Everyday i used to spend an hour in the morning reading emails.

Until i made a script that reads all mails, parses to urgent/priorities/meetings etc. Then shows me a dashboard of everything. 1 hr turned to 20mins max.

Then i made a chatbot out of it and now i just talk to it everytime and gives me the rundown.

Gave me so much time to code instead of reading fucking emails.

Me and my girlfriend are arguing, because I'm programming a lot and I don't have time to give her attention. She said if I don't give her attention, she will break up with me.
Any suggestion where I can find a good tutorial for C#?

I'm really down.
I spent 10 years building on an application worth 800K$ revenue per year.

I tried to build a technical team. All left, because of fights with stupid account managers, CEO, business managers.

I was left alone for almost one year alone, working like 60-70 hours per week to keep the things going and adapt to more customers.

And looking for potential partners to outsource things.

Now out of the blue, 3 weeks before my summer holiday, investors introduce me to a "partner" that will rent to us a "developer" for 2 months. from tomorrow.
What the fuck I'm gonna do with him in 2 weeks I don't know.
Actually I understand that this "partner" will take over the whole project.

They used the word "to help me", but actually during the meeting they said to fix things that are not working, and to develop new features because the project is blocked.

Of course there are bugs, I have no developers with me and hundred of features and integrations to maintain. And of course everything is blocked because I have to think hard about priorities.

I feel humiliated in the worst way.
I don't know what will be my future position.
I wasted time contacting potential partners and the answer was always "there are no money".

The business strategist, entered one year ago and said "no more IT investment".

Basically as cofounder and cto (of myself), they will not fire me, if I stay silent. If I accept to be a puppet. And eat, eat eat a lot of shit. I'll grow fat from the shit I'll eat.
I feel I've lost all my hard work, and I'm alone.

Was visiting a house for possibly renting a room there.

The guy who showed me around gave me the weirdest look when I asked about the Internet speed cD

Priorities!

My boss: "I have an idea for a very important update that we should push to all our apps ASAP."
Me: "I'm not adding a Santa hat to the icons."
My Boss: "............... Carry on"

Happens to me all the time....

toxic workplace; leaving

I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.

I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.

------

On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)

Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).

I'm just.
so, so done.

I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)

Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.

But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.

So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)

I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)

With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.

Got laid off my by old employer back in 2019 because they have their priorities completely wrong.
Got a mail today whether I could fix something for them (ofc, they wanted me to do it essentially for free).
One of the websites I built for a customer back when I still worked there had a massive bug (that I was aware off and patched in later versions of the library causing it).
They never updated it so, I told them "just update the library".

Apparently, the idiot that was in charge of maintaining said site after I left didn't know how to and completely broke everything.
The hilarious part: While I setup everything using stuff like Docker and Git to make rollbacks easy...
That idiot went back to FTP and manually upgrading the databases through PhpMyAdmin :^)
He nuked the entire site.
Database? Gone.
Codebase? Borked (installed a version with a lot of breaking changes without properly reading the migration guide).
And knowing that shit company, they don't have any backups either.

They said "I wasn't needed because we have other good devs" when they laid me off.
Uhu, I can eh... see those good devs doing their job :^)

Got my first paycheck as a Developer.

devDucks Ordered!

:)

Dear clients.

Putting your support subject or content either in uppercase letters or telling US that your matter/ticket has 'the utmost priority' doesn't mean anything to us. You'll just have to keep in line.

WE decide the priorities. Also, calling us when we haven't looked into your very fucking high priority ticket yet for about 5 FUCKING minutes is NOT going to help YOU.

- One of the Linux Support Engineers.

A friend just told me about that dumb tide pods meme.

Oh well. Looks like we have other priorities, no flying cars or anything.

"Hey, Root, someone screwed up and now all of our prod servers are running this useless query constantly. I know I already changed your priorities six times in the past three weeks, but: Go fix it! This is higher priority! We already took some guesses at how and supplied the necessary code changes in the ticket, so this shouldn't take you long. Remember, HIGH PRIORITY!"

1. I have no idea how to reproduce it.
2. They have no idea how to reproduce it.
3. The server log doesn't include queries.
4. The application log doesn't include queries.
5. The tooling intercepts and strips out some log entries the legendary devs considered useless. (Tangent: It also now requires a tool to read the logs because log entries are now long json blobs instead of plain text.)
6. The codebase uses different loggers like everywhere, uses a custom logger by default, and often overwrites that custom logger with the default logger some levels in. gg
7. The fixes shown in the ticket are pretty lame. (I've fixed these already, and added one they missed.)
8. I'm sick and tired and burned out and just can't bring myself to care. I'm only doing this so i don't get fired.
9. Why not have the person who screwed this up fix it? Did they quit? I mean, I wouldn't blame them.

Why must everything this company does be so infuriatingly complicated?

LinkedIn is an alternative reality unhooked from the rest of the world, where hypocrisy and arrogance meet, creating Leaders, Experts and Analysts.

- Every company is an industry leader globally.
- Every offer is life-changing.
- Every normal person suddenly is an expert in his field
- Each candidate is an expert in time management, customer relationships, and software development priorities.
- They are all happy to share their achievements in a disinterested way
- They all deal with important issues, with great reflections on the meaning of life and reality around us
- Each written post usually starts with a question followed by a life experience
- Companies are dynamic, they change their internal processes on a daily basis

Please shoot me, I've had enough of this shit.

- Few companies are leaders globally
- The offers you make are traps and I always have to look for where the bullshit is.
- You're not an expert in your field if you've been doing the same thing for 10 years without moving your ass out of that chair.
- If you were a time management expert, I wouldn't have to call you every week for unresolved tasks, and I wouldn't even have to do 150 meetings to postpone the goals set. Exactly what is your experience with the customer? Because by heart shutting up and always saying yes is not a good way to get the job done.
- I have great news for you. Nobody gives a shit about your work successes. At most they're envious.
- If you really are such a deep and introspective person... how the fuck is it that working with you is hell?
- Copying a quote from a website and then building a narrative on it doesn't automatically make you a superstar
- Companies, especially the largest ones, take years to change and if they do it is because there is the economic motivation behind it, not because they are visionaries.

This rant was written by scrolling through my LinkedIn feed.

At work today. Someone unregistered a domain name (don't remember the exact one) with something funny/positive about beer (for example beerisawesome.com).

Collegue: What?! Why would you unregister this?!?
*tells the boss*
Boss: well someone's got their priorities fucking wrong.

😆

Was struggling with depression and stress for an extended period. So, naturally, I had more sickdays than average.
However, I was still managing to overperform on my goals, so when it came time to discuss salary I was hopeful.

Didn't get a raise, not even a pat on the back. My manager told me he couldn't justify giving me the raise I had earned simply because I had had too many sick days. So my actual performance didn't count. Everybody else got raises though.

On a previous occasion he told me that I had to 'Learn what it means to have a job' and get my priorities straight. I told him I already had very little social life so I could spend what little energy I had on work. I tried to explain to him how depression works and he assured me he understood.

Yeah, right. My colleague with back problems, who suddenly couldn't walk, didn't get that treatment.

Depression is real. I'm so glad they ended up firing me so I could work for a place that cares.

Hey @Root! I know you won't have time to finish Ticket A before holiday vacation, so work on Ticket B instead.

I finished Ticket A in time. except for converting/fixing some horrible spaghetti monstrosity. More or less: "we overwrote this gem's middleware and now it calls back into our codebase under specific circumstances, and then calls the gem again, which calls the middleware again." Wtf? It's an atrocity against rationality.

The second day after vacation:

Hey @Root, drop Ticket B and work on Ticket C instead. Can you knock this out quick, like before friday? ... Uh, sure. It looks easy.

Ticket C was not easy. Ticket C was a frontend CSS job to add a print button, and for unknown reasons, none of the styles apply during printing. The only code involved is adding a button with a single line of javascript: `window.print()`, so why give it to the chick who hasn't been given a frontend ticket in over a year? Why not give it to the frontend guy who does this all day every day? Because "do it anyway," that's why.

And in somewhere between 13 (now 5) minutes and two hours from now, I'm going to have a 1:1 with my boss to discuss the week. Having finished almost all of Ticket A won't matter because it's not a "recent priority" -- despite it being a priority before, and a lot of work. I've made no progress on Ticket B due to interruptions (and a total and complete lack of caring because I'm burned out and quite literally can no longer care), and no progress on ticket C because... it's all horribly broken and therefore not quick. I assigned it to Mr. Frontend, which I'll probably get chewed out for.

So, my 1:1 with bossmang today is going to be awful. And the worst part of all: I'm out of rum! Which means sobriety in the face of adversity! :<

but like, wtf. Just give me a ticket and let me work on it until it's done. Stop changing the damn priorities every other freaking day!

Me: Alright today I'm going to work on X, Y, and Z because that's what we planned yesterday.

(10 Minutes into the day)

Boss: We need you to work on A, B, and C. These need to be done today.

Me: What about X, Y, and Z?

B: You have new priorities.

(30 Minutes later)

B: What's your status on X, Y and Z? You think it'll be done today?

M: (Forwards email about new priorities)

B: I'm coming down to talk with you.

WHY.

Don't wanna miss the most important meal of the day

Devs: Feature A is done! Faster than planned even.

Manager: Hmm... what about feature A+B?

Devs: That requires feature B, and you said that feature B was not as important as feature A during our last meeting, remember? So we planned to do A, B, and then A+B. It's there in the meeting minutes.

Manager: But feature A does not make sense without feature A+B. Let's not release feature A just yet until we have feature A+B.

Then why didn't you say so during our last meeting?!

How priorities work #1

High priority : Client request to change button color to red
Low priority : improvement that will boost product's speed and robustness

Week 278: Most rage-inducing work experience — I’ve got a list saved! At least from the current circle of hell. I might post a few more under this tag later…

TicketA: Do this in locations a-e.
TicketB: Do this in locations e-h.
TicketC: Do this in locations i-k.
Root: There’s actually a-x, but okay. They’re all done.
Product: You didn’t address location e in ticket B! We can’t trust you to do your tickets right. Did you even test this?
Root: Did you check TicketA? It’s in TicketA.
Product guy: It was called out in TicketB! How did you miss it?!
Product guy: (Refuses to respond or speak to me, quite literally ever again.)
Product guy to everyone in private: Don’t trust Root. Don’t give her any tickets.
Product manager to boss: Root doesn’t complete her tickets! We can’t trust her. Don’t give her our tickets.
Product manager to TC: We can’t trust Root. Don’t give her our tickets.
TC: Nobody can trust you! Not even the execs! You need to rebuild your reputation.

Root: Asks coworker a simple question.
Root: Asks again.
Root: nudges them.
Root: Asks again.
Coworker: I’ll respond before tomorrow. (And doesn’t.)
Root: Asks again.
Root: Fine. I’ll figure it out in my own.
TC: Stop making it sound like you don’t have any support from the team!

Root: Asks four people about <feature> they all built.
Everyone: idk
Root: Okay, I’ll figure it out on my own.
TC: Stop making it sound like you don’t have any support from the team!

Root: Mentions multiple meetings to discuss ticket with <Person>.
TC: You called <Person> stupid and useless in front of the whole team! Go apologize!

Root: Tells TC something. Asks a simple question.
Root: Tells TC the same thing. Asks again.
TC: (No response for days.)
TC: Tells me the exact same thing publicly like it’s a revelation and I’m stupid for not knowing.
TC: You don’t communicate well!

Root: Asks who the end user of my ticket is.
Root: Asks Boss.
Root: Asks TC.
Root: Fine, I’ll build it for both.
Root: Asks again in PR.
TC: Derides; doesn’t answer.
Root: Asks again, clearly, with explanation.
TC: Copypastes the derision, still doesn’t answer.
Root: Asks boss.
Boss: Doesn’t answer.
Boss: You need to work on your communication skills.

Root: Mentions asking question about blocker to <Person> and not hearing back. Mentions following up later.
<Person>: Gets offended. Refuses to respond for weeks thereafter.

Root: Hey boss, there’s a ticket for a minor prod issue. Is that higher priority than my current ticket?
Root: Hey, should I switch tickets?
Root: Hey?
Root: … Okay, I’ll just keep on my current one.
Boss: You need to work on your priorities.

Everyone: (Endless circlejerking and drama and tattling)

It was a cold monday evening.
I was alone in my room.
Many hours of coding had passed.

Windows offered me two options:
"Shutdown"
"Shutdown with update"

Anoyed by the update but thankful for the first option i decided to go with number one.
Windows started its shuting down process when all of a sudden...

"Please don't turn off your machine! Your updates are being konfigured!

It was that evening...
That one speciall evening...
I decided...
To finally...
Do nothing about this problem and cry myself to sleep...

Give up.

Craziest deadline I've ever had...

Task: Patch 193 machines
Environment:
- no configuration/patch management
- no knowledge of the machines
- no contact info/application owners

...timeframe...do it today!

Here's the winner...do we have credentials for these machines? Ha, nope.

!!office drama

I haven't been around much in recent weeks. Due to family illness, christmas shopping, dealing with estranged parents, and brooding over the foregoing, I haven't had a lot of time or energy left to myself.

tl;dr: The CTO ("API Guy") is ostensibly getting fired, and I might be taking over his job. I don't know if I should accept, try to stave this off, or simply flee.

------

Anyone who has been following my recent rants knows that API Guy is my boss, and he often writes terrible code. It's solid and unbreakable, but reading it is a *nightmare.* One of our applications is half the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, and it's difficult to tell what code is live and what amounts to ancient, still-active landmines. This is one application; we have several, most of which I've never even looked at.

Ostensibly the code is so terrible because the company grew extremely quickly, and API Guy needed to cram in lots of unexpected / planned-against features. From what I can see, that seems about right, but I haven't checked timeframes [because that's a lot of work!].

Here's a brief rundown of the situation.
- API Guy co-founded the company with the CEO.
- CEO and API Guy have been friends for a long time.
- CEO belives the company will fail with API Guy as head of tech.
- They could just be testing me; I have zero way of knowing. API Guy seems totally oblivious, and CEO seems sincere, so this feels pretty doubtful.
- CEO likes pushing people around. CEO believes he can push me around. API Guy doesn't budge. (I probably won't, either, except to change task priorities.)
- API Guy's code is huge and awful, but functional.
- API Guy is trying to clean up the mess; CEO doesn't understand (maybe doesn't care).
- Literally nobody else knows how the code works.
- Apart from API Guy and myself, the entire company is extroverted sales people.
- None of these sales people particularly like me.
- Sales people sell and sell and sell without asking development if they can pull enough magic features out of their hat to meet the arbitrary saleslines. (because the answer is usually no)
- If I accept, I would be the sole developer (at first) and responsible for someone else's mountain of nightmarish code, and still responsible for layering on new features at the same pace as he. Pay raise likely, but not guaranteed.
- My getting the position is contingent upon the CEO and the investors, meaning it's by no means guaranteed.
- If I don't accept, likely API Guy will be replaced with someone else of unknown ability, who doesn't know the code, and whom I must answer to regardless. Potentially OK, potentially a monumental disaster.

Honestly, it feels like I'm going to be screwed no matter what course I choose.

Perhaps accepting is slightly better?

The best would be to assume the position of CTO and keep API Guy around -- but that would feel like an insult to him. I doubt he'd be okay with it. But maybe. Who knows? I doubt the CEO would seriously consider that anyway.

I feel like a lamb between a dim, angry rhino, and an oblivious one.

Complains why the app is not done yet ...

Because you fucking keep coming up with new features and ask us to implement them immediately !!!??

One of our internal customers to my team: "We need this new feature to be implemented as soon as possible! It's super urgent!! Work on it asap!! PEOPLE ARE DYING!!"

Us: "Ok, we'll prioritize this feature and deliver it as soon as we can"

Them: "Is it ready yet?"

Them: "Is it ready yet?"

Them: "Is it ready yet?"

Them: "Is it ready yet?"

... One month later ...

Them: "Is it ready yet?"

Us: "We're done! We implemented everything as promised! Please give us your credentials so that we can whitelist you and you can start using the new service"

Them: "Okay, we will get back to you"

... Two months have passed since then and still not a single word from them. I'm starting to wonder: are they still alive? 🤔

Honestly? People. For the first two years of my career I worked for an investment bank.. Basically working to make rich people richer. That, plus the technology sucked, made me change what I do.

I now work for a company that, while it doesn't cure cancer, it makes products that my friends use, my family uses, even my 1 year old son uses. And knowing I am making a difference in their life in even just a little way is worth it.

Also now that I have a family and a kid, my priorities have shifted and as much as I love coding, my family and kid will always come first now. Could I be making more at an investment bank where I worked 12 hour shifts every day? Sure. But it's not worth it to me.

So they discovered a small tiny bug in a thing anyone last touched about 3 months ago. It has been there for at least 6 months, and JUST NOW someone noticed it. But OF COURSE that bug is important enough to have me drop FUCKING EVERYTHING that I'm doing, despite us being very short on time already!

Fucking hell, if nobody noticed that shitty little crap bug the past 6 months how can it possibly be so important. Good thing I don't have a large wooden mallet nearby.

So thanks so much for having me fix this RIGHT NOW, or rather IN THREE FUCKING HOURS or however it'll take to set up this project's dev environment... absolute horseshit.

Umm.... O.o

When management produces a list of priorities but every item on the list is #1 priority. So some items are in BOLD to signify their even greater priority over other priorities.

I just realized that CPU's are essentially electronic hookers, for processes.

They'll service any process that calls upon them, but keep switching between various processes so that it can spend time fairly with each of its processes. And of course, they'll immediately abandon their current process if one with a higher priority reveals itself and attend to that one instead. Once it is finished, it'll return to its less-important processes.

Kinda sounds like a hooker to me... 🤔

Hello! A tiny update on the privacy site thingy. (linuxxx here yas).

I've finished the preview page (description of what will be on the site really) and slowly preparing for deployment.
In the mean time, since @ewpratten is very busy at the moment, I'm giving the frontend part a shot myself! Working on the general layout/presentation right now and I will show a preview as soon as I have anything solid enough to show :).

Also working on the custom CMS which is going well!

I am kind of hestitant to publish the preview page because I am not a frontender and I know that I'll get all criticism on here so please, please go easy on me! Also, just in general, if you find any kind of flaws in the web app or wherever, please report them to me! As for frontend, I won't fix anything because I've got bigger priorities (like creating the actual site itself xD) but general feedback would be appreciated :). And as I said, I'm a backender so don't judge me too hard on the frontend!

Alright now let's gather some courage to actually publish this thing 😅

How my priorities got sorted xD

Can't believe I spent the past 2+ hours looking for; and customizing a color theme for my code editor (... again) when I have a shitload of stuff to do :(

I'm astonished again. Linux isn't designed as GUI OS - where Windows has dynamic thread priorities for freshly woken up threads as to increase GUI snappiness.

Now, my CPU has four physical and eight logical cores for SMT. I'm running eight worker threads of some parallel testing stuff, and I'm glad that I chose the AMD 3400G over the 3200G. The CPU load is 100%. On top of that, MP3 audio, the browser, and I'm dd'ing an external USB3 HDD.

Holy shit, the browser is just as smooth as if the CPU were idle. No perceivable lag. I hadn't expected desktop Linux to be that great.

I'm also surprised that the CPU temperature doesn't exceed 44°C despite full load at 21°C ambient, and the cooling is inaudible. Sure, my cooler is massively over-dimensioned to achieve exactly that, but it's still amazing.

It's what I would have wanted ten years ago and only could approach somewhat, but now the tech is actually there.

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?

devRant should place an explicit notice upon registration:
"devRant cannot be held responsible for proctrastination when you have pressing deadlines :D"

and every 20 minutes a popup saying "get back to work! it's been a while"

Hurricane's fixing to hit.

What does that mean?

Downloading porn and movies for the power outage that's imminent. Priorities are aligned lol

what's the point of having Jira task priorities if all the tasks are assigned to major priority? >:(

Just got a new phone. First app I download? devRant. #priorities

Found in repository:
<some_code> //TODO fix it, its really important
It was commited 2 years ago... and still exists in code

So, I was in the middle of a rant about how disorganized maintenance is this weekend, but husband said he might have to go to the ER for a headache that got worse after he passed out in formation and no one caught him.

Suddenly, I don't give a fuck about work. I want to be on a plane to him to be there in case the ibuprofen doesn't work and it's more serious than he thinks. He's less than a week from graduation. I just need him to come home so I can take care of him.

I'm a bit tired of dev and applying for a customer support job for half my current income. During interview I already got promoted to technical support. Even dev job was possible, but I'm done. I've seen the wheel reinvented too much. Also, the looks of software became more important than ever and that's not something I do.

But I'm very positive now. I know the company already, they're great! Super culture! Always hired the right people and me once before as a py dev

I had a delivery deadline on the same day when an urgent support request came in. My boss was a stupid sucker who was afraid of taking responsibility, and that's a vice I absolutely hate with bosses.

We had quite a heated argument where he just wanted me to give priority to both things, which I declined because I had no idea how much time the support research would take me.

Finally, he decided that I should work on the support item immediately, but only for up to one hour. He was totally surprised when I accepted that without further argument. I told him that all I had wanted from him had been a priority decision, and that was one.

Felt like explaining to my boss what his fucking job was.

There is a company providing a very speciffic service. And it has a core application for that svc, supported by a core app team.
That company also has other services, which are derivations of the core one. So every svc depends on core.

Now that we're clear on that... I was working in a team of one of the subservices. We very strongly depended on core. In fact, our svc was useless if integration w/ core broke down.

The core team had an annoying habbit. They refused to version their webservices and they LOVED to push api updates w/o any warnings. Our prod, test, other envs used to fail bcz of core api changes quite often. Mgmt, IT head was aware of the problem and customers' complaints as well.

So as a result, once core api changes we're all in a panic mode: all prior priorities are lowered and revival of prod is to be our main focus. Core api is not docummented, the changes are not clear, so we have to reverse engineer the shit out of it. We manage to patch our prod up w/ hotfixes, but now we have tech debt. While working on the debt, core api changed again, in test env. Mgmt pushes debt back and reallocates us to hotfix test. Hotfix is 80% done when another core api breaks. Now mgmt asks us to drop wtv we're working on and fix that new break. By the time we're to deploy the hotfix, another api breaks in another env. The mgmt..... You get the picture :)

2 years go by, nothing has changed so far.

Marking your email as "High Priority" does not make it high priority. Nor will it get it attended to any faster. But keep believing it will, dear colleagues. Live happily in your little fantasy worlds.

A previous project manager thought that by marking every ticket as high priority, they would get done faster.

// priorities

Priorities..

2 day national holiday and i thought to myself "aaaah finally i can make up for the deadlines which im behind on!"
*spends the entir day procrastinating*

Gettin' your priorities straight be like...

I hate time.

Yes, that dimension which unidirectionally rushes by and makes us miss deadlines.

Also yes, that object in most programming languages which chokes to death on formatting conversions, timezones, DST transitions and leap seconds.

But above all, I hate doing chronological things from the point of view of code, because it always involves scheduling and polling of some kind, through cron jobs and queues with workers.

When the web of actions dependent on predicted future and passed past events becomes complicated, the queries become heavy... and with slow queries, queues might lock or get delayed just a little bit...

So you start caching things in faster places, figure out ways to predict worker/thread priorities and improve scheduling algorithms.

But then you start worrying about cache warming and cascading, about hashing results and flushing data, about keeping all those truths in sync...

I had a nightmare last night.

I was a watchmaker, and I had to fix a giant ticking watch, forced to run like a mouse while poking at gears.

I fucking need a break. But time ticks on...

!rant

Upper management finally caved in to the endless change requests from business and explicitly made the following statement:

"We won't overpromise and under-deliver. With that, we are reducing the committed scope of development work per sprint, but will continue to deliver the same final deliverables by the delivery dates"

So all our compressed project timetables just got uncompressed, and we finally have the breathing room we've been begging for since 2017. Any change requests from business will be (finally) backlogged.

On the other hand, the number of projects have increased to fill out the new extra dev time, but at least we're now less stressed at work. Priorities!

I do believe, genuinely that “I don’t know” is sometimes an acceptable answer. If you don’t know, you don’t know. I appreciate the honesty.

But at the same time

I don’t know how much longer I can take “I don’t know” as an answer from my boss when I ask about critical business things HE tasked me with, or things relating to career development and maximizing my time with this company.

Do I need my boss to have all the answers on company revenue? No.

Do I need my boss to at least have an understanding on wtf is going with projects when my priorities get changed mid-project for the 4th time? Hell yes.

Currently balancing my full time job. A Rails bigass project and certain php contracts.

The rails one is unpaid, and I am doing it on my free time since my "payment" would be a portion of the company and a CTO position once it is done. I am building it with one of my best friends and he got the contract from this one dude he has who is loaded and will be selling this to the dptmnt of education of certain country.

The thing is, we all know how it works with those projects. The CEO had contracted this project to some people. He paid them handsomely and as is the case with certain situations the project was abandonded, the devs took the money and ran. So that is why he decided that instead of paying people like he should he would instead try and see if he could get someone interested. He told my friend to get himself an "American developer" since he was fed up with the devs of said country and that is how I am here now.

But the thing is, he is somewhat desperate to see something and even tho I show advancements on a weekly basis I hate the wordings of his group text messages:
"All right guys. I need to see some advancements, show me what you got now"

Motherfucker. You sit your ass and WAIT for me to want to show you something, but don't demand shit like if you are paying me. As far as I know my priorities lie in my current day job or the other people that ARE paying me.

>i need to see some advancements

Fuck off.

When you dedicate twice as much time on getting that nice button hover effect than actually making it work...

A web developer's bookshelf. Pre and post career. Certainly makes the bugs, chores, dev bosses, and bullshit priorities (that take away from "code purity") all the more tolerable - and introspective. Thanks Mom!

Management Double standards...
At a previous employer, the manager had me doing some QA testing for a updated version of some customer facing UIs. I spent 3 days constantly testing, except for my lunch break.
Every bug that I found I sent to a Sr dev.
Now this Sr dev was a coding savant. I mean awesome coder, but he had the personality of a rat and snake combined. If he wasn't coding he was brown-nosing the manager, talking about how he was doing all the work, or trying to rat on us other devs.
Anyway this dev has spent the 3 days of bug fixing alternating between watching videos and fixing bugs. Don't know what the videos were, don't realy care. I do know that he did not like to be disturbed while watching them...
On the third day, on my lunch break, I decided to watch two fifiteen minute videos on VSTS feeds and linking node packages.
As soon as I started Sr dev came over and asked me if I was focused on the teams priorities. I told him that it was my lunch break and since this was related to an upcoming sprint I thought it was worth it.
This S.O.B. goes full out hissy fit. He was flat out throwing a tantrum like my small daughter would. He made such a noise that my manager walked over and asked what was going on.
This shitbag Sr dev smirked at me and asked to speak to the manager in his office. When the manager called me over I knew what was up. I was lectured on not focusing on the teams priorities. I tried to explain that the videos were relevant to an upcoming sprint but was shot down. When I brought up the fact that the Sr dev was watching videos, the manager told me flat out that he didn't care. I was mad and told the manager that this was bullshit. All the manager cared about was keeping the Sr dev happy. I was told to "treat <shithead sr dev> with respect or else".
It was at that time I decided to look for another job. Less than a month later I left, for a much better paying job with awesome benefits. Sr dev acted like he was hurt I was leaving. Manager couldn't have cared less.
When some others on the team heard what he did, they started looking for work elsewhere too.
A month after I left another Sr dev on the same project left. At the same time a BA and QA tester demanded to be put on another team or else they would leave.
Manager started out with a team of 6 was left with only two people.
When the last one left, manager had the nerve to ask me why I didn't let him know anyone was unhappy. I told him if he cared so little for me, why would I think he care about them.
Ultimately, leaving was one of the best things I could have done.

Girl: you should download the bible.
Me: *Runs into the Vim Quick Reference app and downloads it instead*

Priorities.

I have been working for my current employer about 3 years now. When I first got to work I was asked by another employee to work on an editor for certain types of files. We will call this employee Ed. Because his name is Ed.

Ed is a verifiable genius, and a genuinely great guy to work with. He is amazing with hardware and math. Ed has a need, or shall I say fetish. He wants an editor for some our proprietary files called "Settings files". They are just xml. Nothing special.

However, I have always had other priorities. We actually had a tense moment when I had to tell Ed my boss doesn't want me to work on the editor. I had started looking into working on the editor when my boss said stop working on this file. So since then it had become a running joke between Ed and myself. Well, I think it is funny, Ed smiles, but I know he wants this editor bad. Our boss even suggested at one time that Ed write this editor. He looked into it, but "other priorities" trumped this effort.

Okay, so now it has been 3 years and we still don't have this editor. Then I had an epiphany. Since Ed wants this editor I found an idea for the name of this program. "Settings Editor" is just too mundane. I now think it should be called: "Mr. Edit". I also found that the library we use for most of our development has text to speech built in. So when the program starts I can have it say: "Hello, I am Mr. Edit, the talking Settings Editor". I have never wanted to write this program so badly before. Muahahahahaha!

Priorities

Project manager, who i've complained in the past is neglecting critical things that he doesn't want to do, decided today to cancel our weekly planning meeting, to have the below conversation with me 1:1. Its very long, but anyone who has the will to get through it ... please tell me it's not just me. I'm so bewildered and angry.

Side note: His solution to the planning meeting not taking place ... to just not have one and asked everyone to figure it out themselves offline, with no guidance on priorities.

Conversation:

PM: I need to talk to you about some of phrasing you use during collaboration. It's coming across slightly offensive, or angry or something like that.

Me: ok, can you give me an example?

PM: The ticket I opened yesterday, where you closed it with a comment something along the lines of "as discussed several times before, this is an issue with library X, can't be fixed until Y ...".

"As discussed several times" comes across aggressive.

Me: Ok, fair enough, I get quite frustrated when we are under a crunch, working long hours, and I have to keep debugging or responding to the same tickets over and over. I mean, like we do need to solve this problem, I don't think its fair that we just keep ignoring this.

PM: See this is the problem, you never told me.

Me: ... told you what?

PM: That this is a known issue and not to test it.

Me: ..... i'm sorry ..... I did, that was the comment, this is the 4th ticket i've closed about it.

PM: Right but when you sent me this app, you never said "don't test this".

Me: But I told you that, the last 3 times that it won't be in until feature X, which you know is next month.

PM: No, you need to tell me on each internal release what not to test.

Me: But we release multiple times per week internally. Do you really need me to write a big list of "still broken, still broken, still broken, still broken"?

PM: Yes, how else will I know?

Me: This is documented, the last QA contractor we had work for us, wrote a lot of this down. Its in other tickets that are still open, or notes on test cases etc. You were tagged in all of these too. Can you not read those? and not test them unless I say I've fixed them?

PM: No, i'm only filling for QA until we hire a full time. Thats QA's job to read those and maintain those documents.

Me: So you want me to document for you every single release, whats already documented in a different place?

PM: ok we'll come back to this. Speaking of hiring QA. You left a comment on the excel spreadsheet questioning my decision, publicly, thats not ok.

Me: When I asked why my top pick was rejected?

PM: Yes. Its great that you are involved in this, but I have to work closely with this person and I said no, is that not enough?

Me: Well you asked me to participate, reviewing resumes's and interviewing people. And I also have to work extremely close with this person.

PM: Are you doubting my ability to interview or filter people?

Me: ..... well a little bit yeah. You asked me to interview your top pick after you interviewed her and thought she was great. She was very under qualified. And the second resume you picked was missing 50% of the requirements we asked for ... given those two didn't go well, I do think its fair to ask why my top pick was rejected? ... even just to know the reason?

PM: Could you not have asked publicly? face to face?

Me: you tagged me on a google sheet, asking me to review a resume, and rather than tag you back on 2 rows below ... you want me to wait 4 days to ask you at our next face to face? (which you just cancelled for this meeting)

PM: That would have been more appropriate

Me: ..... i'm sorry, i don't want to be rude but thats ridiculous and very nit pick-y. You asked my opinion on one row, I asked yours on another. To say theres anything wrong with that is ridiculous

PM: Well we are going to call another team meeting and discuss all this face to face then, because this isn't working. We need to jump to this other call now, lets leave it here.

*sees 10+ apps needed to be updated*

*sees devRant update*

*quickly updates devRant first*

Fucking fuck you 'executive' sales director.

You come into my office when I'm not here, and then force people to prioritise your shitty fucking customer above a high priority one that I need to go to. I get phoned and told, "You will go there".

Basically, he just prioritised a shitty fucking issue of 3 users over a high priority SLA customer of 140 users.

Getting shat out as I speak about why the high priority is not being done (I need to do DR there, because their server crashed).

Basically said - I am fucked. I either choose to go to the SLA call and then the 'director' fucking loses his shit and hits me, or I go to the call and the MD loses his shit and fucks me up (again).

Fuck this.
Fuck.

Time to get to work!

Half a year ago, I got fired in my job. The reason was the same always bullshit; we have very little clients, economy nowadays is terribly bad, our priorities are different now than when we hired you, etc.
The last week I spent there, I heard something about my poor performance and programming skills, and that pissed me off a lot. For six months I worked on a laravel web app for managing customers, tasks and invoices, a fucking CRM, but made specifically for that company just because they didn't know sugar, odoo, prime or whatever.
Parallel to the crappy CRM, I was told to patch some PrestaShop, WordPress and plain sites, and it was hard to communicate with customers, management ignored every email I sent, and all I was told to do was "do as they say".
The result was shit, obviously, and my work showed much less skill, knowledge and expertise than I really have.
After that, I spent a few months unemployed, studying and working as a waiter just to survive, because my contract didn't comply with unemployment office requirements for a pay.
Then I got this job, on an analytics company where guess what, I'm told to write a fucking laravel web app for managing customers, invoices and tasks. In the meantime, I design websites, and communication with customers is shit, and management ignores every single mail I send.
My salary is eight hundred putos euros again, and will contract is wet shit.
I know, maybe I am "not that good" to earn a 3000€+ salary and have a good team support.
But I'm not */that/* bad.

devRant was the first thing I installed on my new phone, priorities people!

Priorities:
1. Work
2. Eat
3. Save money
4. Do less of #1
5. Do more of #4
6. Sleep
7. Talk to people
7a. Nevermind - stretch goal

(in a meeting between o&m team and business partners to assign priorities to various tasks)
I.T.: So what priority would you put this new task?
Business : it's our 1.
I.T.: ok, and this other one?
B: it's a 1.
I.T.: ...

So after months of self study my company finally appoints me as a junior developer with a major client as the intermediate dev on the project resigned. My tech lead assures me that junior devs only fix bugs and do other minor changes. One week in and in our first sprint planning session the client decides to priorities a Major update to the app. Now I have 2 weeks to deliver what will either make or break my immediate career. And I have no idea how to implement any of the changes. Stack overflow you're my only hope (and many hrs of YouTube tutorials)

Github 101 (many of these things pertain to other places, but Github is what I'll focus on)

- Even the best still get their shit closed - PRs, issues, whatever. It's a part of the process; learn from it and move on.

- Not every maintainer is nice. Not every maintainer wants X feature. Not every maintainer will give you the time of day. You will never change this, so don't take it personally.

- Asking questions is okay. The trackers aren't just for bug reports/feature requests/PRs. Some maintainers will point you toward StackOverflow but that's usually code for "I don't have time to help you", not "you did something wrong".

- If you open an issue (or ask a question) and it receives a response and then it's closed, don't be upset - that's just how that works. An open issue means something actionable can still happen. If your question has been answered or issue has been resolved, the issue being closed helps maintainers keep things un-cluttered. It's not a middle finger to the face.

- Further, on especially noisy or popular repositories, locking the issue might happen when it's closed. Again, while it might feel like it, it's not a middle finger. It just prevents certain types of wrongdoing from the less... courteous or common-sense-having users.

- Never assume anything about who you're talking to, ever. Even recently, I made this mistake when correcting someone about calling what I thought was "powerpc" just "power". I told them "hey, it's called powerpc by the way" and they (kindly) let me know it's "power" and why, and also that they're on the Power team. Needless to say, they had the authority in that situation. Some people aren't as nice, but the best way to avoid heated discussion is....

- ... don't assume malice. Often I've come across what I perceived to be a rude or pushy comment. Sometimes, it feels as though the person is demanding something. As a native English speaker, I naturally tried to read between the lines as English speakers love to tuck away hidden meanings and emotions into finely crafted sentences. However, in many cases, it turns out that the other person didn't speak English well enough at all and that the easiest and most accurate way for them to convey something was bluntly and directly in English (since, of course, that's the easiest way). Cultures differ, priorities differ, patience tolerances differ. We're all people after all - so don't assume someone is being mean or is trying to start a fight. Insinuating such might actually make things worse.

- Please, PLEASE, search issues first before you open a new one. Explaining why one of my packages will not be re-written as an ESM module is almost muscle memory at this point.

- If you put in the effort, so will I (as a maintainer). Oftentimes, when you're opening an issue on a repository, the owner hasn't looked at the code in a while. If you give them a lot of hints as to how to solve a problem or answer your question, you're going to make them super, duper happy. Provide stack traces, reproduction cases, links to the source code - even open a PR if you can. I can respond to issues and approve PRs from anywhere, but can't always investigate an issue on a computer as readily. This is especially true when filing bugs - if you don't help me solve it, it simply won't be solved.

- [warning: controversial] Emojis dillute your content. It's not often I see it, but sometimes I see someone use emojis every few words to "accent" the word before it. It's annoying, counterproductive, and makes you look like an idiot. It also makes me want to help you way less.

- Github's code search is awful. If you're really looking for something, clone (--depth=1) the repository into /tmp or something and [rip]grep it yourself. Believe me, it will save you time looking for things that clearly exist but don't show up in the search results (or is buried behind an ocean of test files).

- Thanking a maintainer goes a very long way in making connections, especially when you're interacting somewhat heavily with a repository. It almost never happens and having talked with several very famous OSSers about this in the past it really makes our week when it happens. If you ever feel as though you're being noisy or anxious about interacting with a repository, remember that ending your comment with a quick "btw thanks for a cool repo, it's really helpful" always sets things off on a Good Note.

- If you open an issue or a PR, don't close it if it doesn't receive attention. It's really annoying, causes ambiguity in licensing, and doesn't solve anything. It also makes you look overdramatic. OSS is by and large supported by peoples' free time. Life gets in the way a LOT, especially right now, so it's not unusual for an issue (or even a PR) to go untouched for a few weeks, months, or (in some cases) a year or so. If it's urgent, fork :)

I'll leave it at that. I hear about a lot of people too anxious to contribute or interact on Github, but it really isn't so bad!

!rant
I am on vacation from my full time job this week. I wanted to use this week to write a PoC for a potential customer of my side business. really interesting project for me.

potential customer is a window and door manufacturer and needs an application to manage their racks.

their ERP system already has a simple rack management but it is only useable in house.

they want the drivers to be able to scan racks they deliver to a customer with a native app and they want to have a webapp for the customers to see racks that are assigned to them as well as reporting a rack ready for collection. And that all needs to be in sync with their local ERP system.

as i am a .net guy i decided to go with the abp framework (because it got recommended to me) and xamarin for the native app part (because i have experience in this).

i have now spent 4 days implementing this and it has been so rewarding. the framework is so powerful and it's template saved me endless hours.

i even wrote a very basic connector service which synchronizes data between my app and the clients ERP system. Just one way until now because of time issue, but i learned to scaffold an ef core with db first. It is noticable that the ERP system is 2-tiered - meaning the clients directly talk to the db.

Tomorrow i will implement the xamarin client.

4 days just coding what i want to. choosi g my own velocity and making my own priorities without any interruptions or discussions and a bunch of new things to learn.

Probably wasted half a day because of stupidy (implemented some bugs) but fixing and learning is part of the journey and i lime that part, too.

i am so relaxed right now 😁 just wanted to share this without a real reason :P

Inspired by @NoMad. My philosophy is that technology is a means to and ends. We’re a tool oriented species. As it relates to software and hardware, they should be your means to achieve your ends without you needing to think. Think of riding a bicycle or driving a car. You aren’t particularly conscious of them - you just adjust input based on heuristics and reflex - while your doing the activity.

For a long time Software has been horrendously bad at this. There is almost always some setup involved; you need to front-load a plan to get to your ends. Funny enough we’re in the good days now. In the early days of GUI you did have to switch modes to achieve different things until input peripherals got better.

I’ve been using windows from 95 and to this day, though it’s gotten better it’s not trivial to setup an all in one printer and scan a document - just yesterday I had to walk my mother through it and she’s somewhat proficient. Also when things break it’s usually nightmare to fix, which is why fresh installing it periodically is s meme to this day. MS still goes to great lengths with their UI so that most people can still get most of their daily stuff done without a manual.

I started Linux in University when I was offered an intro course on the shell. I’ve been using it professionally ever since. While it’s good at making you feel powerful, it requires intricate knowledge to achieve most things. Things almost never go smoothly no matter how much practice you have, especially if you need to compile tools from source. It also has very little in the ways of safe guards to prevent you from hurting yourself. Sure you might be able to fix it if you press harder but it’s less stress to just fresh install. There is also nothing, NOTHING more frustrating than following documentation to the T and it just doesn’t work! It is my day job to help companies with exactly this. Can’t really give an honest impression of the GUI ux as the distros have varying schools of thoughts with their desktop environments. Even The popular one Ubuntu did weird things for a while. In my humble opinion, *nix is better at powering the internet than being a home computer your grandma can use.

Now after being in the thick of things, priorities change and you really just want to get things done. In 2015 I made the choice to go Mac. It has been one of my more interesting experiences. Honestly, I wish more distros would adopt its philosophy. Elementary only adopted the dock. It’s just so intuitive. How do you install an application? You tap the installer, a box will pop up then you drag the icon to the application folder (in the same box) boom you are done. No setup wizards. How to uninstall? Drag icon from app folder to trash can. Boom done. How to open your app? Tap launch pad and you see all your apps alphabetically just click the one you want. You can keep your frequent ones on the dock. Settings is just another app in launchpad and everything is well labeled. You can even use your printers scanner without digging through menus. You might have issues with finder if your used to windows though and the approach to maximizing and minimizing windows will also get you for a while.

When my Galaxy 4 died I gave iPhone a chance with the SE. I can tell you that for most use cases, there is no discernible difference between iOS and modern android outside of a few fringe features. What struck me though was the power of an ecosystem. My Mac and iPhone just work well together. If they are on the same network they just sync in the background - you need to opt in. My internet went down, my iMac saw that my iPhone had 4g and gave me the option to connect. One click your up. Similar process with s droid would be multi step. You have airdrop which just allows you to send files to another Apple device near you with a tap without you even caring what mechanism it’s using. After google bricked my onHub router I opted to get Apples airport series. They are mostly interchangeable and your Mac and iOS device have a native way to configure it without you needing to mess with connecting to it yourself and blah. Setup WiFi on one device, all your other Apple devices have it. Lots of other cool stuff happen as you add more Apple devices. My wife now as a MacBook, an IPad s d the IPhone 8. She’s been windows android her life but the transition has been sublime. With family sharing any software purchase works for all of us, and not just apples stuff like iCloud and music, everything.

Hate Apple all you want but they get the core tenet that technology should just work without you thinking. That’s why they are the most valued company in the world

Change your fucking specifications and priorities again. Change them. I dare you.

I was talking to my non-tech gf about how a colleague of mine didn't understand priority queue and show led her an example, during explanation fucked up the example and duplicated priorities of 2 values but they came up in the unexpected order. She wanted to find the logic in it and blamed the computer for being dumb, but it has been ~45 minutes, she has Wikipedia about binary trees & linked list open as well as simple graphs visualising both + armed with pen and paper trying to understand how it all all works..

Achievement Earned?

P.S I am either creating a monstrosity (Frankenstein style) or recruiting a fresh mind to our ranks, either way I am proud af 😢😊😍

New project!

Priorities:

1. Dark mode
2. ?

I postponed a job interview due to overtime stress at current job.
I want a New job cause I'm not being treated well and worked to death.
I think the exhaustion and sleep depravity is screwing with my priorities.
Why in hell did I postpone?

// Delivery manager rant part #2

When one of your many stakeholders asks "why isn't feature X built yet?"

Response: have you seen the state of production lately???? Do you really think your item is top of our priority list right now?

"Don't go too crazy with the design, this is just quick to get it out, this is a one time deal" - management

Half a year later...

"Well if you would properly design components up front, it wouldn't be so hard to extend the code" - management

Well if there were some sort of god forsaken process in place, with assigned tasks, priorities, iterations, and conventions, maybe everything wouldn't be a last second shit show and there would actually be forward progress on a project instead of throwing shit over the wall and hoping everything lands in the correct places.

Well atleast we have friends, girls and reasons to live even if its minimal.

However pathetic it may sound, I haven't. I've made good acquaitances, yes. But friends...

Last I had friends was in my first uni years. Long, long ago. After that - they went on their path and I - on mine. Work, family, personal projects and sometimes moto rides - that's my life now. Not really much time for friends. Not really much time to make any. Not enough time in a day to think/worry about it, not to mention reconsider my priorities/choices.

how am i supposed to fix anything if they change the priorities on my tickets every 10 sec, like PM's change them, 2 min later MD over rules them and changes them again, so 5 min later PM's change them again because something urgent came up, but then another client starts ringing my MD so that client is suddenly priority

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARG

I give up

Nearly me this morning:

Hi, thanks for reaching out to me to see if we'd be interested in partnering on the attached R&D project. I'd love to read the proposal but first, can we talk about your personal website? I noticed the link in your email footer and it offends my eyes beyond belief. Will there scope in the project to address this issue?

I really want to stress that we should add the ticket for adding the missing test cases in *this* sprint and not postpone it any further.

-- "Isn't there something more important to be added instead?"

There. ALWAYS. Is. Something. MORE. Important. The real problem was that we implement the test cases in the past to begin violating our definition of done. We have to fix and one point and we have to own that decision as nobody else will care about passing tests and test coverage. It's our job to care for that.

Yes, we can instead focus on all the other high-priorities task that should have been done yesterday, yet that won't change the fact that large part our codebase will remain an untested messy blackbox just asking for weird bugs and wild goosechases in the future.

Don't hide behind "high priority tasks". A job is done when it is fucking done and tests are part of that. Hurrying from one important task to the next will just mean we'll never do it. There is no better time than right now.

If code coverage got left behind in the past, then we'll have to suck it up in order to fix it as soon as possible, otherwise we'll just suck forever.

This is long rant/story:

My manager conducts sync-up meetings regularly. The idea is to sync up all developers on current state of work. He does’t conduct stand-ups. He doesn't have time for it. He rather discusses on individual basis if we are blocked. The rule of the sync-up meeting is NOT to discuss any blockers or problems but simply explain each other what we are doing and how we plan next.

Sometime ago, the manager brought up and explained a new way of working in the sync-up meeting. At this point, a new developer in the team was absent due to sickness.

Today, there was a sync-up meeting and the manager started to question the new member about the newly introduced way of working. He was unaware of it and the manager never communicated this important information via email or any mode of communication available.

So, the conversation goes on as follows:

"Manager": — "Why didn’t you complete your task as per the new way of working?"
"Employee": — "Well, I've no idea. Am I supposed to do? I’ve been working as usual like any other"

"Manager": — "We have a new process and you have failed to follow it, so we’re late in delivering your work"
"Employee": — "I’ve already finished my work on time. I've raised a pull-request this morning"

"Manager": — "It doesn’t matter, it is not merged to main branch and so we can’t include your work in the release"
"Employee": — "I’ve no idea about the new process"

"Manager": — "Haven’t you asked around about what happened from previous meeting"
"Employee": — "Yes, I have. I was told which tasks were handled, but nothing about a new process"

"Manager": — "Aren’t you interested to learn it?"
"Employee": — "Why won’t I be interested? I was on a sick leave and I have no clue what happened here"

"Manager": — "What’s happened is past now, let’s not focus on it"
"Employee": — <Dumbfounded>
The Employee felt ashamed in front of everyone. He did his job but it didn’t pay off.

…. After an hour … the Employee had a talk with the Manager

"Employee": — "You shouldn’t have pointed me out in front of everyone. It made me feel real bad. You should have emailed this information if its important for the team."
"Manager": — "I have no idea what you’re talking about. When did I say so? I think you’ve a bright future in the team. You should be focusing on doing better things."

Employee goes back to work. A minute later, the Manager sends a PowerPoint screenshot of the process in the group chat.

**The Process**
It's about delivering release packages based on priorities defined by client. Each release package is a set of work items or requirements. Individual developers are assigned to work items. They are expected to deliver on planned delivery timelines in order to consider a work item into a release package.

It's always fun to learn from your COLLEAGUES that you're about to leave the project and should hand off your responsibilities to them.
And when you ask your manager WTF?? you're replied with "calm down, nothing's decided yet, we're only talking at this point"

Really hate that Motorola are quite happy producing shit iPhone X knockoffs but they can't create a moto 360 gen 3... Priorities guys!

(I wear the gen 2 and I think we can all agree it is fucking A grade)

A wild project appears!
The deadline is set in two months.

It's a 3D environment interactive app with some oil drilling models and other stuff, for a stand on a show. It needs to look nice, but The Company we're working for needs to figure out where the fuck their product is located on those machines. Think tiny pipes, O-rings etc.

I prepare a build in the first couple of days for The Company to figure shit out.

Management holds the build back because:
> the ocean waves are going the other way
> the underwater area doesn't look so nice
> the antialiasing could be better
> one pipe is 5cm off center
> the sky is not blue enough
> the drillship propellers are pointed the wrong way
> one icon is too far to the right
> the shadows could use some work
> there are shadows on the seabed
> some flickering on ambient occlusion
> it loads too slow
> one random object is flipped on it's Z axis
> it's too green
> camera locks up if you move about 2km out of the range
> the name of the build should represent the date of the build
> the name of the build SHOULDN'T be anything else than just a simple three-word name, no dates because their environment doesn't allow apps that are not allowed (by name) by admin
> lots more random things that won't prevent them from using the app

I'm only a month late, but it's good progress. In about a week I hope we can get some feedback if we can use those models at all and what to showcase.

Then I can work on the basic functionality. And then it's a simple case of time travel to meet the deadline.

My iPhone has two pages for apps, the main page and not the main page - none start on the main page and few ever make it. DevRant has made it to the main page 😊

Why is it most companies think being “agile” simply means “let’s say we do work in two week blocks” but without planning or showcases or reviews, without estimations, with ad-hoc tasks inserted continually, priorities changing, tasks moving to the next “sprint” over and over …

But yes, these companies proclaim they are “agile” and do “two week sprints” when it is nothing more than chaos and rhetoric.

I hate people who think they are always right.

A coworker who seemed to be a friend turns out to be an emotionally needy narcissist who seems to think that he is a perfect human being and is the best example of how to live.

Long story short is that we did some bonding via alcohol and smoking cigarettes. Especially when I was in a bad period in my life where I had little self confidence, was in a bad financial situation and overshared many details abound my personal life.

And yeah we also work as software devs in the same team but I started avoiding working with him directly, because due to his seniority he overcomplicates things a lot to the point where stuff gets postponed for months. Meanwhile I am a simple guy, I do my tasks and if they are not up to the standard I just work on the feedback until Im up to the standard, thats it. Its just a job for me, for him its a way of life and he considers himself to be basically an artist.

Hes always trying to prove me something, showing that the "long way" is the best way and so on. In reality I dont give a fuck about him. I live my own life and I have my own priorities. I work fulltime in one job, also I work part time as a freelancer and in total I make about 20 percent more than he does. Previously before this job I owned my own company where for 2 years I ran my own projects which generated a decent revenue. I know what is hard work and how to sacrifice myself in order to achieve results. I am more pragmatic and I have some limitations of what I can be good at (since I have a shitty working memory due to my ADHD). So I have systems in place and bottom line is that I earn a decent living and my skillset is different. Yeah I agree that in some ways he is better than me, but dude has such a massive inflated ego that now he thinks that he unlocked some sort of universal wisdom and now hes suddenly experienced in every field of life and his opinion is the right one.

This guy takes a massive pride in how good software engineer he is and in every topic or interaction he tries to one up me. Which most of the time is just his preference or in order to gain a 0.0001 percent performance increase. Dude is basically a big walking ego and since "we are close now" his ego started bleeding into personal relationship.

In my personal life, Im in a stable relationship, thinking of proposing soon and getting married. I already co-own an apartment with my current girlfriend. Everything is serious and planned, Im soon to be 30 years old. He is the same age but he still thinks hes young hot shit and all he cares about is getting shitfaced a couple times a week after work and he doesnt really have any other hobbies. He has a girlfriend but I dont see any future in there TBH.

So what I did now is I started putting some distance between us. No more drinking every week with him, maybe maximum once in 2 or 3 weeks. I started working from home more. Also I stopped sharing my personal life with him. Each time when he thinks he is right I just go along with it and dont even pay attention to his emotional manipulations. I just hope one day he fucks off completely and I wont give in to his gaslighting. Maybe in a few months I will be leaving this job, so I will never have to deal with him again.

Lesson learned: dont be vulnerable to coworkers who you bond together only via alcohol.

Being a parent I've come to the conclusion that my "career" isn't a priority, my kid is.

Thats also because I'm at a position wherein i know that even with a non 100% effort towards work i can still get substantial results

I've been thinking now that I've come to this conclusion, would i want to raise my child in a way that she herself comes to a similar conclusion eventually. As in follow a career path, grow, become a parent and realise your priorities aren't the ones you always thought they were.

Or should I raise her to be focused on life and not try to make a mark in the world.. by focusing on the little things and not the grand picture.

Parents only comments are suggested here

When your code doesn't work but Game of Thrones is starting

"No kid we do not need students in their Sophomore year for our undergraduate STUDENTS internship, priorities for seniors, and even if you're in a senior year, you've to be having 6+ experience for Full Stack Mobile and Web application development for our Front-end role with the salary of $150 per month. You don't like it you fucking piece of shit? We'll find another fellow, gtfo"

You know shit is going to hit the fan if the sentence "c++ is the same as java" is said because fuck all the underlying parts of software. It's all the fucking same. Oh and to write a newline in bash we don't use \n or so, we just put an empty echo in there. And fuck this #!/bin/bash line, I'm a teacher. I don't need to know how shit works to teach shit. Let's teach 'em you need stdio for printf even tho it compiles fine without on linux (wtf moment number one, asking em leaves you with "dunno..") and as someone who knows c you look at your terminal questioning everything you ever learned in your whole life. And then we let you look into the binaries with ldd and all the good stuff but we won't explain you why you can see a size difference in the compiled files even tho you included stdio in the second one, and all symbol tables show the exact same thing but dude chill, we don't know what's going on either.
Oh and btw don't use different directory names as we do in our examples. You won't find your own path, there is no tab key you can press to auto-fill shit.
But thats not everything. How about we fill a whole semester with "this is how to printf" but make you write a whole game with unity and c#. (not thaught even the slightest bit until then btw)
Now that you half-assed everything because we put you in a group full of fucks who don't even know what a compiler is but want to tell you you don't know shit and show you their non-working unfinished algorithms in some not-even-syntax-correct java...

...how about we finally go on with Algebra II: complex numbers, how they are going to fuck up your life, how we can do roots of negative numbers all of the sudden and let you do some probability shit no one ever fucking needs. BUT WHY DON'T YOU KNOW EVERYTHING ALREADY HMMMMM, IT'S YOUR SECOND LESSON, YOU WENT TO SCHOOL PLS BE A MATH PRO ASAP CUS YOU NEED IT SO MUCH BUT YOU DON'T NEED TO KNOW PROPER SYNTAX, HOW MEMORY MANAGEMENT WORKS, WHAT A REFERENCE IS AND PLS FINALLY FORGET THE WORD "ALLOCATION" IT DOESN'T PLAY A SINGLE ROLE YOU ARE STUDYING SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT WHY ARE YOU SO BAD AT ECONOMICS IT MAKES NO SENSE I MEAN YOU HAD A WHOLE SEMESTER OF HOW TO GREET SOMEONE IN ENGLISH, MATHS > ECONOMICS > ENGLISH > FUCKING SHIT > CODING SKILL THATS HOW THE PRIORITIES WORK FOR US WHY DON'T YOU GET IT IT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE BRAH

I love coding. I enjoy the clickety-click of my keyboard and the joy of creating code that does something, to help the world be a better place. So why does upper management feel the need to bog me down in process paperwork, tickets to count my widgets, and endless endless emails and spreadsheets to prove that I have work to do. What are the time savings, priorities, cost avoidance... Blah blah blah... #IdRatherBeCoding :)

The company I work for now has so much tech debt. When I find an issue, I can’t necessarily fix it right away because I have other priorities. If something isn’t a site-breaking issue, then I only fix it when a user or staff member reports it.

The website is a mess because it was built and maintained by an outside dev agency. It was so expensive to outsource that my employer decided to bring development in-house.

That’s where I came in. I found so many issues. Tech debt. UX weirdness. Newish features that no one seemed to use. It goes on.

So I’m balancing new feature development, fixing bugs, and trying to lessen our tech debt. I’m a team of one.

I'm considering quitting a job I started a few weeks ago. I'll probably try to find other work first I suppose.

I'm UK based and this is the 6th programming/DevOps role I've had and I've never seen a team that is so utterly opposed to change. This is the largest company I've worked for in a full time capacity so someone please tell me if I'm going to see the same things at other companies of similar sizes (1000 employees). Or even tell me if I'm just being too opinionated and that I simply have different priorities than others I'm working with. The only upside so far is that at least 90% of the people I've been speaking to are very friendly and aren't outwardly toxic.

My first week, I explained during the daily stand up how I had been updating the readmes of a couple of code bases as I set them up locally, updated docker files to fix a few issues, made missing env files, and I didn't mention that I had also started a soon to be very long list of major problems in the code bases. 30 minutes later I get a call from the team lead saying he'd had complaints from another dev about the changes I'd spoke about making to their work. I was told to stash my changes for a few weeks at least and not to bother committing them.

Since then I've found out that even if I had wanted to, I wouldn't have been allowed to merge in my changes. Sprints are 2 weeks long, and are planned several sprints ahead. Trying to get any tickets planned in so far has been a brick wall, and it's clear management only cares about features.

Weirdly enough but not unsurprisingly I've heard loads of complaints about the slow turn around of the dev team to get out anything, be it bug fixes or features. It's weird because when I pointed out that there's currently no centralised logging or an error management platform like bugsnag, there was zero interest. I wrote a 4 page report on the benefits and how it would help the dev team to get away from fire fighting and these hidden issues they keep running into. But I was told that it would have to be planned for next year's work, as this year everything is already planned and there's no space in the budget for the roughly $20 a month a standard bugsnag plan would take.

The reason I even had time to write up such a report is because I get given work that takes 30 minutes and I'm seemingly expected to take several days to do it. I tried asking for more work at the start but I could tell the lead was busy and was frankly just annoyed that he was having to find me work within the narrow confines of what's planned for the sprint.

So I tried to keep busy with a load of code reviews and writing reports on road mapping out how we could improve various things. It's still not much to do though. And hey when I brought up actually implementing psr12 coding standards, there currently aren't any standards and the code bases even use a mix of spaces and tab indentation in the same file, I seemingly got a positive impression at the only senior developer meeting I've been to so far. However when I wrote up a confluence doc on setting up psr12 code sniffing in the various IDEs everyone uses, and mentioned it in a daily stand up, I once again got kickback and a talking to.

It's pretty clear that they'd like me to sit down, do my assigned work, and otherwise try to look busy. While continuing with their terrible practices.

After today I think I'll have to stop trying to do code reviews too as it's clear they don't actually want code to be reviewed. A junior dev who only started writing code last year had written probably the single worst pull request I've ever seen. However it's still a perfectly reasonable thing, they're junior and that's what code reviews are for. So I went through file by file and gently suggested a cleaner or safer way to achieve things, or in a couple of the worst cases I suggested that they bring up a refactor ticket to be made as the code base was trapping them in shocking practices. I'm talking html in strings being concatenated in a class. Database migrations that use hard coded IDs from production data. Database queries that again quote arbitrary production IDs. A mix of tabs and spaces in the same file. Indentation being way off. Etc, the list goes on.
Well of course I get massive kickback from that too, not just from the team lead who they complained to but the junior was incredibly rude and basically told me to shut up because this was how it was done in this code base. For the last 2 days it's been a bit of a back and forth of me at least trying to get the guy to fix the formatting issues, and my lead has messaged me multiple times asking if it can go through code review to QA yet. I don't know why they even bother with code reviews at this point.

The management wants to add gamification to our b2b app and our app is not yet officially out... Yay priorities

Just relocated my wifi accesspoint, so I have better reception on the toilet.
Priorities first!

It's Monday morning, at the gym, just deployed to live...

When you’ve been warning of how much stuff needs work to support TLS1.1 depreciation but now all that stuff broke because he had you working on a bunch of other random less important stuff. Now he is saying back to me the exact things I said to him about why we needed to work on this stuff months ago.

When your PM is whining like a baby about resource issues surrounding developing new features when he/she already agreed one of the teams top priorities was getting "run the business" work done.

Them: Maintaing code quality is a vital part of our team culture!
Me: Really, how important? Can a feature slip to facilitate necessary refactoring?
Them: Well no. We've made a commitment to the client.
Me: So, code quality is not very important then is it...

For higher grade software development it should be mandatory to understand the big picture of problems...

If you are working for a online shop, you might want to ask marketing, what they want to sell, before they do it

You might want to ask billing, what customers buy, before you spend time on unnecessary features

You want to ask billing and legals, how they do fraud detection and you want to get the it security fellows on board too.

If marketing and billing knows, that maintenance needs time and money, they can calculate with that. If security knows, that some fails will be catched, no matter if you fix it in software or not they can adapt their priorities.

You might want to know something about process optimisation... Factories of car parts have spent years on such problems - learn from them.

Stakeholders must learn that code quality and a user-friendly frontend are not "nice to have". If they don't fix their priorities accordingly, someone will have to pay their technical debt and that's going to be expensive.

Boss: Write a program to generate a report using some data from an existing one.
Me: OK, I will look into doing a POC
Boss: Also it would be stored in Mongo so all the data is queryable
Me: OK I will generate the file first
Boss: But it needs to be in DB, couldn't you just upload it when done?

This discussion goes on for 30 mins+ preventing me from finishing release related work...

IF THE FCKING POC/REPORT ITSELF IS WRONG OR IS MISSING INFORMATION/CAN'T BE GENERATED WHY THE FUCK DOES WHERE IT'S STORED MATTER?!!!!!!!!!!! WHY ARE TOY EATING TIME ON THESE TINY DETAILS THAT DON'T MATTER AT THE MOMENT.

FUCKING GET YOUR PRIORITIES STRAIGHT. YES EVERYTHING IS DOABLE... JUST NOT NOW.....

HELL YEAH! First day into the vacation and after checking the mails, I see that I have a new job offer from a company I have applied for. It is not the company with the highest priority on my list, but it is still cool to have them inviting me for a talk that fast.

Btw. I have a question to the experienced job switchers among us (I do not mean job switchers in a bad way).
What do you guys set your priorities on when it comes to joining a company? Do you have any tips for people who want to join a company in a general view? What NO-GOs can you give to us? Thanks.

I hate having to learn stuff for school while actually wanting to learn other things instead. Last semester I preferred the latter, but that got me a bad math grade, which in turn means that I have to actually study for mathematics for the first time in my life in order not to fail the whole year because of one grade.

So I have to delay learning Golang and trying out the Spring framework.
Goddamn it.

receive multi year old confused bug/feature request from a former CEO

why

are there not other people who can immediately answer the questions instead of playing broken telephone when it arrives to me, to go find them

do you not have better things to do with your time and other directional priorities for the company or should i really muck around this low priority thing?

i guess i just lack the CEO M I N D S E T, also the compensation package

Long time stalker, but I finally signed up! Maybe I have dragged it out to not get too addicted, but it seems like that plan has failed.. ;)

Now for the question:
Can anyone recommend a VPN provider (well, functionally proxy) that works in (South) China these days? Because of the holidays the CCP is blocking everything they can to ensure that.. well let's not get political.

Priorities: Reliability > Privacy > Cost (trial or guarantee would be great though)

Thanks :)

A tale of silos, pivots, and mismanagement.

Background: Our consultancy has been working with this client for over a year now. It started with some of our back-end devs working on the API.

We are in Canada. The client is located in the US. There are two other teams in Canada. The client has an overseas company contracted to do the front-end of the app. And at the time we started, there was a 'UX consultancy' also in the US.

I joined the project several months in to replace the then-defunct UX company. I was the only UX consultant on the project at that time. I was also to build out a functional front-end 'prototype' (Vue/Scss) ahead of the other teams so that we could begin tying the fractured arms of the product together.

At this point there was a partial spec for the back-end, a somewhat architected API, a loose idea of a basic front-end, and a smattering of ideas, concepts, sketches, and horrific wireframes scattered about various places online.

At this point we had:
One back-end
One front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
No task-management for UX

You might get where this is going...

None of the teams had shared meetings. None of the team leads spoke to each other. Each team had their own terms, their own trajectory, and their own goals.

Just as our team started pushing for more alignment, and we began having shared meetings, the client decided to pivot the product in another direction.

Now we had:
One back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
Two functional prototypes
One front-end Jira board
One back-end Jira board

No worries. We're professionals. We do this all the time. We rolled with it and we shifted focus to a new direction, with the same goals in mind internally to keep things aligned and moving along.

Slowly, the client hired managers to start leading everything in the same direction. Things started to look up. The back-end team and the product and UX teams started aligning goals and working toward the same objectives.

Then the client shifted directions again. This time bigger. More 'verticals'. I was to leave the previous 'prototypes' behind, and feature-freeze them to work on the new direction.

One back-end
One conceptual 'new' back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
One product Jira board
One UX Jira board

Meanwhile, the back-end team, the front-end team overseas, all kept moving in the previously agreed-upon direction.

At this stage, probably 6 months in, the 'prototypes' were much less proper 'prototypes' but actually just full apps (with a stubbed back-end since I was never given permission or support to access the actual back-end).

The state of things today:
Back to one back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One 'working' front-end
One 'QA' front-end
One 'demo' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
Two front-end Jira boards
One current product Jira board
One future product Jira board
One current UX Jira board
One future UX Jira board
One QA Jira board

I report to approximately 4 people remotely (depending on the task or the week).

There are three representatives from 'product' who dictate features and priorities (they often do not align).

I still maintain the 'prototype' to this day. The front-end team does not have access to the code of this 'prototype' (the clients' request). The client's QA team does not test against the 'prototype'.

The demos of the front-end version of the product include peanut-gallery design-by-committee 'bug call-outs', feature requests, and scope creep by attendees in the dozens from all manner of teams and directors.

Story Time: About Priorities and Sales

So at this point I'm working tech support for a company that makes some super cool networking equipment, think big data / data centers and such.

This company had grown at a good pace but the the support team had not (thus is the way for all tech support evetually). So I get a call from a frantic sales guy:

Sales: "OMG, where are with this ticket?!?!? It's a P2 ticket!!!"

Me: "Well the ticket came in 30 minutes ago, I emailed them some questions, but just so you know I have 8 P2 tickets, and 4 P1 tickets.... so it will be a while."

Sales: "OMG! Make my customer's ticket a P1!!"

Me: "Sure."

-call ends-

-30 minutes passes-

-sales calls again-

Sales: "OMG, where are with this ticket?!?!? It's a P1 ticket!!!"

Me: "Well I haven't gotten to them yet... just so you know I have 7 P2 tickets, and 5 P1 tickets.... "

Sales "ARGH!"

ʅ（´◔౪◔）ʃ

Three weeks of spending at least three hours with my computer everyday, and my back is officially in pain.
Funny how priorities change. Now I really want to invest in a good chair or maybe a beanbag.

A Random Thought--If your priorities don't get scheduled into your planner, other people's priorities will get put into your planner!!!!!

Technologies come and go, but it has a lot in common. Set priorities right. Invest 80% of your learning time in fundamentals. Leave 20% for frameworks, libraries and tools.

It realy just warms my heart when the customer provides us with software that I need to go through manually and test every method individual before we can start implement it. Then I have to spend hours testing every fucking bit of it to make sure the modules we control with said sw doesnt meet their untimely doom cause the sw is too broken to actually run.
Any.net developers on this plattform? If you doesnt use these xml comments for commenting methods, you're on my hit list.
I realy hate these back-alley developers. Sorry of I sound salty and whiny but seriously. These past 3 weeks, most of my time Ive just worked around issues instead of solving them, cause their sw just keeps chaining good coding down to the ground. And theres no documentation cause "we have higher priorities ", testing is done by us at release cause "its faster and we dont make mistakes" and worst of all, our contact quote on quote "senior experienced developer lead design im far up my own ass and way more experienced than you" guy is a consultant who is only reachable about 2h on a daily basis.

Tldr: we live in a society.

When Icriticize a paid service for taking away or not providing functionality for all users equally but then a user comes back defending them with some BS reason...

Ok... I'll just continue helping myself only...

@nnee

Me:

1. Can you put the New books tab with back in the bottom, scrolling down into the New section in the front page is annoying. At least make it a setting?

2. Where's the # of books read stat in Android?

Blinkist: Hi thanks for your message! The best way to view the newest titles on Android is to do just as you mention – scroll down to reveal the New section. As for BiB stats on Android, we're working on releasing this feature (it's only live on iOS at the moment).

Me: Hm... I liked the older way better. Faster and can tell when it was added. The problem is sometimes still new books don't refresh and I need to login out to get it to update. Also I notice sometimes the list changes randomly I think. One day a new book is there. The next day it's gone.

BiB stats have been in iOS for a year now? How hard is it to put it in Android. Personally it only took me a day to find out what my total is as I can write a program to do it so to me I don't understand how this could be taking so

Some user: Priorities and often it’s strategy for future features...

Me: you take away useful functionality and and can't release a feature that's been on the iOS version for a year already... fine,,, I'll just take it as a challenge... that I've mostly solved... for myself...

I got assigned to work on a new project a couple of weeks ago. We got the POC code handed off from senior management, since he came up with the idea over the weekend. The project concept is hella exciting, but the dev manager and PO I have to deal with make life unbearable to say the least.

We have only 2 devs (including me) and 1 QA on this supposedly very important project. Of course, management announced the project to the clients already, so now we have to deliver ASAP cause it adds “sizzle”.

The MVP deadline is... no one knows when, either July 30th or September 1st. The MVP requirements are... unknown. I swear if someone saw the list of tasks and issues attached to “MVP” Epic, they would call us nuts trying to fit it all in.

To make things better, each PR requires 2 reviewers, so we end up adding manager as a reviewer just cause we need him to hit that “approve” button. So in attempt to make life easier, we requested to have a third developer. We are getting another developer, but that guy doesn’t know how to unit test a pure function...

Current priorities are... unit testing with coverage of 95% and if we want to refactor code, we have to add area to the list in a Google Doc. As a result, we are not tackling big things like risk of SQL injections not to mention big features like i18n (5-6 languages to support by the way and yes, it’s part of MVP as well as SSR no one knows why). Currently, I spend 2-3 hours a week in calls with the team just to figure out what the hell MVP is, what we have to do and why we have to do it. Last time we spent an hour refining 1 spike and breaking down one story into 3.

Oh, we also don’t have a deployment plan, not even to test environments since DevOps team was not aware of this project at all. Thus, QA cannot create any test suites and have to test everything manually which eats a lot of their time.

This whole project is a big hot mess and I’m considering leaving it all together especially since I’m working on two squads at the same time. I love the project, I love the idea, but management makes it unbearable, so I’m not even motivated to work on that.

setting priorities right.

We are trying to rebuild our office. 20 people (13 developers). What would be the top priorities for you? Best tips you could give us?

1. Keep my job
2. Keep my side job
3. Revive blogging at least 1 post a month
4. Keep focus on what’s important and what are priorities
5. Finish my notes / diary application cause my text files / html pages are now taking up to much space and using cat/grep to search trough them is painful ( it can also help with point 3 )
6. Maybe just maybe start writing prototype of table top rpg game scenario, I have a concept in my mind for a long time but it’s also connected to point 5 and 7 and 8
7. Spend twice more time to practice drawing than in this year
8. Read / listen to more than 1 book a month
I think that’s it from dev stuff

Everyone was joking about how no major innovations are really being made for front-end. Then you get Microsoft saying they want native 3D model support in browsers. Like, for what?

devRant seriously cuts into my hackernews and regular news time. But it's important to have priorities, I guess.

I once was able to focus on tasks, and then I took this job. The boss has me switching priorities and tasks so often that it's often best to do nothing and wait. If I'm able to devote my time to something longer than a half hour, i consider it a win. I seriously think this job is giving me ADD. Anyone else encounter this? It's a pain in the ass.

A**hole of a "Technical" Delivery Manager, who has changed orgs after at-most every 14 months, and says she can't read code or even understand technical things like Kafka.
It's been 12 months she's joined here, I bet she's again gonna jump to somewhere. Why the hell do they give these roles if there's no relevance.
Only thing she knows is to blame/assign anything to anyone without giving a f**king read.
Any random thread, she'd just ++ and say, ensure this is done on priority. There are 7 priorities already assigned, atleast reply when I ask you on mail to arrange your priorities in order so that you won't say we messed up. We've no issues ticking one thing at a time from the top.
Atleast do something God damnit!

Pixel perfect layout bugfixing doesn't even feel like development, it only proves that some people got their priorities terribly wrong if they worry about a 2 pixel margin anywhere. And I do say this as a front end dev who does respect a respect a good design. But still, pixel pushing sucks!

What IDE to use on Ubuntu?

Hey guys, just recently started getting into Ubuntu & Linux, and I need some recommendations for a good IDE (or just an editor). I want to program C, C++ as main priorities, but want an IDE that isn't locked to only one language :) Been looking at Sublime Text, and while it looks cool and easy to use, I'd prefer something that didn't require a license..

Hope you guys can help out, any help is appreciated :)

So I have two bugs to fix, their severity don't make sense to me

One is classed Medium while it's just some changes in design and ergonomy
One is classed Low while it's a functionnality that is not working

Priorities ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So today we had a pre-sprint-planning meeting where the POs told us about the stories currently in the backlog. They went ahead and "roughly prioritised" some of them. Their priorities were:
- normal (but asap please)
- has to be done this sprint, because the feature has to be in the next release (code freeze after this sprint)
- top priority, because this has to be in the previous release (which was released last friday)

The non-normal stories alone are about twice our normal velocity. Good job guys. Good job.

Task due Friday? Do Friday.

Does anyone else find that they are about as organised as gaseous molecules in a weather cell in their personal life, but that their professional work is regemented within an inch of its life?

Tldr: boss needs his priorities sorted

So as I already wrote about this issue earlier (in a comment) now it's time to actually write the rant...

I'm working between the holidays, not much just doing planning with the boss. Mind you, startup company, so limited resources and all, that's why I'm on planning as well.

So he goes to the whiteboard and draws a line in the middle, writing headings to each side: Need (Panic) and Nice (ASAP). It's starting off well.
We add about 10-ish items to each side, which is kind of okay - then he starts highlighting with different colors within the Need list saying okay, red circles we need NOW, green circles... "Now but later".

How do I not laugh? And now he wants to do even more priorities within these sections and a Soon list just as last time...

This is getting really ridiculous.

Send help (and coffee)

Why do so many people worry about their competences to perform the tasks they get?

You are hired to do the kind of work that gets assigned to you and not to worry if you are qualified to do it. Unless you are in a shitty* company this is someone else’s job to worry. I see people doing this to themselves and frequently have to let them show the value of their work. Many times before they understand what I see in their contributions.

Stress is fine, it will help you get further. But only to a certain point. If you don’t have faith in your capabilities, have faith in the management team...

* if you are in a shitty company, you should adjust your priorities. Do not worry too much, learn as much as you can and seek other options.

Just those days when there's no work and then there's a flood of work. And all high priority. Can't understand how the fuck they always end up like this.

so the startup I used to work on, that ngl had an amazing product, is on its last legs.
It already was when I was let go coz they couldnt afford a full-time staff anymore but now they cant even sustain 0-staff company (ie just CEO/COO/investors remain)

It got millions of USD as grant in some competetion they won before I joined so both the idea and the product were good

Only thing that sucked was the CEO's attitude and their abhorent marketting skills and priorities

ANYWAY. It's bitter-sweet. Even the most well-made of products can fail just coz of the person-at-top not taking the right decisions at the right time.
And all my nudging could do was delay its eventual collapse

I think I just came up with my next app idea while writing a blog post:

--Sometimes Ignorance Can Really Be Bliss?--
I like to be in know so I read a lot. My reading list will never end as there’s always more I can know.

Part of the problem is lack of clear priorities but all these articles and books are just so interesting….

I probably spend 4-5 hours every weekend reading… mostly from my Inbox. Yes I try to clear some daily but again, I keep a lot just because they look interesting.

I also use Boxbe and recently setup some Automatic Cleanup… but sort of hurts when I see an email I want to read but then it’s gone tomorrow…

**An App Idea!**
What if I never see these actual emails. But my computer does?
What if I can use it to generate a list of articles from all my emails and just show a few in a Weekly Digest?

Thoughts? anyone else have this problem?

But the key is still, never actually knowing what you missed!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why don't most products follow a minimalist approach right till the end? Most start ups start like that. But when things begin to fall apart or become better they tend to deviate. While the earlier reason is understandable (because no one likes to fail so they'll do anything to not fail), the second reason seems to me more of an organisational creation than what the users want.

From my understanding as the product becomes popular positions (managerial or product) created need to justify their presence. What do they do? So the breath of fresh air brings in a lot of garbage that may not be required and would be in deviance from the main product idea.

It is debatable that audiences would not accept such ideas that are being brought in, because hey audiences are smart. And they are. But the organisation in order to justify the original wrong decision tends to push their new features (through offers or marketing campaigns). This makes the organisation invested into a wrong direction and security of jobs of the new managers/product people. Win win situation, but lose lose for the organisation and the original product.

So many open tickets and they keep becoming more and more. In the end they will never be worked on, as there's always smth more important, although they are reprioritized on fixed schedules. They will eventually be discarded because they were forgotten and the ticket was already done, just by a ticket with similar naming or similar intent.
How would you solve this? Can this be solved?

For you Jira users, as song:
(to the tune of "Everything is Awesome" from The Lego Movie)

"Everything's P-Zerrrooooooo!!!
Everything is due day before yesterdaaayyyy!!"

My work had Project Management software before to track tasks and issues, but the new boss wanted to switch to some new support tool. A bit annoying, but no problem.

After decommissioning the old (free) PM software, he decided to put off the new software implementation. Instead, he created a shared g suite inbox that we have to log in to and check for issues. No routing, no priorities, no notes section, no progress tracking, no tasks.

Now I have to give progress updates several times a day on my tasks because there is literally nowhere for me to report my progress. I have no idea what my priorities are since we have literally nowhere that specifies priorities. This is a PM and support nightmare, and as a former SCRUM master I'm about to lose it!

You know you have odd priorities when your on your lunch break and you end up writing more of your book instead of eating...

I'm more excited for my devRant dual monitor setup than my work one. I see I still got my priorities in order 🥴

Generally have great experience with our management.
I work at a scale-up, so I've had some run-ins with the founder shifting priorities too often in the early days, but he's got enough notion of tech to understand when we're telling about the why(not)s of what we can and can't do
A while back we got a product owner/manager/scrum master and he's great too. I've had times when he put pressure on making deadlines when it was really not helping, but overall great guy with a lot of empathy and respect for his team.

But recently I've been starting to feel like we (the dev team) are getting more and more excluded from the decision-making process of the features & designs that we're going to be working on. We used to have a say in what we felt like was a good idea for a feature or a design, but it feels to me like we don't get asked that question any more of late...

Not sure if I'm imagining it, or overreacting to a logical (possibly positive?) evolution in our development workflow...

You can't have things quickly and also ask everyone in the building for their opinion on those things at the same time. It just doesn't work that way, no matter how much you want to be liked.

They're called priorities, not equalities.

New to working with git in a large scale application. I've used it in personal things, but not at an enterprise scale.

"genius" me: git pull origin {{dev branch name}}
"genius" me: why won't any of these tests work?
"genius" me: spends 2 hours working on fixing some tests

actual genius that I work with: Dude, revert that shit and pull from master, the tests will work. Don't pull from {{dev branch name}} because you have no idead what might be there.

This makes sense. Things are started and abandoned in favor of new priorities all the time. At least my PM is pretty cool and didn't freak out that I wasted that couple of hours like at a previous position.

Also, git is far superior to mstfs. Very smooth and easy to use once you get the hang of it.

Your time is not limited except by birth and death. What actually defines what you do are other limitations and your priorities.

Why QA should never be left "in charge" of marking priorities on tasks before "demo day" deployment and client handover of a product.

New and refactored, key, features need to be deployed by "demo day", and most developers and the PM (not me) have already been re-allocated to new clients and projects. There's several things being done in paralell to get it done.

QA: We need to be able to download CSV files showing affected users if i do extremely rare action X, and this should pop up in the system for the first 24 hours after doing X.
Priority: High
New priority for feature Y: Medium
(Action X may never be used at all)

This is implemented, reviewed and deployed.

QA: I want a timestamp in the file naming, I'm experiencing duplicate files.
Priority: High
Feature Y: Medium

Develop, review and deploy timestamping for the CSV files.

QA: They are only marked with DD/MM/YYYY, I performed rare action X several times in one day, I can still get duplicate file names marked with numbers. This is #1 priority!
Priority: High
Feature Y: Medium

...Okay, this is nitpicking, this will never happen, but fine. Overtime to do the extra minor, minor adjustment, down to hours and minutes, get it reviewed and deployed at the end of the day.

QA: I managed to do rare action X 6 times in 1 minute, I have duplicate files. It needs to be down to seconds. This is top priority.
Priority: High
New priority for feature Y: Low
.........

Constant interruptions, moronic priorities and voicecalls throughout the entire day.
Dear QA, you can be fucking donkeys at times.

A group without initiative is just the worst....

I need to finish our thesis before the semester ends so that I can proceed to my OJT but get this, WE HAVEN'T EVEN STARTED ON OUR CHAPTER 1. I keep on telling then to meet up about this but they have other 'priorities'

3 days of workshops with new client done - happy days😊

Now starts the real project and the possible agony of dealing with all the things they forgot to mention and/or priorities to us🤘🏻🖖🏻

On Tuesday, I meet with a PM to go through priorities and set up a Trello list with task-specific cards (we live and die by Trello, it's not new to him). We determine that work on that list will begin first thing Thursday. PM calls me mid-morning Thursday and says, "just calling to see what you're working on."

Every single morning I despair. I can’t stand this job.
Why pay very highly and get very skilled people to have them working 4 to a support ticket. Doing the most mundane support tickets you have ever seen in your life (mainly updating client contact details)?
And why have such a rigorous recruitment process to get people’s in in the first place?

The company is pissing money away by working like this and all the new starters like me think it’s complete shit.
But the bosses and anyone who’s been here a while think it’s great. Company still is making loads of money so they don’t even care about it.

I’ve never met senior developers who have never worked on a greenfield project in their entire careers until I came here.

I can’t believe how I got suckered into this (was head hunted).

Does anyone have a feel for the UK contracting market right now?

I’m considering the jump but I think I’d have to be looking for remote only contracts because where I live has few opportunities ‘on-site’. Preferably c# / angular.

Is there much competition for roles or is there a shortage of skills in the contractors?

The thought of going into another permanent role that could be as bad as this genuinely keeps me awake at night.
I’m not sure I can go somewhere and then have it in the hands of managers to decide what projects I’m going to do and what tech it will be on.

At any big company there’s going to be tech debt as well as new work. So becoming perm now feels like it’s 50-50 whether or not a new job will just mean being put into legacy stuff for a couple of years or doing something that is actually good.

I’ve been talking various people about roles in government departments (multiple different departments are hiring) and because priorities change none the gov recruiters can guarantee what the work is that they’re recruiting for actually is.
Just that the the big recruitment push is to bring work previously done by consultancies back in house. Presumably because consultancies have been fleecing them.

How do you guys deal with interruptions / task-switching while you're deep into something?

Generally I don't mind quick interruptions if someone needs help with a shell command or a library, or some other quick ask.

But I had four full new priority tasks/tickets come my way yesterday, and for each one I had to pop open a separate workspace and juggle a separate conversation.

It's not the end of the world, but whenever I'm forced to juggle multiple tasks, I find I end up frozen and frazzled while I try to recalculate my priorities.

This is partially my fault, since I've sort of situated myself as the devops guy for a few systems, so I get regular tickets as well as systems/data tasks.

Any tips? Preferably I'd still receive the tasks, but just deal with them better.

So if you recall, my last rant was about last minute, supposed critical-severity, ASAP due date requests being made, and me telling them to fuck off.

So today the boss' boss' boss called down and said a different task needs to be done by end of the month.

So now my current tasks get pushed to next month, and the person who needed their task done ASAP will now more than likely get it by mid june. Amazing.

And if you've been actively following my other rants, this is the same section manager that sends a quirky email out at the end of every night about what she's been fucking with lately.

I WANT OFF MR TOAD'S WILD RIDE

I need to finish something presentable by May so I decided to make Orchid an untyped language, and the simplicity of all tasks all of a sudden breaks my heart. Static analysis is my guiding principle, the one feature which I always held to be good. Deprioritizing it in _my own programming language_ feels like sacrilege.

Get my priorities fucking straight

Deploying a full test strategy across the company's range of php products because you haven't been scheduled to do anything else and the company has no automated testing after 10 years of functioning.

I was ten years old. At this point, despite being in my early 20's, I've officially been programming more than half of my life. From the first moment I knew that this was possible, that we, as software engineers, can do what we do... I've been quite literally obsessed with the idea.

I don't like to give other people credit for the events in my own life, but there is one thing that, more than anything else at the time that lead me down the path of computer science, directly lead me to where I'm at today. If you're at all interested in film and cinema (not to mention programming) then you've undoubtedly heard of The Social Network, directed by David Fincher. Amazing film, I'd recommend it to anyone based off of the film alone, but for me that movie holds a special place in my heart.

My mom took me to see it that movie in theaters when it came out, I would not stop bugging her to take me, there was just something about the founding of Facebook that... Sparked my young imagination. I swear to you that I didn't blink for the entire time I was in the theater watching it. It blew my mind, not only that you could do that kind of stuff with computers, but that you could actually make a lot of money working with computers as well... Ten year old me had different priorities in regards to programming 😂 Starting the moment I got home from the theater, I dedicated my life to learning everything I could about computers. Originally my goal was to, shock of all shocks, create a social networking site for me and my friends to use. I still like to brag about it to this day, but that project eventually became my groups final project in our computer class in Middle School. It was funny, middle school computer class, I had already been programming a few years by that point and was rather proficient in PHP. There were kids submitting literal spreadsheets in Excel as their final project, a few static HTML pages, that sorta jazz. My group and I submitted a full fledged twitter clone, with complete functionality. We got 100% on the project 😂😂

My reasons and interests have changed over the years. For example, I'm not particularly interested in creating a social media application these days, and I don't program because I think it'll make me rich one day (though the hopes always there) but the one thing that hasn't changed since that night I sat enraptured in the beautiful cinematography of David Fincher and facepaced dialogue of Aaron Sorkin, is the complete and total fascination with computers and technology. For that reason The Social Network will forever be my favorite movie.

Unfortunately, WordPress doesn't provide built-in functionality for exporting user data. The only way to do it is using an import and export user plugin.

But that's fine. Don't waste your time on essential functionality, just keep adding more features and gimmicks to your Gartenzwerg editor.

Always good if you got your priorities right.

Today I created some reusable clean decent code to replace the random chaos in a huge project and then realised I had 3 options:

1. Sort out every instance to use the new code. This is very high risk because the project is both a shit show and has no tests. I don't have time to manual test or write unit tests on so much stuff.

2. Move over only some so that I can manually test. Still no time to unit test (management is fucked on their priorities). This will fuck the project even more since i will never get time to revisit this and adds yet more inconsistency and chaos to a project on its last legs and has this problem in droves.

3. Leave the project fucked

\_(^^)_/

I'm veering towards option 3 these days.

TL;DR: "Best" job is a dynamic flow, your job or your priorities will change, better to just start.

It depends on your definition of "best": do you mean the job that you think you will enjoy the most? The job that you are the most knowledgeable on? The job that you will have the most upward mobility in terms of opportunity for promotions and salary increases?

All of them at once, i suppose, but you cant have everything at once: my advice would be just start somewhere. Thinking you're going to get your dream job fresh out of college is a bad way to look at the world. The best job may be the best right now, but your priorities will change in life.

The best job today may not be the best tomorrow for a variety of reasons, but if you start somewhere, you will always have the experience generated by your existing occupation to carry you forward and propel you into your next big position.

So much to rant and so much time to rant, confused on priorities !

I work at a small shop.

Just a few devs and a handful of other people.

Good people. Even before COVID I worked from home a great deal.

But man there was always a lot to do at a small shop with priorities changing based on this customer's need or that one.

Now with COVID things are slowing down a bit and I can see some light at the end of the tunnel of my backlog.

I really would like to do some serious refactoring of an application I wrote, I'm embarrassed everytime I have to fiddle with it ;)

Every work call you have is a workaround. On call, if you explain something related to code or toolchain, it’s your failure at either documentation or choosing abstraction level. If you explain processes and task priorities, it’s your failure at management. If you discuss deadlines, it’s your failure at estimation.

If you’re an IT manager and do your job right, you should barely have calls.

So remember when I said I had a member in thesis who's sort of the 'connections' guy? And this guy doesn't show up most of the time because he's 'busy'?

Well it turns out he becane editor-in-chief of the school's yearbook!!! I mean I don't mind him doing his thing but why now?!?! Dude set your priorities straight! Do you wanna finish this thesis and graduate or proofread/edit every yearbook entry you get?!

Well we told our advisor about this and he said: 'So he's basically a parasite?' and we just laughed outlr heads off. We'll see what tomorrow brings us.

When your product owner/team leader prioritizes extracurricular activities over your thesis...... You trying to take us down with you?!!?!?!?!

You know my earliest design relating to ML was something intended to mimic human evolution by creating large trees of ideas and rules regarding emotions and how they regulated decisions and priorities.

I somehow think that was a better approach. It was more complex but it was better.

and i could reproduce the stolen diagram from memory as well.

hey is it illegal for someone to sell the contents of a storage locker with your birth certificate in it ?

...tfw management shifts your priorities suddenly, for the next 2 days, and it requires that you completely alter your environment from what you have been building up for the last two weeks...

I have technical problems with postgresql, AlienVault, Xenservers and Fortigate. I should be reading manuals and going through forums and mailing lists but instead, I'm reading ebooks in personal development like time management, verbal communications improvement and personal finance.

What is wrong with me?

Just got back to a solo project I hadn't touched in 5 months due to having other priorities. The whole thing is probably less than 1k LOC split over a half-dozen files and I'm not sure whether I should be angry at my past self for leaving the most recent part untested and insanely bug-ridden, taking almost an hour a fix, or be happy that past me organized and documented everything well enough for it to only take almost an hour to fix.

Debugging over developing?

Looking at @striker28 's rant made me think of my time I did my MSc and I think it needs it's own separate rant so here it goes:

So I did an MSc at one of the big league unis in London. First clue was during week 1 where in one of the class a mature student asked whether there would be actual coding during the course. There was an audible gasp from everyone else! Once the lecturer said the unfortunatly they wouldn't be you could hear the sigh of relief from the students...

Next up was all the lectures being placed in the freakin' basement of the university in crap, smelly rooms with annoying ticking A/Cs whereas all the social siences, business and other subjects had lecture halls and classrooms above ground. The contempt for CS from the university's direction was palpable.

Then there was the relegation to the theory-only (i.e. abstract with pen/paper) "tutorial" to the hand of T/As with bugger-all teaching experience. In short most were terrible and should've found a way to abscond themselved from this obligation which was part of the terms of their phd grants unfortunatly.

Further into the course there was the "group project". Oh boy! Out of the 5 in the group my now mature student friend and I were the only one commiting to the repo. There was either no code and a lot of bullshit from the others or crap code that didn't even compile despite their assurances it was all good.. Someone clearly never actually coded and pressed "run" in their lives which is fucking surprising since they've managed to graduate with a BSc and get into a MSc somehow. None of the code "made" by the other 3 persons made it into the master branch for release.
The attitude was that of "We (hahahah) wrote loads of code. We'll get a great mark!". At that stage the core wasn't even complete and the software didn't work yet.

Some of the courses where teaching things already 10 years out of date and when lecturer where pressed on that the few mature students that happen to be there the answer was always "yes, we are planning to update it for next year". Complete bullshit. Didn't help that some of the code on the lecture slides was not even correct! I mean these guy are touted as "experts" in their field...

None of the teory during the entire year was linked to any coding. Everything was abstract with no ties to applied software engineering. I.e. nothing like the real world.

The worst is that none of the youger students realised they were being screwed over and getting very little value for their money. Perhaps one reason why these evaluation forms have such high scores given on them. If you haven't had a job and haven't lived outside academia yet there is nothing to compare it to. It tends to also fall into confirmation bias (hey it's a top UK university, it must be worth it afterall! Look how much they ask for).

By the end of the year I couldn't wait to get the hell out. One of the other mature student sumed it quite well: "I will never send my children here."
Keep in mind that the guy had just over a decade of software engineering experience in the industry and was doing this for fun.

In the end universities are not teaching institutions. The lecturers's primary job is research and their priorities match that. Lectures tend to be the most time efficient teaching format for the ones giving them but, on their own, are not for the consumer.

To those contemplating university for CS: Do the BSc. Get your algo/datastructure chops and learn the basic theory. It is interesting. Don't get discouraged by the subject just because it is taught badly.
Avoid the MSc unless you want to do a phd and go for an academic carrer. You are better off using that year and the money to learn more on your own and get into colaborative projects (open source) on top of some personal ones. Build up your portfolio. It will be cheaper and more interesting!

Oh let the rant time begin…

So previous post I mentioned about this dev who has resigned and how I was going to see about a Snr. position.

Management is now scrambling to figure out what to do as this dev managed all the migration to AWS etc, I know servers but haven’t got too much familiarity with AWS.

Anyways so I finally get a 1:1 with my new line manager. I ask about the position and he says they don’t know what there going to do yet. Hire a new dev in India to offset and with the same knowledge even though the guy leaving is in the U.K. Bad idea as the servers are in the U.K. so if we get downtime or the server crashes we have no one in the U.K. to reset or access to the servers. India are very cagey who gets access which is annoying to say the least even though us (three devs) in the U.K. are the principal engineering team so there looking at all options.

Anyways we have a back and fourth, we discuss some of the plans for the app, some of which we are nowhere near ready to even conceptualise as the app in its current state sucks, (ruby 2.2.6 and rails 5 but not really). Needs major refactoring and rewrite, one thing they want to do is multi tendency which again given the state is laughable.

So, as my manager is speaking my head is screaming being like “this is just going to be a massive disaster”. Then we go onto that he’s seeing what everyone’s strengths are etc. And then we get onto the upgrade and that he wants me to work on it.

Yes.. the upgrade I’ve been trying to do for the past 4+ months but I keep getting told to stop and getting pushed backed.

I’ve been told we have devOps looking into restructuring the app, not possible as how the app is written, we have India trying to multi tenant again disaster incoming as they’ll end up rushing it. Legal are going to have a field day. Every time I say the issues are the fundamentals with the app, here’s how we can sort it. In one ear out the other basically there patching the ship even though it’s still leaking.

I have so many ideas, and things I can do to improve the app and get it back to not only working order, fix the performance issues, data issues and everything else. Brick wall.

So rants ensue where I basically say I would love to do the upgrade but management gives me no time in the roadmap (we have no say in planning). At this point I’m just speaking to a brick wall.

After the meeting I have a chat with the BAs, we all have the same issues so honestly it sucks we end up ranting to each other for an hour.

I’m being under-utilised, being told do this, do that even though I’ve had two stabs but told to stop and pushed back, I know what benefits I can bring to the app with a refactoring, ideas and how to properly lead the team because honestly we’re working on an old legacy app, and management are clueless and there priorities are all wrong, the company is getting frustrated and it’s a sinking ship. They would rather patch issues without solving them and everything I say goes in one ear and out the other.

Frustrating is not the word.

of course you can now make a vtuber avatar in microsoft teams but markdown support in chat is still is a clunky mess. #priorities