Software requirements

note to self: do not use super glue on your keyboard

note to self part two: do not listen to the internet and use nail polish remover to get super glue off your keyboard

On my way to my first job interview ever! Applying for a Linux Support Engineer position.

Let's nail this 😎

CS Teacher: *provides shitty code written in (I kid you FUCKING NOT) Microsoft Word, sans font*

Me: *Submits beautiful, fully working and commented code*

Half a point off because I didnt write how many points the assignment was worth at the very top of the code.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME YOU CUNT GOBBLER?! YOU JUST **HAD** TO TAKE THAT HALF A POINT OFF, DIDNT YOU? MAYBE YOU'RE INTIMIDATED BY THE FACT I DONT USE MICROSOFT WORD TO WRITE C++?? God, I hope you take a nail gun to the eye.

Sometime it feels like I'm surrounded with idiots.

Got a Ticket:

Support: Please delete installation ABC from Server D.

Me: Checks everything. Installation is on Server E. Asks if this is correct?

Support: Just follow the instructions!

Me: Okey dokey. If you want me to be a hammer the installation is a nail... Drop database, Remove all files. nuke K8s resources

Support: Why did you delete the installation ABC? You should delete XYZ!

Me: Cause the ticket told to delete ABC on Server D and YOU told me to follow your instructions!

Support: Yeah but we just reused an old ticket. We wanted XYZ deleted!

It's not a big deal I can restore the shit but I hate it if a day starts with this kind of shit!

Today.

Last night someone detonated an improvised nail bomb at a concert venue in downtown Manchester. 22 dead and 59 injured (many life threatening).

I'm working from home as my home is listed as a safe haven.

I'm not sure how much, if any, work I'll get done.

If you're in Manchester and need anything let me know.

It's all very much process:

Check everyone I know is ok
List house as safe space
Buy food
Keep passing information around to those who need it

No real time to think about it, just stay in the "response" mode.

If programming languages where weapons...

1. C is an M1 Garand standard issue rifle, old but reliable.

2. C++ is a set of nunchuks, powerful and impressive when wielded but takes many years of pain to master and often you probably wish you were using something else.

3. Perl is a molotov cocktail, it was probably useful once, but few people use it

4. Java is a belt fed 240G automatic weapon where sometimes the belt has rounds, sometimes it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t during firing you get an NullPointerException, the gun explodes and you die.

5. Scala is a variant of the 240G Java, except the training manual is written in an incomprehensible dialect which many suspect is just gibberish.

6. JavaScript is a sword without a hilt.

7. Go is the custom made “if err != nil” starter pistol and after each shot you must check to make sure it actually shot. Also it shoots tabs instead of blanks.

8. Rust is a 3d printed gun. It may work some day.

9. bash is a cursed hammer, when wielded everything looks like a nail, especially your thumb.

10. Python is the “v2/v3” double barrel shotgun, only one barrel will shoot at a time, and you never end up shooting the recommended one. Also I probably should have used a line tool to draw that.

11. Ruby is a ruby encrusted sword, it is usually only used because of how shiny it is.

12. PHP is a hose, you usually plug one end into a car exhaust, and the other you stick in through a window and then you sit in the car and turn the engine on.

13. Mathematica is a low earth orbit projectile cannon, it could probably do amazing things if only anyone could actually afford one.

14. C# is a powerful laser rifle strapped to a donkey, when taken off the donkey the laser doesn’t seem to work as well.

15. Prolog is an AI weapon, you tell it what to do, which it does but then it also builds some terminators to go back in time and kill your mom

All credits go to Vicky from damnet.com

Work at a pro Microsoft company.

CEO wants an app so I explain that we will need a Mac to build the apple version of the apps. Refuses to buy us a Mac. For two years this goes on. Out of nowhere a new employee asks for the same Mac and the CEO goes out and buys $2000 without even thinking. We fought to the nail for a Mac for two years so we could do our job...they get one just for being new. My entire team feels completely insulted and betrayed

It's Friday!

Working From Home. Living the Dream.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail!

This was something which my tech lead used to tell me when I was so obsessed with nosql databases a few years back. I would try to find problems to solve that has a use case for nosql databases or even try to convince me(I didn’t realise it back then) that I need to use nosql db for this new idea that I have, without really thinking deep enough whether the data in question is better represented using an sql schema or not.

Now, leading a team of young developers, I come across similar suggestions from few of my team members who just discovered this new and shiny tech and want to use it in production projects.

While I am not against new and shiny, it’s not a good practice to jump right in to it without exploring it deep enough or considering all the shortcomings. The most important question to ask is, whether some of the problems you are trying to solve can be solved with the current stack.

Modifying your stack requires more than just a week’s experience of playing around with the getting started guide and stack overflow replies. This is something which need to be carefully considered after taking inputs from the people who would be supporting it, that include operations, sysadmins and teams that are gonna interface with your stack indirectly.

I am not talking about delaying adoption by waiting for long list of approvals to get some thing that would bring immediate value, but a carefully orchestrated plan for why and how to migrate to a new stack.

Just because one of the tech giants made a move to a new stack and wrote about it in their engineering blog doesn’t mean that you need to make a switch in the same direction. Take a moment to analyse the possible reasons that motivated them to do it, ask yourself if your organisation is struggling with the exact same problems, observe how others facing the same issue are addressing it, and then make an informed decision.
Collect enough data to support your proposal.
Ask yourself again if you are the one holding the hammer.
If the answer is no, forge ahead!

Mission: automate scrolling to test a project.
Step 0: nail clippers and coaster

Software development process

Laravel is the worst framework ever.

Everything has to be made convenient and easy. That sounds amazing, because developers want to save time, worry less about boilerplate code, right? No more constructors, no more dependency injection, fuck all the tedious OOP shit... RIGHT?

It does one thing well: Make PHP syntax uniform and concise through easily integrated libraries such as Collection and Carbon. But those are actually not really part of the framework... just commonly integrated and associated with Laravel.

The framework itself is completely derailed: You can define code in a callback in the routes file. You can define a controller in the routes file. You can define middleware as a parameter to the route, as a fluent method to the route, you can stack them up in a service provider. Validators can be made in controllers, Request objects, service providers, etc. You can send mail inline, through Mailable objects, through Notification objects, etc.

Everything is macroable, injectable, and definable in a million different places. Ultimate freedom!

Guess what happens when you give 50 developers of various seniority a swiss army knife?

One hammers in a screw with a nail file, the other clips the head from the screw using scissors, and you end up with an unworkable mess and blunt tools.

And don't get me started about Eloquent, the Active Record ORM. It's cute for the simple blog/article/author/comment queries, but starts choking when you want more selective and performant queries or more complex aggregates, and provides such an opaque apple-esque interface which lets people think everything is OK, when in reality it's forcing the SQL server to slowly commit suicide.

!dev
!!rant
!!rooting while drunk

I got drunk last night and painted my nails. I bought a really pretty shade of purple that should match one of my favorite shirts, and it's my last day at the office today (EVER; lease is up), so dressing up is a great idea, right? I'll feel better and more confident and it'll make everyone miss me.

Except. I was drunk.
And for some reason thought painting them in the dark was a great idea.

Oh, they look horrible!
and apparently I don't own any nail polish remover, so.

Today's going to be the best day ever!
😄😅😢☹

Looked at my finger nail after coding all day and thought "This nail needs some border-top-left-radius and border-top-right-radius tuning..."

Enough CSS for today.

Some clients are a real patience test.

Client:
"I want to be able to edit every detail on every page of the whole website"

After site is coded, and admin page is available for page edits, they send requests like:
"please update the text on page x"

Barbecue tools

"Any fool can write code that a computer can understand.
Good programmers write code that humans can understand."

— Martin Fowler,
Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

Nail it!

Intelligence and ability cannot be measured by education.

I have a client who asked a Master in Computer Science to develop a small system, for querying product title and their code. The guy used python, vanilla js, and... Txt file for the "database". Then my client asked me to integrated this in... WordPress.

This was in 2016. And idiot as I'm, I agreed and adapted his code to use php and a database.

April this year, my client said they are still using the python system to add new products all this time, in parallel. And wanted to update the WordPress with the data.

- No problem! - I said. Just send me the SQL file.

So the Master in CS sent me a SQL coded in ANSI. I asked for the SQL again, but with a more appropriate encoding. He took 1 month to reply back, and said it would be better if I get rid of the database and just use the txt file for querying.

This is outrageous.

I really hate people who are educated but completely useless.

Client: Hi there, we worked together I few months ago and loved what you created for us! We have another job and would like to see if you are available?

Me (1h later): Sure! Let me know more details about this new project.

Client (15min later): Oh, sorry, since you took so long to respond, we've decided to choose another freelancer. Thank you anyways!!

Me: ...

Estimated a project would take 30h. Ended up working 110h.

I DON'T FUCKING CARE IF WE'VE ALREADY DISCUSSED THIS, IT FUCKING CAME UP AGAIN DIDN'T IT?! SO WE CLEARLY DIDN'T NAIL IT THE FIRST FUCKING TIME.

Well, this did not work because It was used on a screw. It should have been a nail instead.

1. No more coding on paper! Why can some already write essays on laptops but programmers are stuck with "analog"?
2. No vendor lock-ins! Teach free, cross-platform development, not VB.NET.
3. No more professors stuck in the eighties! If all you know is 6800 assembly, GTFO. I heard NASA was hiring...
4. Enforce code style consistency, proper documentation and even VCS for larger projects
5. Algorithms -> scripting -> programming. Don't quickly explain the basics, then throw students straight into Java.

Hi I am new here!
My friend told me that devRant has a great community, he told me to post here and see what happens...

My macbook air sort of exploded. I was working on it when suddenly it made a pop sound, turned off and exhaled a smelly smoke. This machine has 2 and a half years.
I called apple support but they said the smoke is OK since there wasn't any fire, and I should take it to a repair shop.

Oh well.

Client: hey ***, happy birthday can you help me fixing....
Me thinking: hell no, i deal with yall fuckers 364 days a fucking year and yall can't leave me the hell alone for one cocksucking day. I need this one damn day a year not dealing with yall assholes where i don't snap and drive 300 fucking miles to not drive a nail in a broomstick and drive it up your fucking asdls

A few months ago, I decided to let go some old clients with bad behavior and/or bad projects, since I noticed this was affecting my mental health (lowering my self esteem, make me feel depressed, anxious, etc).

I was exhausted of doing miracles in projects without git, build files, staging enviroments (yes... you can imagine), and receive all sort of curses when sudenly something stopped to work.

I set some requirements to work with any new project/client: 1) project needs to be under version control, 2) it must have staging enviroment, 3) I must work with build files.

As I still have contracts running, I'm communicating this to clients as soon as I finish my obligations.

Today, one of these clients told me they are leaving to work with another developer.

Reason: They said my new requirements are unreasonable and they prefer doing the old way.

My daughter made me two things:
1) She found a rock in the shape of an “alien” head. Knowing I love to research UFOs, she used nail polish to decorate the rock like an alien. And I just love it!

2) I have a reputation for being just like Charlie Brown with my luck in life. I also suck at math. Like, really, really bad. I was diagnosed with dyscalculia 22 years ago. It’s a running joke at our house such that I even have the t-shirt she depicts me wearing in this painting of “me” she did for my birthday.

Had my first coding interview today, and to be honest I didn't really nail it. Its surprisingly difficult to think clearly and critically when you have two strangers staring at you while you code. This is the 4th step of the interview process, hopefully my overall performance through the process is enough to get me through. Wish me luck (pretty plz)!

So recently we re-orged to a product vs engineering (yes, I meant vs, it’s contentious) organizational structure. One of the former dev leads got picked for product and went on this lovely ass-kissing spiel about how great this was in front of our new bosses. The next day(!) he was telling his old team what to do directly to his buddy the scrum master, who works for me and casually mentioned it. How am I supposed to run engineering and deliver if every P.O. can end run around the structure? I hate all this.

Also, if the new PE tells me one more time all my problems can be solved with SQS, I’m gonna explode. Not all dev problems are a nail to fix with an sns hammer. Asynch comms has its uses, it is not the *only solution.

I feel like I’m over reacting, and yet, I still feel rage…and happy to find an anonymous place to rant about it.

Trying to build a mobile first application that relies on camera and geolocation data but use drupal to do it.... ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS .. WTF is this shit?! ... let me nail in this screw with a banana.

Going to system engineer interview expecting technical questions. Very nervous.

First 'technical' question "what does DDoS stand for?"
Second "what does LTE mean?"

😐😐😐🙄🙄😏🤣😄😅😃 Gonna nail this interview.

Interview question:

"What are your three most favorite design patterns?"

Me: "Huh? They're tools in a toolbox. If I want to drive in nails I use a hammer or a nail gun. Do I need to cuddle with them? I don't pick favorites and I don't try to solve everything with just a bunch of patterns. And I've work with a bunch, right now I'm drawing a blank though as this question highly confuses me and would like to do a Google search listing a few names as the only one that's comming to my mind right now are the factory and builder pattern. And no, not necessarily favorites."

People/companies talking about ooh we want gender diversity we want more female software developers, IT professionals etc

You talk the talk, do you know how to walk the walk?? Do you know how to deal with female engineers?

I am a hardcore engineer worked and studied majorly with men for years. I lead, managed teams had my own company worked as a consultant for years.

Then I got into the IT industry as developer later. I was completely against the idea of being female would make any difference or you would be treated differently.

Finally I had my own enlightenment and stopped resisting that idea.

Some treatments made me think what are these guys doing? Don’t treat me like your sister. I am not your sister. Don’t see the femininity or looks. I am not a Merrilyn Monroe to say oooh you are great you know soo much. I am not paid for that act, I do my job! It’s same as yours mate.

Don’t underestimate me or try to preach me as if I am a cute little girl. Don’t show off and boost your ego next to other guys.

Now I regretfully I agree the ladies ranting about male dominance and getting different treatment in IT.

I am literally trying to avoid red nail polishes or red lipstick god forbid. Maybe I should put some fake beard and a belly, loose jeans with an energy drink in hand. Here comes the expert IT professional, already ticking a box.

Honestly you are not taken seriously most of the time. If you are a guy then they are all ears..And those guys talk about they want gender diversity blah blah

You feel like a ghost when you express your opinion. You are not taken into account even when you have a comment or suggestion.

Even humiliated by a guy giving me a speech about how to be a good developer next to a manager. Look buddy I am not a yesterday’s child. I am at your age. I haven’t come to this position by jumping around picking flowers in a field. If I was a man, would you dare saying those to me? There could be a street fight coming.

LinkedIn selfie takers with body show offs putting ooh I am an IT recruiter as a female I got into IT. You can do it too. (don’t get me wrong I respect that achievement that’s good) but those girls get thousands of likes and applauses, you are working in IT for years people say they are seeking for. Your technical post doesn’t even get 20 likes. Your encouraging comment on a guy’s post isn’t even acknowledged. You are not even taken into account. Am I a ghost or something?

Honestly I don’t understand.

What do you mean by gender diversity? What do you want here?

Leave this gender bullshit. Look at the knowledge you don’t even know what equality means. It’s not having even numbers of genders. It is respecting knowledge and hard work regardless. Listening and acknowledging without judgement. Looking beyond male, female or others

Companies that say we want to have more females, you don’t come and knock on my door either. You are already stating a difference there. Attract with indifference don’t come and tell me you are a female we want more females here.

I’m telling you this sector is not getting proper gender equality for 25 years. Talk is there but mentality is not yet there.

I am super pissed off and discouraged today. I don’t even get discouraged that easily. Now I understand some women in IT talking about insecurities. I am on the edge of having one, such a shame.

Don’t come at me now I would bite!

This is my generalisation yes. Exceptions apply and how good it would have been if those exceptions were dominant.

Two months ago, I went to an interview that I thought I aced... Time passed and I heard nothing. Got bummed cause it's one of the rare positions that doesn't require industry experience, plus a friend works there so that would be fun.
Yesterday tho, i received a phone call from said friend saying that he finally got an update on a situation (since the whole thing was kinda in the dark even inside the company).
Apparently, the boss who directly interviewed me fought to the nail to hire me cause I was most qualified (even tho I'm very modest and generally nervous as fuck on interviews), but was denied funds for the new department at the moment.

Still bummed about the whole situation, but god damn it feels great to know that I'm still the first choice if/when they get funds

I hate people who don't value transparent and assertive communication. I'm saying this thinking about an specific client.

This client is a boss of Web agency, and has some contractors working on their projects. I worked for them for a year, doing Web projects from scratch and also maintenance.

Then, one week, the communication stopped. No answers, no feedback, nothing. For months. They ghosted me.

I tried contact a few times with no luck. After 3 months, they started to remove me from slack, git, base camp.

And that's it. I was discarded and it seems I don't even deserved a message to be aware of that.

I don't mind to end business relationship anytime, for any reason. There are lot of reasons a working relationship would not work, and that's OK. We should have partners that are a great fit for us.

But at least say it. Ghosting is something ridiculous and unethical.

Today a potential client contacted me after seeing my works and said they were really interested in having me work on their project. Then, they demanded that I scheduled a call with them, using their calendar app. I did, just to them cancel it a few hours later. Without any explanation.

Deal with people is so discouraging sometimes.

"We nail it first time"

So I just received an email from a developer, saying my client hired him to take care of their website from now on. This client counted on me since 2012, so I felt a little... Betrayed. Even though this client was not big and a little difficult.

It's weird. I am trying to transition to something better in my professional life, but I'm not feeling confident of what I'm doing. Sometimes I feel my professional life is ruining. Uncertainty sucks.

Additionally, my desktop decided to stop working today and won't turn on. Oh well.

1. There is nothing in this field that is impossible or out of reach for someone with the correct dedication and perseverance. Even if you suck at a particular topic, I highly believe that you can make sense of it through computer science, be it math, biology physics, finances etc. The field opens the doors to other subjects. This is true for everything else, but I seriously believe that Comp Sci makes it more reachable.

2. You cannot make development a quirky personality trait. There is more to life than just sitting around all day fucking with a computer, but at the same time that is how you hone your skills, find balance!

3. Being attractive and or charismatic in this field pays a lot, but also makes you a target.

4. I have never met more people in my life I wanted to punch to a pulp, and I worked in retail and was in the military....that says a lot.

5. Penises, there are way too many penises in this field. I hate being surrounded by dudes and since I grew up in a nail/hair salon I am more used/enjoy female company more.

6. Stuxnet se la come.

I just had my cell phone cloned yesterday. End of the day, my phone lost signal suddenly. I thought it was a problem with my chip, so I decided to check that on a store and buy a new one next day.

Today, after I recover my chip and number, I started to see the mess. Someone used my number to send message to all my contacts on whatsapp, asking for money. Also, I had some contact info changed on the bank broker, which is really serious. I do not know what else is compromised, and I'm truly worried about it.

Someone has some good tips for improving security while using cellphones?

I hate doing estimates, but I had to adapt. Since I work remotely and under contract, I'm used to track my time and estimate by hours.

I did a lot of mistakes before, which means I worked for free to wrap up fixed price projects.

Today, the method that is working best for me is:
1) positive estimate
2) most likely estimate
3) worst case estimate
Sum up and divide by 3.
I do this for every task.
Also, for Web projects, I like to divide tasks in categories like: HTML / CSS, UX, programming, testing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking for job opportunities, one grabbed my attention and I decided to apply. First, I had to fill a form with 40 questions, explaining and justifying development processes, best practices and overall knowledge. Ok, no problem. Form submitted, and I see a step 2. Now I have to build a single page site from scratch, and send another form with code, link, and more justifications regarding development. After that, my application will be sent.

Then I found this observation, saying the position was for a freelancer, that will receive work occasionally. Not a full time position as I thought.

Sometimes cleaning bathrooms sounds a better option.

Apply for position as an iOS developer. Nail the interview. Get the job. Get asked to write backend in JavaScript. Now I gotta learn JavaScript.

I just decided to take some time off from work, and use my savings to survive next months. I have been dealing with work related problems for a few years now, and since last year I was sure I needed time to recover my health and improve my skills, to get better job opportunities.

I was trying to balance my life and my time, working a bit less, trying to rest, study, and so on. I was hopeful I could achieve my goals just fine with some adjustments. But now... I just don't care.

Last Thursday my mother was diagnosed with cancer.
Two weeks ago, my only brother lost his job.
The same happened with my bf, few months ago, and he needed to move to another state to get a new job.

There is so much going on... Sometimes I just feel like panicking.

It's sad to fear the future, and deal with so much uncertainty.

It's hard to deal with work and money issues. It's even harder to deal with serious health issues.

I hope things will get better somehow, but I needed to vent this. Sometimes life can be a bitch.

Got my first successful freelance job done today!
Was a very basic website but...I still got paid and I feel good about it. Seriously thinking about making a decent web app that can help me nail more customers.

I'm very dependent on my sense of smell. I always smell whatever I eat or drink. Because of some stuff about my brain that my doctor told me and I forgot, this sense is very precise.

It's so precise in fact that in a closed room I can tell whether a woman is on her period or not. But we're blessed and we're also cursed – put any kind of paint, nail polish, rotten food, so-called "car perfume" near me and I have a headache until I get a full night of sleep.

Coronavirus however fucked up that feeling. When it initially disappeared I was panicking because I felt like a cat with his whiskers cut off. Now it's back and it's strong as usual, but it's different.

Now I can't eat chicken. No matter if it's fresh or not, if I smell chicken my brain just fucking nopes out and tries to vomit.

Corona sucks. Stay safe.

2019 goals:

- finish my masters
- improve my code quality
- build at least 3 personal projects
- learn 2 new technologies
- find better clients or a good job

I worked two months for free, 15h per day, including weekends, due a contract trap. On top of that, client was emotionally blackmailing me and I was feeling threatened and helpless.

I even lost weight, skipping meals to save time and money. One day, my body collapsed. I ended up in bed for 10 days, feeling stiffness, pain, weakness, and shakiness. I even had to ask for help to brush my teeth.

I abandoned the project, and didn't receive any payment. The client went crazy and made me feel the worst person in the world for being sick and unable to work. But didn't put his menaces in execution.

I still remember the joy I felt when I was able to walk again.

That was the worst burnout I had, and also one of the biggest lessons about limits and evil people.

I noticed my co-worker has been using Atom editor for everything (we do Java/Scala). I asked, "So are you using the new language servers? How are you doing code completion?"

"I don't use code completion. I turn it off."

O_o "Do you not use screwdrivers? Like do you tighten screws in by hand?"

I've know people who code Java/Scala in emacs and vim, but they still had completion, type-lookups, etc. They was a higher learning curve in knowing all the keyboard commands, but all the tools were still there. I don't get people who refuse to use tools. It's reflected in this guys works too when looking at the code reviews.

When all you have is a hammer, everything is going to look like a nail.

When project is finished, everything is according specs, and on final review the client says: "everything looks nice! But I would like to change just a few small details. I would like a different design and functionality".

Seriously?!

Testers be like: "Error when using system (see screenshot)"

Nice one, super descriptive with where and what you did to encounter the error, oh and cheers for the finger nail sized screenshot!

Bhramari Pranayama.

Nearly amputated my middle finger by smashing it with heavy armoured door. Blood popped and splashed everywhere, as if I smashed a well fed mosquito mid-july. The nail is broken across the bottom. Finger is swolen to twice the size.

Looks like I'm gonna have a fun start on the new project next week...Unable to code 😁

New project, sent a 7 page contract to the client. First day of work and client begins to ask things outside scope and terms.

I explained what is written in contract and he interrupted me saying "I READ THE CONTRACT".

One minute later, he starts asking the same things again.

"Adding more people to a late software project will make it later." - Fred Brooks

Client wanted a site for the 100th anniversary of an important local musician. They wanted to show calendar of events, biography, store, and more. We started the work 8 months before the commemorative date, and after 4 months, the site was 99% complete and waiting final review and approvement. 2 weeks of silence has passed, when I got an email saying their deleted the site from server and all backups, and now they wanted all the work back.

With luck, I could restore a partial backup, and the client didn't want to pay for redo the rest of the work.

10 months later (yes, after all the events has started and the site being off) they contact me again, asking to continue the work.

I was happy to say no.

Why in the world IT work is so stressful?
I never been like that since I start developing code professionally, 8 years ago.
Since then, I had many health problems due stress, and some were really scaring (heart problem).

I'm trying to adapt to a healthier way of work, but I'm starting to doubt if that is possible.

Work in technology seems cruel and soulless sometimes. The constant pressure to learn new things all the time, to specialize in a lot of skills, simultaneously. The urgency nature of ALL tasks - even a simple form field slightly out of place seems to be an issue of life and death for clients.

Easy and quick communication made some people lost boundaries and respect. Many times I received calls and messages after midnight, about things like elements alignment.

And the worst is when clients blame you about their business problems. If they are not selling well this week, it's fault of the website you did ( which they are using for months now).

This actually happened to me today, first thing in the morning. After I slept just 3h, because I worked until late yesterday (oh yeah many more of these life/death updates).

What happens in this industry? Will this ever be different some day?

This is a little pig I and my grandma made out of black goo and mom's nail polish (I don't know English very well) for Arts. Would suit every client.

A rather happy/neutral post this time for a change. Lol

Firstly the good news: I have successfully recovered from the emotional/mental abuse and have been doing really well. My faith in myself has been slowly restored.

Secondly, I have started to pursue my hobbies again and find joy in them. I spend more and more time listening to music and play video games (CS:GO and AoM).

I have started getting more sun and also spend time outside socialising.

I can sense my happiness and joy get restored in my life.

Now on career front, I have started job hunting again as you all know. The interview process for Product Management is absolutely broken and taxing to go through all the loops.

During all my previous job hunts (three times), I was able to nail down at least one offer in a quarter.

This time, I started in October 2021 and still no success. I have much more experience and skill-set this time yet failures.

Fear not. My optimism is back this time. I am aware of where I am going wrong and sometimes I feel the situation is truly out of my control. The two major reasons I forsee are:

1. Relocation: it can take few months for me to relocate to UK/EU and hence, companies are preferring local candidates.

2. My duration with current employer is just 8 months which could be a potential turn off for many HMs. They might think I am a job hopper and maybe one of the reasons why I got so many calls and opportunities at my previous employer (I was stable with them for 7.5 years).

I feel it's just the matter of time for me now where I must hold my horses and keep the momentum without losing hope.

I will win.

I got a rejection email today. No feedback. And that's it.

Worst part of rejection is not knowing the reasons.

Trying to be agile and employ modern best practices in a decades old traditional super-corp.

I feel like head butting a large nail

I own my grandfather's Victorinox Swiss Army Knife, probably from the eighties. I absolutely love it — it's just like the standard Unix toolkit. Minimalist, multi-purpose, efficient. This is what I have in my knife:
1. Two blades. I call them master (yes) and slave
2. Corkscrew. I call it "ed".
3. Hole puncher, but not just any hole puncher. Mine has an angular sharp edge to carve holes instead of just punching them. Super efficient for wood, plastic and thick fabric. It also has a hole so it can be used as a needle. I call it "vi".
4. Bottle opener which is also a screwdriver. I call it "more".
5. Can opener. This is my favorite one.

It can help you open just about anything. Any type of cans, closed pistachio nuts, oysters, your barely legal girlfriend's virginity — anything. When I eat pistachios, I'm holding my Victorinox in my hand opening tough ones with the speed of rm -rf ripping through your files. Oh, and it's also another screwdriver. I call it "cat".

But let's take a look at modern Victorinox. Maybe it's better? No, not at all. It's totally metrosexual featuring nail files, nail clippers, nail scissors and a flash drive (not even a good one).

Newer doesn't always mean cooler.

(I have the exact same one, photo from the internet because I'm too lazy)

When I'm too tired and just want to get rid of obligations:
I write down 3 to 5 most important things I need to get done. Then I put myself on autopilot.

What technical websites do you follow to stay updated?

"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow

! rant

Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.

I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.

Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.

His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.

It got worse. Much, much worse.

I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.

Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.

AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.

So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.

Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.

And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.

Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.

Much obliged if you stop reloading the folder and searching it every five fucking seconds you fucking cunts.

Good god damn this fucking 'feature' of windows 10 grinds my fucking gears. I hit 'x' to stop seeing the visual distraction of the fucking green loading bar when the folders already loaded. Same thing with music. All I want it to do is open and play my fucking song.

Does it do that?

No instead it spends precious cycles updating fucking indexes or sprinkling crack rocks on the corpse of my cpu or whatever cycle fairies at fucking microsoft programmed it to do while wasting my fucking time.

I wish I had a brick and a microsoft programmer within throwing distance, I'd be sorely tempted to nail the motherfucker square in his fucking big fat melon.

Cunts.

fuck count: 8

This week has not been fun. I worked 12-14h everyday, slept 4h, felt like a zombie. It's 3pm and I still have 8 tasks to go.

When I was 8 I discovered RPG Maker 2000 by chance... I started making little games and basically never stopped.
Fast forward a few years, I wanted to know how to do the 'real' stuff SO BAD. So I chose a CS-oriented high school, which filled in some gaps in my otherwise self-taught programming skills.
Discovering Ogre3D was the final nail in the coffin.

!dev

STUPID PIECE OF SHIT. PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION MY ASS! random() IS MORE RELIABLE THAN YOU!

I rarely go outside, but whenever i do so from my grandparents you must disappoint me. Literally the least crowded streets in this city and you nail it to arrive 20min. to late. I could have walked to street with the lightly dressed women and get some real service in the meantime.

FUCK YOU

Sincerely, the guy who will be to late to celebrate his own birthday with his friends

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

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

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

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

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

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

...sigh...

Hopefully the job market will start opening again soon

Oh, well. Work on bad projects with bad clients/managers, for the sake of the money, it's a life sucker. At first I thought it was not a big deal. I was collaborating to someone's elses business and doing the best work I could.

I was tired, depressed, sleepless, having allergic rhitinis every two weeks, frustrated without any opportunity to grow intellectually, fearing clients calls and emails, and... in denial.

Since last year, I decided to stop working on some kind of project and for some kind of people. As the remaining contracts and projects were being wrapped up, I started to feel relieved, despite of all anxienty of let go long term clients and see income lowering.

Then I started to use my free time and savings to futher my education, send cvs and work on side projects. It's not an easy transition. I'll still need to keep working on not-so-good projects to pay the bills, however, I've been selecting more.

Slowly I'm recovering my life, health and enthusiasm for cs again.
I'm learning to not give a fuck and it really helps.

Let's Americanize idioms:
1. Break the ice — Open the wallet
2. Bite the bullet — Pay the price
3. Hit the nail on the head — Count the exact change
4. Let the cat out of the bag — Drop a dime
5. Piece of cake — Easy money
6. Costs an arm and a leg — Break the bank
7. Under the weather — In the red
8. The ball is in your court — The check is in your hands
9. Burn the midnight oil — Spend the last dollar
10. Hit the sack — Cash in for the night
11. Barking up the wrong tree — Investing in a bad stock
12. When pigs fly — When money grows on trees
13. Kick the bucket — Cash out
14. Spill the beans — Drop a coin
15. Break a leg — Make a fortune
16. Pull someone's leg — Shortchange someone
17. Once in a blue moon — Once in a financial windfall
18. A blessing in disguise — A hidden treasure
19. The best of both worlds — A double dividend
20. Caught between a rock and a hard place — Between a loan and a hard debt

As an introvert, this is a big challenge. A few years ago, I buried my social life to be focused on my work. But after some years, I realized this was doing more harm than good to me.
Since then I try to dedicate more time to friends, social events, and family. It's not easy to keep in touch, invite to a coffee, joining a class/activity and meet new people. Everyone's life is so busy today. But it's worth.
I always feel so much better after have a good conversation, sharing experiences and ideas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last week I received an invitation to lead the development of a e-commerce redesign, replatforming and data migration. I was excited to work on it, and started the analysis and planning, glad to spend time focusing on quality. But Murphy's law is never asleep - this Monday, I was asked to speed things up and reduce a 4 month project to 1 week.

Ionic
React Native
Mobile Angular
Xamarin
Onsen UI
Flutter
jQuery Mobile
Corona SDK
PhoneGap
Intel SDK
Kotlin Mobile...

I'm tired of this piece of shit!
Why are we hitting a nail with chainsaws?
If the hardware/os companies cannot come together to accept a single language, they can all go fuck themselves!!!

Noname Russian $17 wireless charger somehow makes less high pitched coil noise than my fancy nomad charger.

Yes it’s ugly. Yes the led is blasting and yes I painted over the led with a black nail polish.

I disassembled the nomad charger and located the coils that were making noise. I’m going to either fill them with epoxy (a common technique used by gpu enthusiasts to get rid of coil noise) or replace them completely.

TL;DR:
nomad — bouba
noname russian charger — kiki

In-person interview follow up from my phone interview last week. I hope I nail it. Stressing though. Gotta eat, drink water, and calm the hell down.

My first interview was the interview where I cheated and got the job, it was an on campus job interview. I did not have a good gpa, (to be honest it was really bad i was below the 25th percentile)

Anyway this was the only (developer) job interview I knew I could qualify for, I was pretty sure that if I couldn't nail this one then I could kiss my dream of programming professionally good bye.

We were about 25 kids sitting in a class room with a pencil and couple of sheets of paper and the the interview panel walked between the seats looking at what we wrote.

So, when I couldn't write an algorithm for the problem of square rooting a number n. I panicked (was literally shivering with tears rolling down my cheeks, thankfully nobody saw me as i was on the last bench) I gave up, wiped my tears and stared at the board, a panel member saw me and told me to leave after looking at my paper. This was the moment my mind decided (not me but someone else inside me) that I have to do whatever it took, so just when I was stepping out and grabbed my bag i quickly opened the browser of my phone inside the bag typed square root algorithm opened the first result and read the words arrive at the answer by binary search, ass soon as I read that my mind worked at a pace that it has never managed ever since that time, and i knew the solution in a matter of seconds, i dropped my bag when to one of the more sympathetic panel members and explained the whole thing to him on the spot, he was impressed, and he asked me how this algorithm can be extended for the nth root(which is really simple once you have the algorithm for square root) and i blurted it out instantly which impressed him even more and offered me the job on the spot and told me to attend the next 2 rounds as a formality.

Thus i saved myself for a world of hurt and now I am a developer who thinks back to that day every time I need a boost of morale

The GIL sucks.

"Just use a non-GIL implementation!"

Which? The one stuck on 3.4 or the one stuck on 2.7?

"Just use multiprocessing!"

Just hit a nail in with a pile driver!

Any former freelancers who decided to move to traditional employment?

I have been doing freelance since I finished University. 8 years now. I really liked the flexibility and opportunity to work on different projects and people, but my enthusiasm is wearing thin. I'm currently updating my cv and setting up my LinkedIn profile, but it's hard to "prove" my experience, and many projects I worked on are private.

I am not sure if I can mention the companies I worked for, or how do to it... Feeling lost and doomed to keep freelancing.

Anyone made this transition before? How did you do it?

I had so much fun working on my side projects this weekend that now I'm sad to spend next 5 days on client projects.

I know I’ll get mixed views for this one...

So I’ll state my claim. I agree with the philosophy of uncle bob, I also feel like he is the high level language - older version of myself personality wise.. (when I learned about uncle bob I was like this guy is just like me but not low level haha).

Anyway.. I don’t agree with everything because I think he thinks or atleast I get the vibe he thinks everything can be solved by OOP, and high level languages. This is probably where Bob and I disagree. Personally I don’t touch ruby, python and java and “those” with a 10 foot pole.

Does he make valid arguments, yes, is agile the solve all solution no.. but agile ideas do come natural and respond faster the feedback loop of product development is much smaller and the managers and clients and customers can “see things” sooner than purly waterfall.. I mean agile is the natural approach of disciplined engineers....waterfall is and was developed because the market was flooded with undisciplined engineers and continues to flood, agile is great for them but only if they are skilled in what they are doing and see the bigger picture of the forest thru the trees.. which is the entire point of waterfall, to see the forest.. the end goal... now I’m not saying agile you only see a branch of a single tree of the forest.. but too often young engineers, and beginners jump on agile because it’s “trendy” or “everyone’s doing it” or whatever the fuck reason. The point is they do it but only focus on the immediate use case, needs and deliverables due next week.

What’s wrong with that?? Well an undisciplined engineer doing agile (no I’m not talking damn scrum shit and all that marketing bullshit).. pure true agile.
They will write code for the need due next week, but they won’t realize that hmm I will have the need 3 months from now for some feature that needs to connect to this, so I better design this code with that future feature in mind...

The disciplined engineer would do that. That is why waterfall exists so ideally the big picture is painted before hand.

The undisciplined engineer will then be frustrated in the future when he has to act like the cool aid man thru the hard pre mature architectural boundaries he created and now needs links or connections that are now needed.

Does moving to agile fix that hell no.. because the undisciplined engineer is still undisciplined.

One could argue the project manager or scrum secretary... (yes scrum secretary I said that right).. is suppose to organize and create and order the features with the future in mind etc...

Bullshit ..soo basically your saying the scrum kid is suppose to be the disciplined engineer to have foresight into realizing future features and making requirements and task now that cover those things? No!
1 scrum bitch focuses too much on pleasing “stake holders” especially taken literally in start ups where the non technical idiots are too involved with the engineering team and the scrum bastard tries to ass kiss and get everything organized and tasks working so the non technical person can see pretty things work.

Scrum master is a gate keeper and is not needed and actually hinders the whole process of making a undisciplined engineer into a disciplined engineer, makes the undisciplined engineer into a “forever” code grunt... filling weekly orders of story points unable to see the forest until it’s over because the forest isn’t show to the grunt only the scrum keeper knows the big picture..... this is bad this is why waterfall is needed.

Waterfall has its own problems, But that’s another story for another day..

ANYWAY... soooo where were we ....

Ahh yess....

Clean code..

Is it a good book, yes.. does uncle bobs personality show thru the book .. yes lol.
If you know uncle bob you will understand what I just did with this post lol. I had to tangent ( at least mine was related to the topic) ...

I agree with the principles of the book, I don’t agree with the extreme view point. It’s like religion there’s the modest folks and then there are the extremists. Well he’s the preacher of the cult and he’s on the extreme side.. but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.. many things he nails... he just hits the nail thru the wall just a bit.

OOP languages are not the solution... high level languages do not solve everything.. pininciples and concepts can be used across the board and prove valuable.. just don’t hold everything up like the 10 commandments of which you cannot deviate from.. that’s the difference here I think..

Good book, just don’t take it as the Bible as a beginner, actually infact DONT read this book as a beginner. Wait a bit learn then reflect by reading this.

Don't need Netflix when you have a production deployment right before a long weekend. It has failed since last two weeks due to vulnerabilities present in one of libraries(P.S. FUCK JAVASCRIPT and Post release vulnerability scans!). You have rewritten the whole functionality from scratch twice! Security gates finally open for you, welcoming with arms wide open. So you click Deploy! DAFUQ!! FUCK MY LIFE! Deployment failed! It's only a 3 hour window to deploy! You frantically re-review your code, is it me?? Not again!! It isn't! Well, why is the deployment failing, you work against the clock. Going through configs, code, documentation! WTF is it?? Should I give up and raise a support ticket? Nope! You login to the server, sifting through logs and configs, there's a couple of other tickets with today's deadline. What are you going to do? And you get a hint! You take the hunch, change the config 5 minutes before deadline!
Get merge request approved, wait for the build, hit DEPLOY!! Nail biting 3 minutes! Your eyes fixed on the logs! Building..... Pushing instances..... Starting App..... SUCCESS!!! Finish the remaining tickets! Your long weekend still exists!

Zero client complaints today.
Life seems worth living again.

How to conduct yourself in a job interview
Simple test"Write a for loop".
First, write some nonsense bullshit for twenty minutes. Then, when you realize time is up, pass to the next question. After write more nonsense bullshit in SQL and jQuery, it's time to breath fast and panic.
Deliver your exam.
Pack your stuff and go to a cave where nobody ever will find you, cry the next three years and commit to a life of self punishment, shame and tears.
That's how you nail a job interview, suckers.

Goals for 2019
- Land an internship at either of the companies I'm in the final stages of interview for.
- Nail my exams.
- Publish an application to the app store.
- Buy an RTX 2080ti.
- Start a blog.
(Dev-ish goals I guess)

After I took some time off from work, I decided to accept the offer for maintenance of two projects. Those are from two old clients, so I think I will not stress too much, since I know what to expect most of the time.

The issue is, sometimes I have a hard time to keep concentration. In the past, I could work for 3h straight, totally focused, would pause for 20min for stretch, and then come back to work. Now I can only focus for 30min or 1h, and after a pause, it's hard to concentrate again.

There is a lot going on in my life right now, and I know the worry is probably distracting me. I'm trying to listen instrumental music, drinking coffee... But that's not enough. Somebody has any tip?

Nightly anxiety is a new concept that I'm embracing.

On tonight's episode:
> The boss did not like my work.
> He was being nice when he said it's good work.
> I am a failure and should immediately go and get a degree in nail design and work as a minimum wage nail artist. Or hair dresser. Or even cleaning crew.

... This is fun. 😐

Finally, I have a night free of work today. It is the first time this month. I'm so happy to have some time to read and rest.

Life can be insane.

Enjoy the little things in life, because one day you will look back and realize they were the big things.

Spent years ranting about being a contractor and freelancing. Finally got a job at a big company. Now I'm hating it and missing my old flexible work life. Hello dev rant, I'm back!

- hanging my brain on a nail and drying it watching Netflix

- stroll/hike in nature (park, forest, by the river, etc.). At least 1 hour long

- warm seasons: riding around the city on my e-scooter at max speeds (works amazingly well!)

- warm seasons: gardening

Seeing devs having only a hammer in their hand is making me sad. At least don't talk bullshit about things you don't understand or haven't tried... Most of the front end devs at my company are like that.

I didn't rest this weekend and it's Monday already.

I really hate when I have to work on something wrong. I mean, the client wants to embedded a third party service on their website, using iframe. Then, they want us to change the layout and behavior of the embedded page. And well, no matter what, I have to do what they want. Great job.

If you're into IT and you know Java as a fresher, you are gonna get a bunch of openings.

As you go through the advertisement, you get that smile on your face thinking I got that one.

Then you come down to the experience column and it says a minimum of 2 years on the job-type development.

That smile now suddenly turning into a frown...

And you still go on reading and it says No Incentives and Bonuses during the Probation period

And the final nail to the coffin of your happiness...Salary just 20K a month!

You, be like- Am I a joke to you?

And the Employer, be like :

Constant calls from clients who want to talk for hours about every little detail of the project.

Guys, I need to be able to work on the projects. I can't do that if you nail me to the phone. In the end, I'm the stupid one if the deadline was not met.

I don't like when

you have a couple of years of experience with some language and you're like "I should read a good book about it, and have some proper solid foundation instead of playing by ear".

So you get a book and what follows is a very jarring experience.

Because for the first 8 chapters they get into the basics of the language.

You're occasionally like "interesting, I did not know that".

But for the most part you're like "yes, for fucking christ I know that, everybody knows that",

or you complain about the author being redundant,

or about the outdatedness of the book, since most documentation is now in the interwebs

or you reach flawed conclusions out of frustration like "this isn't making me any money, I could get on upwork, or do some bounties instead of wasting time on this"

then you start to skim through the pages like "I know this, and this, and this" until you realize you're in some page you have no fucking idea what it's talking about, as if you ended up on the wrong side of town

so you start backtracking (frustration is going critical at this point)

but backtracking is annoying because it's not well defined where you stopped getting it, as if in page 33 you were getting it 100%, but 0% on page 34, it's more like a gradual, irregular decrease,

so you have no idea where to start re reading from.

you just shove that shit into the wall at that point.

Some of these are learning discipline problems.

I guess there are ways to mitigate them, such as writing down questions of things not understood, co reading, etc.

But the one thing I don't think I can't get past is when authors write like shit,

like being redundant, using different words to say the same shit

or using confusing sentences that can mean different things at the same time,

or using the incorrect terminology, eg: if I were teaching OOP, saying shit like "classes create objects" but later on saying something like "classes create instances".
They usually nail the definitions the first time, but then use different terms for the same thing. It's shit.

And I think that's a writing culture that I hate.
From school you are taught to bot repeat words.

To say the same shit in different ways.

To be descritive, but vague.

That's absolutely shitty for programming in my opinion.

My keybo§rd is broken. I tested it on two different m§chines, ch§nged keybo§rd l§yout, tried to cle§n it up, but no luck. Left side of 2wsx keys is completly useless. I'm so dis§ppointed@@@ ( @ used to be excl§m§tion m§rk :( )

Anyone else ever been through an identity crisis? This shit is intense. For the first time in over a decade I'm questioning who I really am and how to be happy while interacting with the world around me.

I used to not give a fuck what people thought about me, my semi-haggard appearance was just part of my persona, but as time marched on and my hair got longer, I get nothing but shitty looks from people 40+. I feel like nobody takes me seriously anymore. I'm honestly debating just chopping off most of my hair and dressing nicer, essentially 'growing up'. Just kind of rolling over and blending in with everyone else. "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down." - I'm tired of getting hammered. I just want to retreat to my quiet little corner of newfound adulthood.

!rant

Pretty excited today! A buddy of mine wants to try getting into linux, he's mostly done Windows IT Helpdesk and some light Windows SysAdmin work but the company he works for is garbage and he wants/needs a change of pace. He's grabbing himself a raspberry pi 4 model B to use as his learning test bed. I'm grabbing one today or tomorrow so I can help him however I can to try and help get him comfortable with Linux so he can try to escape the hellhole that is his workplace. (I used to work there too, so you can trust me when I say it's fucking shite!)

Gonna start slow and easy and have him get comfortable with the terminal and ssh-ing in using keypairs.

Fuck yeah!!! I'm so excited for him.

He's wanted to get into linux for the last year or so but something at work would always happen to make him comfortable with his job again, like fuckface mcgee would finally get fired. And my dude would be like, "Okay, it's not all bad here, I'll stick it out a bit longer." Then they would just teplace fuckface mcgee with dipshit cockmouth and he'd fall back into a depression about working there. They finally put the final nail in the coffin recently and I think he's really motivated to do whatever he can to GTFO of there this time.

I was today years old when I learned about "shadow jobs". This is where companies list jobs without any intention of hiring anyone. You could also call them "fake jobs", or "lies". Why they do this is anyone's guess. Maybe they want to look like they're expanding for their investors or something. Maybe they're harvesting resumes to train AI. Maybe they're just bored, and this is how the sick fucks get their jollies now that it's harder to find snuff films on the public internet. I wonder if HR didn't exist, would asylums still be popular? Is HR as a field just a way to keep prison populations lower?

For me, this is more of a matter of "want" to change jobs, over "need a job". For example, I've got a friend who is a way, way, way better programmer/developer than I could ever claim to be, and he's been fighting tooth and nail to get the time of day from some of these companies. Despite his extensive academic background, professional credentials, and high levels of skill and competence, he's been out of work for months now. At least they're going to "keep your information on file" though, right? Can definitely pay a mortgage with that.

Maybe I don't get it, but if you're hiring, post the JD. If you're not hiring, shut the fuck up and stay off the job boards. Everyone wins, except for the recovering snuff film addicts in HR.

"Nail the basics first, detail the details later." - Chris Anderson

When you read an article that WhatsApp's end of support is the last nail in the coffin of Windows Phone and you are like: "But I don't care about WhatsApp at all..." 😅

P.S. W10M user here.

So... I’ve recently started a new role, and luckily I’ve established myself as someone that knows his shit (more or less) TM.

I’m leading the charge on tech debt, and raising issues about it, first on my radar is the monstrosity of their approach to app config.

It’s a web app, and they store config in a key-value table in the database.

Get this. The key is the {type}.{property} path and this is fetched from the database and injected *at construction* via reflection.

Some of these objects get instantiated dozens of times per-request. Eurgh.

I see people posting their laptops with stickers all the time here. So I thought I'd share mine.

No love for the rebel scum who supports Flaggy flag.

Worked from 8am to 23pm today. A massive power outage yesterday messed up my schedule. Still have a lot to do tomorrow. Going to sleep now. Stay strong, everyone. Weekend is coming.

Linear algebra is a hammer that actually works well on things akin to a nail when wielded right. Do you have a similar wildcard that works everytime you try it?

Is there any other there that start getting so anxious when programming that bites all nails like me? 10 years without the need for a nail cutter

I've had enough. I can't handle those bad designs layouts anymore. It is getting on my nerves to receive designs from "professionals" that don't think about responsive layouts, correct alignments, grid, vector shapes, use 6 different font families, and have graphics placed in the most wrong places.

Oh, and let's not forget that such design should be coded in 15h. Sure dear client. Keep dreaming, idiot.

How do you keep projects documentation / access info organized?

Our owner's other company sells products online (or has the ability to anyways). Their current site is 7+ years old WordPress/Woocommerce and is seriously outdated because the site breaks if you update anything so we've been told to make a new site (finally). They also said they were going to release a whole new line up of products. So the first thing I tried to do was get them to nail down their product line and how shipping was going to be configured. I was told to just use the shipping from the previous site.

Turns out those shipping rates don't use any sort of math or automation at all, there is literally a manually set shipping value for every single product for every single shipping location (30*60) and even values for different quantities. And there's no way to export these rates into a readable table because the plugins they use shove all the data into the postmeta table, I'm forced to go through and put the data into a spreadsheet so that I can attempt to organize it and hopefully find someone way to automate it. Owner claims at one point that he has a similar spreadsheet that's more up to date but for some reason refuses to send it over or put me in touch with the right people in the shipping department.

I've gone through the shipping rates with the old products and the new products and organized them as best I can and each time I've gotten done and shown them the spreadsheet with their products and shipping, they add or change something which requires me to basically wipe the slate clean and start over eating another 50 or so hours of my time, which with everything else really means another month+ to find time to work on it between other projects.

After about a year they finished their products and I finally finished the planning and got approval to build it out for the site. Small victory!!

After about 60 hours plugging these values into the database (only about 1/3 done) I get an email from their head of shipping who tells me the values in my spreadsheet are "terribly inaccurate, in some areas by $100+" and that the data should not be used anywhere.

So after something like a year and a half and 200+ hours of work, the data I've been using to plan all this isn't even accurate. I'm trying not to go crazy here but this kind of shit is unacceptable. When we're done with this I'm going to send the owner an invoice to show him how much money he wasted on this because nothing was planned and he just wanted it built. There's a fucking process for a reason, when you don't follow the process you fuck everything up. If a client had pulled this shit and turned their simple site into this much work they would have been dropped. I get constant emails asking when the new site will be done and every time my answer is "I'm still waiting for x items that I asked for last time you asked where we were." He gets a couple things on the list and sends them back and then goes unresponsive for weeks at a time.

Management has been telling me that I seem more stressed lately but only one of them understands what's going on here when I explain it. The rest say stupid shit like "why don't you automate it" or "make an intern do it." You won't let me hire an intern and even if I did, I'm not sure I could explain how the shipping works now to even trust someone else to do it. I'm hoping when the shipping guy gives me the new sheet that maybe there's some easier solution here because I'm ready to start shooting people.

Programming is like religion.

- you are making sombody to obey your will
- you have limited amount of resources (churches, processors, RAM, holy items)
- when you torture it, usually it will comply but not in way you are expecting
- smashing nail with hammer is not good idea (you can run out of resources again. Getting new CPU is costly as same as getting new believer)

So, who's in for new Church of Unhandled Exception?

Learning New Design Patterns...

When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Arg.

Recently, my code in almost any controller is like so:

return (new MyFancyClass($param))->methodThatHandlesIt();

that can't be the solution to everything.... although it kind of is
how can I beef up on patterns and avoid crushing a screw into the wall without realizing it's not a nail

!rant about Codecademy:

I decided to go a short, higher-level JavaScript course with Codecademy to help me nail down a few concepts and approaches to writing JavaScript code.

It turned out to be one of the best courses I've done. It didn't cover everything in detail. It is free so I wasn't expecting that.

Still, the topics it covered, it covered pretty well, and the hand-holding approach really helped give me a much better grasp of these concepts and models.

Well worth the time!

I tend to bite my nails when concentrating on my code, therefore I am unable to maintain finger nails properly. How does one get rid of this abominable habit

SIM 800L
The fucking nail to my coffin. This thing is so unreliable. I fixed on issue get the next one. Then get an error trying to make a http request, with little information on the web. Eventually switch to FTP which is working for a while. Then suddenly nothing is working properly. Even the serial communication has errors. This process took over 6 months. Constant debugging and headscraching involved. After hundreds of hours I give up. I'm going to switch to a Raspberry Pi Zero with an UMTS Stick attached. This is going to cost way more battery time but my project needs to be finished by july and I'm tired of this shitty little module.

I write a quick prompt thinking nothing of it, just trying to generate an image to illustrate the next baddie in the dungeon, but I nail it on the first try and the resulting image PHYSICALLY affects me.

What the fuck, now I cannot unsee. I didn't think this was possible. I assumed the whole "cursed photo" thing was just kids being easily disturbed, turns I was wrong. DO NOT fucking mix hyper realistic 3D rendering and cryptids, do NOT fucking do it. THe moment you get anything resembling a """face""" on the other side you've just consumed years worth of nightmare fuel.

Unsettling? Fuck you, this is beyond that. The eyes I saw on the other side of the screen made me RECOIL in fear. You think you know what NOPE means, let me tell you, I have just *FELT* what __NOPE__ stands for.

I would hope I sleep well tonight, but I don't think I will. SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT

Couple of weeks ago I received a negative response about a code test I did for a front and position. They only said I was not a good fit.

Today, I received another email from them, asking me to do a test. I asked for clarification, and they said they are giving me a chance to redo the test.

Sounds weird, but I'll redo the test anyway. The task is to code a responsive page that consume an api. I'm using vue, sass, git, modular and semantic code. What else should I focus?

The deadline is in 36h.

Don't do stickers even take the amd sticker off. Why make yourself standout where people bug you to ask questions? After all the nail that sticks out gets hammered.

Oh SAP, you nail in my coffin...3 days to set up a simple mailing functionality :s I hate you...

I have healthy anxiety, it started around 15.

I have melanonychia right now, which is a change in a nail pigmentation. I have a grey vertical line running from the the start of the nail to the end.

I had it checked out 6 months ago with a dermatologist and he said it was fine, to do a checkup later.

I took a picture now and it's a bit wider than 6 months ago but it still seems pretty regular and doesn't seem to have signs of subungual melanoma (skin cancer beneath nail, which is the only danger).

Because of getting wider, I'm doing another checkup this week. I wished I had more money.

Meditation is helping me a lot, like big time, but I feel that it's just a distraction for a potentially early demise.

I fucking hate this part of my life. It's too painful.
I'm not depressed enough to not want to be alive, but sometimes I wished I wasn't.

oh god, wake up snappy as a lubed tomato, ready for battle. Gotta take my adhd stimulant, namely Vyvanse or else it'd be cokedbenz-like, annoying the f*ck out of everyone cuz me wouldn't even manage to keep still.

So I take those 70mg punch and
my brain takes it like a sissy! It slows to a crawl, surprise, surprise motherf*cker, it's bed time, AGAIN!

Can't keep my peepers open. Why god, why that med gets me into hibernation mode??

No trouble, no trouble, son, pop some Ritalin and you'll be ready to go!

Alright, alrighty! Take a couple of those and it's like a coffin's final nail, Thanatos roundhouse kick to Dreamland! Wtf 😒

If I hadn't gone thru the "I don't need it", "better off without it" phase so many, many! times before, I'd consider not taking those, but I know, I know that even tho those first few days would be great, by week's end I'd find me self rampaging life and crashing like thunder, with a big bang

I'm not that into open source contributions, but the hacktoberfest campaign this year caught my attention. There are so many challenges and events happening... I thought I should give it a try.

So far I got 2 t-shirts and had more fun than I thought.

I cannot believe that MS has not thought of something better than UAC... trying to re-install ADConnect after fixing an error, msi shits out 2502/2503 errors even though it worked first time on the original install. The fix, run the msi from an elevated cmd. Come On Microsoft!!!

Was prepared to fight tooth and nail in recent online codesprint. Well in short, I overestimated my ability to study for tests and now i have 2 choices: study for the test that is 2 days later, or code for 2 days to maintain my rank...

I'm thinking about buying a small nas device to store backup and media files. WD my cloud and synology ds120 caught my attention regarding price and functionality. Does anyone have experience with them? Any recommendations?

Someone has a good keyboard to recommend? I've been dealing with RSI in both my wrists/hands for a while, so I'm looking for a soft, responsive keyboard that doesn't put weight or strain on the wrists.

Did some technology counseling company stumble upon flutter an declared it the next "hit every damn nail with it"-hammer or why does everybody here have to learn flutter?

Intelligent Development class (yeah, that's how it's titled), teacher leaves us as first task to develop our own Database, because later we will make it a fuzzy database.

She gave us three days. Three (counting me) in the team. I began working on Interfaces (Java development) and so on, using GitHub for VCS and documenting each method.

This assholes didn't even ask what was missing or what should they do. One day before date, I told them "Hey, I think I can nail the underlying file management tonight, so, work on the language parser, please"

Stood awake until 1 A.M., waiting for their reply, but there wasn't any.

Next day, I'm the only one of the team and I tried to decline the presentation of my work, but a friend encouraged me, because it was my work and I worked hard.

Presentation went better than expected.

After the class, I have another with one of my team members, he asks "How did you do?", "Us? You meant me, because the other prick didn't go".

And that's all, not another single question nor explaining why did he didn't answered the DM's I sent.

Fuck those guys, fucking team of shit, I hate it when you can't pick your team, but I guess that's just a common place for all of us here, isn't it?

I am a bit of a kit whore, and I’m perfectly happy with that.

But, I am experiencing a dilemma, I have a PC, nothing spectacular, about 5-6 years old, Windows 10 and a Linux VM.

I also have an iMac.

My problem is that I can’t make my mind up about which to use and so spend a lot of time switching between the two.

I know I should really get off the fence, nail my colours to the mast and make a choice, but I just can’t seem to do it.

In Work I am very much Microsoft oriented, which is fine, although I’m trying to move towards .Net core for future development where I can.

At home I’m very much into Ruby on Rails, Nodejs, Laravel etc.

I think it’s getting to the point where I’ll just have to toss a coin

How do you usually handle an argument? Do you prefer not to get involved completely or do you choose to go "back and forth" until you and the other person comes to an (understanding/standstill)??? For me personally, conflict is like stepping on a nail. You can't smoothen a sharp tip, otherwise you're gonna get scratched. All you can do is try to move around it. I say what I have to say and then I'm done!!! If my opponent tries to keep going, I cut them off. Either one: block their number/media account... Two: hang up the phone while they're talking! Or three: get up and walk away ....

If you all weren't pretending to still be here which I wonder if you all are, what would you all do if I suddenly didn't care about anything at all ? Kind of curious because it is hard.
Since you know there are people even breeding small children to slake the lusts of garbage motherfuckers who have STDs ruining one generation after another and that's just another nail on my cross holding me up while your fake asses pretend to give a damn about the patriarchy and preferred pronouns and all that other bullshit

Or continue this COVID 19 masquerade

Wtf ?

Do you not all feel even a little stupid yet ? Even just a little like monsters ? Even just a little bit ashamed ? Or when you're being beaten to death in your dotages by teenagers for being pedophiles in wheelchairs is what it will take ?

Program when you are angry as hell, produce code like a sewing machine.

so they brought a senior engineer to our (very small) dev team. I feel like poking my eyes with a nail looking on his code.