Hi, I am a Javascript apprentice. Can you help me with my project?

- Sure! What do you need?

Oh, it’s very simple, I just want to make a static webpage that shows a clock with the real time.

- Wait, why static? Why not dynamic?

I don’t know, I guess it’ll be easier.

- Well, maybe, but that’s boring, and if that’s boring you are not going to put in time, and if you’re not going to put in time, it’s going to be harder; so it’s better to start with something harder in order to make it easier.

You know that doesn’t make sense right?

- When you learn Javascript you’ll get it.

Okay, so I want to parse this date first to make the clock be universal for all the regions.

- You’re not going to do that by yourself right? You know what they say, don’t repeat yourself!

But it’s just two lines.

- Don’t reinvent the wheel!

Literally, Javascript has a built in library for t...

- One component per file!

I’m lost.

- It happens, and you’ll get lost managing your files as well. You should use Webpack or Browserify for managing your modules.

Doesn’t Javascript include that already?

- Yes, but some people still have previous versions of ECMAScript, so it wouldn’t be compatible.

What’s ECMAScript?

- Javascript

Why is it called ECMAScript then?

- It’s called both ways. Anyways, after you install Webpack to manage your modules, you still need a module and dependency manager, such as bower, or node package manager or yarn.

What does that have to do with my page?

- So you can install AngularJS.

What’s AngularJS?

- A Javascript framework that allows you to do complex stuff easily, such as two way data binding!

Oh, that’s great, so if I modify one sentence on a part of the page, it will automatically refresh the other part of the page which is related to the first one and viceversa?

- Exactly! Except two way data binding is not recommended, since you don’t want child components to edit the parent components of your app.

Then why make two way data binding in the first place?

- It’s backed up by Google. You just don’t get it do you?

I have installed AngularJS now, but it seems I have to redefine something called a... directive?

- AngularJS is old now, you should start using Angular, aka Angular 2.

But it’s the same name... wtf! Only 3 minutes have passed since we started talking, how are they in Angular 2 already?

- You mean 3.

2.

- 3.

4?

- 5.

6?

- Exactly.

Okay, I now know Angular 6.0, and use a component based architecture using only a one way data binding, I have read and started using the Design Patterns already described to solve my problem without reinventing the wheel using libraries such as lodash and D3 for a world map visualization of my clock as well as moment to parse the dates correctly. I also used ECMAScript 6 with Babel to secure backwards compatibility.

- That’s good.

Really?

- Yes, except you didn’t concatenate your html into templates that can be under a super Javascript file which can, then, be concatenated along all your Javascript files and finally be minimized in order to reduce latency. And automate all that process using Gulp while testing every single unit of your code using Jasmine or protractor or just the Angular built in unit tester.

I did.

- But did you use TypeScript?

Last day on the contract from hell. I'd written a project with one other person in our spare time that performed a critical business function. The following conversation was had between myself, the job thief who was handed my job and their manager, with the 10 other IBM GS "dev domain experts" assigned to that team sitting silently on zoom:

Moi: hey all, what seems to be the problem?
JT: how to update the java for requirement?
Moi: I would assume a text editor, have you tried intellij
JTM: she's talking about ticket BS-101, the data is wrong
Moi: ah, well, you might want to fix that
JT: how to fix?
Moi: update the database and update the logic that depends on it
JTM: what changes are those?
Moi: the ones described in the ticket, I would assume, I'm no longer on that project
JTM: didn't you write this application?
Moi: yes.
JTM: ok, so do you know how to fix the issue?
Moi: definitely
JTM: ok... ... Can you tell us how to fix it?
Moi: yes.
*The sound of silence*
JTM: *will* you tell us?
Moi: I would, but I'm already off the clock, and as of an hour ago I no longer have a contract. And even if I did, I don't have a contract or authorization to work on that system. I'm not actually being paid for this call.
JTM: ... What are we going to do about this?
Moi: I have no idea
JTM: ok, so we can look at getting a 1 month contract to support this
Moi: I'm sure our firm has someone who can definitely help you out
JTM: *heavy raging* ... Can you do the work?
Moi: Unfortunatley, I'm already committed to a new contract at another customer. I also don't do one month contracts. I'm an engineer, not a car wash employee
JTM: well, I don't understand how you can just leave us in the lurch like this?!
Moi: well, respectfully, it was your decision to cut me from the budget because you thought you were close enough to end of the project to get it across the line with junior resources.
Interjecting-JT: I am senior!
Moi: Right. So, basically, you took ownership of the product before go live. We advised against it, in writing, numerous times. We also notified you that we would not carry a bench, so the project resources are now working on other things. We can provide you with new resources for a minimum 6 month duration who can help you out. Also, since we've cycled out, our rate has increased per the terms of our MSA.
JTM: we don't have budget for that! How are we supposed to do this?!
Moi: *zoom glare at JT* that question is more appropriate for your finance officer and the IT director. I can send a few emails and schedule a call with your account representative and the aforementioned individuals so you can hash this out.

-_---------------
I'm free! 🥳 That said, still plenty of residual fodder I need to get out of my system on these guys. Might need to start my own Dilbert.

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 :)

Crazy how git got its name:

The name "git" was given by Linus Torvalds when he wrote the very first version. He described the tool as "the stupid content tracker" and the name as (depending on your mood):

- random three-letter combination that is pronounceable, and not actually used by any common UNIX command. The fact that it is a mispronunciation of "get" may or may not be relevant.

- stupid. contemptible and despicable. simple. Take your pick from the dictionary of slang.

- "global information tracker": you're in a good mood, and it actually works for you. Angels sing, and a light suddenly fills the room.

- "goddamn idiotic truckload of sh*t": when it breaks

~ from github git

My second job. I've been hired as a research specialist, not a developer, but they found out I could code during the interview.

Boss: hey, so we have our main product line that shares the control panel for all the models, right?
Me: unh, yeah
B: well, we need to know how it works.
M: sorry?
B: yeah, I mean, we should have a manual with all the tech documentation so we know how everything works
M: ...and didn't you handle the tech docs to the developers?
B: uh...no, actually we requests feature to the devs (note: external company) with a phone call, or email...now we need the specs.
Me: omg

...

The other company (which is part of the same group) handles me the source code.
It is a huge, 25k lines of spaghetti written by at least 7 people, one at a time, uncommented.
After a month I produce a 50page doc with how everything works, after actually compiling my resignation letter 3 times.

M: boss, here the docs
B: fine, I'll take a look
15 mins later
B: this is not what we need! You cannot describe those algorithm like this!
( I described the algorithms with their block flow, with a punctual verbal description)
M: umh.. So how do you need it?
B: we need an excel table, with all the entering conditions on the rows and all the exit conditions in columns, and the description of the condition of work in the crossing cells!
M: are you even serious?

Worst of many. Had to work with someone who could be accurately described as a monkey in trousers with strategically cut fur.

Him: "I have refactored code now I have to refactor all your goddamn unit tests"
Me: "so?"
<silence>
<checks his commit>
Me: "why have you commented out every single line in all the unit tests?"
Him: "I DON'T BELIEVE WE SHOULD HAVE ANY UNIT TEST. THEY ADD TIME".
Me:"You cannot be serious. Apart from the obvious mistake in judgement why in the name of blue buggery fuck did you not delete the files? Have you not heard of source history?"
Him:"...."

I became his lead.
He left.

Well, some time in the future, i will have to sit a computer science exam with C#. It can't be that bad, right?

Wrong.

To start off, Visual Studio 2013. Why the fuck someone would use this pile of garbage in 2018. I have no fucking clue why any semi-competent IT department would decide to skip TWO fucking releases of the software and decide, that it's okay to just roll with it. It's okay to not have any updates. It's okay to just no care at all.

I literally brought in my laptop with a VM installed since Visual Studio 2017 is really superior to the crap from 5 years ago just to do my coursework most lessons.

-------

Second issue, you know thoes desks where the monitor is literally under the desk and you get a small little window to see the monitor? Yeah, well I will have to take my proper exam in one of these all over the fucking room. Pic related.

Today we had a mini mock - - it went something like this:
- There was glare from the glsss on the desk because of the lights in the room and literally the monitor itself.
- The glass was beyond fucking pig filthy.
- There was neck pain from my back because i was constantly looking down and bending over the see the screen.
- There was eye strain because the document given to us was a tiny piece of paper with tiny writing and the monitor was far away and the paper was close i couldn't focus my eyes.
- Literally every desk was as bad as the next.
- I did fuck all work because i just couldn't focus because of the things above.
You can tell how great that felt.

If i was in a room with a man (or if it was a woman, let's just pretend she has balls), who was the creator of the room i just described, Hitler, my College's IT staff and other really bad people while having infinite ammo, i would continuously shoot the creator in the balls while not giving a shit about anything else.

Forever.

Until heat death.

Thanks for reading.

From my last job interview (which I got hired btw)

Lead developer: "so we see quite a lot of frameworks that you listed for php, Laravel,cakephp, codeigniter, we really like the idea of them but have not had the opportunity to use them since as you might know by know our pages run over basic and small scripts, you also listed some cool front end frameworks, react looks amazing and I do have somr experience. Tell me, if given the choice, which framework would you use for php?"

Me: Really depends on the project, but the ones that you have described previously seem that they would not really benefit from them, we should not use them if they are overkill or will not expand to anything else on the future"

Him: "But given the choice?"

Me: my own framework, completed it a couple of days ago, it has its own routing system and everything made by yours truly, used it before on some projects in which the developers work with it with no need to ask me about stuff, the documentation is sound and the code rather simple. Php is and can really be all you need depending on what we are talking about."

Him: **stands up, moves closer to me and fist bumps**
"All right now moving on, i was wondering abouy redux, what are the benefits of..."

Walked out of there like a boss, it got interesting when we started talking about Lisp, apparently they are interested in putting some Clojure to test in small things since they want to learn new things and apply them. Yup, this gon b good!!

After a long time just reading your posts, here's my first post:

Just for clarification: I'm studying electrical engineering in Germany. During your time at university, you have to work half a year as a intern to get some practical experience. So I'm in a position where I mainly have to say "yes" to work that is given to me. Also I'm working with a lot of PLC programmers, so I'm nearly the only one who programs non-PLC stuff at the department.

But now it's time for my rant (and also my most satisfying optimization ever). In the job interview for the internship, my task at the company was described as C# programmer. I only programmed C and Python before, but C# looked interesting and so I learned C# from ground up in the summer before the internship. I quite liked it and I was really happy on my first day of work. Then I was greeted with this message: "I know you are hired as C# programmer, but could you please look into this VBA program, it takes 55 seconds until it finishes its task and that's to slow". So I (midly angry because I had to do VBA and not C#) started the program and it was really horribly slow (it just created a table with certain contents from a very big imported symbol file). I then opened up the source code and immideately saw bad code. The guy who wrote it basically just clicked on the macro recording button and used the recorded mouse clicks in the source code. The code was like: Click on cell A1 -> copy cell A1 -> move to sheet XY -> click on cell A2 -> paste copied stuff and so on... I never 'programmed' in VBA before, so I used my knowledge of 'real' programming languages to do this task. After using some arrays and for-loops, which did not iterate over all the 1.000.000 unused cells after the last used one, the program took only 3 seconds after it finished the new table! Everybody was quite impressed, which led to much more VBA optimization... That was clearly not my goal haha :)

I just lost faith in the entire management team of the company I'm working for.

Context: A mid sized company with
- a software engineering departmant consisting of several teams working on a variety of products and projects.
- a project management department with a bunch of project managers that mostly don't know shit about software development or technical details of the products created by engineering.

Project management is unhappy about the fact that software engineering practically never sticks to the plan regarding cost, time and function that was made at the very beginning of the project. Oh really? Since when does waterfall project management work well? As such they worked out a great idea how to improve the situation: They're going to implement *Shopfloor Management*!

Ever heared about Shopfloor Management? Probably not, because it is meant for improving repetitive workflows like assembly line work. In a nutshell it works by collecting key figures, detecting deviation in these numbers and performing targeted optimization of identified problem areas. Of course, there is more to Shopfloor Management, but that refers largely to the way the process just described is to be carried out (using visualisation boards, treating the employee well, let them solve the actual problem instead of management, and so on...). In any case, this process is not useful for highly complex and hard-to-predict workflows like software development.

That's like trying to improve a book author's output by measuring lines of text per day and fixing deviations in observed numbers with a wrench.

Why the hell don't they simply implement something proven like Scrum? Probably because they're affraid of losing control, affraid of self managed employees, affraid of the day everybody realizes that certain management layers are useless overhead that don't help in generating value but only bloat.

Fun times ahead!

Today i implemented something of such a complexity that the part of my brain i am in could not follow it.
(Really guys. I did not know what i was doing. I only knew i had to do it exact this way)

This feeling when you are in a tunnel and unstoppable. I even documented what i did.
Sadly i do not even understand my thoughts there xD
I wrote about three hours straight and then run a test. And the only mistake was a variable not filled as described. Used another one and it run smoothly as hell.

Today i will drink a beer on whatever part of me did this. Cheers

You know what really grinds my gears? As a junior webdeveloper (mostly backend) I try my hardest to deliver quality content and other people's ignorance is killing me in my current job.

Let's rant about a recent project I had under my hood, for this project (a webshop) I had to restructure the database and had to include validation on basicly every field (what the heck, no validation I hear you say??), apperently they let an incompetent INTERN make this f***king webshop. The list of mistakes in this project can bring you close to the moon I'd say, seriously.

Database design 101 is basicly auto incremented ID's, and using IDs in general instead of using name (among a list of other stuff obv.). Well, this intern decided it was a good idea to filter a custom address-book module based on a NAME, so it wasn't setup as: /addressbook/{id} (unique ID, never a problem) but as /addressbook/{name}, which results in only showing one address if the first names on the addresses are the same. Lots of bugs that go by this type of incompetence and ignorance. Want to hear another joke? Look no further, this guy also decided it was a great idea to generate the next ID of an order. So the ordernumber wasn't made up by the auto incremented id on the order model, but by a count of all the orders and that was the next order number. This broke so many times, unbelievable.

To close the list of mistakes off, the intern decided it was a great idea to couple the address of a user directly to an order. Because the user is able to ship stuff to addresses within his addressbook, this bug could delete whole orders out of the system by simply deleting the address in your addressbook.

Enough about my intern rant, after working my ass of and going above and beyond the expectations of the customer, the guy from sales who was responsible for it showed what an a**hole he was. Lets call this guy Tom.

Little backstory: our department is a very small part of the company but we are responsible for so much if you think about it. The company thinks we've transitioned to company wide SCRUM, but in reality we are so far from it. I think the story below is a great example of what causes this.

Anyway, we as the web department work within Gitlab. All of our issues and sprints are organized and updated within this place. The rest of the company works with FileMaker, such a pile of shit software but I've managed to work around its buggyness. Anyway, When I was done with the project described above I notified all the stakeholders, this includes Tom. I made a write-up of all the changes I had made to the project, including screenshots and examples, within Gitlab. I asked for feedback and made sure to tag Tom so he was notified of my changes to the project.

After hearing nothing for 2 weeks, guess who came to my desk yesterday? F**king tom asking what had changed during my time on the project. I told him politely to check Gitlab and said on a friendly tone that I had notified him over 2 weeks ago. He, I shit you not, blantly told me that he never looks on there "because of all the notifications" and that I should 'tell him what to do' within FileMaker (which I already had updated referencing Gitlab with the write-up of my changes). That dick move of him made me lose all respect for this guy, what an ignorant piece of shit he is afterall.

The thing that triggers me the most in the last story is that I spent so much free time to perfect the project I was working on (the webshop). I even completed some features which weren't scheduled during the sprint I was working on, and all I was asking for was a little appreciation and feedback. Instead, he showed me how ignorant and what a dick he was.

I absolutely have no reason to keep on working for this company if co-workers keep treating me like this. The code base of the webshop is now in a way better condition, but there are a dozen other projects like this one. And guess what? All writen by the same intern.

/rant :P

So I was talking to the support engineer at PayTM regarding their integration in my app. Idiots!

Many users in my app want PayTM as the payment option. I am using their API and after trying for a few hours, when it was just not working even though I followed their guide and docs, I decide to call the support. After I described him the errors I was getting, he asked me to follow the docs which, being a developer myself, I already did. When I told him that I have done everything exactly as mentioned in the docs, he asked me to hold the phone. Came back after 1 minute and said, "Sir, I discussed the issue with my TL and he says that our API does not work in PostMan."

I hung up.

I managed to make it work by trying evening I could possibly do. But I am amazed what kind of people are running such a giant company. PostMan is made to test APIs. Idiots!

My job feels (and acts) like a soulless void.

Wow, that sounds like lyrics to an emo song for adults. screw that.

But it's still pretty accurate: While I have quite a few coworkers, and they're at least somewhat chatty, they never seem to respond to me, or even notice me. I see them talking, but anything I do or say gets ignored. It goes into the void and disappears.

I talk in the off-topic channels. People talk around me.
I make comments on releases. No responses.
I talk about music I've been addicted to. No responses.
I talk about food and cooking -- a popular topic at work. No responses.
I respond to an invitation to join the security team. No responses. (well, an empty deferral)
I release various features, some both my boss and a coworker described as "soul-crushing." No thanks, priase, appreciation; honestly, no one even seemed to notice.
I build useful utilities and functions for other devs to use. Nothing.
I optimize the scripts everyone uses on a daily basis, and mention it to others. Still nothing.

The void eats my efforts, and occasionally spits out parcels of work for me to do. The only responses I recieve from the void are when I ask about its parcels of work. When I send them back completed, nothing happens -- unless they need more work. If they do not... nothing.

My previous job was friendly and nice and rewarding.
The job before that was Hell.
This one feels like Purgatory, but ... somehow emptier.

This is a story of suffering and despair.

I'm working on a build system for our firmware. Nothing major, just a cmake script to build everything and give me an elf file.

I'm fairly new to cmake at that point, and so it's not abundantly clear to me how the `addDirectory` command works.

Now those of you with experience in cmake will say:
"Hold on there champ, this is not a cmake command, the real thing is add_subdirectory()"

Well, that is not what chatGPT told me. I still trusted the fucking thing at this point, it explained that it was in fact a command, and that it added all subsequent source files from a given folder. When I asked it to provide me with sources, it gave me a dead link in a cmake dot com subdomain.

I spent FUCKING HOURS trying to understand why I couldn't find that shitty command, I looked through that shitty page they call documentation through and through, I fucking checked previous and nightly versions, the command was nowhere to be found.

Until I found an old as time post in stackOverflow...
Someone had made a macro with that name, that did what GPT had described...

On the positive side, I know cmake now. I also don't use this fucking deep Learning piece of shit. Unless you write simple JS or blinking LEDs with Arduino it codes like a Junior, high on every kind of glue on the market.

Me in conversation with the CTO a couple of weeks before starting the job:
I don't want to be mainly doing ui stuff
Him: that's cool
Me now: HTML

So, my lunchtime is spent applying for jobs...

If this isn't the worst thing.

I was asked to develop a WordPress plugin as an intern developer and I've been on it since last week. I got stuck when i finally had the loops running but couldn't find a way to format the output without overwriting the existing values on each iteration.

For the last one week I've been showing the progress on my code to the CTO and this is how it has been.

Me: Hello. Everything is coming along fine, I have most of the functions running properly, do you mind looking into the algorithm?

CTO: Oh not at all, let's see what you got. Omg great code for an intern. I think you should add a new variable there and maybe clean up that function over there because it's deprecated now and yeah HaHa, Great work.

Me: Thanks xD I'll have it finished latest next week.

CTO: Oh great. I can't wait to see what you'd have by next week so we can install it on our WordPress.

*Next finally week comes and I'm done with the code.

Me: Hello, I'm done with the entire code! Want to take a look? The plugin works just exactly as described.

*CTO takes a look

CTO: Omg?

Me: Omg?

CTO: This is completely bad programming practice, so you are running 4 nested loops that all send queries to our data base and make changes to data. This would have a very drastic effect on the server considering the traffic we get.

Me: But you saw this exact code last week and said it was okay, I only changed some CSS since the last time.

CTO: Omg, we can't accept this, you have to develop it again from the scratch without using those loops and queries.

Me: What? Okay, fine. Any hints?

CTO: Yes.

Me: What?

CTO: Just start. That's the greatest hint I could ever give. And also, always have a plan before you begin.

Me: Yeah, thanks for those. It's the first time I'm hearing them and they would totally be applicable to building this thing.

So I just got off of a teams call which I suffered the classic BSOD part way through, a colleague tells me that the entire time I was disconnected waiting for my laptop to restart, my team's account was broadcasting a super loud jackhammer style racket to everyone else in the call 🤦🏼‍♂️ and of course nobody knew how to mute me so they sat in 3 minutes of what can only be described as noise 😂😂

I'm not sure whether to feel embarrassed to have caused the issue or to be annoyed that the software does something so random while I'm not even in the call or with a powered on laptop 🙈

This is fucking rediculous.

A client wanted me to make them a image download resistant galary.
They said they had seen some other site that is "impossible" to download pictures from. This just is not true, they were overlaying transparent images over the images.

Two days after I do that, set up everything on their server, and disable hotlinking in their CloudFlare, without being contacted at all, I've received a not-as-described PayPal dispute.

They said someone downloaded their picture and that I said it would be impossible.

How is this possible? The fuck PayPal? I'm going to lose this damn dispute which was gonna pay half of my rent.

This was not exactly the worst work culture because the employees, it was because the upper level of the organization chart on the IT department.

I'm not quite sure how to translate the exact positions of that chart, but lets say that there is a General Manager, a couple of Area Managers (Infrastructure, Development), some Area Supervisors (2 or 3, by each area), and the grunts (that were us). Anyway, anything on the "Manager" was the source of all the toxicity on the department.

First and foremost, there was a lack of training for almost any employee. We were expected to know everything since day-1. Yes, the new employees had a (very) brief explanation about the technologies/languages were used, but they were expected to perform as a senior employee almost since the moment they cross the door. And forget about having some KT (Knowledge Transfer) sessions, they were none existent and if they existed, were only to solve a very immediate issue (now imagine what happened when someone quit*).

The general culture that they have to always say "yes" to the client/customer to almost anything without consulting to the development teams if that what was being asked to do was doable, or even feasible. And forget about doing a proper documentation about that change/development, as "that was needed yesterday and it needs to be done to be implemented tomorrow" (you know what I mean). This contributes to the previous point, as we didn't have enough time to train someone new because we had this absurd deadlines.

And because they cannot/wanted to say "NO", there were days when they came with an amount of new requirements that needed to be done and it didn't matter that we had other things to do. And the worst was that, until a couple of years (more or less), there was almost impossible to gather the correct requirements from the client/user, as they (managers) "had already" that requirement, and as they "know better" what the user wants, it was their vision what was being described on the requirements, not the users'...

And all that caused that, in a common basis, didn't have enough time to do all this stuff (mainly because the User Support) causing that we needed to do overtime, which almost always went unpaid (because a very ambiguous clause of the contract, and that we were "non-union workers"**). And this is my favorite point of this list, because, almost any overtime went unpaid, so basically we were expected to be working for free after the end of the work day (lets say, after the 17:00). Leaving "early" was almost a sin for the managers, as they always expected that we give more time to work that the indicated on the contract, and if not, they could raise a report to HR because the ambiguous clause allowed them to do it (among other childish things that they do).

Finally, the jewel of the crown, is that they never, but never acknowledge that they made a mistake. Never. That was impossible! If something failed on the things/systems/applications that they had assigned*** it was always our fault.

- "A report for the Finance Department is giving wrong information? It's the DBA's fault**** because although he manages that report, he couldn't imagine that I have an undocumented service (that runs before the creation the report) crashed because I modified a hidden and undocumented temporal table and forgot to update that service."

But, well, at least that's on the past. And although those aren't all the things that made that workplace so toxic, for me those were the most prominent ones.

-

* Well, here we I live it's very common to don't say anything about leaving the company until the very last day. Yes, I know that there are people that leave their "2-days notice", but it's not common (IMHO, of course). And yes, there are some of us that give a 1 or 2-weeks notice, but still it's not a common practice.

** I don't know how to translate this... We have a concept called "trusted employee", which is mainly used to describe any administrative employee, and that commonly is expected to give the 110% of what the contract says (unpaid overtimes, extra stuff to do, etc) and sadly it's an accepted condition (for whatever reasons). I chose "non-union workers" because in comparison with an union worker, we have less protections (besides the legal ways) regarding what I've described before. Curiously, there are also "operative workers", that doesn't belong to an union, but they have (sometimes) better protections that the administrative ones.

*** Yes, they were in charge of several systems, because they didn't trust us to handle/maintain them. And I'm sure that they still don't trust in their developers.

**** One of the managers, and the DBA are the only ones that handle some stuff (specially the one that involves "money"). The thing that allows to use the DBA as scapegoat is that such manager have more privileges and permissions than the DBA, as he was the previous DBA

So, I've been working as a developer for 15 years almost. I recently started what could reasonably be described as my dream job. As in absolutely fucking awesome. Really interesting product, sane technology, nice co-workers, decent salary, 100% remote.

So, why am I suffering from motivation issues? I find it difficult to get started on the simplest tasks. and looking at the check-ins from my coworkers is intimidating. I had a phase of burnout previously so I'm watching that in myself too...

So far the best solutions I've found are.
1 Coffee, lots of coffee.
2 quick catch-up calls so that I'm reassured I'm actually doing the right work and the quality is good enough.
3 following TDD strictly and not thinking too far ahead on each iteration. (I recommend "99 bottles of OOP")

I googled "scrum sucks" and now I can see a pattern described as an argument against the whole scrum/agile/whatever thing, which is already happening since we started adopting agile: we're consciously incurring technical debt and being allowed to create a mess out of the previously existing code architecture just to "get this ticket out of the way"

We're also refraining from acting immediately on negative user feedback on a feature just released, which I think can wear user perception of the company as a whole, all because it's "not the focus" of the current sprint

At a chocolate museum: some quiz to tell you the best chocolate kind to try and suddenly:
wait...... I can actually mark stuff....
......... Thinking
...... Can I get a context menu?...
..nice!!!.... Let's click search with bing.
And we have an internet explorer! xD
Unfortunately the pc was in French and my French can be described as one could say rather basic or maybe more as pretty bad xD (and I didn't want to break a museum) so I did not go further ;)

Ok, I am actually losing my mind at this bad excuse of a work place.

This guy, that I had only briefly talked to in email twice before, never met or even had a video chat, opened a ticket like this:

"Hi Alt-Tab,

I hope you enjoyed the end of last week, the weekend, and the beginning of this one! All well here. I ventured to [random place in London] for the first time on Saturday – liked it."

Now. I already can't fucking stand when colleagues that are not at all close start emails with "how was your weekend?" shit because then I have to waste another minute addressing that. But this guy took it to such another level that I literally had to read his email 3 times to believe what I just witnessed.

And of course he then went on and described the issue as folows:

"Just a quick note about the issue I have - could you let me know why the calendars are not syncing?"

Maybe if you fucking spent half of the energy of you writing a polite bullshit "hello" and instead used that to actually describe the issue I could help.

Fuck off.

Ok now I'm gonna tell you about my "Databases 2" exam. This is gonna be long.

I'd like to know if DB designers actually have this workflow. I'm gonna "challenge" the reader, but I'm not playing smartass. The mistakes I point out here are MY mistakes.

So, in my uni there's this course, "Databases 2" ("Databases 1" is relational algebra and theoretical stuff), which consist in one exercise: design a SQL database.

We get the description of a system. Almost a two pages pdf. Of course it could be anything. Here I'm going to pretend the project is a YouTube clone (it's one of the practice exercises).

We start designing a ER diagram that describes the system. It must be fucking accurate: e.g. if we describe a "view" as a relationship between the entities User and Video, it MUST have at least another attribute, e.g. the datetime, even if the description doesn't say it. The official reason?

"The ER relationship describes a set of couples. You can not have two elements equal, thus if you don't put any attribute, it means that any user could watch a video only once. So you must put at least something else."

Do you get my point? In this phase we're not even talking about a "database", this is an analysis phase.

Then we describe the type dictionary. So far so good, we just have to specify the type of any attribute.

And now... Constraints.
Oh my god the constraints. We have to describe every fucking constraint of our system. In FIRST ORDER LOGIC. Every entity is a set, and Entity(e) means that an element e belongs to the set Entity. "A user must leave a feedback after he saw a video" becomes like

For all u,v,dv,df,f ( User(u) and Video(v) and View(u, v, dv) and feedback(u, v, f) ) ---> dv < df

provided that dv and df are the datetimes of the view and the feedback creation (it is clear in the exercise, here seems kinda cryptic)

Of course only some of the constraints are explicitly described. This one, for example, was not in the text. If you fail to mention any "hidden" constraint, you lose a lot of points. Same thing if you not describe it correctly.

Now it's time for use cases.
You start with the usual stickman diagram. So far so good.
Then you have to describe their main functions.

In first order logic. Yes.

So, if you got the point, you may think that the following is correct to get "the average amount of feedback values on a single video" (1 to 5, like the old YT).
(let's say that feedback is a relationship with attribute between User and Video

getAv(Video v): int
Let be F = { va | feedback(v, u, va) } for any User u
Let av = (sum forall f in F) / | F |
return av

But nope, there's an error here. Can you spot it (I didn't)?

F is a set. Sets do not have duplicates! So, the F set will lose some feedback values! I can not define that as a simple set!

It has to be a set of couples, like (v, u), where v is the value and u the user; this way we can have duplicate feedback values in our set.

This concludes the analysis phase. Now, the design.

Well we just refactor everything we have done until now. Is-a relations become relationships, many-to-many relationships get an "association entity" between them, nothing new.
We write down on paper every SQL statement to build any table, entity or not. We write down every possible primary key or foreign key. The constraint that are not natively satisfied by SQL and/or foreign keys become triggers, and so on.

This exam is considered the true nightmare at our department. I just love it.

Now my question is, do actually DB designers follow this workflow? Or is this just a bloody hard training in Pai Mei style?

It's been two months since I've left my previous job, after 1.5 years. I never had the feeling my boss trusted his dev team, since he was checking up on us regularly, even though we had planned out a sprint and work for us was "clear". I say "clear", because every single feature on this project was pretty much half-baked, since they were just ideas our boss/PO (same person) on the spot and were labeled as "the next big thing" without every properly writing them out as user stories. Every demo came with a bunch of criticism, because features weren't implemented "as he imagined", because what do you know, the user stories weren't properly described anyway. Bringing that up as counter-argument also made him angry every time, so that didn't help much either. The launch of the platform was also postponed every time because of vague reasons, so that didn't make the project any more interesting either.
It took a while before I got sick of this of this pretty hopeless situation and toxic environment. Mind you, it was my first job since I graduated, so I was a bit naive thinking the working environment would improve and aforementioned company issues would be resolved over time. Eventually, I ran out of patience and motivation, so I finally bit the bullet and handed in my resignation letter.
From that moment, I at least had an end in sight, since I was still obliged to do my four-week notice period, which felt like an eternity. The borderline childish and sociopathic behaviour of my boss didn't make it any better (e.g. checking up on me even more, more mistrust, randomly accusing me of ruining the working atmosphere because I shared a meme with a colleague of mine and didn't involve him, going lunching with all of my colleagues but explicitly asking me to stay at work, ...). Being forced to work from home the last 2 weeks as part of the country's lockdown measures at least helped my sanity a bit, since I had the comfort of my home office and not the frequent "looking over your shoulders to check if you're still working".
By the last day of my notice period, I was bitter, exhausted, lost confidence in my skills and had completely lost my joy of being a developer. I had to physically meet with my boss one more time to hand in the company laptop. He thanked me for my service and said that we'd keep in touch. I hope I won't keep that promise (he made a lot of false promises before, too), because I'd rather never encounter him ever again. It felt like a huge relief to finally close the door of this bad experience behind me for good.

Now, 2 months later, I've got a new job and rediscovered my joy for coding, mostly thanks to the complete opposite of a toxic environment here, management which actually has respect and faith in me and a challenging but fun project. My mental state has made a complete turnaround compared to two months ago. I have absolutely no regrets of switching jobs. If only I had made that decision sooner.

Hello and welcome, to a presentation in which I will tell you my thoughts on the shortcomings of modern day computers and programming practices.

Computers are based on a very fundamental and old idea, folders, and files, a file is basically a concrete amount of data, whereas a folder is a group of files, and it comes from the real life concept of files and folders, now it might be quite obvious already that using a concept invented in 1898 by a guy called Edwin G. Seibels, might not be the best way for computers to function in the year 2020, but alas, it is.

Unless of course, you step into the world of a programmer.

A programmer’s world is much different, they use this idea of a data structure, or in simpler terms, an object. An Object is just like what you would think of as an object in your head, something with different properties that you can think about in different ways, for example your mobile phone, it has a battery percentage, it has a screen size, it has free space available. Programmers use these data structures to analyse data very quickly, like finding all phones with a screen size bigger than a certain size for example.

The problem is that programmers still use files and folders to create the programs that use these objects.

Consider this example.

Let’s say you want to create a virtual version of a drink bottle, consider what properties it will have, colour, volume, height, width, depth, material, etc..

As a programmer, you can leverage programming features and change the properties of a drink bottle directly, if you wanted to change the colour, you just say, drink bottle “dot” colour, equals blue, or red.

But if the drink bottle was represented as a file, all the drink bottles data would be inside the one file, so you would have to open the whole file, find the line or section of the file that has the colour data of the drink bottle, and select it, highlight it, delete what’s there, and type in your new value.

One way to explain this better is to imagine a folder that now represents the drink bottle, imagine adding a new file into that folder that represents each property I described before, colour, volume, etc.., well now, you could just open that folder, find the file for colour, either by looking with your eyes or you could do a file search in the folder for a file called colour, open it, and edit the value inside. This way of editing objects is the one that more closely represents the way programmers and a program itself interacts with objects inside a running programming language.

But the thing is, programmers don’t use the folder/file way of creating objects and putting them into programs, because it would be too cumbersome, they just create 1 file for an object, or have lots of objects in a file, and create all the objects in 1 file, and then run the program which creates the objects, then when they stop the program, it deletes the objects. So there is no actual link between the object in a file and the object that the program creates by reading the data from that file, if you change the object in your program, it does not get saved to the file.

So programmers created databases to house these objects, but there is still a flaw in databases, they are hard to interface with, and mostly databases are just used to send data or retrieve data from, programmatically, you can’t really browse a database the way you can browse the files on your computer. You can, but database interfaces are not made to be easily navigated the way files and folders are.

As it stands, there is no way to store objects instead of files on your computer and interact with them in complex ways the way programmers can inside the programs they create.

If the idea of an object became standard the way a file and folder is standard, I think it would empower human’s a great deal to express things far more easily and fluidly than they can today.

Thanks for reading.

Storytime!

(I just posted this in a shorter form as a comment but wanted to write it as a post too)

TL;DR, smarts are important, but so is how you work.

My first 'real' job was a lucky break in the .com era working tech support. This was pretty high end / professional / well respected and really well paid work.

I've never been a super fast learner, I was HORRIBLE in school. I was not a good student until I was ~40 (and then I loved it, but no longer have the time :( )

At work I really felt like so many folks around me did a better job / knew more than me. And straight up I know that was true. I was competent, but I was not the best by far.

However .... when things got ugly, I got assigned to the big cases. Particularly when I transferred to a group that dealt with some fancy smancy networking equipment.

The reason I was assigned? Engineering (another department) asked I be assigned. Even when it would take me a while to pickup the case and catch up on what was going on, they wanted the super smart tech support guys off the case, and me on it.

At first this was a bit perplexing as this engineering team were some ultra smart guys, custom chip designers, great education, and guys you could almost see were running a mental simulation of the chip as you described what you observed on the network...

What was also amusing was how ego-less these guys seemed to be (I don't pretend to know if they really were). I knew for a fact that recruiting teams tried to recruit some of these guys for years from other companies before they'd jump ship from one company to the next ... and yet when I met them in person it was like some random meeting on the street (there's a whole other story there that I wish I understood more about Indian Americans (many of them) and American engineers treat status / behave).

I eventually figured out that the reason I was assigned / requested was simple:

1. Support management couldn't refuse, in fact several valley managers very much didn't like me / did not want to give me those cases .... but nobody could refuse the almighty ASIC engineers. No joke, ASIC engineers requests were all but handed down on stone tablets and smote any idols you might have.

2. The engineers trusted me. It was that simple.

They liked to read my notes before going into a meeting / high pressure conference call. I could tell from talking to them on the phone (I was remote) if their mental model was seizing up, or if they just wanted more data, and we could have quick and effective conversations before meetings ;)

I always qualified my answers. If I didn't know I said so (this was HUGE) and I would go find out. In fact my notes often included a list of unknowns (I knew they'd ask), and a list of questions I had sent to / pending for the customer.

The super smart tech support guys, they had egos, didn't want to say they didn't know, and they'd send eng down the rabbit hole. Truth be told most of what the smarter than me tech support guy's knew was memorization. I don't want to sound like I'm knocking that because for the most part memorization would quickly solve a good chunk of tech support calls for sure... no question those guys solved problems. I wish I was able to memorize like those guys.

But memorization did NOT help anyone solve off the wall bugs, sort of emergent behavior, recognize patterns (network traffic and bugs all have patterns / smells). Memorization also wouldn't lead you to the right path to finding ANYTHING new / new methods to find things that you don't anticipate.

In fact relying on memorization like some support folks did meant that they often assumed that if bit 1 was on... they couldn't imagine what would happen if that didn't work, even if they saw a problem where ... bro obviously bit 1 is on but that thing ain't happening, that means A, B, C.

Being careful, asking questions, making lists of what you know / don't know, iterating LOGICALLY (for the love of god change one thing at a time). That's how you solved big problems I found.

Sometimes your skills aren't super smarts, super flashy code, sometimes, knowing every method off the top of your head, sometimes you can excel just being more careful, thinking different.

No wonder why Google Chrome takes up alot of RAM when running, I've just seen chromiums dev requirements:

System requirements

- A 64-bit Intel machine with at least 8GB of RAM. More than 16GB is highly recommended.

- At least 100GB of free disk space on an NTFS-formatted hard drive. FAT32 will not work, as some of the Git packfiles are larger than 4GB.

- An appropriate version of Visual Studio, as described below.
Windows 7 or newer.

I really need to vent. Devrant to the rescue! This is about being undervalued and mind-numbingly stupid tasks.

The story starts about a year ago. We inherited a project from another company. For some months it was "my" project. As our company was small, most projects had a "team" of one person. And while I missed having teammates - I love bouncing ideas around and doing and receiving code reviews! - all was good. Good project, good work, good customer. I'm not a junior anymore, I was managing just fine.
After those months the company hired a new senior software engineer, I guess in his forties. Nice and knowledgeable guy. Boss put him on "my" project and declared him the lead dev. Because seniority and because I was moved to a different project soon afterwards. Stupid office politics, I was actually a bad fit there, but details don't matter. What matters is I finally returned after about 3/4 of a year.

Only to find senior guy calling all the shots. Sure, I was gone, but still... Call with the customer? He does it. Discussion with our boss? Only him. Architecture, design, requirements engineering, any sort of intellectually challenging tasks? He doesn't even ask if we might share the work. We discuss *nothing* and while he agreed to code reviews, we're doing zero. I'm completely out of the loop and he doesn't even seem to consider getting me in.

But what really upsets me are the tasks he prepared for me. As he first described them they sounded somewhat interesting from a technical perspective. However, I found he had described them in such detail that a beginner student would be bored.
A description of the desired behaviour, so far so good. But also how to implement it, down to which classes to create. He even added a list of existing classes to get inspiration or copy code from. Basically no thinking required, only typing.

Well not quite, I did find something I needed to ask. Predictably he was busy. I was able to answer my question myself. He was, as it turns out, designing and implementing something actually interesting. Which he never had talked about with me. Out of the loop. Fuck.

Man, I'm fuming. I realize he's probably just ignorant. But I feel treated like his typing slave. Like he's not interested in my brain, only in my hands. I am *so* fucking close to assigning him the tasks back, and telling him since I wasn't involved in the thinking part, he can have his shitty typing part for himself, too. Fuck, what am I gonna do? I'd prefer some "malicious compliance" move but not coming up with ideas right now.

My previous employer, which I've described on here many years ago as "the best job I've ever had", pivoted a couple of times during my time with them.
I felt obligated to help them, next thing you know I'm no longer developing, the company focus changes and I end up in a general IT support position.
I knew I needed to get out, but the skills I'd picked up were mostly forgotten because they weren't being utilised. When I looked for other positions nowhere was taking on someone at my barely-existent skill level, despite being well liked in terms of company and team fit.
I was tired all the time, stressed out, miserable. I couldn't grow in the company and was starting to worry about finances due to company issues. I thought COVID and lockdowns would help me get myself back in the game, but I burnt out with everything I was trying to take on at once and didn't make much progress.
When I was made redundant I'd thankfully picked up enough to finally find a much better position. The old company was in a lot of trouble and it's a case of when, not if, it will fold.
Now I really am doing the best job I've ever had, feel much better about myself and my relationships have improved.

Wasted a day as Shitlock Holmes with the build chain.

It would not reproduce the firmware hexfile that had been checked in. Reverse engineering that along with the mapfile to find out the cause, it was a const string that was guarded by an ifdef from another file that was auto-generated as prebuild step via a script that fetched some version control info.

Or, it would have been if the installation instructions had been correct and someone had described that no spaces in the absolute path name of the project are allowed. Otherwise, that shit just failed silently.

I then had to reverse engineer the intended workflow from the commit history in the version control to figure out that the last dev obviously hadn't quite understood the project specific workflow and how the version control interacts with these build scripts.

At least, I finally did get a matching hexfile.

Can we collectively as an industry just calm down a little and stop lying to ourselves in a misguided attempt to inflate our sense of purpose...

I just stumbled upon a job listing for a WordPress developer position that described it as "helping solve the big problems of the day". Seriously?! Let's stop and get real you're probably just building themes. Maybe a plugin or two. So just relax and accept you're just another web developer building yet another 💩site you're not solving "the big problems"...

... Then again it IS WordPress...

So I'm required to take an intro Java course at my university, and can't test out...

My professor actually just described constructors as classes, not analogous to, or metaphorically. He said they were classes. All of the students are now confused out of their minds. Should I say something?

Other peoples' code... (in C++)
I am finding what some people consider good code is not as described. I found a class that provides strings. Great it gives me paths and stuff. I incorporated it in a new project.

segfaults

Hmmm, it must have an init function... It does, but not in the class. It has a friended init function:
friend init_function(). If this function is not created and called external to the class then the class will segfault...

okay...

I implement this. I use code from another project that implements this correctly. The friend class allows the private constructor to be called to create the main instance of the class. So its a fucking cryptic ass singleton. I look at this class. It uses a macro to decide what to function call in the class. The class already has function names for each call it needs to make. The class is literally a string lookup table. I vow to redo this shitty code, someday...

I start to wonder what other fragile code I will find. Not long later I keep getting errors on malloc. Like any malloc that is called results in a segfault. The malloc is not at fault though. I run valgrind and find a websocket library is returning an object a different size than the header file describes.

WTF...

Somebody has left an old ass highly modified definition of the websocket header in a location in that I include headers (partly my fault). I eliminate that from my include path. All is well, everything behaves. I will be making sure this fucking header is not used and it is going to die. Wasted a bunch of time.

Lessons learned: some code is just fucked and don't leave old ass shit you tried laying around.

!dev

TL;DR: Today my phone Kruger&Matz Live 3+ got ebola. Anyone had same issues?

I woke up and unplugged my phone from charger as always, but it was hot as hell. I was not worried, thought it heated up cause of charging as I plugged it few hours before waking up.

Then things got serious. I was unable to use phone, it freezed randomly, opened apps I hovered when frozen, etc. I thought thats becuse it was hot, so I turned it off and put it into the fridge (I do it sometimes).

I was leaving house in an hour so I hoped that would help. I turned it back on when leaving, but nothing changed and it was getting hot again. I've checked processes, was deleting apps like mad, thibking that was some bug in update of one of them, cleared cache partiotion too. That did not help, so I was forced to factory reset. Guess what... same issues.

I tried everything possible and lost all hope, was ready to send it to service. So I turned it off, so it won't burn my pocket out.

Few hour later I talked with dad complaining about the issue and tried to show him what's wrong, but... it was all right again. No freezes, no heating.

Later that day my sister told me she had issues with her phone - Live 3, described same as mine. Even weirder that my girlfriend had no issues with her Flow 4+ from same company.

Two phones of same company, almost same product line with the same exact issues on the same time frame? Any ideas what happened?

!dev

Through life, I've heard some people say horror movies are bad, that they promote violence (usually religious people).

Of course I think that's pure bs, but I think I could provide one argument that is hard to deny, so here it goes, although I might go off rails at the end.

I'll preface with this: life itself is violent. Violence, the word, is mostly used to describe immoral inflictions of harm on other beings.

But you can also say that some deaths are violent by themselves too, event those that weren't caused by humans, like a disease or a natural disaster.

This would be the "visual" meaning of the word, "the way it looks", the shock of humans when observing something gruesome/violent.

That described, it's not hard to also think that technological advancements in modern western life has made such observations of violence very unfrequent for people.

And naturally, modern people get accustomed to the lack of these observations. So accustomed that when they happen they become traumatic.

Because of this, people react weirdly to death. One reaction is censoring the topic. Another reaction is trivializing it, as if it doesn't really matter.

Sometimes they can't even accept old people dying at 90, an awfully stupid reaction in my opinion.

Another interesting reaction is personifying diseases as if they were villains ruining lives intentionally.

Or at least that's what it feels until you look at them through a microscope and realize that diseases aren't more evil than bread changing flavour after toasting.

All of these irrationality and cowardice comes from low exposure to violence, and that's where horror movies balance things out.

Some diseases in the real life can put some of the worst horror movies to shame.

The human body itself is pending violence. Why? Because when you die all sort of worms eat your fucking flesh. And sometimes that happens even before you die.

We bury humans because of the diseases corpses transmit, but also because we don't like the spectacle and the aesthetics of the rotting process.

Just picture for a second bad things happening to your body, and if you feel that is making you too uncomfortable, then maybe you got too used to this too.

I think horror movies help us to remember the reality of our inminent and intrinsic violence.

In ancient times, you would live outdoors, stepping on dirt, and be very used to "bad" things happening to humans.

Nowadays, most homes are sterile clean, and it's unlikely to observe violence.

Oh, some family member is pucking blood and dying from something? Send em to a hospital, or an elderly care center. Don't need to witness that!

I understand and accept grief. What I don't understand or accept is the vilification of death, describing it as something wrong that shouldn't happen.

it almost feels like a burden, like you shouldn't die when you're young, that it's an unforgivable thing to happen.

Well thanks, society, you can't even fucking die in peace.

I would love to die (no suicide) in a mildly celebratory way, watching people around me smile. I think that would be a good ending for me.

But no. Most of my relatives would be fucking crying like the chickenshits they are, ruining it for me.

And that scares the shit out me: people usually say the scary part of dying is that they die alone.

Well that's what dying alone would mean to me: watching people cry instead of smiling at me.

When my grandma died at 80, with all the achievements she made, I considered her death a success, also considering how quick it was. And because of that I didn't mourn for too long.

In fact, I don't even consider her dead, and not because of some religious mumbo jumbo. I guess the memories are still alive in me, I don't know.

Some famous chunk of coal said once that he felt people don't believe they're gonna die. And I agree with him.

Another upside of horror movies is that they hurt nobody, which is why you can enjoy it and not get ptsd, unlink watching a snuff film.

I will also be fair and add that this might a be a cultural thing, but deep down desire for survival is a genetic thing could play a big part in this too.

!rant: I need a little advice from fellow devs. I've come to the conclusion that development is not the right career path for me, but how to advance from here?

I've worked a little over a year as dev/scrum master and lately I've been assigned small project management tasks. I really liked the project management stuff, and I like talking to stakeholders and converting their ideas into well described requirements and development tasks.

But who will hire a junior level engineer with no formal project manager training or certifications?

What kind of jobs could I apply for?

META-LUCK: A Pseudo-Ontology Of An Authentic Future

* * *

I think in the not-to-distant future we will abandon the idea of authenticity (messaging, corporate responsibility, ethos) in favor of other factors, such as cost. We won't abandon it and replace it with fakeness, so much as realize
that we don't, as a society favor it at all, not in the absolute sense, nor in the relative sense like in relation to things like cost.

We will either abandon authenticity entirely, or alternatively, transition to a world where authenticity is the highest valued quality, being adjacent to truth.

Heres why. Authenticity, like all social qualities, can be 1. mimicked, 2. simulated,
or 3. emulated.

In the first case, a corporation, product, leader, organization, or other, apes authenticity simply by its knowable, external features. It mimics the sounds, like a jungle bird copying a jack hammer to scare away predators or attract mates.
There is no understanding, let alone model, external or internal. The successful mimic
is little more than a lifeless, unthinking puppet.

In the second case, the attempted authentic simulates authenticity: That is, an external
model is formed, or pattern, that is predictable, and archetypal. It may have an internal
model even, a set of policies and processes for deciding the external-facing behavior.
But these policies and internal processes and models are all strictly outward facing. It is purely pathological in its goal, desiring only at minimum to achieve *externally attribute* authenticity (public opinion) rather than those internal changes that generate the true perception of the public--a perception not of surface behaviors and shrewd calculating policies and processes, but as a quality of authenticity for its own sake. This is in some sense the difference between the mundane and the atavistic, that the benefit, while not definable strictly, is assumed as a 'matter of course', culturally, within the organization or individual or company. It is to say, a *quality* of the thing, that *generates* outputs of a certain character and nature, rather than a *goal* that is attained 'after-the-fact' by behaviors generated for *other* than being authentic.

Here we reach the limitation of definitions.

Finally, we arrive at the case of number three, the emulation. We have in part already described it, but lets try and summarize a bit.

The Authentic is an *originator* of behavior and outward appearances, being an internal quality of a person or organization. It originates behavior, rather than being the goal of behavior and outward appearances.

Its benefit is assumed, though not always nameable or definable, even though this sounds naive, superseding other factors like cost and profit. As such the authentic does not emerge in a cost-focused environment, not readily, not often, and not cheaply either.

It is in some sense an experimental state of being, of goal-seeking only after-the-fact of "being true to ones origins" is established above and beyond those goals--setting and achieving only those goals which ultimately align with the origin and intent of the authentic.

A very long rant.. but I'm looking to share some experiences, maybe a different perspective.. huge changes at the company.

So my company is starting our microservices journey (we have a 359 retail websites at this moment)

First question was: What to build first?

The first thing we had to do was to decide what we wanted to build as our first microservice. We went looking for a microservice that can be used read only, consumers could easily implement without overhauling production software and is isolated from other processes.

We’ve ended up with building a catalog service as our first microservice. That catalog service provides consumers of the microservice information of our catalog and its most essential information about items in the catalog.

By starting with building the catalog service the team could focus on building the microservice without any time pressure. The initial functionalities of the catalog service were being created to replace existing functionality which were working fine.

Because we choose such an isolated functionality we were able to introduce the new catalog service into production step by step. Instead of replacing the search functionality of the webshops using a big-bang approach, we choose A/B split testing to measure our changes and gradually increase the load of the microservice.

Next step: Choosing a datastore

The search engine that was in production when we started this project was making user of Solr. Due to the use of Lucene it was performing very well as a search engine, but from engineering perspective it lacked some functionalities. It came short if you wanted to run it in a cluster environment, configuring it was hard and not user friendly and last but not least, development of Solr seemed to be grinded to a halt.

Elasticsearch started entering the scene as a competitor for Solr and brought interesting features. Still using Lucene, which we were happy with, it was build with clustering in mind and being provided out of the box. Managing Elasticsearch was easy since there are REST APIs for configuration and as a fallback there are YAML configurations available.

We decided to use Elasticsearch since it provides us the strengths and capabilities of Lucene with the added joy of easy configuration, clustering and a lively community driving the project.

Even bigger challenge? Which programming language will we use

The team responsible for developing this first microservice consists out of a group web developers. So when looking for a programming language for the microservice, we went searching for a language close to their hearts and expertise. At that time a typical web developer at least had knowledge of PHP and Javascript.

What we’ve noticed during researching various languages is that almost all actions done by the catalog service will boil down to the following paradigm:

- Execute a HTTP call to fetch some JSON

- Transform JSON to a desired output

- Respond with the transformed JSON

Actions that easily can be done in a parallel and asynchronous manner and mainly consists out of transforming JSON from the source to a desired output. The programming language used for the catalog service should hold strong qualifications for those kind of actions.

Another thing to notice is that some functionalities that will be built using the catalog service will result into a high level of concurrent requests. For example the type-ahead functionality will trigger several requests to the catalog service per usage of a user.

To us, PHP and .NET at that time weren’t sufficient enough to us for building the catalog service based on the requirements we’ve set. Eventually we’ve decided to use Node.js which is better suited for the things we are looking for as described earlier. Node.js provides a non-blocking I/O model and being event driven helps us developing a high performance microservice.

The leap to start programming Node.js is relatively small since it basically is Javascript. A language that is familiar for the developers around that time. While Node.js is displaying some new concepts it is relatively easy for a developer to start using it.

The beauty of microservices and the isolation it provides, is that you can choose the best tool for that particular microservice. Not all microservices will be developed using Node.js and Elasticsearch. All kinds of combinations might arise and this is what makes the microservices architecture so flexible.

Even when Node.js or Elasticsearch turns out to be a bad choice for the catalog service it is relatively easy to switch that choice for magic ‘X’ or component ‘Z’. By focussing on creating a solid API the components that are driving that API don’t matter that much. It should do what you ask of it and when it is lacking you just replace it.

Many more headaches to come later this year ;)

Anyone reading "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber? My job is not the duct-taping or box-ticking described in the book, but I'm catching myself too often seeing my job as buying 40 hours of my time each week instead of my actual development work.

“if an ancient Greek or Roman saw a potter, he could imagine buying his pots. He could also imagine buying the potter—slavery was a familiar institution in the ancient world. But he would have simply been baffled by the notion that he might buy the potter’s time.”

I've been trying Flutter the past 2days. I liked how amazing Flutter framework is but I also hated how UGLY the Dart language is. First of all, I've been doing Java(Android) and JSX(React). So, after coming from these languages, Dart seems awful. Here are the things that I hated the most:
1. JSON parsing: The worst part of Flutter/Dart. No GSON/Jackson equivalent. not even possible to make one as described in the doc
2. Redux for flutter. I tried and I hated it. So, Tried some other state management libs
3. the way static functions are written in a class
4. Widgets hiarachy
5. Ambiguity - "this context is not the context we need, we need that one to make it work. so, pass that even when you don't have it" (if you have used flutter, you will know what I mean)

The analytics guy just sent me updated tracking specs for a web site.

There are two sheets in the file: "Custom Events LATEST" and "Custom Events updated". This is already confusing enough.
One of them has comments like "I'd like this to be amended", but the event specs described are the same as the ones implemented.

I asked him for clarification, turns out he wants the ones marked in black to be updated, the ones that don't have any label saying they don't need to be updated.

This is also a guy who for at least 2 years has been making columns in spreadsheets wider not by just widening them, or merging multiple cells, but by just letting text overflow into other cells.

I do wonder how some people manage to keep a job.

Why are some defaults still so broken on Windows? Do they just not care or expect poeple will replace everything with third party stuff as the real defaults anyway?
Now through RDP connection stuff I have to spend more time on that #*?%&$§ OS and I would have expected the standard programs to work better. Here some of the stuff that really irks me:
* Groove Music sucks hard, how it doesn't let me edit playlists, but relies on its broken discovery of tracks. So I can play my old Eels songs from some subfolder in music folder, but only by manually loading each song. It never adds the songs to the list whereas the new NIN album is recognized. - It could have been nice, more of a lightweight Cessna, compared to that scary giant nineties Jumbo of media player?
* every time I use the snipping tool for a screen shot they suggest to use that screen sketch tool. I tried. Inside the RDP it was just unusable, when I tried to select the part of the screen. The selection cross wouldn't show or only too late. Unusable.
* using Internet Explorer as the default application for xml files. Sorry it's just so damn slow. And this smiley always gives me the creeps. (liveoverflow had one episode where he described his panic when he first saw an opening internet explorer: Uh, that strange face there, has it been hacked?) - but then nothing happens for a minute, I calm down, and open the file in some useful editor.

Working on a project (auction website) with a group, one of them described himself as an experienced web developer (both front and back end). Two weeks into the project, he won't shut up about using Bootstrap and how great it is (even tho we decided on not using it); fucks up even the simplest queries and doesn't know any OOPHP. Needless to say, he got kicked pretty soon and after making some nonsensical threats to the group members we never heard of him again. Or so we hope.

rust can't even do rustfmt properly

it just does things unadvertised

like reorder_impl_lines which is described as putting type and const on top of files adds new lines between fn declarations and that's not disclosed anywhere. ffs took me a while to figure it out

and chain_width should be different for fn calls and match statements. because newlining multiple fn calls makes it readable, but newlining match statements and wrapping them in {} does not / makes it ugly. there is match_arm_blocks but it still newlines random stuff awkwardly, raaghh

I thought hey so cool I can write without caring about formatting and just press Ctrl + shift + i and all done but now I'm arguing with the formatter and the settings available suck and are poorly described. please don't write a formatting documentation with no examples, wtf? And disclose everything it does, preferably with consistent language so I can search the page (some of the descriptions say new line others call a new line a break. thanks)

Okay. Here's the ONLY two scenarios where automated testing is justified:
- An outsourcing company who is given the task of bug elimination in legacy code with a really short timeframe. Then yes, writing tests is like waging war on bugs, securing more and more land inch after inch.
- A company located in an area where hiring ten junior developers is cheaper than hiring one principal developer. Then yes, the business advantage is very real.

That's it. That's the only two scenarios where automated testing is justified. Other such scenarios doesn't exist.

Why? Because any robust testing system (not just "adding some tests here and there") is a _declarative_ one. On top of already being declarative (opposed to the imperative environment where the actual code exists), if you go further and implement TDD, your tests suddenly begins to describe your domain area, turning into a declarative DSL.

Such transformations are inevitable. You can't catch bugs in the first place if your tests are ignorant of entities your code is working with.

That being said, any TDD-driven project consists of two things:
- Imperative code that implements business logic
- Declarative DSL made of automated tests that also describes the same business logic

Can't you see that this system is _wet_? The tests set alone in a TDD-driven project are enough to trivially derive the actual, complete code from it.

It's almost like it's easier to just write in a declarative language in the first place, in the same way tests are written in TDD project, and scrap the imperative part altogether.

In imperative languages, absence of errors can be mathematically guaranteed. In imperative languages, the best performance (e.g. the lowest algorithmic complexity) can also be mathematically guaranteed. There is a perfectly real point after which Haskell rips C apart in terms of performance, and that point happens earlier on than you think.

If you transitioned from a junior who doesn't get why tests are needed to a competent engineer who sees value in TDD, that's amazing. But like with any professional development, it's better to remember that it's always possible to go further. After the two milestones I described, the third exists — the complete shift into the declarative world.

For a human brain, it's natural to blindly and aggressively reject whatever information leads to the need of exiting the comfort zone. Hence the usual shitstorm that happens every time I say something about automated testing. I understand you, and more than that, I forgive you.

The only advice I would allow myself to give you is just for fun, on a weekend, open a tutorial to a language you never tried before, and spend 20 minutes messing around with it. Maybe you'll laugh at me, but that's the exact way I got from earning $200 to earning $3500 back when I was hired as a CTO for the first time.

Good luck!

So last weekend I started digging into openhab2 and tried to integrate my Philips Hue lamps with the help of "Eclipse Smarthome Designer". But they refused to work. I checked the error log of openhab, I double checked my code then the tutorials then the official documentation. I did everything as described. After hours of try and error I tried to switch off the lamps with my openhab android app and bang it worked! Turns out: the integrated web browser of eclipse Smarthome Designer was sending broken data to openhab and the official apps did not...

I was watching an Ancient Aliens episode called "Beyond Roswell". The show described the idea of some of our tech being seeded slowly by introducing alien technology to specific companies. They suggested that computing technology has advanced very fast and introducing this tech could be part of that.

At first I was kinda pissed about this. I have read about the creation of the first transistor back in the 40s or 50s. WWII really advanced our need for computing devices such as what Turing built. Then I realized a lot of the explosion of computer tech did occur after key ET events. This kind of made me wonder how much is "us" and how much is ET tech. I also realized it can take a lot of effort to understand something really advanced. So reverse engineering can take a LOT of effort to figure these things out. Being seeded by external tech does not take away from humans at all.

A parallel to this is a programmer that learns how to use a C++ compiler. They could go their whole career without ever understanding how the compiler itself is doing its job. I find myself wanting to learn how compilers work and started down this path. I look at the simple grammar I have learned to parse. Then I look at the C++ grammar and think "How can I ever learn to do that?" So I see us viewing potentially advanced things and wondering how the heck can we ever learn to do that. The common reaction when faced with such tech would be disbelief and in some cases ridiculing the messenger. When I was a kid the idea of sending a picture over a phone was laughable. Now this is common and expected. It was literally a scifi concept when I was a kid.

So, back to the alien tech. I am now thinking it would be cool to be working with alien technology through computing. This is like scifi stuff now! So what if what we have was not all invented here (Earth). If anything this will prepare us programmers to get jobs working for alien corporations writing ship level programs and brain interfaces. Think of it as intergalactic resume building. 😉

Earth is hell. Let me explain.

What is this floating rock in the middle of nothingness that we're on? It can truthfully be described as

"It is a place where few enjoy living while majority suffer"

Do you know what else can be described like this?

Hell.

Let me go even deeper.

I am a christian. On tiktok lots of atheist And christian videos pop up for me. I like seeing them both because i like forming my own rational conclusions. The more i saw those videos the more i realized:

"Hold on... If satan and his demons are supposed to be busy burning in hell and suffering in eternal torment, then how are they here? How is satan ruling this floating rock in the middle of nothingness and spreading so much evil around? Shouldn't he be busy being in hell?"

Some christians replied to me saying "well satan is a very powerful angel and he can be in multiple places at once"

I am not going into how this logic is flawed.

The other christians replied "satan isnt in hell right now but he will be thrown there once the 2nd coming of Lord Jesus Christ comes, the rapture and judgement day"

Wait a second. You're telling me satan and demons are not in hell right now? Where are they? Chilling in heaven? And since we're being threatened to going to hell, we the people go to hell Right Now but satan does not? God rewards the MOST evil entity by not throwing them in hell but throws in hell some person for doing infinitely less evil than satan? Ok

This has lead me to conclusion that the Earth is Hell:

1) satan is not in the hell that we imagined - he's here, which makes this place the true hell
2) satan rules this world
3) everyone suffers, but the more evil, immoral, corrupt, satan worshipper you are, the better life you're gonna live
4) what kind of life you're gonna live by being good and praying to God? You're gonna live a poor live, you'll remain broke and helpless
5) this world is a place where God doesn't help you but Satan does if you worship him - what other place can be described like this? That's right Hell

We are all in Hell and that makes perfect sense considering how everything is fucked, immoral, corrupt unfair and everyone is full of bullshit.

To repeat:

- I am not optimistic. I believe by being an optimist you're lying to yourself about shit being better than it is which in future will make your life even worse

- I am not pessimistic. I believe by being a pessimist you're just dumping more depression into your life and making it harder than it already is

- I am realistic. I will say shit how it truly is without giving a fuck whose feelings gonna get hurt or what someone thinks. This is the only single source of truth.

We are in Hell right now.

Being a Varikist is encountering in the same document one's own previously-written useless functions, which span across multiple lines, in addition to functions which only operate properly because the planets have aligned in something akin to an elliptic curve; these are not indecipherable because the program entirely lacks comments, but because the comments pertain to a program which is somewhat different from that which one wishes to understand.
An example of this is “if senderOfMessage != regexpressiona...senderOfMessage = regexpressiona”; I am wholely uncertain of my reason for having written the program in this manner, but I will not be changing it, because my programs can be diplomatically described as having been developed with a utilitarian approach; they merely need to be functional, and, as such, a lot of repositioning is used during the development process. Of course, for the programs which I write for occupational reasons, I create flowcharts before beginning work on the program, and I imagine that the adoption of this habit for personal projects would likely not kill me.