Finally after one year I understood how to carry out my job. I should do exactly NOTHING. I stopped completely organizing the team, solving bugs, helping the team developing and solving problems, explore and try stupid things said by CEO, PM and consultants.
I stopped for 2 months now and nothing happened.
I work remotely, nobody knows if I'm working or not, because nobody cares really about priorities, bugs, customers or products development.

I gain 10K$ (ten thousand) per month.

I attend skype meeting once per week or less. I say yes to everything, nobody gives a shit to what I say, even if they consider me the technical director. Actually in the meetings I only take care of being considered the technical director.
I achieved the mythical 4 hours working week.

I keep skype open in all my devices in order to answer promptly in case of problem, wherever I'm am, that's the most important thing right now.

I attended some meeting from the toilet or from the bedroom.

It was hard. To understand that the board is only after the next funding and not looking to develop a real product. It's hard to pretend helping people while thinking inside you "fuck you".
You have to let go the "guilt": if you can't login, I KNOW that is my fault, that there is a bug, that is possible to solve it, that resources and planning are needed etc. That's guilt. Just let go and say "next release" and never include it in the next release.
In this way I discovered that some users are paying the application even if they can't login.

The company is not going to disappear in the next 5 years. On the contrary, it's going to receive more money.

So the only "bad" thing is, what will I write in my CV in 5 years?

A misconception that software engineers just sit in front of their laptops and code 40 hours a week, with no social interaction.

A software engineer’s job is actually pretty social. Personally, I probably spend around half of my time interacting with people. This could be partially due to 1:1, team, and other meetings. But a large part of it is spent in bouncing off ideas about your project with your project mates (especially during the planning phase), chiming in the conversations about some recent or urgent problems to help find or propose solutions, answering others’ questions, organizing some events, etc.

Of course, I do need some dedicated uninterrupted time to focus on programming and to get into the zone, but it’s certainly not the only activity I do at work. The main point to understand is that the software engineering is not a solitary, but a social job.

Overall, I’m very happy with my profession. The enjoyment I get out of my work vastly outweighs all of these points combined.

Can we agree to from now on do all our sylesheets like this?

Honestly. It takes a bit of work organizing everything but bloody hell is it easy to use.

PS I just started a decent chunk of those #ID's will be replaced it's just to build the UI up.

Also you get a + if you can guess what ui I am trying to recreate. 😂

Instead of accepting reality like a big man and acknowledging that making software with a cargo culted process that has no function in organizing the development work, the boss is insisting I'm to blame and wants me to "take responsibility". Taking responsibility my *****. I slay the dragon in its lair.

Since I'm leaving, I tried to give him some sincere advice, totally flipped him out.

#6 days left.

About a year ago, the organization I work for decided we don't really need team leads. We would be more self organizing if we didn't have technical leads. Now, one of those former leads who feels out of place can't get over it. She is constantly trying to add her two cents -- which is totally cool -- but in such a way as to make it sound/seem like we need to do what she says. Also, based on everything I've seen from her coding ability, I'm not sure how she ever became a tech lead. That's coming from me, and let me tell you, I feel SUPER junior sometimes. Like how the hell did they ever offer me a job junior. Well anyway, another dude was working with her the other day (we do pair programming) and snapped. He flipped out for like a solid 3 minutes on her. It was the most awkward thing I think I've ever experienced.

If there is anything I hate in life more than XCode is not organizing work!

A feature done few months ago on mobile, tested, passed QA and now it is not working! Why? Because API got screwed!! Why? Because someone is changing the core of the system without notifying anyone!!

Both API and that feature were not touched in months and suddenly stopped working and guess who is blamed, damn right me and the API dev when non of us even made a change -.-

We have a delivery specification. It's documented and it tells every developer how deliveries have to be done. Every *FUCKING* *SINGLE* *STEP*. For most deliveries you don't even have to think much, just check the steps.

Why do I always stumble across deliveries that are missing vital parts so if you want to reconstruct some project status, because someone is on vacation or has quit, you can't or need hours of investigation? Am I a private investigator, or what?

Am I the only one who tries to make his work comprehensible?

!rant

So, when I was young, I wanted to be a freelancing nomad. You know, live the live, work remote and travel.

But I didn't have the bones to pursue that. After 10 years of struggling as a normal "programmer", I did a little of everything. I did normal boring "erp maintenance" in C#, Oracle and some legacy stuff called Visual WEB GUI , which was fun, but required a full 9,5 hours work day, 8:00 am to 6:30pm, and the bosses where squares, and I was young and wanted to try something out of the corporate world.

Then I did some work for a newly funded consulting company that used python, Django, and postgresql, but the bosses promised a lot and delivered none, (I was supposed to work backend and have frontend support, which I did not have, and that hurt my productivity and bosses instead of looking at what they promised but did not deliver, they just discounted my salary 3 months in a row, so Bye bye MFs!!

Then I did some remote work for some guys, that, I managed to sustain for a whole year, the pay was good, the stack was simple, just node.js and pug templates, that gig was good, but communication with the bosses was hard, and eventually things started to get hard for them and me, and we had to say farewell to each other, I miss those guys. This is the only time I remember having fun working, I could work whenever I wanted, I only had to reach the weekly goals, and then my time was mine, I could work from home in the odd hours, or rent a chair in a co working space if I wanted to socialize.

Then fate got me one big gig with a multinational company, and I could hire some people, but I delegated too much and was asking too little of myself, and that project eventually died because I did not know how to negotiate.

So, I quit the whole entrepreneur idea, and got a public job at my University, I was a public employee with all the perks, but none of the fun, I just had to clock-in, work, and clock-out. That experience led me to discover a lot of myself, I worked as a public employee for a year and a half, and in that time, I discovered more about myself than what I learnt in 27 years of previous life experience.

Then, I grew bored of that life, and wanted some action, and I found more than enough fun in a VC funded startup ran by young narcissists that did not have a clue of what they were doing, I helped them organize themselves into "closing stuff", you know, finish the things you say you have finished. Just to give you an idea of what it was like before I got there, the were working for 3 months already on this project, they had on paper 50% of the system done and working, when I tried to use the app, I couldn't even sign-up without hacking some database commands, (this was supposedly done). So I spent a month there teaching these guys how to finish stuff, they got, Sign Up, (their sign up was a mess, it is one of those KYC rich things, that financial apps have), Login, and some core functionality working in a month, while in the previous 4 months they only did parallel work, writing endpoints that were not tried, and an app that did not communicate with the backend. But the bosses weren't happy with me, because I told them time and time again that we were not going to reach the goal they needed to reach to keep receiving funds from the investors, and I had to quit before it became a mayhem of toxic employer/employee relationship.

So now I decided to re-engage with life, I have funds to survive about a month and half, I have a good line of credit in case I need some more funds, and the time of the world.

So wish me luck!!! And I'll be posting often, because I would like opinions, hear from people with similar life experiences and share anecdotes.

Next post, it's going to be about how I discovered taskwarrior, and how implemented my first weekend following some of the aspects of GTD to do all my housekeeping chores, because, I think that organizing myself will be key to survive as a freelancer nomad.

Any web developers care to share their file structure when breaking css / pre processed styles into modules? Want to organize but I don’t want to over-do it.

Dev planning
- set timeline for feature for 2 weeks
- share timeline with everyone involved
- project manager calls and says it's taking too long
- dev adjusts timeline to 1 week
- project manager call next day asks for a new feature to be included in the 1 week timeline

What the f*** is wrong with these ppl. People don't seem to get the concept of schedules, timelines and organizing work. It's not like there is an abundance of resources (only few devs available ) with limited budget and salaries

I'm organizing my leaving handover etc,
Just spent the better part of 2 hours making sure a graduate, who due to come on the project has the environment all set up, which is cool dont wana see them stuck,

But when u ask a mid/senior level dev how his set up is goin and he replys with his user name and password for a VM and says, "Work away at it yourself" ,

thats when im trying to hold back my inner Hulk and not lose the Fucking plot! Lazy Cunt!

This kid in my class wants to work on a project idea he has with me.
The project sounds useful. A desktop client to find and download our class assignments from the school’s site with a clean GUI and other useful college note taking and organizing features and the potential to be distributed across the school if done well (there’s more too it but typing a lot on phone irks me)

But all the difficult time consuming and not learned in class parts he’s attempting to throw on me cause I’m the TA so in his words ‘I know more and am better suited for the task’.

What he doesn’t fucking realize is I know more because I do my own damn projects outside of class work and my comfort zone so I can get the knowledge to know more I don’t throw 80% of the work on other people so I can stick with the 20% that we’ve basically done in class before

So long story short I’m building my own version (it is an interesting project) with the smaller features (unnecessary for the main purpose) to be added at a later date if I ever feel like it. And he’s trying to get a different TA to do the majority of the work on his own version

If I’m still working on the project wouldn’t it have been better to just work with him even if I’m doing 80% and all the difficult time consuming aspects. Probably. But I just don’t appreciate people throwing everything difficult at me without actual reasons or time restrictions on themselves. I’d prefer just to do it 100% myself since his 20% would’ve been negligible until later anyway

Kut boosts CLI productivity by organizing commands. I recently put lots of work into it and I am looking for testers / contributors / critics!

[POLL] How do you develop stuff?
1 - just write code. It doesn't need to be organized, it just need to work how you thought it would, and THEN you start organizing things, like editing/creating new files, letting things DRY, optimizing the sutff you did earlier;
OR
2 - you surgically write code, making sure you keep everything is organized from the beginning. Basically you only write when you are sure.

Or maybe it's a blend between the two or something.

I'm asking because I do like the #1 and I feel uncomfortable when people see my code when it's under development. It's a mess, there are tons of comments everywhere and a bunch of repetition. But, when I find the right stuff, I start writing modules to make my code work better, remove unnecessary things, add documentation, and so on.

My development process is not the best of the best, but I get things done with it.

you know supposedly the life of a hunter gatherer was easier on the human body than that of a farmer.

i could kind of see that in a way.
we're built to move around, i don't know about the being out in the sun all day part though.

anyway I was thinking. is this bs better or worse ? it would a be a terrible letdown to work as a warehouse guy the rest of my life and land is expensive right now and people are nuts.

the latter especially, however there are better ways of organizing society.

for example.

if i had to work in a backbreaking job for several years i'd want to shoot myself or a crap job that was sort of grimey.

but making those jobs as livable as possible and moving everyone through them on a schedule.

that is doable for most people.

but if you say work in construction for 40 years your knees back and face are bye bye.

there are better ways of conducting the day to day business of our cuntry.