peak after next 3 months.

A formal systems modeler that iterates all provable theorems given the rules of the system and your premises. This would be completely and utterly useless since it doesn't aim to answer any specific question, just tries to answer every possible question. Since any meaningful formal system is pretty much guaranteed to have infinite provable theorems, this is really just a computerized automated fidget spinner

They say you can have work that is good, fast, and cheap, but you can only pick two.

Well now you can have a job that pays ok, is fully remote, and is meaningful, but you can only pick two.

Of course many times we get work that does not satisfy two of the three and there are many jobs that don’t satisfy any of those three. But I’m just saying if you are in a position to have some choices about your job.

Everytime I get a call from my society's security guard saying"Sir, you got a courier"... I'm like **devRant, is that you 😍😍**

...then it's always some stupid Amazon delivery my roommates ordered.😐😐😐

🎵🎵🎶🎶
....waiting for devRant to come, wishing I have strength to stand... so meaningful show-offs in plan, but it's out of my control...

If I know more UX than our designer does, I will do everything in my power to make them feel as small and minuscule as possible until they can actually contribute something meaningful and not a utter time waster to the team.

my friend: i have landed a job at a top tech company, without experience on their tech stack, through a referral with our mutual friend

me: happy for them, but also seething as when im referred through the same friend i dont even get to the screening process

the pain of being weak, shitty at your job, and lacking meaningful experience being stuck at a meh company for years

the universe will torture me, and never be so merciful as to just put me out of my misery

Is there a limitation of how much I can commit in git each day in a separate 'feature-branch'?

Cause, I had to explain to a team member (somewhat senior than me) why I committed 9 times in a single 8 hours task(s) (according to him where it was two separate tasks done in a single day).

When I said, I prefer to save my progress in a small commit (at least try my best to write meaningful commit)", I turned out to be a stupid team member. 😔

Work/life balance doesn’t exist!

I have no personal life outside what I do. My creative expression. It heavily influences my every decision and makes up who I am, and it is not possible to draw the line where my creativity ends and my personal life with my partner, friends and stuff begins. Coincidentally, it is also my “job”.

The day my creativity stops will mark the end of what makes my life meaningful.

"Nobody can tell you if what you’re doing is good, meaningful or worthwhile. The more compelling the path, the more lonely it is. " - Hugh Macleod

i don't understand what would be termed as "relaxing" for me.
when i was in college , i watched a lot of movies on romance, bromance and friendship. being from a very angry , isolated family with bitter relationships from relatives, we had almost 0 people to interact with.
i personnally was also very different from society and struggled making friends.

as of now i did have somewhat come over this problem and have a good number of "known people" (atleast 500+) that i can categorise into'
- A just people with whom i shared a situation( college, office, tutions)
-B people with whom i have spent my free times in those situations (aka friends, and free time = lunch breaks, seat sharing, projects with them, etc)
-C people with whom i spent some time willingly( aka close friends from college, tutions and home, with whom i played cricket, went on partying/touring places , etc)

-D people whom i liked but never got a love back( aka girls to whom i told i like them. they mostly belonged to category C but eventually went to category A)

previously the category C people were special for me and i would weave my life around them. like all those bromance and friendship movies? these are the guys with whom i would do that. world tours and awesome weird shit? these people will be their in the pic... i would wish them on birthdays, i will call them every few days, go meet with them , have a bite, plan trips, movies , etc...

but today i feel am so done with everyone. i feel like everyone is so fake and forgetful, no one is worth my attention. i can easily forget wishing them birthdays or calling/meeting them every few weeks, because i don't want to or care about it.

friendship , from what i have realised, is just a means of dealing with a task in a group. it just provides a herd immunity and herd advantage . and once you learn how to survive alone, you don't really see a point in it. after coming out of college i was alone in the world, as my friends were from different fields. before college, i thought these were the guys with whom we will be living as F.R.I.E.N.D.S, not just in terms of relation, but rather in a symbiotic way: each one helping each other.
today, i feel criingy just thinking about it.

no friend will remember you for more than a year if you die now. everyone will move on. and in the struggling phase that me and my friends are right now (20-30s), we don't even need to die to forget our friendships.
my so called friends have wished me less on my birthdays than the lifeless apps i have on my phone.

so neither i am expecting someone to do something for me, nor do i think i want to do anything with anyone

------
so back to the problem, i don't know how will i find some relax or meaningful time anymore.
i am always up for trips and one of the first person to say yes to plans.

once upon a time i had this realisation that in a trip, we can enjoy 3 things:
1. the people with whom we are
2. the place we are visiting : the locals, the foods, the nature
3. the mode of travel : car on highways, bikes or flights above the clouds , or some memorable train journeys, etc.

but lately so even that seems to be not working out.
- the people are shit
- places feel like somewhat same everywhere . it's either : rocks/mountains or snow or water or buildings and population. it's just a temporary change of scenary and doesn't really gives a feeling of peace. same for mode of transport.

if i rule the going out part, the things that remains is to enjoying your job, home family and daily life. that i do , but that's the thing that creates an environment of "bored-out"-ism in my mind.

i don't know what i am looking for. the only thing i have not experienced is that class D of people. to have a token of faith/respect/appreciation/love from a non blood related person. to have someone with home i will not feel "bored out" when am planning a journey with them.

mathematically , it seems so far fetched and crazily impossible. like if get bored out and loose trust on people whom i shared most of my life after 50-60 meets, how can i be not bored, and be unhappy with a person to whom i have to see each day?

but since this happens for most of the couples, i will say the mind is the biggest and the most fantasizing mystery of human body ❤️ 💔

Unlimited time is impossible... But I don't wanna ramble.

The one thing that I absolutely miss in my kind of work is something that does exist in dozens of flavors and each existence promises to solve some thing...

It's "bug tracker" / "time management" / "ticket management" / "board" / "kanban" or what ever pervert method you prefer software.

I haven't seen a decent one.

I'd think I'd want to build one - it would be definitely an all time consuming effort, since I would be in dire need of specialists.

The thing with nearly all of the solutions is that they lack ... an associative mindset.

Simply put, what we humans can.

The longer a project exists, the more it's housekeeping (guess that's a better word for it) turns into maintenance nightmare.

I remember quite well the joy of puzzling together eg Jira / Bugzilla / ... complex search formulars trying to find the needle in a planet of hay.

If you're read so far and have had similar experiences, think about how nice it would be if you had a mixture of AI and BI doing exactly that.

BI / Business Intelligence to get meaningful statistics is possible, but without AI it's a lot of work.

The AI would need to do several things...

- Match information (eg version XY was released at XY, so each bugreport after XY belongs to version XY and higher if no version matched)

- Tag and categorize (crashed / faulted / fried / ... - tag crash)

- "do the mundane work": ask nicely if the marching / tagging and so on was right, ask for missing info, require feedback etc.

There's a lot I could write more about that topic. But that's the gist. ;)

I don’t want to write paper/ run test to produce meaningful numbers

Anyone want an image like this?

Just tell point me to the image, a set of text and I will do it for you

Please I’m bored

This is the mandalorian using his lines from season 1

On the topic of having to make decisions as a dev that shouldn’t be made (solely, at least) by devs…

There’s a lot to like in my current work environment: I enjoy being around my colleagues, I get to do a variety of tasks, and many of them interesting to me and/or great learning opportunities, the pay doesn’t suck and so on… there’s also not much pressure put on the dev team from other parts of the organisation. The flipside of the coin is that nobody who should express some kind of vision as to how we should develop the product further does so.

Me and my fellow devs in the team are so frustrated about it. It feels like we’re just floating around, doing absolutely nothing meaningful. It’s as if the business people just don’t care. And we are the ones ending up deciding what features to develop and what the specs are for those etc. and I really don’t think we should be the ones doing that.

One would think that’s a great opportunity to work on refactoring, infrastructure, security and process improvements and so on - but somehow we get bothered just enough by mundane issues we can’t get to work on those effectively. Also, many of the things we’d want to do would need sign-off from the management, but they are not responsive really. Just not there. Except for our TM, but they don’t have the power neccessary… at least they are trying tho…

Would you rather give meaningful name to your services or cool sounding names like aws greengrass?

WTF?
Just found this code:
"It is assumed that all 'static final String'-Attributes of this class are a key in the property file (which is validated by reflection)."

SO REFACTORING YOUR FUCKING MAGIC NUMBERS WITH A MEANINGFUL CONSTANT MADE THE APP CRASH. ASSHOLE.

I am just student looking for job, and got this pre interview test:
Develop an Android or iOS app with login and password input field, download button, place for image we prvided.

... reading further:
What we are looking for in the code ?
internal quality:
-consistent formatting of the source code
-clean, robust code without smells
-consistent abstractions and logical overall structure
-no cyclic dependencies
-code organized in meaningful layers
-low coupling and high cohesion
-descriptive and intention-revealing names of packages, classes, methods etc.
-single small functions that do one thing
-truly object-oriented design with proper encapsulation, sticking to DRY and SOLID principles, without procedural anti-patterns
-lots of bonus points for advanced techniques like design patterns, dependency injection, design by contract and especially unit (or even functional or integration) tests

external quality:
-the app should be fully functional, with every state, user input, boundary condition etc. taken care of (although this app is indeed very small, treat it as a part of big production-ready project)
-the app should correctly handle screen orientation changes, device resources and permissions, incoming calls, network connection issues, being pushed to the background, signing deal with the devil :D and other platform intricacies and should recover from these events gracefully
-lowest API level is not defined - use what you think is reasonable in these days
-bonus points if the app interacts with the user in an informative and helpful way
-bonus points for nice looks - use a clean, simple yet effective layout and design

... I mean really ? and they give me like 2 days ?

So I've been tinkering with this idea since this morning:
There should be a dictionary for developers, to help give meaningful names for variables, functions.

With some pipe like interface to narrow down possible names,

"Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful." - John Maeda

I just found a class in the codebase which was named "Ariadne". Coz it was responsible for holding the information of where you are on the site wrt the homepage. Talk about giving meaningful names. There was no other documentation whatsoever. You know you've serious code quality issues when you expect fellow developers to know entire stories from Greek mythology to understand the code.

Write meaningful unit tests! Unit tests are like micro documentation for your code that you can validate in seconds.

Am I weird if I decline lucrative job offers just to have a job that is fun and kinda meaningful even if I don't push my limits here, but they really can use my expertise? On related note, is there a bag of money that would convince you to do some boring job in corporate environment working on some fucked up internal systems of some fucked up bank? I found out that twice my current salary is not enough but tempting. Am I weird?

I should try to put ascii arts of pepe memes instead of meaningful error handling messages in my code, this way I would know for sure if people are actually not just patching fucking try catch silence everywhere instead of doing proper code.

I should probably do the same with documentation as well while being at it.

I find goals for developers to be pure busy work and almost impossible set meaningful ones.

You can't set ticket based goals, because one ticket may take a week or an hour. You can't really set learning goals, because how do you measure 'learning Svelte'? And if that was your goal, what'd be the point of the outcome?

You can set goals like, ensure all tickets have at least one unit test... but then you get tickets that need to get out yesterday and you get people knocking on your door while you're trying to create meaningful tests.

But we often have a meeting to teach everyone how to set goals, then we have to sit and invent goals that satisfy someone in the org, then twist our usual daily work into some BS about how we're working towards the goals in 1:1s and then the whole thing is forgotten by H2, if not sooner. Just to be resurrected in Jan/Feb of next year.

I'd argue to say that committing often, even if the commits aren't always meaningful, has saved me numerous times from bad code gone awry.

It's winter and it's quiet. Too quiet. My shitty job has me sitting here, waiting for work to appear. I could be at home working on something dev related and fun and meaningful to the progress of my life but no, I have to be here and I have to "look" productive for the bosses. I hate this shit, it's like prison, except I get paid, so I should be thankful. I can remote into my PC at home but I already got snapped for that, now I'm paranoid and afraid to try use this shitty downtime in a productive way.

Well, guess I better go sweep the already swept floors again to maintain the illusion of "work" for my penny dripping masters.

QQ having nothing to do is worse than too much to do.

Today the product designer (like he calls himself) on my team decided we should not use urls containing more meaningful information in our web app as absolutly necessary. It would be easy to use RESTful Urls displaying more details about the current navigation in the app with angular. But he thinks that would go against the "app feeling" and customers might think it is "just a website". Bookmarks, browser history, a useful "back" button in the browser and more power to the user "might be confusing" and "it's better for markting purposes". -.-
Well, if he thinks so... I made my point clear and he ows me beer if this feature is ever requested.

* Good salary
* Interesting work (ML in my case)
* Respects employees
* Startup culture
* Somewhere I can make a difference
* Doing something worthwhile (green energy/healthcare/etc)
* Freedom to try and fail

Make your code available for your team members, please.

So we're working on this robotics project using ROS, a framework that enables multiple nodes in a network exchange their functionality among each other through tcp connections. Each node can be implemented and executed on your own machine, and tested with dummy inputs, but in collaboration they make a robot do fancy stuff.

The knowledgebase needs data from the image processing unit, providing this data to others with semantic context to high level planning, which uses this semantic data for decision making and calling the robot manipulation node with meaningful input, to navigate the robot's components in the environment. We use a dedicated machine, which pulls the corresponding repositories and is always kept configured correctly, to run each node, such that everybody has access to each other's work when needed.

So far so good. We tried to convince the manipulation guy (let's call him John) to run his code on our central machine, not a week, but since the first day, 5 months ago. Our cluster classification has been unavailable for 2 months, but my collegue fixed that. We still can't run the whole project without John's computer. If his machine blows up we're fucked.

Each milestone feels like a big-bang-test, fixing issues in interfaces last-minute. We see the whole demo just moments before our supervisors arrive at the door.

I just hope he doesn't get hit by a truck.

I started down my career path to make games. I have never really made anything good. I think I am finally fed up with not doing this. So I am going to be working on selecting a game engine. I want 3D, I want to experiment with voxels, I want a permissive license, I don't want something huge, I want to contribute back in a meaningful way, it needs to support 3D. So after looking around I found Godot. Another programmer who lives near me uses this as well.

Does anyone else have some good positive experience with game engines for smaller projects? I have played with UE4 and Torque3D/2D. I don't like the bloated feel of UE4 even though its a very cool engine. I didn't like their install system at all. T3D is old and not up to date.

In my job - I have nothing meaningful to do and it drives me fucking insane, I'm pulling my hair out of boredom. Got nothing to do that makes me proud at the end of the day. I'm going through Lynda courses all day... Bored. Out. Of. My. Mind. Can't quit either because the pay is too high. I'm stuck. Shit. Crap. Damn it :-(

Short names for the short living variables and good and meaningful name for long living ones because they'll be with you for long-long time. They are family.
I hope you get the f***g point 😠.

"Averice - a serial novel"

2021 - found on the remnents of an old 'youtube' server rack.

A gaunt but handsome man walks into the view finder. Adjusts the camera. "Hi guys and girls." he smiles weakly. rubs his blonde unshaved stubble, running his hand over his mouth, inhaling as if trying to find the right words.

"How can I say this. god. ...americas fucked and rapidly going down the shitter,
college is a fucking scam,
all success in the modern day is based on fraud, bullshit, mythmaking, and "who you know."

we're on the verge of a new cold war, the merger of the fed and the treasury combine with negative oil is the legit death signal of the petrodollar, we're gonna go through a *50% haircut* in living standards and a doubling of taxes on *everything* in the next six months, the tech bubble is gonna burst taking with it half the industry jobs overnight, the credit bubble will burst even as the fucking stock market climbs higher, a quarter or more of all retail will shut down leaving empty assets turning every state property market into the equivalent of fucking detroit. MAD as a protective doctrine is dead with the spread of hypersonic weapons so enjoy living with the constant threat of being obliterated without warning, my entire generation basically has no meaningful or stable future to look forward to, and none of us have really had an actual, genuine say in anything involving society for decades."

He exhalled visibly on camera, as if exhausted by the demons of anxiety he'd poured forth, a torrent of fears, uncertainties, and revelations like the tormented ghost of christmas past

A long pull from a bottle of southern comfort.

"look. we have an out of control intelligence apparatus that are in their operation more orwellian than the real life stasi ever were, a government at both the federal and state level thats made of millionaires and billionaires who give no fucks at all except for their own power, out of control and absolutely dogshit-corrupt *local* leaders, nothing is audited, nothing is meaningfully transparented, rampant fraud, destruction of evidence, witness tampering, railroading, intimidation, violence, threats of violence, skyrocketing cost of living, skyrocketing spending, skyrocketing taxes, skyrocketing policies of total control by police, skyrocketing homelessness, fatherlessness, poverty, political corruption, drug abuse, massive politically funded thinly veiled state propaganda, collapsing and decaying infrastructure, the loss of all tradition, culture, community cohesion we might have had, and on and on and on and on.

and all I want right now is to get my dick sucked. drink a beer and blow my motherfucking brains out.

and when people start fighting in the streets over some bullshit and it turns into race riots, because the motherfuckers in the media serving wallstreet always make it about race or some stupid shit like that, I wont be in america to put up with it.

do us all a favor. when you're hanging bankers, hang some fucking journalists too. they never tell the truth. doesnt matter which side they are on
they only divide people and advocate for more of the same bullshit, expanded state powers, more federal dollars, more workers for their campaign, more privileges. they're fucking cancer. yes even your favorite journalist. they're a tumor on society.

our government has become hostile to us even being *alive* anymore. it has for me become intolerable, and in time I have grown to hate it.

there is no way to change it. no way to salvage it. I cannot see any hope for the future anymore. And if you search yourself I know many of you feel the same."

He took another long pull from the bottle.

"we no longer have a voice in america and no means to air our grievances peacefully.

theres nothing in it left worth saving when it all can be taken away at a moments notice by a deaf and hostile bureucratic government. I should have voted for bernie last year. At least he would have destroyed it.

many of you will disagree with this sentiment, thinking things can still work out. because you still have your creature comforts. your apartment which you cant afford. your car with its maintenace bills and monthly payments you've fallen behind on same as half the country now out of work, but in a short few months, a year at most, you will learn what I have learned, and the reason I drink, what I knew about as early as june of 2019, that this is it. this was as good as it was ever going to get. and that the good days, the best days are behind us. that all that you hold dear could be taken. all that you worked for, was already gone, and you just havent realized it yet. I've set this to autoupload once it's done recording. I built a company just to watch the people who dont want any of us to succeed burn america down around it. Im done. Goodbye america."

The man got up from his chair, camera still recording, and left. Only the red flashing dot remained, the only witness to the silence.

Tech Twitter is a fucking joke, unless you're a somewhat accomplished programmer, wrote something interesting / useful, or at the least have contributed anything meaningful that isn't just a repository with Markdown documents in then I don't want to see your fucking stupid inspirational quotes or words of encouragement with thousands of damn retweets. The circle jerk is frankly just unbearable.

There are plenty of developers that you can learn a lot from and that's great, and I don't want to put new developers down, but you're really not in any position to be giving advice or motivational monologues, you're still new, or worse yet, you've literally just started. Behave yourself.

I'm convinced they're all just LARPers who jerk each other off and shut people down when they have "naughty" opinions. They spend more time writing articles about HTML tags or some aspect of JavaScript you can just get from MDN and get a million fucking applause for it. Maybe you'd be a better programmer if you actually did some programming.

Okay I'm done

ISO floating point numbers are essentially wrapped in a hardware-level monad because the normal meaningful values aren't closed over basic arithmetic so conceptually wrapping everything in Maybe using the 'infectious sentinel value' NaN leads to substantial speedups.

With this in mind, I think high-level languages that have a Maybe should use those and have the language-type float refer to a floating point that isn't NaN.

I don't have any experience in teaching, but I'd venture to say that teaching anything is hard. For most subjects, teaching has been refined over thousands of years to be easier and meaningful. Not CS. As has been mentioned by many people CS is a very new subject when compared to the likes of maths, for example, and education systems haven't been able to cope with it adequately (nor should they be expected to).

That the CS industry is rapidly evolving certainly doesn't help matters, but in reality that shouldn't really be that big of a problem (at least in earlier years of education). The basics of computer systems and programming don't really change that much (please correct me if I'm wrong) and logic stays the same. Even if you learn stuff that's a bit out of date it can still be useful and good lessons should be able to be applied to new technologies and ideas.

Broken computers is a big inconvenience, but a lot of very useful things can be done without a computer, and I should think the situation is a lot better than it was 5 years ago. What I think would be good, instead of trying to use broken computers would be to get students to set up and use a raspberry pi each; you learn about something other than windows, learn how to install an OS and you don't need that much computing power for teaching people computer science.

I think the main problem is a lack of inspiring teachers. Only a very few teachers will be unable to get you through the exams if you put in the effort, but quite a lot of the time students don't put in the effort because they can blame it on the teacher.

My solution would be to try and get as many students into computer science as possible and the rest will follow: more people will become teachers, more will be invested in the subject, more attention will be payed to the curriculum.

That's not to say I don't agree that many of the problems that have been mentioned need to be fixed for CS education to work properly, just that there is no way that I can see to fix them currently without either creating more problems or some very rich person giving a load of money.

This has gone on a lot longer than I expected so I'll stop now.

you know i see plenty of evidence I was alive all this time extending past the year 2030 at least the problem is certain people fucked up everything.

they twisted what would have been a meaningful life around because they're garbage that believe in nothing and like playing games to feel like garbage more in control that are actually alive themselves, when they're not.

Get the requirements cleared, create stories and tasks for them, decide what you wanna do everyday for the rest of the sprint, and then procrastinate. Give a half meaningful update in every stand up so that it seems like you kind of know what you're doing.

The Pressure of last minute deliveries gets the blood pumping so hard that you don't need any other stimuli.

Seriously though, clear requirements and expectations and peaceful music

Having a lot of bad experiences while working as intern in startups and about to join a MNC, i wanted to share my work life balance and technical demands that i expect from a company. These are going to be my list of checkpoints that i look forward , let me know which of them are way too unrealistic. also add some of yours if i missed anything :

Work life balance demands ( As a fresher, i am just looking forward for 1a, 2a and 8, but as my experience and expertise grows, i am looking forward for all 10. Would i be right to expect them? ):

1a 8 hr/day. 1b 9h/day
2a 5days/week. 2b 6 days/week
3 work from home (if am not working on something that requires my office presence)
4 get out of office whenever i feel like i am done for the day
5 near to home/ office cab service
6 office food/gym service
7 mac book for working
8 2-4 paid leaves/month
9 paid overtime/work on a holiday
10.. visa sponsorship if outside india

Tech Demands (most of them would be gone when i am ready to loose my "fresher " tag, but during my time in internship, training i always wished if things happened this way):

1. I want to work as a fresher first, and fresher means a guy who will be doing more non tech works at first than going straight for code. For eg, if someone hires me in the app dev team, my first week task should be documenting the whole app code / piece of it and making the test cases, so that i can understand the environment/ the knowledge needed to work on it

2. Again before coding the real meaningful stuff for the main product, i feel i should be made to prepare for the libraries ,frameworks,etc used in the product. For eg if i don't know how a particular library ( say data binding) used in the app, i should be asked to make a mini project in 1-2 days using all the important aspects of data binding used in the project, to learn about it. The number of mini tasks and time to complete them should be given adequately , as it is only going to benefit the company once am proficient in that tech

3. Be specific in your tasks for the fresher. You don't want a half knowledgeable fresher/intern think on its own diverging from your main vision and coding it wrong. And the fresher is definitely not wrong for doing so , if you were vague on the first place.

4. most important. even when am saying am proficient , don't just take my word for it. FUCKIN REVIEW MY CODE!! Personally, I am a person who does a lot of testing on his code. Once i gave it to you, i believe that it has no possible issues and it would work in all possible cases. But if it isn't working then you should sit with me and we 2 should be looking, disccussing and debugging code, and not just me looking at the code repeatedly.

4. Don't be too hard on fresher for not doing it right. Sometimes the fresher might haven't researched so much , or you didn't told him the exact instructions but that doesn't mean you have the right to humiliate him or pressurize him

5. Let multiple people work on a same project. Sometimes its just not possible but whenever it is, as a senior one must let multiple freshers work on the same project. This gives a sense of mutual understanding and responsibility to them, they learn how to collaborate. Plus it reduces the burden/stress on a single guy and you will be eventually getting a better product faster

Am i wrong to demand those things? Would any company ever provide a learning and working environment the way i fantasize?

My client wants me to "help increase sales" by applying seo voodoo. For over two years they didn't even have Analytics. Now, after 12 days they're asking me what do I make of the results. Like that's a meaningful amount of data for analysis.

Why is my test not failing? The actual and the expected json is completely different? What the fuck!?!

It says:

static::assertJson($expected, $actual);

right there.

Oh wait.

Nevermind.

`static::assertJson` only checks for any VALID json string that I always provided in with my own expectation m)

Use `assertJsonStringEqualsJsonString` instead.

What.

Who needs meaningful defaults.

(I would claim that `assertJson` should be defaulft for string equalness, and assertValidJson should be for any Json validation. But you are free to disagree.)