What it's like to be a network engineer...translated into normal people speak

User: I think we are having a major road issue.

Me: What? No, I just checked, the roads are fine. I was actually just on the roads.

User: No, I’m pretty sure the roads are down because I’m not getting pizzas.

Me: Everything else on the roads is fine. What do you mean you aren’t getting pizzas?

User: I used to get pizzas when I ordered them, now I’m not getting them. It has to be a road issue.

Me: As I said, the roads are fine. Where are you getting pizzas from?

User: I’m not really sure. Can you check all places that deliver pizzas?

Me: No I don’t even know all the places that deliver pizza. You need to narrow it down.

User: I think it is Subway.

Me: Okay, I’ll check…No, I just looked and Subway doesn't deliver pizzas.

User: I’m pretty sure it is Subway. Can you just allow all food from Subway and we can see if pizza shows up?

Me: Sigh, fine I’ve allowed all food from Subway, but I don’t think that is the issue.

User: Yeah I’m still not getting pizza. Can you check the roads?

Me: It’s not the roads, the roads are fine. I’m pretty sure Subway isn’t the place.

User: Okay, I found it. It’s Papa Johns.

Me: Okay, I looked and Papa Johns does deliver pizza. Is it the local Papa Johns or one in a different town?

User: I don’t know. Can you allow pizza from all Papa Johns to me?

Me: No I can’t do that. Can you get me an address for Papa Johns?

User: No, I only know it as Papa Johns. Can you get me all the addresses of all Papa Johns and I’ll tell you if one of them is correct?

Me: No, I don’t have time for that. Okay, I looked at the local one and it looks like they have sent you pizza in the past and they are currently allowed to send you pizzas. Try ordering a pizza while I watch.

User: Yeah still no pizza. I’m guessing they are getting blocked at the freeway. Can you check the freeway to make sure they can get through?

Me: No, this is a local delivery. They aren't even using the freeway.

User: Okay, well then it has to be a road issue.

Me: No, the roads are fine. Okay, I just drove from the Papa Johns to the address they have on file for you and there is nothing there.

User: Hmm, wait we did move recently.

Me: Did you give your new address to Papa Johns?

User: No, I just thought they would be able to look me up by name.

Me: No they need your new address. What’s your new address?

User: I’m not really sure. Can you look it up?

Me: Sigh, give me a second…Okay, I found your address and gave it to Papa Johns. Try ordering a pizza now.

User: HEY! PIZZA JUST SHOWED UP!

Me: Okay, good.

User: (To everyone else they know) I apologize for the delay in the pizza but there was a major road issue that was preventing the pizza from getting to me. The network engineer has fixed the roads and we are able to get pizza again.

Me: But it wasn’t the roads…whatever.

User: Oh, can you also check on an issue where Chinese food isn’t getting to me? I think it may be a road issue

New for avatars - emotions! You can now change your facial expression on your avatar to better capture your dev mood! Getting expressions working right turned out to be quite the undertaking due to the ripple effect of the various layers that each expression touched so our total layers just for men ballooned out from 300 layers to 1100. And @dfox re-architecting how layers work to handle the interconnectedness of expression meant tying together facial expression, skin tone, facial hair, and hair color to make sure everything stays in sync. It’s a fun new addition, I hope everyone enjoys!

I also want to apologize for the delay in getting this out, I meant to have this done ages ago but I got thrown a curveball at work and was laid off back in April and have been super stressed running around trying to find a new job for the past 3 months. I figured I’d have more free time to work on devRant, but hunting for work is so exhausting, it’s really taken its toll emotionally and financially (no unemployment benefits because according to my state even though we lose money every month “you’re still a corporate officer”). Things are finally looking promising on the job search front, and I expect once things get back to normal @dfox and I can get our release velocity back up, but until then, please bear with me.

P.S. If you have the resources, we certainly do appreciate your support with devRant++ Your monthly contributions really do make a difference! Thanks all!

I wonder when there will be the first manufacturer to introduce the "cool" new notch design to normal screens. 🤔

C: application not working
Me: k. What changed?
C: we didn't make changes
Me: k... *gets a tech team (W) on the phone*
W: Hey, what's broken?
Me: C's application. How do things look?
W: running healthy. I'll check logs.
Me: thanks. *gets tech team (S) on the line*
S: hey, everything clear on our end, will check logs.
Me: thanks *gets tech team (U)*
U: hey! They asked us to deploy their new version today during normal deployment time. Is it acting up?
Me: C, what did you change?
C: nothing major, just how we connect to W and S...
W&S: are you shitting me???
Me: U, will you please roll it back?
C: no! Must stay on this version, you need to fix your side!!
Me: nope. *calls U boss (UG)*
UG: U, you have my permission to roll back, they need to fix. C, if your boss doesn't like it, have them call me.
*rollback fixes problem*

IF I FUCKING ASK YOU WHAT THE FUCK YOU CHANGED, YOU BETTER TELL ME THE TRUTH, OR I WILL STRIP YOUR CODE OFF OUR FUCKING SYSTEMS AND SHOVE IT DOWN YOUR THROAT. MY JOB IS TO HELP YOU AND YOU NEED TO BACK TO FUCK UP AND NOT GET IN THE WAY OF MY JOB OR YOU WON'T HAVE ONE ANYMORE.

'Normal' people when they get a new phone:
- install whatsapp
- install Facebook (or other social media)
- install regular email app

Me:
- Root phone
- Install app ops
- Install Signal
- Install encrypted email services' app
- Install firewall
- Install devRant

Anyone else like me here?

When I was in my second semester of college I was tasked with creating a file encrypt/decrypt program. Take in normal textfiles and spit out a new random text and symbols file. I worked on it for two weeks and read up on all different encryption types and stuff. I was so excited when it was done. After it was done compiling I tried it out on its own source code. Encrypto.c and named the output file Encrypto.c 😰 The next thing I did was google " best version control and how to use it."

Rant
Why do shithead clients think they can walk away without paying us once we deliver the project !!!

So, here goes nothing..
Got an online gig to create a dashboard.
Since i had to deal with a lot of shitheads in the past, I told them my rules were simple, 20% advance, 40% on 50% completion and 40% after i complete and send them proof of completion. Once i receive the payment in full, only then i will hand over the code.
They said it was fine and paid 20%.
I got the next 40% also without any effort but they said they also needed me to deploy the code on their AWS account, and they were ready to pay extra for it, so i agreed.
I complete the whole project and sent them the screenshots, asking for the remaining 40% payment. They rejected the request saying my work was not complete as i had not deployed on AWS yet. After a couple of more such exchanges, i agreed to setup their account before the payment. But i could sense something fishy, so i did everything on their AWS account, except registered the domain from my account and set up everything. Once i inform them that its done and ask for the remaining payment.
The reply i got was LOL.
I tried to login to the AWS account, only to find password had been changed.
Database access revoked.
Even my admin account on the app had been removed. Thinking that they have been successful, they even published ads about thier NEW dashboard to their customers.
I sent them a final mail with warning ending with a middle finger emoji. 24 hours later,
I created a github page with the text " This website has been siezed by the government as the owner is found accused in fraud" and redirected the domain to it. Got an apology mail from them 2 hours later begging me to restore the website. i asked for an extra 10% penalty apart from the remaining payment. After i got paid, set an auto-reply of LOL to thier emails and chilled for a week before restoring the domain back to normal.
Dev : 1
Shithead Client: 0

The problem with being a programmer...

I just broke up with a girl I've been seeing the past 2 months, that I was really into.

But in the end, it became a question of, either i'm with her, or I'm with my work.

I don't think that would happen with other professions, at least, not as easily.

I think, with other professions or projects, you tell someone "I need to work" and it's really fucking understood. "Ok, you need to work"

They understand it. If I was a lawyer.. I have a case. if I was a carpenter, I have a wall to build,
or a house. Etc. All understood things. Or physical things that can be seen.

But with programming, first of all, I work my own hours, I write software and then sell it. I do it all myself, I own my own business. I don't have normal hours like a job, but I do know my requirements, which is at LEAST 8 hours a day of solid, uninterrupted work.

If I had a "job" it would be like "gotta go to work" and that would be it.

But, because I work for myself, and because the things I build, aren't like something you physically see, nobody gets it.

My parents, as supportive as they are, will never understand how I just implemented a new design pattern and like, leveled up because of it.

They see software... buttons, and even then, when I try to explain what excites me, it's like trying to get a 3 year old interested in calculus.

How could they possibly understand the richness of what I do, how fulfilling it is
and how much I love it, when all they see
is me on a computer, clicking keys.

The same for this girl I dated.

The only place I feel where people understand,
is here.

Do you have any similar experiences to share?
Would love to hear it right now.

Happy Thanksgiving! Thank you for waiting for this new release of avatar items! We have new pets, new computers, new eye wear, some fun shirts and a special treat for our #1 ranter @linuxxx. The required ++ pts for these are a little higher than normal to reward the dedicated people who have helped support and build this community over the last few years. Thank you all!

Friend sees me learning React js.

Friend: "Why are you always studying? Your exams are over and you already have a job."

Me: "Because I don't know it and it looks interesting?"

Friend: "What a waste of time..."

I try to upskill myself and friend gives me shit.

He's the type of guy that would watch a 5min YouTube video on a topic and suddenly become an expert in it.

I believe that a day without new knowledge is a waste of a day.

Dont know if that's normal or I'm just weird. But I still stand by it.

Anyone know this bitch hacker 127.0.0.1 story?

WORST HACKERS OF ALL TIME

CONTINUED IN THE COMMENTS BECUASE IT IS SO LONG...

TLdr bitch hacker hacks himself by localhost

bitchchecker (~java@euirc-a97f9137.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-61a2169c.dip.t-dialin.net) has joined #stopHipHop
<bitchchecker> why do you kick me
<bitchchecker> can’t you discus normally
<bitchchecker> answer!
<Elch> we didn’t kick you
<Elch> you had a ping timeout: * bitchchecker (~java@euirc-a97f9137.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
<bitchchecker> what ping man
<bitchchecker> the timing of my pc is right
<bitchchecker> i even have dst
<bitchchecker> you banned me
<bitchchecker> amit it you son of a bitch
<HopperHunter|afk> LOL
<HopperHunter|afk> shit you’re stupid, DST^^
<bitchchecker> shut your mouth WE HAVE DST!
<bitchchecker> for two weaks already
<bitchchecker> when you start your pc there is a message from windows that DST is applied.
<Elch> You’re a real computer expert
<bitchchecker> shut up i hack you
<Elch> ok, i’m quiet, hope you don’t show us how good a hacker you are
<bitchchecker> tell me your network number man then you’re dead
<Elch> Eh, it’s 129.0.0.1
<Elch> or maybe 127.0.0.1
<Elch> yes exactly that’s it: 127.0.0.1 I’m waiting for you great attack
<bitchchecker> in five minutes your hard drive is deleted
<Elch> Now I’m frightened
<bitchchecker> shut up you’ll be gone
<bitchchecker> i have a program where i enter your ip and you’re dead
<bitchchecker> say goodbye
<Elch> to whom?
<bitchchecker> to you man
<bitchchecker> buy buy
<Elch> I’m shivering thinking about such great Hack0rs like you
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-61a2169c.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-b5cd558e.dip.t-dialin.net) has joined #stopHipHop
<bitchchecker> dude be happy my pc crashed otherwise you’d be gone
<Metanot> lol
<Elch> bitchchecker: Then try hacking me again… I still have the same IP: 127.0.0.1
<bitchchecker> you’re so stupid man
<bitchchecker> say buy buy
<Metanot> ah, [Please control your cussing] off
<bitchchecker> buy buy elch
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-b5cd558e.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-9ff3c180.dip.t-dialin.net) has joined #stopHipHop
<bitchchecker> elch you son of a bitch
<Metanot> bitchchecker how old are you?
<Elch> What’s up bitchchecker?
<bitchchecker> you have a frie wal
<bitchchecker> fire wall
<Elch> maybe, i don’t know
<bitchchecker> i’m 26
<Metanot> such behaviour with 26?
<Elch> how did you find out that I have a firewall?
<Metanot> tststs this is not very nice missy
<bitchchecker> because your gay fire wall directed my turn off signal back to me
<bitchchecker> be a man turn that shit off
<Elch> cool, didn’t know this was possible.
<bitchchecker> thn my virus destroys your pc man
<Metanot> are you hacking yourselves?
<Elch> yes bitchchecker is trying to hack me
<Metanot> he bitchchecker if you’re a hacker you have to get around a firewall even i can do that
<bitchchecker> yes man i hack the elch but the sucker has a fire wall the
<Metanot> what firewall do you have?
<bitchchecker> like a girl
<Metanot> firewall is normal a normal hacker has to be able to get past it…you girl
<He> Bitch give yourself a jackson and chill you’re letting them provoce you and give those little girls new material all the time
<bitchchecker> turn the firewall off then i send you a virus [Please control your cussing]er
<Elch> Noo
<Metanot> he bitchchecker why turn it off, you should turn it off
<bitchchecker> you’re afraid
<bitchchecker> i don’t wanna hack like this if he hides like a girl behind a fire wall
<bitchchecker> elch turn off your shit wall!
<Metanot> i wanted to say something about this, do you know the definition of hacking??? if he turns of the firewall that’s an invitation and that has nothing to do with hacking
<bitchchecker> shut up
<Metanot> lol
<bitchchecker> my grandma surfs with fire wall
<bitchchecker> and you suckers think you’re cool and don’t dare going into the internet without a fire wall
<Elch> bitchchecker, a collegue showed me how to turn the firewall off. Now you can try again
<Metanot> bitchhacker can’t hack
<Black<TdV>> nice play on words
<bitchchecker> wort man
<Elch> bitchchecker: I’m still waiting for your attack!
<Metanot> how many times again he is no hacker
<bitchchecker> man do you want a virus
<bitchchecker> tell me your ip and it deletes your hard drive
<Metanot> lol ne give it up i’m a hacker myself and i know how hackers behave and i can tell you 100.00% you’re no hacker..

LONG RANT AHEAD!

In my workplace (dev company) I am the only dev using Linux on my workstation. I joined project XX, a senior dev onboarded me. Downloaded the code, built the source, launched the app,.. BAM - an exception in catalina.out. ORM framework failed to map something.

mvn clean && mvn install

same thing happens again. I address this incident to sr dev and response is "well.... it works on my machine and has worked for all other devs. It must be your environment issue. Prolly linux is to blame?" So I spend another hour trying to dig up the bug. Narrowed it down to a single datamodel with ORM mapping annotation looking somewhat off. Fixed it.

mvn clean && mvn install

the app now works perfectly. Apparently this bug has been in the codebase for years and Windows used to mask it somehow w/o throwing an exception. God knows what undefined behaviour was happening in the background...

Months fly by and I'm invited to join another project. Sounds really cool! I get accesses, checkout the code, build it (after crossing the hell of VPNs on Linux). Run component 1/4 -- all goocy. run component 2,3/4 -- looks perfect. Run component 4/4 -- BAM: LinkageError. Turns out there is something wrong with OSGi dependencies as ClassLoader attempts to load the same class twice, from 2 different sources. Coworkers with Windows and MACs have never seen this kind of exception and lead dev replies with "I think you should use a normal environment for work rather than playing with your Linux". Wtf... It's java. Every env is "normal env" for JVM! I do some digging. One day passes by.. second one.. third.. the weekend.. The next Friday comes and I still haven't succeeded to launch component #4. Eventually I give up (since I cannot charge a client for a week I spent trying to set up my env) and walk away from that project. Ever since this LinkageError was always in my mind, for some reason I could not let it go. It was driving me CRAZY! So half a year passes by and one of the project devs gets a new MB pro. 2 days later I get a PM: "umm.. were you the one who used to get LinkageError while starting component #4 up?". You guys have NO IDEA how happy his message made me. I mean... I was frickin HIGH: all smiling, singing, even dancing behind my desk!! Apparently the guy had the same problem I did. Except he was familiar with the project quite well. It took 3 more days for him to figure out what was wrong and fix it. And it indeed was an error in the project -- not my "abnormal Linux env"! And again for some hell knows what reason Windows was masking a mistake in the codebase and not popping an error where it must have popped. Linux on the other hand found the error and crashed the app immediatelly so the product would not be shipped with God knows what bugs...

I do not mean to bring up a flame war or smth, but It's obvious I've kind of saved 2 projects from "undefined magical behaviour" by just using Linux. I guess what I really wanted to say is that no matter how good dev you are, whether you are a sr, lead or chief dev, if your coworker (let it be another sr or a jr dev) says he gets an error and YOU cannot figure out what the heck is wrong, you should not blame the dev or an environment w/o knowing it for a fact. If something is not working - figure out the WHATs and WHYs first. Analyze, compare data to other envs,... Not only you will help a new guy to join your team but also you'll learn something new. And in some cases something crucial, e.g. a serious messup in the codebase.

I started in 2015 at my current job. The first contract was for a year, very normal in the Netherlands. Also, I had only 6 months of professional experience with programming.
I already knew that I would replace an older colleague who's going to retire and I would get some of his responsibilities.

One year later (6 months ago) I had an evaluation with my boss. He told me he was proud I learned everything so quick and offered me a permanent position and wanted me to take over one of the major products we sell. Even more, he wanted me to decide how to change the framework since it's over 20years old. (Multiple languages combined)

I am currently working on a new design and UX as well, which I presented last year. The love it.

I've never felt so appreciated and valued before.

I was 15 years old and the first year of high school. Everything was new to me and I was such a newbie. At that time I had 2-3 year of programming behind me at an institution where they taught competitive programming. And I knew something about computers. Not much but more than most of my school mates. At that time I wanted to become "super cool hacker".

So we had this very very thought teacher for history which was also our form master. She really knows how to explained everything about history and in an interesting way. But while she was teaching we also had to write down notes from her powerpoints that were on a projector. And occasionally she would wait for us to copy everything and then move on with her lecture. But sometimes she didn't. This was frustrating as hell. The whole class would complain about this because you couldn't take notes down normal, you had to do it at double speed.

But she got one weak spot. She was not very good with computers. Our school computers were locked in some kinda closet so that students didn't have physical access to a computer and were also password protected. So I came up with the plan to plant wireless mouse in her computer so that I could control her mouse. At that time it seemed like SUPER HACKER MASTER PLAN.

So I got an opportunity one time when she left the classroom and let closet where the computer was open. I quickly sneaked the USB of the wireless mouse in the computer and then go back to the seat.

So THE FUN began.

Firstly I would only go back in powerpoint so that all my schoolmates could write down notes including me. And it was hilarious to watch when she didn't know what is happening. So then I would move her mouse when she tried to close some window. I would just move it slightly so she wouldn't notice that somebody else is controlling mouse. And by missing X button just by slight she would click other things and other things would pop up and now she had to close this thing so it became a nightmare for her. And she would become angry at the mouse and start complaining how the computer doesn't work and that mouse doesn't obey her.

One time when she didn't pay attention to her computer and projector I went to paint program and drew a heart and wrote we love you (In Slovenian Imamo vas radi -> See the picture below) and one of my school mates has the picture of it. We were all giggling and she didn't know what is was for. And I managed to close everything before she even noticed.

So it got to the point where she couldn't hand it more so she called our school IT guy so that he would check her computer (2 or 3 weeks passed before she called IT guy). And he didn't find anything. He was really crappy IT guy in general. So one week passed by and I still had messed with her mouse. So she got a replacement computer. Who would guessed all the problems went away (because I didn't have another mouse like that). I guess when our IT guy took the computer to his room and really thoroughly check it he found my USB.

So he told her what was the problem she was so pissed off really I didn't see her pissed off so much in all my 4 years in high school. She demanded the apology from whom did it. And at that moment my mind went through all possible scenarios... And the most likely one was that I was going to be expelled... And I didn't have the balls to say that I did it and I was too afraid... Thanks to God nobody from my school mates didn't tell that it was me.

While she waited that somebody would come forward there was one moment when our looks met and at that moment both of us knew that I was the one that did it.

Next day the whole class wrote the apology letter and she accepted it. But for the rest of 4 years whenever was there a problem with the computer I had to fixed it and she didn't trust anybody not even our IT guy at school. It was our unwritten contract that I would repair her computer to pay off my sin that I did. And she once even trusted me with her personal laptop.

So to end this story I have really high respect for her because she is a great teacher and great persons that guide me through my teen years. And we stayed in contact.

Here's my piece of advice for new devs out there:

1 - Pick one language to learn first and stick with it, untill you grasp some solid fundamentals. (Variables, functions, classes, namespaces, scope, at least)

2 - Pick an IDE, and stick with it for now. Don't worry about tools yet. Comment everything you're coding. The important thing is to comment why you wrote it, and not what it does. Research git and start using version control, even when coding by yourself alone.

3 - Practice, pratice and pratice. If you got stuck, try reading the language docs first and see if you can figure it out yourself. If all else fails, then go to google and stackoverflow. Avoid copying the solution, type it all and try to understand it.

4 - After you feel you need to go to the next level, research best practices first, and start to apply them to your code. Try to make it modular as it grows. Then learn about tools, preprocessors and frameworks.

5 - Always keep studying. Never give up. We all feel that we have no idea of what we are doing sometimes. That's normal. You will understand eventually. ALWAYS KEEP STUDYING.

Hi there fellas,

I'm new to devrant and I'll like to share with you my first story.

It was my first payed job. A good friend of mine (media designer in print) called me "My customer needs a website, do you think you can do that?"
At this time I've never build a single page, so my answer was "Of course, easy-peasy".
She told me it was a family business and a nationwide player in finance sector.

I met the CEO, did my research and build a prototype. Well, the CEO and his staff liked it so I finished the website and prepared for the first review.

I booted the laptop and tried to connect to their network. There was none. They just never had a wireless connection not a single cable in the entire office. That was the time I realized that I work for a family business.
The CEO was an ancient guy who probably saw Jesus Christ hanging on the cross in personal and internet is weird thing controlled by the devil himself.

I took the laptop and went over to the CEOs personal office, plugged the network cable out of his Computer and into the laptop. Finally I could show them what I've done.

He took a look at it and called for his assistant. "Might you print that website for us?" That was my second wtf moment.

The assistant returned with a half chopped down and bleached rainforest that contained an image of their new website.

I tried to tell him that a website on paper can't show him the functions n shit, but he looked at me like I was talking two foreign languages at once.

So we reviewed the website on paper and his one and only problem was the size of the letters. "I can't read it well, please make the text bigger" At this moment I wanted to hit my forehead on the table and tell him that it is normal to have readings difficulties when you are walking the shores of Styx.

At the end everything went well, but I realized that dealing with customers is a lot more difficult than developing something for them. The future should prove me right.

That's it.
My first story about my first job.

Thank you for reading 😊

For the Dutch people on here, the new surveillance law in short:

- dragnet surveillance, data retention of normal data is a maximum of 3 years, encrypted data up to 6 years.

- secret DNA database, data retention up to 30(!!) years.

- use of 0days without having to report them to the vendors.

- third parties may be hacked to get to main targets; if my neighbor is suspected they may legally hack me in order to get to him/her.
Cleaning up (removing backdoors etc) afterwards is not required.

- sharing unfiltered (raw) data gathered through dragnet surveillance with foreign intelligence agencies is permitted, even if it's to a country which doesn't have as much 'democracy' as this country does.

Decide for yourself if you're voting (at all) against or in favor of this law, I'm voting against :)

We do need a new/reformed law, this one is just too intrusive imo.

How I went from loving my job to wishing i dont wake up tomorrow just to avoid it.

Ive been a backend dev in the company im at for 2 years now.

First year was a blast, i loved my work so much, I used to get so many random features to do, bug fixes, campaigns, analytics, etc..

Second year i started getting familiar with the part of the code that has to do with Search in our music streaming app. Nobody wanted to work on it, so i wanted to take initiative and start doing a few tasks.

A few tasks turned into sprints, and sprints turned into months worth of sprints. And because the code was the definition of tech debt, and because it was so messed up that changing one thing can blow up everything else, working on Search was not too fun.

However, people seemed to be happy search tasks are no longer piling up and someone is handling them so that used to make me feel good about it. They also gave me so much freedom and i felt like my own manager because no one told me what to do (not even my actual manager) they just let me be and were happy i was handling the part they want nothing to do with. I was also given an intern to mentor and have her work on Search tasks with me which turned out amazing.

During the last few months, I completely rewrote search, made it 10 times more performant in such a neat way, made an inhouse dashboard to automate certain tasks so we wont need to waste developers on them (all of which were extra effort on my own time without being asked), all meanwhile still tending to the fixes of the old implementation.

I felt so accomplished, and in a way, i felt like a lead (even tho im not managing any employees, i had so much freedom and I was literally responsible for everything about Search and if i decide to play with the sprint task order i can even do that).

Then 6 or so weeks ago my manager left the company, and while i thought id be a standalone team / person (single person teams are not uncommon in the company) i was instead put under someone else. Someone who likes to micro manage the fuck out of me. I have been happy working on shit code because it was my baby, my project, no one interferes and no one tells me what to do and everyone would call me the search lead (unofficially). now if i dont report to that guy every two hours he calls to see if im working. preplans sprints i no longer have a say in, and im the only dev who knows the code so all tasks go to me. I feel i got demoted so fucking much. I felt like a lead on a project and now im back to being a normal code minion. From deciding everything about a project to blindly following a some irrelevant manager's opinion. (who btw is making Search worse) And after all the extra effort i put in, after actually caring, after actually embracing Search as my responsibility i get rewarded with losing everything i liked about my job...My Independence. From feeling like a lead to feeling demoted. I am so demotivated.

I love the company, but this is hell for me and this made me hate a job i always loved. I am thinking of talking to the CTO asking to work on other stuff because i no longer want this. If i am to be a code minion at least let it be on code i like, let me go back to dealing with PMs, fuck my new manager I dont wanna work with that guy he can take the project along with all its poopoo.

Hey everyone,

Unfortunately earlier tonight some code was deployed with functionality only compatible with the new version of the devRant app that will be coming out early this week. It caused some weird issues where normal rants would be rendered as collabs causing them to not show up correctly.

This happened when going to rants from the feed (fixed earlier) and going to rants from push notifications (fixed a little while ago).

If you notice any of that behavior still occurring please let me know, thanks!

Apologies for the weirdness and missed notif activity for those who were impacted.

Wrote my friend Sam a letter when I was still working in support. I think it still holds up today.

---

Dear Sam,

I understand that you will join us in our overseas office. Congratulations on landing that job. It’s good steady work. I’ve been doing it for the last ten years.

Your still young so maybe I can give you some little wisdom that will help you in your working years to come.

Let me begin by shedding some light on phone calls.

I try. I really do try Sam. But it is getting so hard for me to hold back the rage that builds up during certain phone calls. Especially the ‘Sorry, I just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’ ones.

Those are the times that I have no access to what they see. I’ve no team-viewer, can not take over that screen in any other way. And why-oh-why can I not take over that terminal session dear Sam? It’s because the caller can not double-click an icon or find a terminal session number.

And what is the reason for this? Because they ‘just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’. This is a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. Beware of these callers Sam.

There is nothing so nerve-wrecking then finding yourself at the mercy of people describing Internet Explorer (do not even get me started) as ‘the big ‘E’, if they use Chrome for their webmail then they most likely will say ‘Mail’ if they mean Chrome. There is no logic Sam. That is just the way these people work.

They will suck all enjoyment out of your work. They will make you want to hunt them down in dark office hallways and show them your tears Sam. Because cry you will.

Sure, I understand that not everyone can be tech savvy. Why, if everyone would be, where would that leave us? No. I love the technologically challenged. They put the fiber in my internet. They make me LOL for real. After the initial anger subsides anyway.

But just below that well-willing folk, on the other side of that border… there they dwell: Management.

Nice cars, suits and iphones Sam. First thing a new manager will require is a brand spanking new business-card. It will hold his/her new title. Then an iphone or overpriced android model will follow suit.

Then they will barge into your office, holding it like it’s the next best thing since sliced bread.

Any manager will automatically assume that you will drop anything you are doing at the present moment to acknowledge the presence of greatness. Failing to do so will result in awkward yet fulfilling situations. I recommend that you do not take your hands of the keyboard and give only the slightest of nods after 5 minutes of complete silence and glaring.

Well… you feel the glare. You do not glare yourself. You do not break eye-contact with the monitor. It does not even matter if you are typing for real or not. I once clicked away happily for 5 minutes. I just typed ‘he is still there’ over and over again. Do not break down Sam. This moment will decide your relationship with this individual.

After the nod there will be a flood of words aimed in your general direction. You can disregard anything that is said. It boils down to ‘can not operate device’.

You then take the device from this person and put it next to you on your desk. You’ll ask the name of this simpleton, write it down on a sticky-note, slap that on the phone. Then you’ll write a random date in the not so near future on another sticky and hand that to the bewildered person in front of you.

It will usually utter some incoherent words about ‘needing, time or but’ (I find that ‘but’is a word they like. They tend to use it three or four times consecutive before you usher them through the door).

Now you’ve won Sam. Well… not really. But it will feel good, I can guarantee that.

This must do for now. A new suit is glaring at me for the last five minutes.

Felt good to do something productive with this time.

Take care,

Baltasar

P.s. I just noticed that there is some foam around his mouth. So if you encounter this, don’t worry: it seems to be perfectly normal.

The Orange Juice Saga ....

I've just come off one of the stupidest calls ever.

Firstly, I am not in tech support, I'm a software developer - read the below with this in mind.

My client called up to say the system I created as been compromised. When he attempts to login, he is logged off his Windows machine.

He'd also apparently taken his PC to ***insert large UK computer superstore here***, who took £100 plus to look at the machine and conclude his needs to buy a new PC.

I remoted into his computer to see WTF was going on.

As he described, visiting my login form did log you out. In fact, whenever you pressed the "L" key you were logged out. Press the "M" key, all windows were minimized. Basically, all Windows hotkeys appeared to be active, without the need to press the Windows key.

Whilst connected to his PC I spent a good 30 minutes checking keyboard settings and came up short.

After asking all the normal questions (has anything changed on your PC, have you installed stuff lately etc.) without any useful answers I got nothing.

I then came across an article stating several presses of the Windows in quick succession will solve the issue.

I got the client to try this, pressed the "L" key (which would have logged me off previously) and the issue was resolved.

Basically, the Windows key was "stuck", which oddly makes your PC kind of useless.

I asked the client if they'd split anything on the keyword whilst working. His exact word were simply lol:

"Oh yer, yesterday, I was trying to drink a glass of orange quickly and split some in the corner of keyboard. I did clean it up quickly though".

Yep, the issue was due to the client spilling orange juice on their keyboard , which in turn made the Windows key stick.

Disaster averted.

A call that started with the client stating I made a system that was easily compromised (i.e. my fault), morphed into a sorry saga of cold drinks.

The client did ask why the ***superstore name*** charged him money for that and recommended a new machine. That is a good question and demonstrated some the questionable tech support practices we see nowadays, even at very large stores.

To be fair to the client, he told me to bill him for half a days work as it was his own fault.

When I'm able to stop myself involuntarily face palming, I'm off for a swim to unwind :)

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.

Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.

Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.

I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.

We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.

Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.

These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?

Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON

I'm getting ridiculously pissed off at Intel's Management Engine (etc.), yet again. I'm learning new terrifying things it does, and about more exploits. Anything this nefarious and overreaching and untouchable is evil by its very nature.

(tl;dr at the bottom.)

I also learned that -- as I suspected -- AMD has their own version of the bloody thing. Apparently theirs is a bit less scary than Intel's since you can ostensibly disable it, but i don't believe that because spy agencies exist and people are power-hungry and corrupt as hell when they get it.

For those who don't know what the IME is, it's hardware godmode. It's a black box running obfuscated code on a coprocessor that's built into Intel cpus (all Intell cpus from 2008 on). It runs code continuously, even when the system is in S3 mode or powered off. As long as the psu is supplying current, it's running. It has its own mac and IP address, transmits out-of-band (so the OS can't see its traffic), some chips can even communicate via 3g, and it can accept remote commands, too. It has complete and unfettered access to everything, completely invisible to the OS. It can turn your computer on or off, use all hardware, access and change all data in ram and storage, etc. And all of this is completely transparent: when the IME interrupts, the cpu stores its state, pauses, runs the SMM (system management mode) code, restores the state, and resumes normal operation. Its memory always returns 0xff when read by the os, and all writes fail. So everything about it is completely hidden from the OS, though the OS can trigger the IME/SMM to run various functions through interrupts, too. But this system is also required for the CPU to even function, so killing it bricks your CPU. Which, ofc, you can do via exploits. Or install ring-2 keyloggers. or do fucking anything else you want to.

tl;dr IME is a hardware godmode, and if someone compromises this (and there have been many exploits), their code runs at ring-2 permissions (above kernel (0), above hypervisor (-1)). They can do anything and everything on/to your system, completely invisibly, and can even install persistent malware that lives inside your bloody cpu. And guess who has keys for this? Go on, guess. you're probably right. Are they completely trustworthy? No? You're probably right again.

There is absolutely no reason for this sort of thing to exist, and its existence can only makes things worse. It enables spying of literally all kinds, it enables cpu-resident malware, bricking your physical cpu, reading/modifying anything anywhere, taking control of your hardware, etc. Literal godmode. and some of it cannot be patched, meaning more than a few exploits require replacing your cpu to protect against.

And why does this exist?
Ostensibly to allow sysadmins to remote-manage fleets of computers, which it does. But it allows fucking everything else, too. and keys to it exist. and people are absolutely not trustworthy. especially those in power -- who are most likely to have access to said keys.

The only reason this exists is because fucking power-hungry doucherockets exist.

A quite normal Windows day:

Bios to Windows: "Go now! Get up!"

Windows to Bios: "Always slow with the young circuit boards."

"I've got something weird on screen."

Windows' answer: "Ignore it first."

Hardware assistant to Windows: "The user puts pressure. He wants me to identify this thing. Could be an ISDN card."

Windows: "Well, well."

Unknown ISDN card to all: "Will you please let me in?"

Network card to intruder: "You can't spread out here!"

Windows: "Quiet in the case! Or I'll cut both their support!"

Device Manager: "Offer compromise. The network card is allowed on Mondays, the ISDN card is on Tuesday."

Graphics card to Windows: "My driver retired yesterday. I'm crashing now."

Windows to graphics card: "When will you be back?"

Graphics card: "Well, not at first."

CD-Rom drive to Windows: "uh, I would have a new driver here..."

Windows: "What's ich´n supposed to do with it?!"

Installation software to Windows: "Leave it, I'll mach´ that already."

Windows: "That's nice to hear."

USB connection to interrupt management: "Alarm! Just been penetrated by a scanner cable. Request response."

Interrupt management: "Where are you coming from?"

USB connection: "I was in the computer right from the start. I'm joined by another colleague."

"You're not on my list." - "Say something."

Windows: "Hopefully there won't be another printer."

Graphics card: "The new driver twitches."

Windows: "We'll just have to get the old one out of retirement."

Uninstall program to new driver: "Go away."

Unwanted driver: "Fuck you."

Windows to Norton Utilities: "Kill him and his brood!"

Utilities to driver rests: "Sorry, we have to delete you."

Important system file: "Arrrrrrgghh!"

Windows on blue screen: "Gib´, the Norton Boys are over the top again."

Blue screen to user: "So, that's it for this week."

Excuse me for stealing your time

And I know it's way too long

A few years back we hired a new guy for our sales department. He worked with us for less than a week and seemed pretty normal.

Until one day he came into my office sat reeeeally close to me and actually whispered into my ear: "last night around midnight i was a bit hungry so i got up and fried some sausages".

Then he looked at me with the weirdest grin ever and just sat there for like 15 seconds not moving a muscle.

😳

About two years ago I get roped into a something when someone was requesting an $8000 laptop to run an "program" that they wrote in Excel to pull data from our mainframe.

In reality they are using our normal application that interacts with the mainframe and screen scrapping it to populate several Excel spreadsheets.

So this guy kept saying that he needed the expensive laptop because he needed the extra RAM and processing power for his application. At the time we only supported 32 bit Windows 7 so even though I told him ten times that the OS wouldn't recognize more than 3.5 GB of RAM he kept saying that increasing the RAM would fix his problem. I also explained that even if we installed the 64 bit OS we didn't have approval for the 64 bit applications.

So we looked at the code and we found that rather than reusing the same workbook he was opening a new instance of a workbook during each iteration of his loop and then not closing or disposing of them. So he was running out of memory due to never disposing of anything.

Even better than all of that, he wanted a faster processor to speed up the processing, but he had about 5 seconds of thread sleeps in each loop so that the place he was screen scrapping from would have time to load. So it wouldn't matter how fast the processor was, in the end there were sleeps and waits in there hard coded to slow down the app. And the guy didn't understand that a faster processor wouldn't have made a difference.

The worst thing is a "dev" that thinks they know what they are doing but they don't have a clue.

- Take a course called "Mobile Application Development"
- Teacher is new and is thus lost on how things work because there is no formal training for them
- Teacher only knows Objective-C so that's all we're allowed to use
- Nobody owns a Mac and I think one or two people had an iPhone/iPad
- Only 4 public Mac computers are available to the school
- One to two people are on them frequently, limiting our time on them as well
- Not a part of the schools normal imaging and updating system, so we get to do it ourselves, which takes up like a week or two of classes (4 classes)
- This includes installing XCode and getting Apple IDs
- No real instructions are given besides "implement the APIs for Facebook, Twitter, and Google Maps into an app"
- Being an ass, for the final day instead of showing off the app we made I made a PowerPoint of my dislike of Objective-C and various struggles I ran into and how I decided not to make the app at all.
- shrug emoji

Me — A normal web designer

*How my relatives introduce me to someone new *
- " Meet my nephew. He works for an IT company. He is a computer engineering."

😶

So I'm a entry level female Developer and I started a contract to hire position in July. Its my first job as a developer and I love almost everything about it. Except this..., there is a Senior Female Developer on my team who hates me and isn't shy about it. She goes for the throat man! She magnifies any mistake I make, hell she calls me out on things that people would consider positive. In sprint planning this week she got mad at me for pulling tasks from the backlog after finishing mine early. I've tried to do everything I could to make her like me. I patiently listen when she goes on and on about her damn cats, kids, sports, ah everything, and she is a non stop talker.

Her main problem with me, so she tells the head of engineering, is that I bug her too much. I almost laughed when I heard this was her main issue with me! Sure, I asked her the normal amount of newbie questions but it's not like I don't know how to read code or google! In fact I started avoiding talking to her about a month ago because she was so rude to me. Now getting hired on full time comes down to whether or not she can stand me still if I am working on another team. I'm so frustrated because it's impossible to prove my worth to this company with this crazy lady making me look bad. I have no problems with anyone else at work. In fact a lot of us have become good friends. No one understands why she hates me so much. It feels like middle school all over again.

On top of that there is an even newer hire who she is supposed to help bring on to the team, but because of her horrible management skills, I have become his defecto mentor for learning the project, as well as the technologies we use. The stress of being in an uncertain contract to hire position + tyrant coworker + helping the new guy + still learning and having my own work to do has been overwhelming! I don't know what to do other than hope that she doesn't try to sabotage me moving to a new team.

This rant means YOU if you are one of those people that "fix" their family's computers.

I was visiting my family over the holidays and while I managed to stay away from fixing their computers for the most time, I offered to help my grandfather to update the Garmin navigation device he wanted to gift my father. (They do not use smartphones for navigation, and my father doesn't want "these modern shitty phones".)

When booting up my grandfather's laptop, I realized something odd: Linux Mint boot screen. Wut?

And immediately I said: "It could be impossible to update your navigation device on this laptop."

As true enough, the Garmin Express update software requires either a Windows PC or a Mac; and even though I vaguely hoped it might be possible to upgrade through Linux, I just could not be bothered to find out that day.

What I wondered though is why did my grandfather of all people ran Linux!?

Don't get me wrong, I use Linux myself on my work machine and I never want to work with something else when coding; yet my grandfather is an end user of the show-me-where-and-what-and-how-often-to-click-kind.

What could he gain by it?

As it turns out, the computer nerd's friend of my uncle managed his PC. And my uncle and he decided unanimously my grandfather should better run Linux. Is it something my grandfather needs? No. BUT IT'S RIGHT! Suck it up! (My father's laptop therefore also runs Linux Mint. So he can't upgrade his new device either.)

This is the ugly kind of entitled nerd-dom I truly detest.

When discussing things further, my grandfather told me that he had problems ever since with his printer. Under Windows, he knew how to print on the special photo paper. Under Linux, all he can barely manage is to print on normal papers. Shame, printing photos was the only thing he liked doing on that device. What did my uncle's friend tell him?

"Get a decent printer!"

Fuck that guy.

It's fine if Linux works for you, but before you install it on a PC of a relative, you better make sure it fits their needs! If you have that odd member that only wants to write letters, read emails, use facebook, and wants to play that browser game, feel free to introduce them to Linux.

Yet if they have any special wish, don't stand in their way.

If they want to do something that requires a certain OS, don't just decide for them that their desire is wrong, but help them achieve their goal. If you can't align that with your ideology, then get the fuck out of my way and stop "helping".

For some people, a computer is a device to achieve a certain goal, a work. They only get hindered by your ill-advised attempts at virtue signalling.

So before today, I'd never used GoDaddy before. Not even once. My supervisor walks in and happily informs me that I'm going to be adding photos to a website that she does editing for. Okay, fine, that's stupidly easy. What I did not realize, however, is that this entire website had been built using GoDaddy's site builder, and if you're not familiar with it, thank whatever gods you worship that you've dodged that bullet. I hardly want to go wandering around somebody else's web hosting, so I search about for a bit praying that there's SOME semblance of a normal text editor someplace, because text editors make me happy and all, and find very little on the regular site. Already not thrilled. So I figure, how bad is this site editor? Really, how bad can it possibly be?
Oh, you poor misguided son of a -
Anyway, I go in and look at the site. Slideshows everywhere, nothing is aligned correctly, it's a web designer's nightmare. Thankfully, I'm not a web designer, so I press on and reorganize a little bit. I try slapping a new slideshow on their, and discover that unlike the way it SHOULD work, elements do not move to allow for other elements, they just sit there and let you throw things on top of them. I stare at my neatly-stacked slideshows for a second in utter disbelief, knowing but not really accepting that I'm going to need to take every last one of those slideshow elements and slide those little so-and-so's down by hand. ....why? Who designed this? Who decided that was a good idea? I do some Googling to see if there's anything out there to make this less horrid, and lo and behold I find a GoDaddy page about their FTP file manager! It's under web/classic hosting, which apparently means it's deprecated because I spent the next ten minutes hunting around for the "web hosting" link those chicken-lickers were so proud of and it's nowhere to be found.
Alright, so they want to do this the hard way.
At this point I'm screaming internally and PRAYING that I'm just being stupid and not seeing anything to make it easi-
No, not even easier. Just less stupid. This website builder makes no sense. It's like hiring a contractor to build a bridge and handing him a box of Legos and a banana.
So I do more googling and find instructions on getting to the file manager. FINALLY. The first step is find "Hosting" under "My Products." I rush over to My Products joyfully, hoping I can get this stupid website up and running reasonably quickly, and...!
There's no hosting tab.
No button.
Not even a little hard-to-see link. At this point my brain is screaming. WHY would you give me a website builder but absolutely no way to actually write the website? Do people actually use this thing? I mean, I get it if they want to make it nice and accessible for people to make websites without overwhelming them with HTML but if they know how to edit the website and they don't want your help, why would you force me in to this? Why? Then it occurred to me that maybe the organization just hasn't ever had a web developer in it, ever, or at least not one who was willing to help out with the website, so they purposefully signed up for hosting that deprived them of any kind of HTML editor. Then on top of all of that, I noticed that on the home page, which had been edited by someone else long before I ever looked at it, ALSO had one of these stupid slideshows that I had to reorganize by hand, and some sad, angry little man had put in one of the photos sideways. It was SIDEWAYS. Just sitting there on its side, the photo's occupants staring at me with sad eyes begging me to turn them facing up again. I sat there and stared at a badly-designed website in a questionably-designed editor. And I wondered. I wondered who put this all together, and I wondered why *I* was the one doing it, when I work for a university and the website was for some beach homeowner's association. And I wondered if this job was a task that my supervisor had agreed to do and just passed off onto an office monkey. And I wept bitter tears at the realization that I am that office monkey.

I forgot what it felt like to not be the domain expert in a thing. 😅 Have to learn a ton of new things for work, which is great, but I feel guilty for being so slow. SO SLOW.

I know it’s normal, I’m just…. Getting used to it. 😉

Anyway, here’s a cat.

My first dev job was a paid internship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. But I wasn't in the computing division with the supercomputer and the 30-foot 18-screen wall display. In a way, I was doing something more exciting. I was in the Hollifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility.

That meant that I was working next to a radioactive ray gun that they fired at different targets to try and make new kinds of particles. To refine the beam components, there was a tower with the world's highest voltage Van de Graf generator at 25,000 kilovolts. I got training on how to put on a radiation suit, and was told that if I got locked in the wrong room and red lights began to flash, I had about five seconds to run to the far wall and push the E-stop, before I got irradiated and died slowly over the next five weeks.

But, I was reassured, that never happened. Radiation leaks are rare too (that's why we wore dosimeters). More likely, there would be a leak in the generator tower. To explain why that's bad, that tower wasn't filled with normal air. 25,000 kilovolts would punch through that like nothing, arc against the walls, and we'd lose the electric charge. No, instead, the tower was filled to a few atmospheres of pressure with sulfur hexafluoride gas. You know how helium makes your voice go up? This stuff makes your voice go down. It's heavier than air, and it kills you by displacing and starving your lungs of oxygen.

So, while I was happily coding away on PHP, CSS and the Bash shell, making a log book for all the ion gun settings and targets the scientists used in their experiments, I was keeping an ear out for the oxygen alarm. I had a blast!

It were around 1997~1998, I was on middle school. It was a technical course, so we had programing languages classes, IT etc.

The IT guy of our computer lab had been replaced and the new one had blocked completely the access on the computers. We had to make everything on floppy disks, because he didn't trusted us to use the local hard disk. Our class asked him to remove some of the restrictions, but he just ignored us. Nobody liked that guy. Not us, not the teachers, not the trainees at the lab.

Someday a friend and me arrived a little bit early at the school. We gone to the lab and another friend that was a trainee on the lab (that is registered here, on DevRant) allowed us to come inside. We had already memorized all the commands. We crawled in the dark lab to the server. Put a ms dos 5.3 boot disk with a program to open ntfs partitions and without turn on the computer monitor, we booted the server.

At that time, Windows stored all passwords in an encrypted file. We knew the exact path and copied the file into the floppy disk.

To avoid any problems with the floppy disk, we asked the director of the school to get out just to get a homework we theorically forgot at our friends house that was on the same block at school. We were not lying at all. He really lived there and he had the best computer of us.

The decrypt program stayed running for one week until it finds the password we did want: the root.

We came back to the lab at the class. Logged in with the root account. We just created another account with a generic name but the same privileges as root. First, we looked for any hidden backup at network and deleted. Second, we were lucky: all the computers of the school were on the same network. If you were the admin, you could connect anywhere. So we connected to a "finance" computer that was really the finances and we could get lists of all the students with debits, who had any discount etc. We copied it to us case we were discovered and had to use anything to bargain.

Now the fun part: we removed the privileges of all accounts that were higher than the trainee accounts. They had no access to hard disks anymore. They had just the students privileges now.

After that, we changed the root password. Neither we knew it. And last, but not least, we changed the students login, giving them trainee privileges.

We just deleted our account with root powers, logged in as student and pretended everything was normal.

End of class, we went home. Next day, the lab was closed. The entire school (that was school, mid school and college at the same place) was frozen. Classes were normal, but nothing more worked. Library, finances, labs, nothing. They had no access anymore.

We celebrated it as it were new years eve. One of our teachers came to us saying congratulations, as he knew it had been us. We answered with a "I don't know what are you talking about". He laughed and gone to his class.

We really have fun remembering this "adventure". :)

PS: the admin formatted all the servers to fix the mess. They had plenty of servers.

All web developers should support up to IE9 without any problems.

Why? Because in Korea, it is normal.

Every person uses that damn Win7, which has either IE9 or IE10. Without IE support, no one will browse your webpage.

Now you would ask us, why don't you use other modern browsers?

We would then ask you, why would you install a new browser that is
1. Buggy
2. Heavy
3. Takes up ram
4. Has so many features
when you have an awesome minimalistic browser that is preinstalled, and works in all Windows? No thanks.

So, if you put a message saying you will soon drop support of IE, it means that you won't target Korea. Just after the support drop, there won't be traffic to your web site.

So what is the point of this rant?
1. We love IE. Lol
2. IE is lightweight, minimalistic, and the fastest browser in the world.
3. All websites should NOT drop support for IE.
4. We don't care whether web devs will have a hard time. We just think websites are built with Wix and Wordpress, and they work in IE, meaning, IE support is the number one priority.
5. If you ever start a business in Korea, and has a website, make sure to hire an senior Korean web dev who has worked with IE for a long time.
6. Here is the tl;dr
Hate us. Period.

So my friend, who owns a restaurant, asked me over 6 months ago, if i could redesign his homepage. I told him "sure why not" and since we're friends i didn't want him to pay me any money.

He told me what his thoughts about the design were and i told him that i needed the menu, some decent pictures of the restaurant, the "about us" story and the credentials to the server.

He didn't know the credentials to his server and i told him to ask the person, who made that page to send me the information i needed, but he kept on saying "could you call her because blah blah". Well, i did but she couldn't give me that info without asking the owner. So i met him and told him "hey i told you so, because it's completely normal not give sensible information to unknown people and besides that she told me to tell you that you should give her a call, because she hasn't got your new phone number". Two months later i got an email with the credentials, but still no menu and no pictures.

Four days ago i made a transition page, because i didn't want to publish the page with stock images and without menu, so i wrote him again whether he wanted design #1 or #2. Got a text at ~21:00 saying "design 2, but you need to publish it at 22:00".

I mean wtf?! He assured me he would call some people he knows to get those things. I told him, that it would be free, because of our friendship, but no support from him and he keeps stressing?! He knows i've got a full-time job and my studies going on, so my time is really limited and he keeps fking around like that?! Man it pisses me really off...

So this happened a few days ago. I always want to root my smartphones for that little bit more control.

*Put's new smartphone into fastboot mode*
*Tries to flash root zip onto it*
"You have to OEM unlock the bootloader first"
*OEM unlocks the bootloader*
*Tries to flash but fails*
*Tries to reboot*
Phone: "The bootloader has been tampered with, the device will boot in 5 seconds".
*Screen just hangs there for ages*
FUCK.
*Tries to enter fastboot again to OEM re-lock the bootloader*
*Fastboot appears to startup RIGHT AFTER THE FUCKING ERROR MESSAGE so can't boot into that anymore*.
FUCKING FUCK.
Hmm... TWRP is still installed...
*Tries to flash some stuff through TWRP*
"The zip file you are trying to flash is corrupt".
FUCK MY FUCKING LIFE.
*Connects phone to Linux for adb flashing*
*Nothing happens after half an hour of trying*
*Connects phone to ancient windows 7 laptop*
*Laptop doesn't even RECOGNISE the phone although all drivers are installed*.
*Le me about to completely lose my fucking mind*
*Connects phone desperately with Linux again*
*Phone is recognised right away but the SPL flash tool can't detect it*
*Tries to put it into fastboot again*
*Fails for about an hour*
*phone in charging mode again*
*Presses the power button for a last, desperate attempt*
*SPL flash suddenly recognises the phone*
FLASHING
FLASHING
FLASHING
DONE.
*Android boots again like nothing happened*

I can use it again like normal but the No-Root firewall is draining my battery like crazy.
That was one hell of a journey though!

There was a time I made an update on one of our client's e-commerce website sign-up page. The update caused a bug that allowed new users to create an account without actually creating an account.

The code block meant to save user credentials (i.e email address and password) to the database was commented out for some reasons I still can't remember to this day. After registration new users had their session created just as normal but in reality they have no recorded account on the platform. This shit went on like this for a whole week affecting over 350 new customers before the devil sent me a DM.

I got a call from my boss on that weekend that some users who had made purchases recently can't access their account from a different device and cannot also update their password. Nobody likes duty calls on a weekend, I grudgingly and sluggishly opened up my PC to create a quick fix but when I saw what the problem was I shut down my PC immediately, I ran into the shower like I was being chased by a ghost, I kept screaming "what tha fuck! what tha fuck!!" cus I knew hell was about to break loose.

At that moment everything seemed off as if I could feel everything, I felt the water dripping down my spine, I could hear the tiniest of sound. I thought about the 350 new customers the client just lost, I imagined the raving anger on the face of my boss, I thought about how dumb my colleagues would think I was for such a stupid long running bug.

I wondered through all possible solutions that could save me from this embarrassment.
-- "If this shitty client would have just allowed us verify users email before usage things wouldn't have gotten to this extent"
-- "Should I call the customers to get their email address using their provided telephone?... No they'd think I'm a scammer"
-- "Should I tell my boss the database was hacked? Pffft hack my a**",
-- "Should I create a page for the affected users to re-verify their email address and password? No, some sessions may have expired"
-- "Or maybe this the best time to quit this f*ckn job!"
... Different thoughts from all four corners of the bathroom made it a really long bath. Finally, I decided it was best I told my boss what had happened. So I fixed the code, called my boss the next day and explained the situation on ground to him and yes he was furious. "What a silly mistake..!" he raged and raged. See me in my office by Monday.
That night felt longer than usual, I couldn't sleep properly. I felt pity for the client and I blamed it all on myself... yeah the "silly mistake", I could have been more careful.

Monday came boss wasn't at the office, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday not available. Next week he was around and when we both met the discussion was about a different project. I tried briefing him about last week incident, he seems not to recall and demands we focus on the current project.

However, over three hundred and fifty customers swept under the carpet courtesy of me. I still felt the guilt of that f*ck up till this day.

Is it expected for a new arrival to post a 'Hello World'? Only I don't normally do what's expected. Actually, I don't normally do normal. Then again, I don't know what I am doing most of the time. Or where I am. Or who I am.

Because of hardware failure we had to move some vpns from one datacenter to another.

The team of highly untrained monkeys at my hosting provider were hired to do this. First they ran backups of all the systems. Then they started the moving process. A few hours later they were done. We got an email everything was back online.

So we restarted all our processes and no data was coming in from our Raspberry's around the country. So we start a little investigation. What did these buffons do, they changed our rsa keys.

So we kindly ask them to put the old keys back so we do not have to fix 200 changed key warnings on systems that are not remotely accesible.

Apperently something that can't be done because their back up process is automated and always makes new keys.

Holy fucking fuck, whats the point in having a backup its not an exact copy. Is this fucking normal?

Now I will be spending the next few weeks literally standing in cow shit reconnecting Raspberry's.

Thanks a fucking lot. Not!

How to make your employee suffer, drive them insane and having suicide tendency 101.

Delay the paycheck for 18 days but still asking about task progress like a normal day. Like nothing happened.

I can't pay water and electricity bills that due in 3 days, can't buy medicine,
can't buy gas for the bike,
next week i'm not gonna be able to buy food

The good thing is, i still got the internet, i can look for new jobs and play some games to forget how shit my life right now while the electricity lasts.

Disclaimer
I have no suicide tendency, just to make it more hiperbolic 🤣

Just got my Christmas present from Shopify:

You have 45 days to integrate with our new Billing API or lose your app on our app store.

Because I just LOVE dropping everything to deal with yet another mandatory Shopify change. Have you guys not heard of backwards compatibility?

My coworker just spent *weeks* getting our app approved, including submitting an obscene amount of information and multiple live reviews and now they're threatening to remove our listing from their app store if we don't adopt their new API by the end of January, requiring a complete re-submission and review to get it back on.

This is apparently a completely normal way to do business to Shopify.

I think I nailed it.

I had an interview on Friday. Never had I ever such a good one. Everything went so smoothly I'm amazed to this moment.

It started pretty much normally. Few questions about me and my CV. Next some soft skills check and few minutes talking in English to make sure I know how to speak.

Next, two funny trick questions. I hope I'll translate them good enough.
1) You've got 6 cups in a row. Three of them, next to each other, are empty. Remaining 3 are full. You've got one movement to make them stand alternately, ie. Full, empty, etc. or Empty, full etc.
2) You've got yourself a cake. Normal, birthday cake in a shape of a cylinder. On three cuts, you have to cut it in 8 equal pieces.

Next was technical interview. The only thing I couldn't answer to was a formula to get angle between camera and two objects on the scene. Something about cos x.

They told me that I was the only recruitee to make project using Hololens SDK. Other people made the images gallery in 2D only.

Also they were VERY impressed that I managed to send them fix that changed a lot of the gallery in an hour. No one was expecting it so fast since the feature wasn't all that simple. Or so they said. Code was written so it wasn't hard to implement this change.

Now I've got to wait at least a week for their response. As you could imagine, I'm nervously checking my email each time I get any spam.

I'd like to thank @fire-phoenix and @Root that were responding to my last posts about this new work tasks and current hardships. I know it's a bit too early to celebrate but I'm just so hyped for how well everything went 😀

Hello devRant,

This is already from a few days ago but I had to process the whole thing myself first.

It was a normal day at work nothing special. Customers came in got their repaired PC's/Laptops and brought some new work in. So I went through some and then I got to the case that is the most well unbelievable and shocking I had in the only 2 years doing this. At first it was a normal HDD bad sector thing and I started copying the old HDD to a new one.

//NOTE: the program we use shows every file it's copying and the sectors it spans //

Suddenly I saw a weird thing happening where it started copying tons of files from a folder called "mature/kids" over to the new HDD.
I noted the path and after it finished we returned the laptop to the customer and he luckily left his old HDD with us. So my boss and I we did some investigation and we'll turns out the dude has a whole library of childpornography.

tl;dr check what you copied and report such cases to the police.

Don't do such stupid shit and stay legal guys.

Which you all a great day/night/morning/evening/whatever

//EDIT: I ofc won't post pictures cause of obvious reasons

New HOE came. He “streamlined” the processes and “standardised” the policies. And in turn.. fucked up the whole startup feel of my company.

I saw it happening right in front of my eyes in a matter of only few months.

Earlier, things were flexible, work was fun, people were even ready to put in more hours because we were all having fun. Now, work feels like work, fun is gone, frustration has become normal, and the most frustrating part is that.. WFH is now a “privilege”.

Fuck this shit man! That fucker exhausted the whole company in just a few months. Given enough time, he will be the end of this company.

A PCB I designed on the job over the last weeks shipped today! A benefit of hardware is the haptic element you have at the end of the design process - you made something touchable. (I am proud.)
Also, errors made earlier in the design process are permanent now. But other than on my software my design got reviewed, so I'm optimistic it'll not contain many if any.

I'm on vacation right now for moving stuff but I'm looking forward to do the "pick'n place" on monday. Soldering manually is quite relaxing for me, you should try it, too! ;)

In other news, I'm no longer sleeping on the floor in my home-office while the paint is drying in other rooms.
I already moved the most of my stuff - books and tech equipment are the worst - and I moved my furniture yesterday.
My new roommates are considerably quieter and my sleeping rhythm is slowly shifting back to normal.

Idk man. I can't be the only one that thinks the new iPhone looks stupid, can I? It's too glassy and glossy. It looks like a makeup case or something my sister would use to hold mascara.

And WTH is with the border-radius on that bottom menu bar? Like, either choose to make it a background strip like a normal nav menu or leave it out, but don't just give me more of that weird recta-bubble shit.

Assigned to a new project team..

Using git, in a creative way. So.. "master" is "dev" branch, usually. Everyone can push their branch to dev server .. so it's "dynamic for us". Production branch is whatever, as long as the branch has the release version. Sometimes, the release comes from "master".. that mean "dev" in normal geek..

That's just Git. The source code is a saturated spagetti of Entity framework and Caliburn. It is littered with antipatterns, especially basebean. Holy Christmas and Easter that baseclass do a lot of stuff that has no place as a base class ..

Fucking frameworks, I'm gonna start to evangelize frameworks as the no1 antipattern.

MS SQL as the main DB, but is dumped to json FILES through a scheduled task to increase read performance on web.

There is a soap endpoint to expose the json files, fml..

I am assuming I was placed here to improve stuff, I have never in my life seen anything like this before.

There is a special place in hell for this repository

2018 was a dumpster fuck for me. I was looking for 2019.

Oh boy, I was wrong.

I had a flight booked for 3rd Jan. I was supposed to go to Delhi, back to my job.

On 2nd Jan evening, I got a high fever. 103 F and my heartbeat were around 140. My brother took me to Hospital and after the doctor checked me.

There were no other symptoms. Only high fever. The doctor told me to do some blood test and give me a dose of Antibiotic.

Next day all the result came back negative. Doctor give me 3 days of antibiotic course and told eat light.

After 3 days of getting the 4g antibiotic in my body, Nothing changed. The fever was there and no symptoms.

on the 3rd day, the doctor increases the course to 2 days and told me to get more blood test. I also had to get 4D sonography and Heart ECG and its sonography.

on the 5th day, nothing changed. I still had a high fever. All the blood test were negative.

On the 6th day, I was admitted to the hospital and my medicine was changed to high does of broad-spectrum antibiotics and lots of new blood test.

There were taking blood from one hand and giving antibiotics to another.

After the broad-spectrum antibiotics, my fever went down to normal but all the 17 blood test I did came completely negative.

On the 8th day, we went to an infection specialist. He checked all the report and ask us to do a very details sonography. After all those things he said it most likely staphylococcus infection.

So here I am, making a chart of my temperature every 2 hours and taking two tablets every day.

This last 10 was very hard. There was a point where I was thinking "this is it. I am gonna die".

I am still waiting for a very detailed blood report which takes 5 days to create. I will get it after 2 days.

So after lots of medicine and over 15+ reports, Here I am working from home.

What a wonderful start of 2019.

On the screen: four text boxes cycling through rainbow color backgrounds and spinning wildly in circles.

Manager walks in.

Here's the context.

We were pair programming and working on a simple form. We were just finishing up the style, and I suggested we use a CSS3 animation to make the invalid fields pulsate a light red once.

I'm the young guy in the office, so I am most familiar with the "new" front end stuff like flex and CSS3.

My colleague was unfamiliar with CSS3 animations, so I implemented the red flash quickly and showed him.

He was curious what else you could do with CSS3 animations, so I changed my "to/ from" to a "0%/ 25%/ 75%/ 100%" style animation to show how keyframes worked. Then I made the animation iterations infinite so it went on forever. Of course, I didn't have any normal colors on hand so I just went with my debug colors: red, green, blue, yellow, etc.

We submitted the form with invalid inputs and sure enough, they flashed rainbow colors. It looked pretty funny so I thought "haha, lets quickly add rotation while we're at it"

That's the point where the education turned to a little fun but it wasn't going to take more than a second.

So we did it and it looked pretty funny and it actually made me laugh. Then we started discussing next steps on the form (back-end). Discussion lasted maybe five minutes before our manager visited to update us.

As we were discussing, the invalid controls were still spinning and rainbow colored in the background. Whoops.

The words we managed to say were just "It's invalid" and then we broke out laughing.

Never EVER buy a Mac as your primary PC if you're a developer.

Back in 2014 I bought an iMac because I already had an iPhone, and being able to code on xCode and also have a Windows partition seemed perfect. It wasn't.

Soon enough, I started encountering issues. My storage was randomly filling up, my computer started getting slow despite me having a small number of start apps and still a lot of storage available, it was all a mess.

So - I installed Windows 10 using Bootcamp to use it as my main OS. All was great until I wanted a new partition of Windows so I can test some things out without damaging my stuff. I try multiple methods, none of which work because my disk is not in the right partition format, and I don't want to change it because I'd have to format the whole thing.

Whatever - I give up, and try going back to my normal partition, disappointed. Guess fucking what?! My Windows Boot was damaged! Yes, I shit you not!

So - not only was this absolute piece of shit not able to add just one more fucking partition with an OS on it, but it BROKE my main partition, and now I'm trying to recover it.

I've said it once and I'll say it again: Never EVER get a Mac as your primary computer, unless you only work on Mac/iPhone apps.

For paying 1300$, I was expecting a seamless experience with little to no issues - yet all I got is a computer that's fucking broken from it's very core.

Fuck you, Apple.

Bit of an essay. TLDR: come Monday I'm either getting fired or promoted. And the CTO is a dickhead. If you think you work with me or know who I am, no you don't, shut the hell up.

Was having a discussion with my team, went on for a bit, at one point my manager mentioned that the CTO wanted me to go into the office occasionally, same thing I've had since I joined when they literally wanted me to move hundreds of miles to be close to the office mid covid when the office was closed. I give a nondescript answer. He's a bit more persistent, I snap a little but the conversation moves on. Discussion of company and team dynamics, at one point he makes a comment about people at another company being told if they don't go into the office they won't be eligible for promotion.

I ask everyone else on the call to leave.

I point out that 2 years ago me and him were interviewing candidates. He on a few occasions introduces me to candidates as a _senior_ engineer. My job title does not contain the word senior. I let it slide the first time, not worth it for a slip of the toung. Happens a couple more times, I take him aside and privately point out my job title does not contain the word senior. He says he didn't realise and thought I was.

My take away then: I'm expected to do the work of a senior without being paid for it and without being given the acknowledgement of the appropriate job title. I remind him of this. My job title hasn't changed. Fuck, I took a low ball offer when I joined and have had a minimal pay rise in like, 3 years. My tone is "not happy".

His response? He discussed promoting me with CTO however budged constraints. I somewhat understand, however.

We have promoted several people in the last few years. We have grown by hiring new people in the last few years (5 in a company of 30). There are ways to compensate someone in ways that do not impact day to day budget (shares, TC, total compensation, is normal terminology in the tech field for this). I ask why the hell should I travel a few hundred miles to the office to get get to know people, put effort in to a company that demonstrably doesn't value me? Particularly as all levels of management have completely failed at developing a social atmosphere during covid? My first month, I had 3 5 minute meetings with my manager a week. That was all of the communication I had with people. I literally complained and laid out what they should do instead, they adopted most of it.

I also ask him if he genuinely thinks being here is in my professional interest? My tone has well passed pissed off.

I will say, I actually quite like my manager, we have a good working relationship and I've learned a lot from him.

He makes some mediocre points, tries to give advice about value of shares. To me, the value of shares is zero until they are money. The value to the company, however, is that it's a sizeable chunk on their balance sheet and shares sheet that they have to be willing to justify. If I wanted money, I'd go work at a high frequency trading bank and make 5x what I'm on now. No joke, that's what they pay, I could get a job, came close in the past but went to amazon. He understands.

He says will discuss with CTO. They were on a call for like an hour. His tone has changed to "you will be promoted ASAP, comp may be structured as discussed". Point made.

I'm in this job because it's convenient, is easy for me. Was originally lower challenge than previous, has a range of chances to learn and _that's_ the value to me. He's suitably nervous.

Point made I think.

So given I swore a few times, at least once about the CTO. Interesting to see how it goes.

Message from him to the effect that he spoke to CTO, has been told to write a proposal for promotion (kinda standard), will discuss with HR on Monday as they're on holiday.

So, maybe not getting fired today?

Blood pressure still very high.

Who the fuck came up with the idea of using SharePoint? What it even is?! Is it a website, wiki, document repo...?

Our version seems to be a broken wiki with no info content, old links, illogical navigation. And somehow word documents are integrated into it. Sometimes you see some weird calendar and timelines (from old projects). You can navigate into a folder, but you cannot get back. There's no ".." button?? You can map it like OneDrive to yourself, but Windows doesn't support any document version control. Where's the check in/out option from explorer menu??? I sure as shit have those for SVN, GIT etc. Is there a new version created everytime I press ctrl-s or only when I close the document?

Well, I could open the document in "online" mode. Ok, the formatting goes weird and everything is super slow. But at least I can fuck up someone elses document by accidentaly copy/pasting stuff, deleting lines, hitting my face into keyboard etc. There's automatically new version added!

Somehow you can enable the forced check in/out for documents. Obviously only the library admin can do that. And since he's just a program manager, he has no clue what the fuck is version control or document management. So he has this thing on his "things to do" list. For him, document management means sending various spec versions as email attachments. And the developers can figure out together who has the most recent one.

How did M$ push shit piece of shit to corporations? They even use this crap for the intranet making it slower than creation of galaxies. Though it's ok, since you cannot find anything from the intranet. It's all just head honchos blogs, seasonal greetings and stock market statuses. Nowhere is seen the downstairs cafeteria menu for the day. Or where to report for broken toilet. You know, stuff that 99% of people would like to see.

I complained to M$ about the SharePoint, but apparently there's no problem. You can code it yourself? Yeiii! So, instead of just updating some line in design spec, I have to take a 3 month class and get a MS sertificate, code some class-based-web-shit for 6 months and maybe, maybe then I can make the page/document look normal?

I am thinking, that I will just start writing my specs on paper. I will put them on the shelf and if you want to read it, you will check it out manually. And if someone else tries to edit it while you are editing it, you just cover the paper with your hands. There might be a requirement to make the document look more like MS Word, but that's easy to do. Just go to WC with the paper and wipe with it a couple of times.

I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.

I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.

We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.

The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.

We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.

It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.

Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.

But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.

I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.

But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.

Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.

They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.

I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this

Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.

I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.

But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.

... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.

Trying to install new proprietary graphics drivers on my desktop. Reboots. Black screen. SSHes into computer uninstalls new graphics driver and reinstalls Xorg.

[ Level up ]
Idiot running Linux -> Normal Linux user

@netikras since when does proprietary mean bad?

Lemme tell you 3 stories.

CISCO AnyConnect:
- come in to the office
- use internal resources (company newsletter, jira, etc.)
- connect to client's VPN using Cisco AnyConnect
- lose access to my company resources, because AnyConnect overwrites routing table (rather normal for VPN clients)
- issue a route command updating routing table so you could reach confluence page in the intranet
- route command executes successfully, `route -n` shows nothing has changed
- google this whole WTF case
- Cisco AnyConnect constantly overwrites OS routing table to ENFORCE you to use VPN settings and nothing else.

Sooo basically if you want to check your company's email, you have to disconnect from client's VPN, check email and reconnect again. Neat!

Can be easily resolved by using opensource VPN client -- openconnect

CISCO AnyConnect:
- get a server in your company
- connect it to client's VPN and keep the VPN running for data sync. VPN has to be UP at all times
- network glitch [uh-oh]
- VPN is no longer working, AnyConnect still believes everything is peachy. No reconnect attempts.
- service is unable to sync data w/ client's systems. Data gets outdated and eventually corrupted

OpenConnect (OSS alternative to AnyConnect) detects all network glitches, reports them to the log and attempts reconnect immediatelly. Subsequent reconnect attempts getting triggered with longer delays to not to spam network.

SYMANTEC VIP (alleged 2FA?):
- client's portal requires Sym VIP otp code to log in
- open up a browser in your laptop
- navigate to the portal
- enter your credentials
- click on a Sym VIP icon in the systray
- write down the shown otp number
- log in

umm... in what fucking way is that a secure 2FA? Everything is IN the same fucking device, a single click away.

Can be easily solved by opensource alternatives to Sym VIP app: they make HTTP calls to Symantec to register a new token and return you the whole totp url. You can convert that url to a qr code and scan it w/ your phone (e.g. Google's Authenticator). Now you have a true 2FA.

Proprietary is not always bad. There are good propr sw too. But the ones that are core to your BAU and are doing shit -- well these ARE bad. and w/o an oppurtunity to workaround/fix it yourself.

So, I found this :

Dear Tech Support:
Last year I upgraded from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0. I soon noticed that the new program began unexpected child processing that took up a lot of space and resources. In addition, Wife 1.0 installed itself into all other programs and now monitors all other system activity. Applications such as Poker Night 10.3, Football 5.0, HuntingAndFishing 7.5, and Racing 3.6. I can't seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background while attempting to run my favorite applications. I'm thinking about going back to Girlfriend 7.0, but the uninstall doesn't work on Wife 1.0. Please help!

Thanks ...Troubled User
-------
REPLY:

Dear Troubled User:
This is a very common problem. Many people upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0, thinking that it is just a Utilities and Entertainment program. Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM and is designed by its Creator to run EVERYTHING!!! It is also impossible to delete Wife 1.0 and to return to Girlfriend 7.0. It is impossible to uninstall, or purge the program files from the system once installed. You cannot go back to Girlfriend 7.0 because Wife 1.0 is designed not to allow this. Look in your Wife 1.0 manual under Warnings-Alimony-Child Support. I recommend that you keep Wife 1.0 installed and work on improving the configuration. I suggest installing the background application YesDear 99.0 to alleviate software augmentation.

The best course of action is to enter the command C:\APOLOGIZE because ultimately you will have to do this before the system will return to normal anyway.

Wife 1.0 is a great program, but it tends to be very high maintenance. Wife 1.0 comes with several support programs, such as CleanAndSweep 3.0, CookIt 1.5 and DoBills 4.2. However, be very careful how you use these programs. Improper use will cause the system to launch the program NagNag 9.5. Once this happens, the only way to improve the performance of Wife 1.0 is to purchase additional software. I recommend Flowers 2.1 and Diamonds 5.0, but beware because sometimes these applications can be expensive.

WARNING!!! DO NOT, under any circumstances, install SecretaryWithShortSkirt 3.3. This application is not supported by Wife 1.0 and will cause irreversible damage to the operating system. 

WARNING!!! Attempting to install NewGirlFriend 8.8 along with Wife 1.0 will crash the system.

(see Wife 1.0 manual, Apologize, High Maintenance & Secretary with Short Skirt)

The manager and selfperceived omnipotent cult leader was the worst kind of businessman. Slimey and trecherous, zero sense of ethics, but felt holier than the pope because he "helped" his weakling herd of piteous employees.

These employees were smart kids, most of them in their late teens. All of them legally disabled. There was this kid who gobbled up ritalin like candy, a boy who had received his measles shots and turned socially awkward (/s), a chubby girl who could name all the hex colors of her chocolate stained shirt... you know, what we call skilled developers in the industry.

Fiftyfive of them.

They were awesome, awkward highschool dropouts, like I had been a decade earlier. They worked 50h a week. They had great humor, were passionate, devoured information about new technologies, and they built custom websites from scratch in no time. I had to lead this flock, and felt honored to work with them.

Then things started to smell funny.

I discovered all 55 of their workstations ran pirated software, from Windows to Adobe CS. I'm not without sin in that regard, but as a company it's just plain stupid.

Clients were treated like shit. I mean, we all feel like punching a client in the face sometimes, but I'm taking about unjustified debt collections paired with death threats.

Then I found out these kids were often disappearing for a few months, only to return months later.

I started digging, and discovered they were all working reintegration internships (because they were on below minimum wage disability payments), at almost zero cost to my employer.

After 6 months, my boss gave them a negative recommendation, they were all too "sick" to function in normal jobs.

Then they were rotated to a shadow company, doing the same work for another 6 months, and so on to a third company.

He broke these kids, talked them down, made them feel worthless. He threatened the ones who understood what was happening.

I ended up bringing the company down, with the CEO and two government officials jailed for fraud and corruption.

Some employees were quite mad about it, at least at first — I was the shepherd who abandoned his sheep. Luckily, most found better paid positions in no time.

Truly one of the most fucked up and difficult situations I've been in.

New job...
No introduction to project
No database overview
No documentation
No commented code

Shit, hope this isn't normal in the industry I have aimed the rest of my life at

MENTORS - MY STORY (Part I)

I've had several great mentors during my career. This is the story of the three most important.

1.- Professor E.
When I was on my first year (University - Computer Science), all my professors were 'normal' except for this one.

E. was the Programming I - Laboratory professor. And the most important thing he teached us was to think. To be independent, and to look for answers beyond simple solutions.

He was always pushing us beyond what was requested and to try new things, to try to improve our own solutions and to look at them as always improvable.

In a regular class, this would happen:
Student: Hey E. How can I do this X requirement?
E.: Use function xyz with A and B parameters.
S: Ok thanks...

...10 minutes later...

S: Hey E. that function doesn't work very good for my case.
E.: You have a book, you have internet connection. Don't waste 10 minutes trying to abide what I told you. Investigate, find a way or even a better way; use your resources.

Other example, in the first year all projects were requested to be delivered with text based interface (console projects).
What about E.?
"Well, you CAN deliver your project with a text based interface BUT you definitely SHOULD try to make a GUI, something simple but effective. Just so you learn more in the process"

Good E. He gave me strong foundations for this industry.

Finished my project early today. I assumed it would take another day or two since it's primarily research and I had no idea how to progress, but I caught a break and finished it early. I also finished another surprise ticket! yay! I had the rest of the day to myself!

... had!

But then I noticed I had been working on the wrong branch. Fuck. Moving my work over was tedious, as was the cleanup. I kicked myself for good measure. Also, every time I switch branches, I need to run a bloody slow script that runs all the migrations, data tasks, backfills, etc. for the branch. It takes 12-18 minutes. There's a faster version, but it usually breaks things.

Turns out the branch I was supposed to be working on wasn't up to date with master. So I merged that in, leading to....

merge conflicts. Because of course there are conflicts. To make matters worse, I had (and have) no idea which changes were correct because idfk what those 248 new commits are doing. So I guessed at them, ran the script, and (after more waiting) ran a few related specs. Yet more waiting. Sense a pattern here? Eventually they finished, and all the specs passed. H'ray. So I committed the changes, and told Jenkins to kick off a full spec suite, which takes 45+ minutes.

La de da, I go back to cleaning up the previous ticket, pushing reversion commits, etc. Later, I notice the ticket number, look at the branch number I've been working on.... and. Fuuuck. I realize I had put everything on the wrong freaking branch AGAIN. I'm such an idiot. Cue more cleanup, more reversions, running the bloody script again and again. More wasted time, more kicking. ugh.

All of this took well over three hours. So instead of finishing at a leisurely 5:00 like a normal person, I finally stopped around 9pm. and I won't know the Jenkins spec results until morning.

A nice early day?
I should know better.

Fuck my manager. >_<

I'm a fresher at a medium-sized company. Our team is relatively new and we don't have a dedicated support team for the product the team developed (before I joined the company).

So when I was allocated to the team, I was put into support, citing it as a good learning experience (and it was). But it's been a few months. And the support work got boring and uninteresting, looking at logs which don't say anything, dumps which are completely normal and most of all, dealing with unresponsive OSEs, when they claim the issue is super critical and really tricky.

Anyway, there was this tool (among other things) that had to be developed as a support tool for our product and I ended up being paired with a guy who ended up being in charge of it. We started working on it slowly, designing and implementing a framework for the tool.

This goes without saying, I love development.

4 days later, my manager says "why are you developing it? Who's gonna look at support issues?"

Fucking hell. I was hired to be a developer and you got me just decide to up and shove me into support for the next 3-6 months while others are at least enhancing our shitty ass product? And I can't even quit for another year and a half because I signed a bond!

Oh, the depression.

not sure if counts as a compliment, but the follwing exchange with my team lead programmer felt pretty good:

"... wait, where did you find this function you're using here?"

"i didn't, it was missing so i wrote it."

"but... oh, i didn't realize you're gonna need it, if i had, i'd have given you a different task... noooo, that's internal framework functionality, i write that stuff for you guys so that you can just use it, cause it's complicated... oh, god, no, where did you put, how did you imple... (right clicks, go to definiton)... oh, it's exactly where it's supposed to be... (skims the code)... and is written exactly as if i had written it.
(looks at me and smiles, then turns to the rest of the team), guys, that component i told you to wait with making because i first need to write that complicated utility function that you'll need to use? you can start working on it now, Midnight wrote that function for me. (turns back to me) Nice, quick learner. But next time, at least let me know first, yeah?"

(that was third day in a new job, corporate-sized system. the rest of the team had been working there on that system for the past 2 years.

(probably not a good form, kinda going over team lead's head, but tbh i didn't realize i'm not supposed to touch that code because "it's complicated", while doing my task i just realized i need a function similar to a family of already implemented ones, so i just followed their convention amd added it.)

tl;dr - best programming compliment is people being surprised/confused that i did something which they thought as a normal thing that they will have to do for me, because it's in their job description to be doing it for people on my position/with my job description)

What is your story of your first encounter with a Linux Distro?

Here's mine (Slight long version) –
Back in my 8th grade I used to buy Tech magazines that used to have DVDs filled with random updated contents like Audio/Video tools, Wallpapers and other stuff. There used to be this "Linux Distro of the Month" section that I used to ignore because I didn't know what it is.
But one issue of the magazine had a review of this "amazing new" Ubuntu 10.10. I read it and at first I thought it's some kind of theme for Windows (I know). But then I tried it out on my HP Compaq nx6120 which had a pure BIOS. No UEFI shit. Ubuntu came with it's wubi installer and it installed Ubuntu smoothly like a normal software. Later I discovered that it is a completely different operating system that doesn't run anything from my Windows. I was upset about it and I booted back to Windows.
But I never removed it. I felt like exploring what it was and why people use it.
It's almost 9 years later and I'm so glad with what had happened back then.

My first ever post! So awesome to find out dev rant and cheer up my day as I go thru everyone's story/rant.

I was single the whole time while I'm at school. After graduated, I finally pick up the pace to date girls. So I signed up for a few online dating sites/apps. Every single time that I create a new profile for the app/site, I always get frustrated and confused about the language field. Especially when there's only selector or check box for languages selections.

Like, where's JavaScript, PHP, HTML5, Css3, Ruby, on the selector or check box. I think a suggestions to those dating site/app dev needs to rethink the options for language selections. At least try to let us developers have a better profile than normal people! :-/

!rant - Story:

I got accepted to the university of Osnabrück!

Finally! I've had a though time.
After kindergarten kids went to primary school while I had to go to a place called "Vorschule". Kids with disabilities go there. I, for one, was not physically disabled. I was psychologically disabled.
My German was not that good. My native language is Turkish. I had to spend 1 or 2 years there, before I was able to attend the primary school like the normal kids.

In the primary school a few teachers started making racist comments. I didn't really understand them, but my father did. After 2 years of attending that school, I switched to another primary school and continued with everything there.

In the secondary school (comprehensive school) I got bullied a lot. I was getting racist comments on a daily basis. Even by some teachers. Whereas some other teachers were showing it indirectly.

In the same school a teacher made me get a bad grade in one subject on purpose. Thus I got a bad certificate. Not the certificate I deserved.

I spent a year in economics after the secondary school. I was in a vocational school. I didn't like it, because I wasn't really interested in economics.

"Why did you choose that then?" you might ask. That's a legitimate question.

I didn't get accepted in anything related to informatics.

Anyways, I got bullied there, too. Physically beaten by trouble makers in my class and mentally by a french teacher.
He told me that I will not be able to get my certification that allows me to attend a university after me telling him that I will change the school and try it again in informatics. Several times.

I was in the new vocational school after that one. It was very stressful.
I, again, got bullied there. But this time not by the kids, but by some abusive teachers and directors.

One of them was a racist moron. My ex-PE teacher. He someday told me that I won't be able to achieve anything in my life.

I was always naive and kind of let all these words destroy my future plans in my head, but I had a little bit of hope nonetheless.

Today, I got a letter in which it was written that I got accepted to the university of Osnabrück!

Omg! I'm so fucking happy! I could explode! (A lil racist pun)

After I spent 4 years in a startup company (it was literally just me and a guy who started it).

Being web dev in this company meant you did everything from A-Z. Mostly though it was shitty hacky "websites/webapps" on one of the 3 shitty CMSs.

At some point we had 2 other devs and 2 designers (thank god he hired some cause previously he tried designing them on his own and every site looked like a dead puppy soaked in ass juice).

My title changed from a peasant web dev to technical lead which meant shit. I was doing normal dev work + managing all projects. This basically meant that I had to show all junior devs (mostly interns) how to do their jobs. Client meetings, first point of contact for them, caring an "out of hours" support phone 24/7, new staff interviews, hiring, training and much more.

Unrealistic deadlines, stress and pulling hair were a norm as was taking the blame anytime something went wrong (which happened very often).

All of that would be fine with me if I was paid accordingly, treated with respect as a loyal part of the team but that of course wasn't the case.

But that wasn't the worst part about this job. The worst thing was the constant feeling that I'm falling behind, so far behind that I'll never be able to catch up. Being passionate about web development since I was a kid this was scaring the shit out of me. Said company of course didn't provide any training, time to learn or opportunities to progress.

After these 4 years I felt burnt out. Programming, once exciting became boring and stale. At this point I have started looking for a new job but looking at the requirements I was sure I ain't going anywhere. You see when I was busy hacking PHP CMSs, OOPHP became a thing and javascript exploded. In the little spare time I had I tried online courses but everyone knows it's not the same, doing a course and actually using certain technology in practice. Not going to mention that recruiters usually expect a number of years of experience using the technology/framework/language.

That was the moment I lost faith in my web dev future.

Happy to say though about a month later I did get a job in a great agency as a front end developer (it felt amazing to focus on one thing after all these years of "full-stack bullshit), got a decent salary (way more than I expected) and work with really amazing and creative people. I get almost too much time to learn new stuff and I got up to speed with the latest tech in a few weeks. I'm happy.

Advice? I don't really have any, but I guess never lose faith in yourself.

Is it normal that I get really excited when I see a new VS Code update or there is something wrong with me?

Alright, this my fucking rant right here. Distraction? This whole company is a distraction! Boss decided to throw us all in an open work environment doing jobs that require careful concentration. Straight outta college I'm getting handed vague ideas, (make a desktop app that helps our customers put data on the internet, make an iPhone app) with out so much as an inkling of what technologies to use, just make it work.
Ok I will but when you hit a roadblock with very little resources to draw in it's hard to stay focused.
On top of that since I worked in support for a year I'm our senior support person! But sometimes support just doesn't use their brains and I'm using my time to solve very basic problems.
That brings me to my next point, the goddamn piece of shit that is our telephone. Fuck that thing when it rings it's never good. Moreover, since I don't want to get roasted for not being responsive I have the motherfucker forward to my personal cell. So I answer every fucking call and I get so many spam calls!
Not to mention I'm mainly running the hardware show around here. Shits broke I'm the one fixing it. Need new shit I'm putting the order together.
Tried to get a new guy to be the sys admin, ordered a 6th gen board with a 7th gen proc, had to pull 3 machines apart to get that sorted. Then he left bc family issues, and has been gone for weeks.
The other devs are also slam up busy, and the main product is about 15 people's piss on a plate of garb age spaghetti. (I got a lot of shit going on but at least I'm the only one pissing in my spaghetti) it's a constant run around if who does what with a code first plan later mentality causing confusion and delay.
Nobody wants to help anybody because they are also annoyed with this setup and are getting bitched at by customers or management.
Sales is mostly composed of a bunch of crackhead yes men and women who just want a commission and only half know the shit we sell and have sold 15 new features that had not been discussed. But management always says make it happen. In what priority? It's all a priority they say! Wtf.
So yea, then it brings me to me, dealing with this much chaos at work makes it seem like a high amount of chaos in my life is normal. I'm just now learning to control this.
I've had to do a lot of growing up as a person and as a developer. I've went from being the most junior to about the 3rd most seniors and I've no doubt my efforts have contributed to the growth of the company.
I'm a big believer in coding flow, and that it takes at least 15 mins to get in that flow and about 5 seconds to break it. There is no do not disturb on the company chat, everything always on fire it seems.
So fuck a lot of this, but I've done the research and where I'm at is the best opportunity in a 100 mile radius. So I am thankful for this job. Plus I usually win the horror story contest.

So TL;DR the biggest distraction is every fucking thing in this god forsaken place.

Well that's new..

So I was sitting on a toilet, thinking about life and stuff and b2plane [because of obvious reasons], when suddenly... I felt a very sudden and very strong urge to... code something in perl.

I haven't touched perl in years, don't even remember its syntax [can u blame me though? It's perl], but there we go, an urge hit me.

As soon as I flushed, the urge went away.

@b2plane, I'm asking you as an expert of shit. What's it mean? Is this normal?

So this one made me create an account on here...

At work, there's a feature of our application that allows the user to design something (keeping it vague on purpose) and to request a 3D render of their creation.

Working with dynamically positioned objects, textures and such, errors are bound to happen. That's why we implemented a bug report feature.

We have a small team tasked with monitoring the bug reports and taking action upon it, either by fixing a 3D scene, or raising the issue to the dev team.

The other day, a member of that team told me (since I'm part of the dev team) he had received a complain that the image a user received was empty. Strange, we didn't update the code in a while.

So I check the server, all the docker containers are running fine, the code is fine, no errors anywhere.

Then, as I'm scratching my head, that guy comes back to me and says "I don't know if it can help you, but it's been doing it for a week and a half now".

"And we're only hearing about it now?!", I replied.

"Well, I have bug reports going back to the 15th, but we haven't been checking the reports for a while now since everything was fine", he says as if it was actually a normal thing to say.

"How can you know everything is fine if you're not looking at the thing that says if there's an issue?!", I replied with a face filled with despair.

"Well we didn't receive any new reports in a while, so we just stopped looking. And now the report tool window is actually closed on my machine", he says with a smile and a little laugh in his tone.

In the end, I got to fix the server issue quite easily. But still, the feature wasn't working for 1.5 weeks and more that 330 images weren't sent properly...

So yeah, Doctor, the patient's heart is beating again! Let's unplug the monitor, it should be fine.

Welcome to my little piece of hell :)

Started developing a new expansion for C# out of a very personal need. It's called Dyslex-C# and it contains the normal C# functions spelled wrong since I seem to do it all the time anyway. Hello Wrold! Productivity++.

I work as the entire I.T. department of a small business which products are web based, so naturally, I do tech support in said website directly to our clients.

It is normal that the first time a new client access our site they run into questions, but usually they never call again since it is an easy website.

There was an unlucky client which ran into unknown problems and blamed the server.
I couldn't determine the exact cause, but my assumption was a network error for a few seconds which made the site unavailable and the user tried to navigate the site through the navbar and exited the process he was doing. It goes without saying but he was very angry.

I assured him there was nothing wrong with the site, and told him that it would not be charged for this reason. Finally i told him that if he had the same problem, to let me know instead of trying to fix it himself.

The next time he used the site I received a WhatsApp message saying:
- there is something clearly wrong with the site... It has been doing this for so long!
And attached was a 10 second video which showed that he filled a form and never pressed send (my forms have small animations and text which indicates when the form is being send and error messages when an error occurs, usually not visible because the data they send is small and the whole process is quite fast)

To which I answer
- It seems that the form has not been send that's why it looks that way
- So... What an I supposed to do?
- click send
It took a while but the client replied
- ok

To this day I wonder how much time did the client stared at the form cursing the server.

Normal person : 365 + 1 = 366
Developer dealing with julian dates : 365 + 1 = 1(New year)
Business person : 365 + 1 = 001 (because they like symmetry in their file names with dates)

We found this BUG, now we are celebrating our new year by changing code in each of script to format string accordingly.

!rant

Hey all, I just wanted to spread some aware to mental health issues in this industry since I'm very close to burn out according to my psychiatrist.
I'm not even 25 years old, just worked 1 1/2 years full time and 3 years apprenticeship before that. So, I'm pretty young and "new" as a software developer.
Many projects got wrong horribly and fights with the clients felt as they were carried out on the back of the developers. Timings and specifications were communicated poorly, deadlines were undoable but no one listened.
I thought, this is normal. Now, after weeks of on-off-working because of reoccurring small illnesses, clearly caused by the permanently high stress levels, my psychiatrist, which I visited yesterday for the first time, was totally shocked. She was surprised, I could even handle it so long. That hit me quite a bit. I already expected it to be bad, but close to burn out... That came, I don't want to say unexpected, but quite unexpected.
It was really hard holding the tears back while telling her my story.
And now here I am. I'm currently on sick leave till the end of the year (then my employment at this company ends) and I feel bad for them, to leave them. I know, they could use my knowledge and abilities, but I shouldn't damage my mental health even more.
I will not work for the entire January. If my psychiatrist thinks, I shouldn't work in February as well, I will do so even though my plan was to work again.
I will not work full time again, since my brain seems to not be able to handle it. Maybe some time in the future.

This turned out to be way more sad than expected. I just wanna leave this here. Thanks for reading.

If you people are in such horrible situations, try to break out.

You will have a first phase when you will do everything on your own.

Then you will have a second phase when you will totally rely on external libraries found on the internet.

Then you will have a phase when you will use libraries only for the stuff you don’t want to bother because, never reinvent the wheel but do not get too much tech debt.

Then the hyper simplification phase when you will refuse modern solutions for good old robust stuff as they used to do back then

Then I don’t know… but I am getting interested in agriculture

Anyway try always to learn new stuff and don’t be afraid of change as it is normal. And learn other skills not related to code, those will keep you alive

Ohh man i fucked up bad. 5 days as intern, and i fuck up really bad with my ego and ignorance.

I love my this company. A great environment, lots of people to learn from , i am given reasonable tasks and i feel happy to complete them. But what happened today was weird and fucked up.

I have never worked at a place with seniors designers tech leads and more people with positions. I have also worked with a lot of competitive people who are always in a race to be first.
And how do we come first? Have a lot of knowledge, hear the smallest of detail and sprint towards goal (because the combination your knowledge, assumptions and speed is enough to make you reach to the top). You don't ask for specific details, because they are obvious. And that's me in short.

Today i fucked up.
Mistake #1 ) first i was given a small task by my senior. It was a 20 mins task max if i had done it the normal noobie way . But i am a pro in mind , i have to do it with all the architecture , even if i don't understand why. So i asked for 50 mins. They gave it and did not had a problem with my time, but with the way i wrote my code.

He was like "who told you to make it like this ? Why did you made it like this?" And was visibly irritated. And i was like super chill saying "i don't know the why, but i know its correct way of using it" , pissing him even more. In my eyes he's just a super friendly sr, more like a bro and wouldn't mind some cheeky answers. And he didnt show any
consequences for that time.

Mistake #2 this is super fucked up. Our office is going under some renovation & interns were asked to sit in the co-working spaces (outside of the office). It was already very disturbing and i had to go to office every few minutes.

So after lunch this happens : We are working on a new module that already has a tonne of screens and logics. I have made a small part which is from the middle and now we can go both in the forward or in the backward direction.(Also, its quite a new module whose idea was recently discussed and decided. And weirdly i am also being treated like a core member as the ceo once himself asked what would he my flow for doing things in this. i am in direct contact and under direction of backend , designers , ceo and My senior and many ppl are giving me tasks ) And... Aagh fuck it. .. its a long story and i don't feel like repeating it but

inshort :

got a task,

didn't understood it completely and thought its my task to figure it out, took a long time figuring it my self ,

techlead/designer somehow changed my and my sr. direction of flow even tho we were taking a different approach

I sit in a noisy and irritating place

Techlead/designer comes during the time when i am figuring out the solution(already overtime the one in point #2) nags for result.

I get in an argument with him, justifying for my time and arguing that it's difficult to think technical logics for that design
( truth be told, it WAS a difficult logic which he thought was too easy. It consisted of 3 variables and 8 states we were doing different works for 4 of them and rejecting 2 and ... I don't know, i had got that wrong . But that shouldn't had been my problem to solve. I should have gone to my senior and didn't get into argument with tech lead ). It think i might have offended him too.

After he left, i am so angry on him that after sometime my senior comes and i misbehave with him. He just asks to meet me before i go, and i do so. During the meeting we discuss this whole fuck up and how many times i showed him my ego and indiscipline. And then i realise what a fuckup i did due to my ego and lack of asking, blindly following my own over confidence and blindly following or arguing with others.

Fuck fuck fuck

If you think learning a language / working with a language you don't like is offensive to you and your morals .. Then don't do it.

Money is important to you ? Then you're just prostituting yourself to some higher authority. So DONT COMPLAIN!

You have the right to hate stuff while being paid for it. Understandable.

But don't shit on the shit you think is shit just cause you put yourself in the situation of not having an option !!

You're a worthless. Money hungry whore.

Yes, you hate Java/ x language but have to work on it ?

You're either a whore or have serious problems with standing up for yourself, but on the internet you become this amazing troll saying the language has problems.

Half the people who hate languages hate them cause it's common to hate them. Like being racist in the early American ages cause it was "normal".

Brain deficient motherfucking whores. Manipulated cocksuckers.

Sidenote : if you've honestly gotten shit on by a new version of the language you were using .It's understandable and I'm on your side. Using it without thorough research on the other hand is your mistake. Languages aren't ideal. Just Like most women don't like your dick cause, well it doesn't fit their use case. Deal with it not, troll about it.

I'm not like you. I experiment with whatever I like before using it. I work on my own stuff. I suck my own fucking dick and I get paid.

If you honestly disagree with me, put a couple points down on the language you hate and why you hate it ( considering the fact that you have actually used it and are not just trying to disagree with me )

At the first company I worked for out of college, the CEO was a bit like a child. Whenever he came up with a new feature he wanted to add to the product, it had to be done asap otherwise we were going to "miss the boat." Every single time.

So rewind to a few years ago. It's a normal day at work and then suddenly my team lead and the CEO call my team into the conference room. The CEO starts telling us about this industry conference (we were in online dating) that was happening and this flashy new company dating company was going to be showing off this awesome search feature.

Naturally, our CEO concocted a Hail Mary plan of how our company was going to upstage this company and get all of the press to write about us instead. Basically, the "plan" was for us to build a brand new search feature of our own, in the week before the conference, and then he stated that the press would "have to write about us because ours will be better."

Everyone on my team knew it was ridiculous but we were pretty young and naive so we busted our asses to get this search feature out the door in the short week. The Friday before we stayed until like 2 AM. It was a little bit fun because the people on my team were cool, but the whole situation was absurd and no one, except the CEO, thought this had any chance of working.

Annnnddd in the end we didn't get an ounce of press, the search feature was pulled from our site, and the "awesome" company that we were so worried about getting all the press is out of business. But hey, we did get it done!

Want to make someone's life a misery? Here's how.

Don't base your tech stack on any prior knowledge or what's relevant to the problem.

Instead design it around all the latest trends and badges you want to put on your resume because they're frequent key words on job postings.

Once your data goes in, you'll never get it out again. At best you'll be teased with little crumbs of data but never the whole.

I know, here's a genius idea, instead of putting data into a normal data base then using a cache, lets put it all into the cache and by the way it's a volatile cache.

Here's an idea. For something as simple as a single log lets make it use a queue that goes into a queue that goes into another queue that goes into another queue all of which are black boxes. No rhyme of reason, queues are all the rage.

Have you tried: Lets use a new fangled tangle, trust me it's safe, INSERT BIG NAME HERE uses it.

Finally it all gets flushed down into this subterranean cunt of a sewerage system and good luck getting it all out again. It's like hell except it's all shitty instead of all fiery.

All I want is to export one table, a simple log table with a few GB to CSV or heck whatever generic format it supports, that's it.

So I run the export table to file command and off it goes only less than a minute later for timeout commands to start piling up until it aborts. WTF. So then I set the most obvious timeout setting in the client, no change, then another timeout setting on the client, no change, then i try to put it in the client configuration file, no change, then I set the timeout on the export query, no change, then finally I bump the timeouts in the server config, no change, then I find someone has downloaded it from both tucows and apt, but they're using the tucows version so its real config is in /dev/database.xml (don't even ask). I increase that from seconds to a minute, it's still timing out after a minute.

In the end I have to make my own and this involves working out how to parse non-standard binary formatted data structures. It's the umpteenth time I have had to do this.

These aren't some no name solutions and it really terrifies me. All this is doing is taking some access logs, store them in one place then index by timestamp. These things are all meant to be blazing fast but grep is often faster. How the hell is such a trivial thing turned into a series of one nightmare after another? Things that should take a few minutes take days of screwing around. I don't have access logs any more because I can't access them anymore.

The terror of this isn't that it's so awful, it's that all the little kiddies doing all this jazz for the first time and using all these shit wipe buzzword driven approaches have no fucking clue it's not meant to be this difficult. I'm replacing entire tens of thousands to million line enterprise systems with a few hundred lines of code that's faster, more reliable and better in virtually every measurable way time and time again.

This is constant. It's not one offender, it's not one project, it's not one company, it's not one developer, it's the industry standard. It's all over open source software and all over dev shops. Everything is exponentially becoming more bloated and difficult than it needs to be. I'm seeing people pull up a hundred cloud instances for things that'll be happy at home with a few minutes to a week's optimisation efforts. Queries that are N*N and only take a few minutes to turn to LOG(N) but instead people renting out a fucking off huge ass SQL cluster instead that not only costs gobs of money but takes a ton of time maintaining and configuring which isn't going to be done right either.

I think most people are bullshitting when they say they have impostor syndrome but when the trend in technology is to make every fucking little trivial thing a thousand times more complex than it has to be I can see how they'd feel that way. There's so bloody much you need to do that you don't need to do these days that you either can't get anything done right or the smallest thing takes an age.

I have no idea why some people put up with some of these appliances. If you bought a dish washer that made washing dishes even harder than it was before you'd return it to the store.

Every time I see the terms enterprise, fast, big data, scalable, cloud or anything of the like I bang my head on the table. One of these days I'm going to lose my fucking tits.

I'm in the process of changing jobs and at the point where I need to sign the contract with the new company.

The concern I have is that of work life balance. There is a clause that obviously speaks to overtime and renumeration thereof, etc. But, there is also a clause that mentions that their office hours extend to Saturday mornings.

Speak to my wife about it and all I get is "That's how it is in your industry. I know of my other programmer friends who work late and long hours, so the fact that you don't currently work overtime seems very rare."

I don't think it's rare nor should it be the normal to have to constantly work extra hours. This is not a thing of being lazy or not dedicated to your job, but rather that you put in the time that is required and that alone should be enough to show your "dedication" to the job. Personally I feel that if you're fucking there everyday, giving your best, and you leave at the end of the day, no questions asked, that it is good enough!

> Advice to new coders

Don't worry over picking language A or B.
Just pick A, use it for a month, then move on to B.
In a normal 3 year college degree you'll try multiple languages, some of which you'll never use again, and they'll each teach you something.

I had classes in Java, C, C++, C#, Prolog, Assembler, F#, JS.

Never used F# again and no one uses Prolog. But they were great for learning recursion and logic.

It's not like you take "a step down a bad path" if you pick a language you're never gonna use again.

You'll also learn new stuff on the job. We have one team that uses Go and one that uses Rust. None of the devs ever studied those languages. They were mostly former Java devs who leaned on the job.

Blabbering co-worker rant.

So this bonker who speaks non-stop for 15 minutes without even a breather break is more annoying than I thought.

1. She used to work for a project A and then they moved her to my project. She kept cribbing she wants to continue working on A because that's where her expertise are. So management hired a new team member so she can continue on A and new member can work with me.

Now next week, the new member is joining us. As we prepare the onboarding plan, bonker comes crying that she wants to work on my project and NOT on Project A. She is forcing us to give Project A to new team member.

Manager upfront rejected her proposal and told her that she'd be working on A.

2. She literally gives orders. Her tone is rude and blunt. The other day ordered me to review her presentation and kept following up even when I said I was busy. Same tone and attitude with manager.

Then she complained about my behaviour saying I was a bossy person even when I used the most polite tone (because I have actively worked on and built my social skills).

3. Knows shit about the product, has no skill set, asks the same question 10 times, and isn't able to deliver bare minimum.

And then evidently everyone follows up with me because I am on top of everything (because I have to as bonker can't function).

4. She lied to me that company gives good hikes and easy promotions.

She was kicked out of her previous project because of her incompetency.

Fortunately or unfortunately, my manager saved her ass. But she literally is the most stupid person I have worked with me in my entire career.

5. She has no communication skills, something that is highest valued skill in my profession. And when I do my normal, it pisses her off. She keeps complaining that I am overstepping.

If I don't then product will just fall apart and everyone might get fired because of no work.

And that is causing her insecurities and she starts fear mongering about both of us being fired.

I told our manager upfront that I want to lead the product and she was more than happy about the proposal. What sucks is that my manager is leaving this month end and I'll have to build trust with my new line manager.

Ugh!! She is annoying..

Business Intelligence, the most confused market technology has to offer. (Perhaps rivaled only by machine licking. Learning, whatever)

Step 1: develop a product that can replace a company's database guys. Make it cost more than the database guys.

Step 2: Show off product to managers using images of the product that the managers will love, but never have the skills to do themselves.

Step 3: Fucking obviously the managers buy it.

Step 4: Fire half the database staff.

Step 5: Managers give the BI tools to their remaining database guys ANYWAYS and instruct them to use it

Step 6: Database guys spend a month learning the new tool because management "wants to use it too".

Step 7: Database guys now use this new system for reports but have trouble using it for complex use cases, as it was designed for simple use cases. Meanwhile, management will never, ever touch the tool again.

Step 8: Hire new guys for reporting, because the remaining database guys can't complete both their normal tasks *and* the reports.

Step 9: Database guys are expensive. Go to step 1.

Just another big rant story full of WTFs and completely true.

The company I work for atm is like the landlord for a big german city. We build houses and flats and rent them to normal people, just that we want to be very cheap and most nearly all our tenants are jobless.
So the company hired a lot of software-dev-companies to manage everything.

The company I want to talk about is "ABI...", a 40-man big software company. ABI sold us different software, e.g. a datawarehouse for our ERP System they "invented" for 300K or the software we talk about today: a document management system. It has workflows, a 100 year-save archive system, a history feature etc.
The software itself, called ELO (you can google it if you want) is a component based software in which every company that is a "partner" can develop things into, like ABI did for our company.

Since 2013 we pay ABI 150€ / hour (most of the time it feels like 300€ / hour, because if you want something done from a dev from ABI you first have to talk to the project manager of him and of course pay him too). They did thousand of hours in all that years for my company.

In 2017 they started to talk about a module in ELO called Invoice-Module. With that you can manage all your paper invoices digital, like scan that piece of paper, then OCR it, then fill formular data, add data and at the end you can send it to the ERP system automatically and we can pay the invoice automatically. "Digitization" is the key word.

After 1.5 years of project planning and a 3 month test phase, we talked to them and decided to go live at 01.01.2019. We are talking about already ~ 200 hours planning and work just from ABI for this (do the math. No. Please dont...).

I joined my actual company in October 2018 and I should "just overview" the project a bit, I mean, hey, they planned it since 1.5 years - how bad can it be, right?

In the first week of 2019 we found 25 bugs and users reporting around 50 feature requests, around 30 of them of such high need that they can't do their daily work with the invoices like they did before without ELO.
In the first three weeks of 2019 we where around 70 bugs deep, 20 of them fixed, with nearly 70 feature requests, 5 done. Around 10 bugs where so high, that the complete system would not work any more if they dont get fixed.

Want examples?
- Delete a Invoice (right click -> delete, no super deep hiding menu), and the server crashed until someone restarts it.
- missing dropdown of tax rate, everything was 19% (in germany 99,9% of all invoices are 19%, 7% or 0%).

But the biggest thing was, that the complete webservice send to ERP wasn't even finished in the code.
So that means we had around 600 invoices to pay with nearly 300.000€ of cash in the first 3 weeks and we couldn't even pay 1 cent - as a urban company!

Shortly after receiving and starting to discussing this high prio request with ABI the project manager of my assigned dev told me he will be gone the next day. He is getting married. And honeymoon. 1 Week. So: Wish him luck, when will his replacement here?

Deep breath.
Deep breath.

There was no replacement. They just had 1 developer. As a 40-people-software-house they had exactly one developer which knows ELO, which they sold to A LOT of companies.

He came back, 1 week gone, we asked for a meeting, they told us "oh, he is now in other ELO projects planned, we can offer you time from him in 4 weeks earliest".

To cut a long story short (it's to late for that, right?) we fought around 3 month with ABI to even rescue this project in any thinkable way. The solution mid February was, that I (software dev) would visit crash courses in ELO to be the second developer ABI didnt had, even without working for ABI....

Now its may and we decided to cut strings with ABI in ELO and switch to a new company who knows ELO. There where around 10 meetings on CEO-level to make this a "good" cut and not a bad cut, because we can't afford to scare them (think about the 300K tool they sold us...).

01.06.2019 we should start with the new company. 2 days before I found out, by accident, that there was a password on the project file on the server for one of the ELO services. I called my boss and my CEO. No one knows anything about it. I found out, that ABI sneaked into this folder, while working on another thing a week ago, and set this password to lock us out. OF OUR OWN FCKING FILE.
Without this password we are not able to fix any bug, develop any feature or even change an image within ELO, regardless, that we paid thausend of hours for that.

When we asked ABI about this, his CEO told us, it is "their property" and they will not remove it.
When I asked my CEO about it, they told me to do nothing, we can't scare them, we need them for the 300K tool.

No punt.
No finish.

Just the project file with a password still there today

When I started off working on this particular project under a new technical manager, I used to love working overtime because the work and the problem we were trying to solve was really interesting. My technical lead was also a really awesome dude and I was able to learn a lot of things under his guidance. A couple of times, I didn't even mind working on the weekends too in case we wanted to meet some strict deadlines. I wanted to make sure that my team's brand name does not get spoiled and we deliver on what we promise.

It was all good until all the management started taking our overtime and weekend work for granted. It took me some time to realize this. Now it almost became a part of standard expectations. It was getting irritating. Managers could see this uneasiness but chose to do nothing.

The work increased, so did the team and the communication channels. The newbies in the team now worked overtime and on weekends. And everybody started acting as if it was normal. That's when it stuck me that I am responsible for inculcating this unsustainable and life sucking culture in the team. I stopped working overtime and started questioning the set deadlines, often asking them to postpone things. Management got furious and changed their focus on the newbies who'd work overtime, often rewarding them to reinforce the behavior.

I tried undoing it, asking managers that the team will not work on weekends. There was friction and managers would agree but the old bad habited cultural spore would pop up tume and again and the team would go back to the regular overtime and working weekends thing. As more time passed, the managers would circumvent me and start talking to others in the team, giving them work and deadlines directly because I started to say 'No' when I felt the need to do so. I tried to protect some folks in the team who would not be able to speak up but were frustrated. I started caring less about the team's brand and more about colleagues who were suffering due to such unethical (and illegal?) practices being normalised in the team.

Trying again and again to get back to 'normal', I failed everytime. Unsure of how far I'll be able to go on with this without getting severly burnt in the process and seeing no respite, I decided to move on. I put in my resignation two weeks back and want to start a fresh in another company.

I feel I am responsible for bringing this into the team without realizing the repurcussions of my working overtime. Staying in the team for more than 3.5 years, I could actually feel how managers have no fucks about your personal life and work life balance (despite showing oh so much concern about the well being of my family) and would reward anyone who works as per their whims and fancies. I wish I never get to work for a management such as this.

Everyone is remote working and executives keep telling non-technical to push their communications into shared channels in Microsoft Teams.

It forces analysts and managers to ask questions plainly. They are getting developer input quickly so aren’t wasting time on in-person meetings. The higher ups see how little many produce. Developers are busy churning out software as usual and responding to technical questions.

Our CEO said something in a channel that suggested he is considering downsizing the management and adding more developers. 😱 The response was that analysts and managers packed the developer schedules with online meetings and are trying to initiate more documentation work.

Wanted to switch mobile plans because im severely overcharged for 4g. While im at it, i thought lets buy a phone aswell, its cheaper with a new contract and this one is almost 2yro.

Then i had to realize that my carrier (telenor) has 2858 iphones, 99999 smasungs and thats basically it. Fuck me for tryna buy a normal phone i guess. I didnt even have any special requests, like an lg q6 or g5 would have been perfect but noooooo. Fuck you.

So I decided to positively tackle the negative energy surrounding me these past few days. I tried to be productive. I went overboard, of course. Where is the fun in normal?

I wrote down all the urgent tasks I must die-die finish. Anyone closed with Asians will know the severity of the die-die and must combo. I started with tasks I have to finish in 3 days. Then in a week. Then in 2 weeks. I ended up creating more than 25 cards across my respective Trello boards.

The tasks that come to me always need minimum 3,4 working hours. Literally. The furthest deadline I see is Oct 15. The tasks I counted is more than 25. No appointments nor meetings were counted yet. It is not impossible. If I finish 2 tasks per day, 14 days is enough to complete all. I might have to continuously work 2 whole weeks of course. But it is still fine, right? Right, guys? Right? It's doable. Right?

I won't get any unskippable appointment within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't get new tasks to finish within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't have to guide other people how to do their tasks within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't have to work other people's tasks when they absent within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't have to entertain any annoying client because customer service team can't deal within this 2 weeks. Right?

I won't have to do other personal tasks within this 2 weeks. Right? (Like helping with creating a wedding slideshow for a friend marrying on Oct 28)

My life is totally fine. Right?

Sat for hours programming in a great new feature. At the end I tested it... and nothing happened. It didn't even have any effect. It just continued as normal. Talk about deflating enthusiasm...

Every single stakeholder in my company tells me that I should be working on something different, every time I talk to them. For example - we've got some issues, that I've ranted on previously. I go to my manager, and tell him that it's going to take longer than I'd hoped, because the author of this part of the codebase wasn't familiar with functional programming or OOP, didn't document anything, and just generally produced an unmaintainable, borderline indescribable mess. The next guy after him made it all so much worse, because they're both a couple of tryhard douchebags, and I hope they fucking die. For real. I hope fire ants are involved.

Anyway, getting carried away there, whew. So I tell my manager that we'd be further ahead just replacing the code, because it's only doing a couple of things, and should not be so complex. He says "cool, but what you really need to be doing is rebuilding this other thing." So I switch gears and work on that other thing until I hit a point that requires the input of another stakeholder. I go to talk to this guy, and all hell breaks loose "why are you working on that, this is higher priority", and I explain the sequence of events. Manager denies having said what he said, I look like an asshole, yet again. Then the old "this should be simple, just change this" from the dudes who don't know code, and don't want to know. I try to explain, offer to show them precisely why their "simple ask" is anything but, but they just start screaming about how they hate technology. Yeah, well me fucking too. I keep hearing about how much "job security" I have, but man I'm going to lose my mind at this rate. I have seventeen motherfucking things that are "emergencies", and as many fucking dumb ass unintuitive workflows to go through to get them changed. All on production, because this place is fucking stupid. Just let me discard this shitty legacy code and be done with it already. FUCK.

Thank fucking fuck it's friday. In about six, seven hours, my goal is to be so fucking wasted that I can't feel my face. Get drunk, play with the dog, install a new distro on the desktop, maybe play a little guitar (the guitar is normal sized. It's not a ukulele or anything). Perfect friday night.

*Outsourcing DevOps Company*

> HR got a call from a customer
> Got my contract terminated immediately
> HR and my boss trying to explain to me about the situation
> The customer is one of BIG GIANT conglomerate in my country and high expectations AF
> My boss wants me in the team
> HR denied due to headcount and limited budget from investors
> CEO pay me for the whole 2 months in salary in compensation including unused vacation under the national labour law right away after signing an acknowledge form
> HR told me if I go to the new company, don't forget to tell them about referring

This all happens under 30 minutes after a normal working friday

What a shock

PS. It's a nice DevOps outsourcing company in both working culture and technical TBH

Create a new, fast, strictly typed programming language with organized project structure, normal package manager, dynamic syntax extensions (that means you can change the syntax of the language if you like!) and (most importantly) if statements which are written like this:
(bananas == 0) -> print 'No bananas!';

them: welcome new project members, this is our CI/CD pipeline which is completely different from the rest of the company, there won't be any great knowledge transfer, we just expect you to be able to know and use everything. but also, we expect you to work on your tasks and don't waste any time.
me: okay, so my tasks aren't going as fast as expected, because I need to invest some learning so i can set up my project correctly.
later: some help would be nice, i'm stuck right now
coworker: *helps me to fix my problems, which were partly due to misconfigured build servers* i know it's a lot, and unfortunately, for this topic sources on the web aren't so good. i can really recommend this book, this will give a deeper understanding of the topic.
me: okay, yeah i mean, tbh, i'll read the book if the project invests some time for me so i can learn everything that's required, but this won't happen. also, some initial workshop on the topic or anything would have been nice.
coworker: well, i mean, i am a software developer. for me, it is normal that i learn all that stuff in my free time. and i think that's what the PM expects from us.
me: okay, that's fine for you, i mean, if i'm interested in a topic, i will invest my private time. but in this case, PM would just expect me to do unpaid labor, to gain knowledge and skills that i can use in this specific project. i'm not willing to do that.
coworker: ...
me: ...

it's not that i don't want to learn. the thing is that there isn't any energy left by the end of the day. i'm actually trying to find some work life balance, because i don't feel balanced right now, haven't felt since i started this job.
also, this is only one of several projects i'm working on. it's like they expect me this project has top priority in my life. if it wasn't so annoying on different levels, maybe i'd have a more positive attitude towards it.

also, at the moment i find it fucking annoying that i have to invest so much time in this dev ops bullshit and this keeps me from doing my actual work.

if they are unhappy with my skills, either they can invest in my learning or kick me out. at this point, either is fine for me..

Receive several documents of blog posts from a client, each one titled "Blog $n - $category - $title." Cool, the client gave them to me in order and I just have to plug them in.

Enter blogs on site starting with Blog 1.

Client sees the blogs on the site and loses their shit. "I specifically numbered the blogs so you knew what order to put them in! How hard is it to put them in numerical order? Blog 1 is the newest blog and should be first on the page."

The site displays the newest post first, but because any normal person would have named the oldest blog "blog 1" and counted up from there the blogs are in the reverse order the client expected.

What the hell kind of dense motherfucker numbers their blog files in a manner which requires them to rename every file each time they write a new blog post?

I have a new UNTRAINED bot on my site. It's based on openai now. And that's why it's blazing fast and blazing usless.

I can tell you why bots are so boring and will sure cause the dead internet theory. My datasets for example never contain real disturbing stuff ACCORDING TO NORMAL PEOPLE. EVERY TIME:

"The job failed due to an invalid training file. This training file was blocked by our moderation system because it contains too many examples that violate OpenAI's usage policies, or because it attempts to create model outputs that violate OpenAI's usage policies."

Now i'm really done. I gonna email them about their unusable training system.

In theory, i could test the message one by one if it is bad first. Don't want to do or pay for that. There should be an option to skip the data it considers disturbing instead of cancelling a whole data set for 0.1%. You also don't want to know how long it takes BEFORE he is finished validating you set. I think someone is doing it manually and clicks 'Uh uh..'-button..

Also, for the people who think they have gpt4o by having the API, you're lied to. The 'own gpt'-option on the paid openai is way more advanced than the ones you make locally.

They don't give us the real good stuff!

Oh, btw! The input data for my training is based on FORMER conversations with the bot. I automated a script to repeat a conversation I had and selected those messages and clicked 'train'. So it even complained about its OWN data! That data was already saying stuff like 'I can't help you with that' IN my training data. So, you 'corrected' and corrupted my data and now its still nog good enough for round 2?

I would really love to go back to local LLM's, but I can't imagine having ever a machine that generates as fast as the real GPT does. I also prefer to do it myself, but it's David vs. Goliath, even with a 5k computer. I'm sure.

Low quality rant, I know. I'm typing while still frustrated. For people who think censorship is needed often, this is the result! According to someone else, YOU are the one who has to be censored. Don't forget that.

Rant time of 'Derp & Co.'

Today I decided that I am going to find another job, I just can't keep with this shit.

They said that use Agile: FALSE.
• Daily (best scenario) take like 1 hour and a half.
• New task enter the sprint and "Fuck you, more task in the same time". This is something regular done.

• "Oh, dev, we need you to check this other project" I am in the middle of my sprint on this project. "But you have to fix this bug here". (3 fucking days the bloody bug) "You are late again with tasks".

• Meeting for fresh sprint: 6 BLOODY hours... nonstop

The workflow is garbage:
• SOMEONE should did all the devops shit on the first sprint, guess what? They did nothing!, guess now who is being blamed for it (not only me, but a few coworkers).

• Nothing is well designed/defined:
~ task are explained like shit
~ times measured wrongly
~ We are in the last fucking SPRINT and still doing de ER of the DataBase cause Oh, apparently no one has work before with SQL (damn you MongoDB! (Not really)) so I am doing my best, but "jezz dev, this is so hard... maybe we can do it WRONG and easy".
~ No one is capable of take responsability of their mess, they just try to push down the problems. (Remember the devops situatuion? Why is.my fault? I came at the 3 or 4 sprint and I am doing backend tasks, I know nothing about devops).

But the big prize, the last one:
• Apparently you can't send whatever you want to the boss, it has to pass a filter previously of coordinators and managers, hell yeah!

And I am an idiot too!
because I see that we can't reach our schedule and do hours on my spare time!
This is because there are a few good coworkers who probably ended with my unfinished tasks... and they are equaly fucked as me...

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I am not a pro, I am not a full stack developer and still need to learn a lot, but this is just not normal, eight months like this...

why I say FUCK AI -

-> So much stupidity with "It will replace devs". Any dev who has more than 2 brain cells has had their issues with ChatGPT or AI knows that AI is not sufficient nor good enough to get even basic tasks done.

-> "It will be good in 5 years" - well then, talk to me after 5 years. I'm not buying a product or an idea on a "promise". I judge the tech for what it is today, not on what it can be in 5 years.

-> "Just trust me bro" - I see influencers suck that robot dick, but no explanations are given. What they say sounds to me like it's parroted off of general mass media. Nothing new to add nor any insight.

-> AI has issues that nobody seems to talk about. Hallucinations being the biggest of them all. ChatGPT tells you something, and you're supposed to take it as fact? That's too dangerous for a normal person.

-> Junior software developers are scared even to this day that AI can replace them. If they can't think for themselves, it falls upon us (or at least, me) to drive them in the correct direction or give them real opinions on what it is.

How normal people learn a new coding language: books, vids
Me: CodinGame and Google

Works fine actually

VR/AR research.

I used to work as a photographer then got more interested in image processing and that got me into programming.

I somehow just ended up in my current position which is pretty much my dream job. I don't know if I could work as a "normal" programmer. Research projects tend to be extremely hectic and the goal is not to produce a perfect piece of software but to make prototypes to prove a certain concept might work. It is not possible to focus only on single technology and sometimes the technology is not mature at all.

All this means that sometimes this prototype might be a spaghetti code nightmare which works as long as you don't touch anything. But when you get follow up projects you are able to refine the concept and eventually have quite tidy code base.

Currently I'm making projects with Hololens and luckily I have had time to clean up some components from previous projects. It feels quite nice to have working technology and lots of ready made building blocks. I can finally make stable prototypes quite rapidly.

I'll enjoy this situation until some new crappy world changing technology comes along...

Developers that prefer to play the asshole card because it is easier than going through the trouble of acting like a normal person and lose a chunk of their time.

I come across this more and more: if I have a conversation with a random stranger at an event, and we touch upon a new thing that neither one of us knows about or whatever, there is this sudden cut off when one stops the conversation and leaves, rather than staying and keep on exploring the subject and risk of saying something stupid.

Am I just in the wrong place talking to the wrong people?
Or is there some developer budget your time manual that I haven't heard about?

Well what an adventure with this SSD...😑
my sis' laptop is from 2013-ish(?) and has/had a slow HDD in it. I wanted to speed it up, before her study, so I bought a new internal SSD (no new laptop wanted).
Created a bootable USB, exchanged the hard drives and install the OS on it. Seems easy enough...
The laptop restarts to finish its process ... laptop shuts down immediately, no warning whatsoever. 😳🤨
Start it up, loading screen, fan gets louder and louder ... instant shut down.😳🤨🤨.
Redo process, this time landing on blue-screen, error code critical process died? ... instant shut down again.🤔
Restart from old HDD, normal.😐
Retry with boot USB and reinstall SSD. Setup process copying files, meanwhile instant shut down.😳 Please don't tell me!😩 Since every part of the laptop was working, except the new inserted SSD, I thought "FUCK not a broken SSD!😣"
I had my own PC with internal SSD slot, so tried to find out, whether it would be broken...
All starting up fine??🤨🤨
Ok then? Finish the setup for the third time now ... everything up and running.😐🤷
Normal shut down, unplug, plug back onto laptop, it works. HOW?? WHY?? 😕
Why the fuck are you suddenly working? 😐🤷🤷🤷
That's some magic...

Working with a new team and I don't understand how this is normal or ok.

Me: Does anyone need help troubleshooting the broken build or can I revert this change that broke it so I can push my change out?

Dev: Stop build shaming me, I wouldn't leave the build in a failing state.

Me: Well, I wasn't sure how long to wait, before asking.... it's been broken for 4 hours.

Dev: It's the development environment, you should expect development to be going on.

Me: Yes and appears that this project architecture doesn't support any sort of isolation for development. So nobody can deploy anything except through the development branch.

Dev: That's what development is for IMO, so it doesn't bother me.

My boss and I, with a normal morning greeting in slack

Me: morning boss, how are you?

Boss: very good and you?

Me: marvelous. hey boss, do you have a secret entry to your office? I didn't see you coming

Boss: hahaha, front door :| . And I greeted everyone too

Me: :( sorry

Boss: Microsleep 😂

Me: 😎 nope, extreme concentration

Me: it's a new development methodology, born from extreme programming

Boss: 😶

I'm here in my bed. I can't sleep and in less than 5 hours I will have an important exam. I was thinking that a few months ago I went to a IT company as a school program. I would have to stay there for 2 weeks and "work" for them.

Upon arrival, the guy who had to monitor me gave me a sheet of paper with 5 alghoritmic problems to solve. He tells me to use java and hands me a laptop. naturally with windows. I try to look for some ideas but I can not find anything. I go to the control panel and search for something. Obviously there is a lot of bloatware and nothing catches my attention. then strangely I find something called oracle ... something ... but when trying to open it it gives me an error.

Fuck me. I decided to open notebook(normal one not ++ or something) and start solving the problems trying to remember the names of the methods and the classes based on what I had learned in school. then the guy comes back and looks at me puzzled. I tell him I did not find any IDE for java and the only one I found seem to give me an error. The guy double clicks and the program opens...fucking shit... He tells me to finish the problems and goes away perplexed. I copy the code from notepad to the IDE, I check the errors, I run it and the add some comments and I call the guy. he looks at the code, says that everything seems fine and then assigns me other things to do.

Now. HOW FUCKING STUPID MUST SOMEONE BE TO THINK THAT WRITING JAVA IN NOTEPAD IS A VIABLE CHOICE, AMONG ALL THE POSSIBLE SANE CHOICES I COULD HAVE MADE LIKE TRY TO UNDERSTAND THE ERROR OF THE IDE OR CALL THE GUY... NO. MY LITTLE SHOTTY FUCKING BRAIN DECIDED THAT NOTEPAD WAS A GOOD CHOICE. IF I COULD GO BACK IN TIME IN THE SAME MOMENT THAT I OPENED NOTEPAD I WOULD BITCH SLAP MYSELF SO HARD THAT I WOULD LOSE MY SOULD AND THE LAST 2 NEURON THAT MADE THAT SHITTY CHOICE. I WOULD BITCH SLAP MYSELF SO HARD THAT THE KINETIC ENERGY PRODUCED WOULD COLLAPSE THE UNIVERSE ITSELF. AND FROM THE DARKNESS A NEW UNIVERSE WILL BE BORN. A UNIVERSE WHERE THERE IS NO JAVA OR WINDOWS. A UNIVERSE WHERE MY 2 NEURONS WOULD HAVE MADE THE SHITTIEST DUMBEST CHOICE EVER IN A I LAST MISERABLE SELF DESTRUCTIVE ATTEMPT.

but then I come on devrant and I read about people who did thing worse than writing java on notepad and then everything is fine

PS my English is so bad I had to use Google translate, write an original version, translate it and do a side by side comparison with my translated version to check If I could improve something. Don't now If It improved the quality or not...

Holy shit firefox, 3 retarded problems in the last 24h and I haven't fixed any of them.
My project: an infinite scrolling website that loads data from an external API (CORS hehe). All Chromium browsers of course work perfectly fine. But firefox wants to be special...
(tested on 2 different devices)
(Terminology: CORS: a request to a resource that isn't on the current websites domain, like any external API)

1.
For the infinite scrolling to work new html elements have to be silently appended to the end of the page and removed from the beginning. Which works great in all browsers. BUT IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE SCROLLING DURING THE APPENDING & REMOVING FIREFOX TELEPORTS YOU RANDOMLY TO THE END OR START OF PAGE!
Guess I'll just debug it and see what's happening step by step. Oh how wrong I was. First, the problem can't be reproduced when debugging FUCK! But I notice something else very disturbing...

2.
The Inspector view (hierarchical display of all html elements on the page) ISN'T SHOWING THE TRUE STATE OF THE DOM! ELEMENTS THAT HAVE JUST BEEN ADDED AREN'T SHOWING UP AND ELEMENT THAT WERE JUST REMOVED ARE STILL VISIBLE! WTF????? You have to do some black magic fuckery just to get firefox to update the list of DOM elements. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO DEBUG MY WEBSITE ON FIREFOX IF IT'S SHOWING ME PLAIN WRONG DATA???!!!!

3.
During all of this I just randomly decided to open my website in private (incognito) mode in firefox. Huh what's that? Why isn't anything loading and error are thrown left and right? Let's just look at the console. AND IT'S A FUCKING CORS ERROR! FUCK ME! Also a small warning says some URLs have been "blocked because content blocking is enabled." Content Blocking? What is that? Well it appears to be a supper special supper privacy mode by firefox (turned on automatically in private mode), THAT BLOCKS ALL CORS REQUESTS, THAT MAY OR MAY NOT DO SOME TRACKING. AN API THAT 100% CORS COMPLIANT CAN'T BE USED IN FIREFOXs PRIVATE MODE! HOW IS THE END USER SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT??? AND OF COURSE THE THROWN EXCEPTION JUST SAYS "NETWORK ERROR". HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO TELL THE USER THAT FIREFOX HAS A FEAUTRE THAT BREAKS THE VERY BASIS OF MY WEBSITE???

WHY CAN'T YOU JUST BE NORMAL FIREFOX??????????????????

I actually managed to come up with fix for 1. that works like < 50% of the time -_-

New manager was hired in another department but he sits close to me.

After a couple of weeks he complimented how it always seemed like I was there at work.

I just said thanks. But what I wanted to say was...

"Yeah no kidding fucktard, you get here after 8am, leave before 3pm, and you some how are impressed that not only does my normal 8 hour shift completely overlap the time you are here, but I also regularly put in 9 hour days which is pretty normal for people around here.”

!Rant #motivation #hugeProject
Yesterday i started a new app and i designed some of it but classes i coded will speed up the whole coding of other parts .
Anyways today i needed to work on the server side of the project and when i was working on setting up the databases structures i realized how big is this project (it uses like 3 APIs) so i was unmotivated because its a side project and it takes alot of time and overall it dont worth it and even app may fail or may be successful.
So i said i dont care about how it will turn out
Im gonna do it , and im gonna do it right now
So i did now its 6 am and the server part is almost finished ! 75% done .
It was a secure login system and signup with verifications and more security stuff and the codes that provide the server status and most of the user parts . And some of the features of the app .
The most hard thing remaining is to setup the in app purchases and the APIs .
So if you see a project that is huge .
Dont give up . Just do it as long as you can
And you will see how much you progress !
And the huge project will be a big project ;)
Then a normal project , then a tiny project :P
Good night

Super depressed rn and nobody to talk to about it. Stupid life problems. Can’t seem to learn new tech so if I lost my job I’d have to switch to landscaping or something. Can’t talk normal with people without someone taking offense at something I never dreamed could be offensive (stupid cancel culture) or trying to shut me down. Friends ending friendships and family cutting me out of their lives without communication as to why. My kids just don’t seem to care about anything I have to try to teach or share with them anymore. Nothing I do seems to matter to anyone or make a difference even when I’m trying to do good things for people. I don’t want to take my life but tbh if COVID got me I wouldn’t even be mad. I’d embrace it as my get out of jail free card.

People that upgrade to Windows 10 FREE by going to the... "special needs category"(people with special needs that could use the new things that Windows 10 has... like Cortana), but are perfectly normal... don't be ashamed of that... you were retarded enough to upgrade to Windows 10, so it's justified...

Hello all, I was wondering how some of you guys manage stress on the job? I recently got a new "real" job as a lead php dev working 9-5 in down town Houston. I must say, this "normal" work schedule is kicking my ass. I'm constantly exhausted, stressed out and am now having second thoughts about the position. What should I do?

I got a little jaded at work (the normal officer politics stuff), so I started doing less work, and reaching out to recruiters.

My boss noticed I was having a go, reached out and offered a raise and a new computer. I told him I'd have to research market value for the raise.

In the mean time I got an offer for 50% more than what I'm making now. I'm heading to him today with my research in writing. Either way I'm getting that raise!

You know you are not normal and way outside of this world when you shake your head up and down, and get convinced while you read about new definitions on existing words ON A FUCKING SATURDAY!

New normal. New app to build.

- Still have to maintain older systems in parallel
- That leaves 1 week for developing the new app
- Slept 2 hours a day, coding coding coding
- Tested the shit out of the app because.. hey, its to help the customers' safety and health... I don't mind staying up late
- Finished the app in 5 days, code is now on prod
- Could barely look myself at the mirror because I look like shit
- Btw the app requires an external device as an input, the existing device works flawlessly based on my testing
- We need more devices
- Clueless manager bought new model instead. He assumed everything is fine, no testing is required
- Tested the app with new device model, doesn't work
- Deadline closing in
- Thanks, there goes my sleep
- THANK YOU

Guys seriously, how the fuck did we end up like this? What's the deal with the new ~2Kg piece of aluminium that Apple is selling for $999, the "Apple Stand Pro"...

How did we allow for such a company gain this much of arrogance and confidence to sell us normal goods for exorbitant prices?

I seriously cannot imagine the unit production price going beyond $100, and I'm exaggerating a lot here. I can't think of any economic model that justifies the extra $899. They're exploiting cheap Chinese labor for fuck sake! What costs do they have?

A certain person here on devRant was annoyed about my phone being named “Beyond”, seeing a screenshot of my settings.

What they said: “the name, beyond, reeks pretentiousness and arrogance, you say you’re better than other people”

What really happened: during one of my manic episodes, I discovered the band named Death Grips. Their music resonated with me and helped me to cope with my derealization. In one of their songs, I misheard lyrics, and heard the word “Veyon” that was never there in the first place. Upon my inner voice pronouncing it, as it usually happens to me, a brand-new universe appeared before me, where Veyon was a name of a megacorporation that exists in a shaky spacetime plane somewhere in India. If you want to go there, three outcomes are possible: you can actually come to their building that appears to be normal, with people working inside you can talk to, and no signs of trouble in sight. Or, you can try to walk to their building, but you will never reach it. GPS will show you slowing down gradually as you get closer, but to you, it would look like you’re just walking with your regular speed, as if nothing happened. Like a function trying to reach its asymptote, you’ll never come to your destination. The third outcome is by far the most interesting one. You will reach the building, but it will be abandoned, with doors scattered on the floors randomly, some of them will disappear after you walk in, rendering you missing in this universe. Oh, and floors are guarded by robots and turrets, and they are made by Grumman, the military aviation manufacturer. Yes, Grumman, not Northrop Grumman. This building in the third outcome originates from the spacetime plane where Northrop and Grumman never merged.

The whole thing raced through my mind in a millisecond. I liked it and decided to squat the name, but it was already taken by Veyon open source software (Virtual Eye On Networks).

In some time, I bought a new phone second-hand, and named it Veyon. The next day, I took it to shower with me. It turned out that the seller lied to me about it never being fixed. It was, and in the process its water resistance was compromised. So, this phone was damaged beyond repair the next day I bought it.

The same day, I went and bought the same phone model, but brand new, and in black, as I originally wanted. I was grateful for this opportunity that helped me escape the situation where I would've been using the phone of the colour I disliked just because I cheapen out. I know myself, and I would’ve been feeling uneasy every day, hesitant to sell it and get a new one because “nothing is wrong with it, quit being this picky, it’s just a colour”, but wait, don’t I deserve to make the colour a significant enough reason to switch the phone because I care about colour, especially if it’s me who’s paying the money? Did I make this money rightfully, or am I an impostor who gets paid because of intricate lies I tell? Do I actually tell them, or do I make that up to somehow convince "them" I'm innocent? Or do I try to get attention?

I’m terrible at dealing with that kind of mess, So, I was grateful.

The only thing left to do was to name my new phone. I decided not to name it “Veyon” again, just in case. So, I named it “Beyond”, as this word is probably what the actual song said.

The monstrosity of a story above is the usual thing for me to feel. I was really hurt by you telling me the name I chose was a display of pretentiousness. Do I deserve to be pretentious? I say yes, but my voice is shaking, as flashbacks of my awful mother abusing me come in the way.

You hurt me with that comment. Let’s meet? :)

Why the heck is Office so incompatible with everything??? They have their own proprietary standards for Word, Powerpoint and Excel and then implement them WRONG. WTF?

And don't get me started on Outlook: MSG files are the worst horsecrap ever, why can't you use EML like a normal mail application? Not to mention the complete incompatibility with CSS in mails. Nooooo you have to design everything with tables and images like we are still in the 90s. WHAT YEAR IS IT? Everytime i have to work with this boolshit i can feel sweaty Steve Ballmer scream "DEVELOPERS!!!" right in my fuckin' face.

The real cherry on top is their permanent advertisement being shoved up your ass. The stuff is all over the place! When you register a new mail account via IMAP they open Edge and prompt you to give them your phone number so they can send you a download link to their stupid Outlook app. I could understand that if the Office suite would be free... but it isn't! I effectively pay a shitton of money to see ads.

Why is everyone still using these applications?

Just got my new MacBook Pro, so I’m in the process of installing everything..
so, Xcode has been installing for over one hour... is this normal ? 🤔

It all started with an undelivereable e-mail.

New manager (soon-to-be boss) walks into admin guy's office and complains about an e-mail he sent to a customer being rejected by the recipient's mail server. I can hear parts of the conversation from my office across the floor.

Recipient uses the spamcop.net blacklist and our mail was rejected since it came from an IP address known to be sending mails to their spamtrap.

Admin guy wants to verify the claim by trying to find out our static public IPv4 address, to compare it to the blacklisted one from the notification.
For half an hour boss and him are trying to find the correct login credentials for the telco's customer-self-care web interface.
Eventually they call telco's support to get new credentials, it turned out during the VoIP migration about six months ago we got new credentials that were apparently not noted anywhere.

Eventually admin guy can log in, and wonders why he can't see any static IP address listed there, calls support again. Turns out we were not even using a static IP address anymore since the VoIP change. Now it's not like we would be hosting any services that need to be publicly accessible, nor would all users send their e-mail via a local server (at least my machine is already configured to talk directly to the telco's smtp, but this was supposedly different in the good ol' days, so I'm not sure whether it still applies to some users).

In any case, the e-mail issue seems completely forgotten by now: Admin guy wants his static ip address back, negotiates with telco support.
The change will require new PPPoE credentials for the VDSL line, he apparently received them over the phone(?) and should update them in the CPE after they had disabled the login for the dynamic address. Obviously something went wrong, admin guy meanwhile having to use his private phone to call support, claims the credentials would be reverted immediately when he changed them in the CPE Web UI.

Now I'm not exactly sure why, there's two scenarios I could imagine:
- Maybe telco would use TR-069/CWMP to remotely provision the credentials which are not updated in their system, thus overwriting CPE to the old ones and don't allow for manual changes, or
- Maybe just a browser issue. The CPE's login page is not even rendered correctly in my browser, but then again I'm the only one at the company using Firefox Private Mode with Ghostery, so it can't be reproduced on another machine. At least viewing the login/status page works with IE11 though, no idea how badly-written the config stuff itself might be.

Many hours pass, I enjoy not being annoyed by incoming phone calls for the rest of the day. Boss is slightly less happy, no internet and no incoming calls.

Next morning, windows would ask me to classify this new network as public/work/private - apparently someone tried factory-resetting the CPE. Or did they even get a replacement!? Still no internet though.
Hours later, everything finally back to normal, no idea what exactly happened - but we have our old static IPv4 address back, still wondering what we need it for.

Oh, and the blacklisted IP address was just the telco's mail server, of course. They end up on the spamcop list every once in a while.

tl;dr: if you're running a business in Germany that needs e-mail, just don't send it via the big magenta monopoly - you would end up sharing the same mail servers with tons of small businesses that might not employ the most qualified people for securing their stuff, so they will naturally be pwned and abused for spam every once in a while, having your mailservers blacklisted.

I'm waiting for the day when the next e-mail will be blocked and manager / boss eventually wonder how the 24-hours-outage did not even fix aynything in the end...

This was originally a reply to a rant about the excessive complexity of webdev.

The complexity in webdev is mostly necessary to deal with Javascript and the browser APIs, coupled with the general difficulty of the task at hand, namely to let the user interact with amounts of data far beyond network capacity. The solution isn't to reject progress but to pick your libraries wisely and manage your complexity with tools like type safe languages, unit tests and good architecture.

When webdev was simple, it was normal to have the user redownload the whole page everytime you wanted to change something. It was also normal to have the server query the database everytime a new user requested the same page even though nothing could have changed. It was an inefficient sloppy mess that only passed because we had nothing better and because most webpages were built by amateurs.

Today webpages are built like actual programs, with executables downloaded from a static file server and variable data obtained through an API that's preferably stateless by design and has a clever stateful cache. Client side caches are programmable and invalidations can be delivered through any of three widely supported server-client message protocols. It's not to look smart, it's engineering. Although 5G gets a lot of media coverage, most mobile traffic still flows through slow and expensive connections to devices with tiny batteries, and the only reason our ever increasing traffic doesn't break everything is the insanely sophisticated infrastructure we designed to make things as efficient as humanly possible.

My old mechanical keyboard broke, so I had to buy a new one. I'm Brazilian, so the local market for mech keyboards is either limited or very fancy (fancy as gaming keyboards).

So I got this amazing Logitech G610, which unfortunately is not sold with blue switches here, only brown ones. Very solidly built, well made, good extra keys and whatnot.

BUT OH MY, who ever thinks those LED effects are good for normal usage after 5 minutes of playing with them??? VERY distracting! <o>

> Mister IHateForALiving, we need a new table on the website do to thing

No biggie, we know there's a datatable plugin somewhere.

> No, you can't use that, it doesn't have pagination

Oh, right. I also see here it was last updated 4 years ago, it's kinda shit too, it's like the inbred cousin of a real datatable. Ok, how did you tackle the thing until now?

> There's a script template somewhere in the page, we iterate over that to create our tables

Ok, but I'll have to write some logic for that, how much time do I have?

> I want this to be online by this evening

Can't be done, what if we used a normal datatable like normal people?

> No, it looks too different from the real site

How am I supposed to manage the thing then?

> IDK, just reload the page every time

_____________
And here we are, triggering a full page reload on an already bloated Laravel app (something like 600-800ms) for 20 lines of json. Great idea mister team leader, but consider the following: fuck you and your bastard lineage.

Started new job at startup and finished all the development environment setup started development it was going smooth for one week.all the created API were working fine on the next day morning without any changes API's were giving cors error.asked my senior what must be the problem he said bypass cors and figure out the problem after trying for 1hrs i couldn't figure out what was the problem but API's were back to normal without any changes. then after sometime same day in zoom call i asked what was the problem he said show me the error but I couldn't reproduced the same cors error he then lectured me for 1 hrs and after that he said that learn to solve by your own dont come with silly mistake like this to me.
I don't know what was the problem he even refused me show to what the problem was.

>Discovers a new low level profiling tool that could help us at work with stuck process debugging and gets all hyped
>Installs on test machine, tool doesn't work
>Wonders why. Oh. Needs a kernel module to work, compiled and loaded
>"Well, its my test machine... Guess that's no problem..." but... my hype died down a bit. Kernel module installation just for a new tool that aggregates all other commonly used tools? eh... Maybe it will blow me out of my shoes still

>Installs and loads the module
>Tool works. Turns out its just a htop-like tool, with shortcuts to launch specific other profiling tools like strace/ltrace/lsof/netstat/ss etc...
"Oh... That's boring. Maybe it has all those tools built in at least?"
>Tries to run ltrace - tool exits as ltrace is not installed

Lol
>Installs ltrace and launches tool again. Tries to ltrace a process and
>Nothing. Nothing happens. For seconds... Then kicks me off of SSH
WTF?
>Tries to ping machine... silence
Did... our net go down again? (Having issues due to a storm going over our area these few days)
>Pings google and... gets instant reply
More wtf
>Pings the hypervisor the machine was running on
Works like normal

Oh... Oh no. Please tell me it didn't!
>Logs into the hypervisor UI, checks machine state
Running OK
>Opens machine console aaaaand... Yep. Stacktrace as well as a lot of kernel mumbo-jumbo... It took the machine down to kernel panic.

I never went so quick from "We need this tool deployed everywhere" to "Omg I need to get rid of this crap as soon as possible" lol.

And just for those wondering, it was sysdig.

Hello all,

I am an apprentice, 19. I joined this software developer apprenticeship to leave college as it was not particularly great for my mental health, and programming is the only thing I can do reasonably well.

The company that I find myself in is a strange one. It has about twenty or so employees, but we all instructed to operate as if we are a giant company—our sales person, for example, will tell our clients that we have hundreds.

The development team is a collection of software developers. There is no database administrator, network administrator, software engineer (not in name only), test engineer, requirements engineer, etc. There are just several software developers. Of these developers, one has left by now. When he joined, he was promised to be working on a new system: he left after spending seven years on an old system. A new developer has just arrived to replace him: he was told he would be working with Raspberry Pis; it was interesting to see his face after we informed him that we do not use Raspberry Pis.

The codebase is fourty-years-old and written in Delphi, which is some kind of cousin of pascal, from what I understand. Code is not peer-reviewed. Instead, it is self-reviewed, and you just push whatever changes you make. The code is very much spaghetti, and there is a whole array of bugs that, at least to me, look impossible to track down and fix. I have a bug assigned to me at the moment were someone appears somewhere when they are not supposed to. After asking seniors about this, I learn of this huge checking mechanism and all of its flaws: a huge, flawed checking mechanism... for toggling a single boolean value. This isn't a complicated boolean value, by the way, this is just a value to say whether someone has clocked in or clocked out of a building, via a button.

In terms of versioning, we have several releases, and we often do development work in older releases (or new releases and then write them into older releases) because our clients are larger than us and often refuse to upgrade, and the boss does not want to lose any contracts. We also essentially have multiple master branches.

With the lack of testers, bizarre version control, what appears to be unfiffled promises to staff, etc. I must ask that, since this is my first gig as a software developer, is any of this normal?

TLDR;
How much do you earn for your skill set in your country vs your cost of living?
BONUS;
See how much I & others earn.

Recently I became aware of just how massive the gap in developers earnings are between countries. I'd love to calculate a fixed score for income vs cost of living.

I know this stuff is sensitive to some so if you prefer just post your score (avg income p/m after tax / cost of living).

I'm not shy so I'll go first:

MY RATES
Normal Rate (Long term): $23
Consulting / Short term: $30-$74
Pen Test: $1500 once off.
Pen Test Fixes: consulting rate.
Simple work/websites: min $400+
Family & Friends: Dev friends are usually free (when mutually beneficial). Family and others can fuck off, even if they can pay (I pass their info to dev friends with fair warning).

GENERAL INFO
Experience: 9 years
Country: South Africa
Developer rareness in country: Very Rare (+-90 job openings per job seeker).
Middle class wage in country: $1550 p/m (can afford a new car, decent apartment & some luxuries like beer/eating out).
Employment type: Permanent though I can and do freelance occasionally.
Client Locality: Mostly local.
Developer Type: Web Developer (True web dev - I do anything web related from custom HTTP servers to sockets, services, advanced browser api's, apps & more).

STACKS / SKILLSETS

I'M PROFICIENT IN:
python, JavaScript, ASP classic, bash, php, html, css, sql, msql, elastic search, REST, SOAP, DOM, IIS, apache

I DABBLE WITH:
ASP.net, C++, ruby, GO, nginx, tesseract

MY SPECIALTIES:
application architecture, automation, integrations, db's, real time data, advanced browser apps/extensions (webRTC, canvas etc).

SUMMARY
Avg income p/m after tax: $2250
Cost of living (car+rent+food): $1200
Score: 1.85

*Note: For integrity when calculating my cost of living I excluded debt repayments and only kept my necessities which are transport, food & shelter.

I really hope you guy's post your results, it would be great to get an idea of which is really the worst / best country to be a developer in.

So I began at my first programming job as an intern and it was as bad as it gets but I kept going, thinking that this was normal. After my internship I continued to work full-time at the same company and was working on new functionality on their legacy product build in ASP Classic and their shitty inhouse front-end framework (which btw used eval to evaluate strings in so called queues). So I was assigned a task to create a module which needed some available data in the database. I was discussing my ideas with my supervisor and she didn't let me finish and began speaking on how I should get the data needed. My approach was much more clean and used only one request and hers used two. So I heard what she had to say and I wanted to finish what I was about to say before she interrupted me but she did it again. I go nervous but let her finish once again. After that she left me to work on my task and I did it the way thought was right (and it was). After she saw my approach she was furious because I didn't talk it over with her and she said that she don't think that we can work together if I continue to work like this. I felt how my head filled with blood but I kept calm. If I had opened my mouth I would surely get fired. But I didn't open my mouth and quit after one or two months. She was a real bitch that day...

I got pranked. I got pranked good.
My prof at my uni had given us an asigment to do in java for a class.
Easy peasy for me, it was only a formality...
First task was normal but...
The second one included making a random number csv gen with the lenght of at least 10 digits, a class for checking which numbers are a prime or not and a class that will check numbers from that cvs and create a new cvs with only primes in it. I have created the code and only when my fans have taken off like a jet i realised... I fucked up...
In that moment i realised that prime checking might... take a while..

There was a third task but i didnt do it for obvious reasons. He wanted us to download a test set of few text files and make a csv with freq of every word in that test set. The problem was... The test set was a set of 200 literature books...

You know what you shouldnt do? Leave your bag with your work laptop at the stairs.

Woke up as normal today and helped the kids down the stairs without checking. Then I just heard how I stepped on something.

Lets say its a big crack in the middle of the screen and you see shit. But gladly it work with work with external screens so its just the screen that are damaged. So tomorrow I must either:

- Work as normal with an external monitor and simply wait to call the boss for fix until after christmas.

- Or call the boss and tell him how stupid I am and hope its okay and I van get a new one/fix this.

Right now I feel for the first one.

People at work found out Teams in a nightmare and really screws with your normal email address processing. They also found out it isn't free with the shit tier of Office (or wherever it is bundled). So for everyone but sales there is no Teams. Whew... However, for the tech dudes: electrical and software we made a custom Discord server. Of course my avatar is "trolling DiCaprio".

Some technical and some not work stuff has gone on with this server. Kind of gives the tech people a place to talk and joke.

devdude: Apologies that I saw this (some question I had) too late to prevent you from walking upstairs.
me: oh, the exercise trauma!
devdude: it's 2024 and we still have to walk up and down stairs
me: I was expecting flying chairs like on Wall-E
devdude: Me too! that's why I put on this much weight so I can be prepared for when the chair finally is here.
me: That is the exact opposite of helping this tech along.

Another thing I noticed about my work place. The BMI of employees seems to increase the closer to a break room you get. The company is fond of bringing donuts periodically. Coincidence I am sure. The problem is I am right next to the break room... Yes, my BMI went up a bit when I moved to my new desk. Before I was much further away. Now I am on a low carb diet. I am going to break the stats damn it!

Now this is fucking ridiculous... Our website is being constantly limited though we've never reached even 80% of the available CPU resource.

The hosting said that we had the CPU fault (that fucking cyanide spike on the graph that triggers the limit once) because of huge load on the server. The FUCKING SERVER... Not our virtual environment. And once more because of the RESOURCE MONITORING service caused a server restart. For fucks sake, really???

And apparently it's perfectly normal that all users even ones that run in low resources are being limited to a level that a request takes 30 seconds to complete instead of frickin' 1...

The best they could offer is to move us to a new server, which will arrive in two weeks, if the problem persist. IT'S PERSISTING FOR FUCKING MONTHS YOU MORON. I wonder how much time would have been taken you to realise the server shutdown this week if I hadn't phoned you in 5 minutes. FUCK!

Every shared hosting is that garbage or am I just the choosed one?

It's was the forth year of my college, in the corner of the world in south India, I wanted to something to combine both medicine and the coding that I learnt, I started learning about heart murmurs, it's basically a skill based diagnosis that only 1 in 20 heart specialists can make by hearing the heart beat and listening to a small murmur that happens during the systolic cycle or the diastolic cycle. I wrote a program to learn a lot of sample murmurs and try to find (very bad hand made logic) the similarities between two wave patterns, the problem started with noise so I went out and built a new stethoscope with a carbon mic inside a normal stethoscope head and try filtering the sound at source (worked well enough at that time) I then tried to find people to test it on, but alas I was not able to find patients as doctors are not supposed to reveal them etc. I wanted to show them visually how a murmur pattern would look like and I stole some code and made a plotter for the wav file and presented everything. By that time I got a lot of close amazing friends involved and they helped me solidify the project and we won the best project award and I got my first gold medal of my life at the end of my academic life :) it was one of the best moments of my life. Second only to the joy of getting married to wife. May be third if I put getting a job in Microsoft India Development Center.

I still wish I could dig that code up and write it properly with what I have learnt today but work is never ending and I find great problems to solve everyday which I know I can make a difference, may be when I get retired I will dust out that CD with the decades old c++ code and write one last program...

About one week in my new entry level job and I feel completely clueless and useless. This is my first professional environment. Is this a normal feeling? What was your first programming job experience like?

so i am on notice period and suddenly my manager has realised that there are a lot of tasks that i have to pickup. well fuck this guy.

i was initially dumb enough to think that i leaving is a bad thing,and i should be doing everything to make the transition easier. the task was also interesting enough , as we were trying to add a new and complex feature and i was the main dev there.

so i started at full pace. i would work on my tasks for hours , even missing on my personal projects. but since last week he would keep adding new tickets in my jira boards every few days , followed by a quick huddle telling how this is a very small and high priority ticlet and i should look at that first.

and me being me, i would not only just finish those small tickets in time, but have a progress on my major feature, as well as answer doubts of other team mates and attend meetings.

--------

i always forget how hypnotising this work culture usually get. the above scenario that i explained? i have no problem with that in a general day. i love to work, solve problems and help others. but these are no normal days, this is my fuckin notice period.

And i am here coz of a reason. if they rely on me so much, why did they forced me to relocate when i just can't? why don't they gove me a lucrative salary + worthy relocation benefits ? fuck them. i even have to serve for a fucking 60 days coz they are not willing to reduce my notice period .

fake promises everytime.
"you don't worry about different office mentioned in your offer letter. we will always keep the environment remote" ~ lie

"even if we go wfo, our company will open an office in your city too, your city is the capital and we had an office there before" ~ lie

"your notice period will get reduced, dont worry about the 60 days" - another fucking lie

______

notice period experts, i need some devil advice to not get exploited by a lier corp. how to utilise my notice period and what should he the excuses to not attend any nloody meetings?

So saw some new cool technology/library (vue 2.0) and suddenly I feel like my codes are rubbish and outdated. major urge to rewrite months worth of codes. Is this self-suicidal mindset normal? please share.

How to deal with situations when in work people are overstepping personal boundaries too much?

My situation is that 2 months ago I started working in a very small startup and it currently consist of 3 ceos(main ceo, marketing ceo, product manager) and 3 employees (backend, android and ios).

What I currently dread is tea breaks. There is one at monday before work which lasts for 1 hour. And there is another one at Friday after lunch which lasts 1 hour again. I hate these Friday talks about "what are your plans for the weekend" which then triggers a circlejerk of ppl trying to impress each other about what they are going to do on their weekends. Same happens on mondays they circlejerk about how their weekend was amazing.

My situation is that I came to this country just to get skills and make shit ton of money when Im at it. Besides my fulltime work, I also am freelancing part time in my previous gig and also Im managing 2 other hobbie projects. I like to keep myself occupied during weekends so they usually consist of shopping/pc repairs/gym/working on my hobbie projects.

So basically when I tell them what I've done over the weekend the ceo's don't seem to be impressed so they start suggesting me to do something else. I completely loose any motivation of sharing my personal life when they start telling me what to do with my life.

I don't feel like exploring the city or meeting new people since maximum Im going to stay in this country is 6-9 more months. Then I'm probably going back to my own country.

Anyways even overall, I started dreading this companies culture. The politeness is so fake. For example there is an employee which has worked 3 years for them and the ceos haven't even increased his salary. I joined 2 months ago and I get paid more than him! They dont value loyalty at all since immigrants can be replaced easily. Another example: 2 weeks ago it was my birthday and no one from ceos even shook my hand, for them it was normal to just say happy bd during a standup.

So fking weird. I feel like I'm seeing redflags every day and not sure how long more I can stay here.