Today my oldest son is 8 years old and with pizza and cake we discussed how to hack his friends tablet, star Wars vs star trek and how to hijack wifi networks when friends parents won't give password.
And he told me how to evade detection and bypass the schools filters that he figured out alone.
I feel so damn proud.

I have my own secret script hidden in a /batcave dir on the production servers. It fixes everything the other devs usually manage to screw up.
I call it Batman.bat

I got called into a "personal development" meeting with the department lead, apparently my vocal and innovative cursing during coding/debugging is disruptive to the entire floor.

Girl I met asked what I do for fun outside of work and training. Brain threw nullreference exception.

Me: Fix this for me and I'll send you a cookie.
Collegue: Deal!
(5 mins later)
Collegue: Done, give me cookie.
Me: send MUIDB4T.txt ..... Long cookie file on Skype.
( Munches chocolate chip cookie)
(Collegue stares in disbelief....)
Me: hey I Even gave you a big one.

( Passes cookie jar )

For years I've felt confident that my system was idiot proof with only one button to click through the process.

Today a user proved me wrong.

CEO and board members are in town for a meeting and getting shown around. They get to our area chatting loudly and CEO go "shhhh... Be quiet"

(Looney tunes voice)
Me: "we're hunting wabbits!"

PM used his wife's data in testing against legacy data.
Discovered she had different social number before they met.
Apparently she was also a he.....

Might be a interesting evening for him.

Lost interest in work for the day, changed a co-workers upload function to target pornhub.
Now we wait....

Fixed broken project into something that builds with check-in comment:
Unbroken builds ( also unicorn inside)
added ascii unicorn as I'm no liar.

Today I got yelled at for planning to skip work because I had pressed interested on a Facebook event that occurs at the same time as a overtime work event....

Last day of vacation, decided to check my work email.... The list of things they've broken is.... terrifying, I don't want to go back... ever...

Job interview today, wish me luck guys.
It's find another job or take my kids to work every day as the hours aren't possible as a single dad.

Fixed a project for a collegue.
Him: How did you fix things, what's the process?
Me: Click stuff and press Buttons randomly until it works.
Him: ... That's all you did?
Me: Yup, the rest is just experience.

Today a user printed a pdf my system produced, scanned the printed pages and mailed the scan as pdf..... To me...
I'm physically hurting from seeing it...

New dev couldn't get his laptop set up and screens working. After a day struggling I walked over and recommend he plug in the power cord......

Fighting against management is my daily struggle.
I reject the notion that more management, meetings and reports makes me work faster.
Want it done in time?
Stop wasting my time and interrupting me when I'm deep in complex thought. Let me do what's necessary and put in the hours if I have the energy and time.
But you damn better pay me for it.
I do not care for your praise, when I make the impossible happen time and again in days that would take months.
I expect your praise in the form of higher numbers going into my account.

Big News from corporate today, we are no longer making bots to replace people. We are now "virtualizing" the workforce.
I swear I'm living in a dilbert strip...

Today I nearly killed my new boss, he picked the really wrong day to accuse me of something I did'nt do and could prove... You wouldn't like me when I'm angry cause I back up my arguments and would willingly quit gladly for a better job.

Dealing with other people.
Machines > humans.
Easier to debug.

I got a urgent call from a lead dev in another department. Needed data and services and her deadline was yesterday. I never heard of it, but worked late and got it done in 2 days. Delivery success, they had cake, speeches and praised my work apparently... I wasn't invited and didn't get any cake.

Secret job interview tomorrow, I've had it with this place and it keeps getting worse. Today they took away the last thing that made it liveable and forced me to have 5 hour longer days for the forseeable future. 3 of them with no extra pay.
I have kids I barely get to see today with longer days I will never see them.
Fuck this, I'm out.

Spent 20 minutes on the phone to our server center in india spelling letter for letter who I was and what the issue is.
Finally she says: "Send me an email."
Me: "I did, you are calling me remember?"

I've been locked in a room with another dev for 2 days working like insane to remake a outdated crm system. Had to inform the department lead that the deadline isn't possible and we need another week. Got questioned about what we had been doing the past days, redesigned the database, migrated data, frontend etc. Boss goes "that's all you manager in 2 days?" We went in with 2 slides and had to design and plan everything from scratch.
I lost count of how many rounds and added complexity happened in 2 days when Customer came by. Now there is going to be a board meeting with PM as he complains that the project is taking too many resources and should be killed. I invited myself to that meeting to defend the work done. Hold my laptop and watch this.

Trying to get into better shape, for every bug I find I do 20 pushups or situps.
30 mins into debugging and i'm exhausted.

Debugging async multithreaded apps is so much fun that I have a pile of hair on my desk that's been pulled out in frustration.

Considering making a wig to wear after I'm done.

Some years ago I was in cyber security in the military being shown some new tech for our use. Was challenged to try and get past it after being explained it's basics. Took me one long line in Linux about 10 seconds.
Anomaly detection firewall with machine learning seemed like a good idea.
Setting it to aggressive response and then change the package header to the firewall's own address however made it kill itself.

We didn't deploy that firewall that I know of.

Boss says everyone praises my work and efforts, except when nearing salary discussions then I suck and have a lot of unstable issues apparently.
I really struggle to give a polite f... When praised.
Wanna praise me? Pay me!

PM: We don't need a spec. We'll figure it out as we go.
Me: O_O.... So what do you need the system to do?.....
PM: ( gives vague requirements)

4 weeks later I still no clue what they need.

Monday: coffee tastes like dead rat. And I wrote hacks around hacks in legacy code just to get it to last a little longer until the new system can be made.

The coffee left a better taste than my commit.

so i was in colorado
walking past this goat ranch.
at least I thought it was just a goat and sheep ranch.
it was some kind of dog daycare with an attached petting zoo of scary looking animals.
so it was late afternoon.

i had some food left and stopped to feed the animals which included some of the largest damn goats i ever saw, i mean towering goats.

suddenly, this big horrific reptile like head with red eyes appeared over the fence, and i screamed in fright, to which a giant fucking bird ran away several feet.

motherfuckers had a goddamn emu in with the goats !!

There is a red button in a briefcase that launches nukes if you got access code.
We then gave it to a emotionally unstable hothead.
Left a post-it with admin password inside briefcase.

In this company we hire consultants to manage consultants Who spend their days in meetings with other internal consultants.
Wonder why profits are down, we need more consultants!

While working I was munching from a bowl of candy, suddenly realized my face hurt and hard to breathe. Emergency room....
I apparently ate something I'm allergic to while in a code fog.
No idea what it was yet.
Must have been bad code.

Since hearing about devRant:

Added new hidden function in my service: If you don't reply with "thanks" after I send you requested data, I will not reply to your requests for 15 minutes.
Clients really need to learn some manners and I'm here to help.

15 hour days, build is broken, laptop crashed and I ragequit by nearly throwing it out the Window.
Time to go Home.

Was assigned a project for my degree with 2 others. I was only one Who knew coding and development. 1 guy spent 5 months on YouTube and other one corrected my papers grammar and stressed out notes while I did everything else in development. Came out with an A, but pissed at YouTuber.

Playing guitar and bass is one of my biggest, also weight lifting and videogames. I have not had much time to read books recently, but I do try and keep up with the novels that interest me from time to time.
The rest of my time is spent with my family. I also like going to my friend's ranch to fish and shoot at things. I love ranching, because, well... Texas.

Today I got more praise for adding a spinning animation while loading page than the 5 months of complex coding I've done so far.

Users are simple, look shiny, ignore that nothing works.

I'm lead frontend developer/ consultant on a big government project, it's 10 days to release and I couldn't make it to a dinner with girlfriends extended family.

Pretty sure I just got dumped as she doesn't want to be in the way for my work so she is packing her stuff and leaving my apartment tonight.

relationshipsFailedDueToWork++

I've learnt that you should always make descriptive comments in your code to explain it.

Overtime rant, I suspect they will try to denie me half of the overtime pay for the past week cause I did more than ordered to reach their arbitrary deadline.
I will in return offer to delete half the work I did. Rollback changesets and delete the code.

Got a weird bug report, 6 red bull later i'm a energizer bunny on speed. But have found and fixed a severe underlaying bug. Can't believe noone had noticed for years.

Now i'm afraid to report it to my boss cause it most likely costed us a lot of money over time. And I just got shafted in the pay raise so my loyalty is low.

Went to sleep early due to being up for 2 days to get work done and overtime pay to afford a nice vacation with the gf. Woke up to several messenger txts from gf about me not responding, ending with me being dumped.

With 3 weeks until deadline, been working massive overtime and under massive pressure.
My body just gave up finally, for 5 days I've been unable to get up at all.

I worked all weekend to reach a deadline monday for testing, fixed all issues detected and made the release document, change elements, everything required by end of tuesday. And sent it to release manager. He calls me back immediately and tells me the release Windows was closed monday and it will have to wait until next month. Noone told me the deadline for release changed, and the users are invited to a training and release event next week. Gotta love working for a huge company and being the little guy noone keeps informed. #releaseblocked

Best hack... Think it was in high school when I figured out the eurobate free sms api was exposed and with my own php script could send as many free sms as I wanted and sms nuke friends.
Sms cost quite a lot pr message back then.

Starting the week with a 3 hour meeting to discuss importing Customer data to a new crm, if I should be allowed to take the time to do it or not.

I finished it last week and already imported the data to the syst enviroment and scrubbed it.

I spend more time Waiting for meetings and attending than doing the work.

Today I realized that a project that Ive worked on for years is now redundant and will probably be scrapped after my own new and more effective process hits production.
Im happy about that, no matter how good and hours spent. I made something better to replace it. This must be what finding a New gf after divorce feels like.

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?

Overtime weekend.
What kind of pizza gives the best dev performance?

I'm leaning towards Chicago style ham and shrooms for development and something heavier for debugging. What greasy pleasure makes your devengine purr?

Some days I feel like drinking to forget the bad legacy code Ive seen.

Usually I'd go grab a smoke and coffee and think up a solution while smoking.
I quit smoking 2 weeks ago, no idea how to fix it now.

As a dev, I think nothing have made me better prepared or equipped for explaining technical issues and functionality to PMs and board members than having kids and explaining things on their level.

I really hate interruptions when i'm deep in my code. Headset on and blocking out the world, then get annoyed taps on the shoulder from boss for not greeting people.
So now i'm out of the zone, browsing devrant and have pissed off the boss for being anti-social.

I was working on email reporting to business customers and in the test phase was mass sending email to my own account. However it suddenly stopped working and it took me a few minutes to realize I had commented out the hardcoded line with my email address. I had to write to each Customer and apologize for the spam after my error. Also had to get whitelisted our email server after the incident with a few.

Told department lead several of us devs are considering quitting due to low wage and insane workload.
Result: Team spirit questionaires and team building gathering.
No extra pay and now even less time to get work done.

Today I will be locked into a small room with an accountant, 2 computers and I can't leave until the new system is complete. Efficiency ftw if I want to see my kids today.

Worst interview, had to travel half a day, tired already and got grilled on how to debug a overloaded complex network schematic and no additional information, just told that traffic was being dropped. I'm not a network engineer and had no clue where to even start. Manager had mixed papers and thought I was interviewing for a senior position. I was fresh from uni.

*giggles* congrats to 16 upvotes

So... it's break time.

I just was eating fries with ranch... dipped my fingers in the ranch as if they were holding fries...then immediately hit Ctrl + z.
Took me a few seconds to realise why it didn't work.

I made systems automated and effective, requiring less or no human action to process, was told it was to free up people for more sales and personal service, today I found out they fired the equilavent number of people to what my solutions made uneccesary. I really liked especially one of them and was hoping to ask her out. Guess that won't happen now. I feel horrible when my solutions cost people their Jobs.

Migrated to new email clients, half a page long signatures were gone and no notice to put it back.
So I added my own: "Freeeeeeedoooooom, no more signatures".
Promptly got called by PM to: "It puts the signature back in the mail or else it gets the free seating back."

Today I solved issues I didn't cause and took International phone calls while on the toilet to help corporate.
Bug fixing can be a shit job, at least I was in the right place for it.

Today I found out we have 5 different Customer databases, one for each product area. We don't have access to more than 2 of them, while corp. it central has full access, but we have to beg and pay to see our own customers....
Now i'm tasked with integrating all these into a Customer db. and the way i get access is cobolt made, fixed length csv files and it's different for each db.
FML

Final day on this project, tonight I'll get drunk to forget about the backlog since client didn't hire me longer ( consultant).

I hate leaving unfinished code.

Monday I start my next project, which is refactoring. .Net code to .net core.

Here is to hoping it doesn't rely too much on unsupported 3rd party libraries.

Cheers fellow devs, have a good weekend.

I got the requirements specifications today.... for something I've worked on for a year and is 9 months delayed due to design constantly changing and management always lagging behind.
Best part is specifications have requirements we have no chance of meeting in time.
Yet another failed deadline. Yafd

For the one I currently have. Spent about 2 weeks looking to get as much of my PHP skillset in the right place since I knew PHP was their main technology as well as JS, C# and VB.NET, we seldom use them tbh, and it is mostly extension or maintenance stuff, so I focused on PHP.

I was not panicking, I rarely ever do, but my body tends to disagree with my state of mind and I can feel myself trembling in certain situations, such as the interview.

The interview was on Monday and my last day of preparation was Sunday (obviously) so what I did was drank a lot of beer and played videogames, I just wanted to take my mind off things. I was, and have always been annoyingly confident in myself and could not understand why I was feeling so nervous internally.

Everything went away when the manager came to greet me, lovely looking gal with an awesome sense of style and a big smile, we clicked instantly and to this day the place is kinda like my second home, as hectic as it is to work in an institution of this size it is really my peace and quiet zone. The entire I.T department is a big family, before the pandemic we would go to bbqs together all the time, would go to a friend's ranch to shoot shit and just chill, parties and gatherings, it really is a nice place to be at and they take the "we are family" very fucking seriously, I fucking love it. The boss lady ain't here no more, but she recommended me for the position and well, here I am.

I severely hope everyone here finds the same kind of place, there are a lot of assholes in this industry and a lot of places that seem very into the idea of making you absolutely miserable with no chance of leveling up, I know because all other jobs previous to this place was the same way for me.

Have faith, keep them chins up, and don't ever fucking let anyone make you think you are something you are not. You glorious beautiful basterds!

I think the programmers diet is probably the most effective weight loss program I ever tried. Used to be ex-wife had to remind me to eat or else I forgot for days at a time. Now im single, coding and skinny.

I'm working on 3 projects, alone, and no chance to finish any of them in time. Woosh goes the deadlines....

Female lead PM told me to another field to a already overcrowded screen, I slipped out the phrase: "Another one? It's already tighter than a Virgin just not as wet...."

Guess I just figured out why I didn't get a raise this year.

!rant after over 2 years of fighting, I'm finally rid of my cheating-ex in finances today.
My House and life is finally my own again.

This is how non devs imagine our devs. They tend to think a huge change is this quick. Meanwhile back at the ranch it will take a while and a lot more concentration.

Too many projects, too little time and didn't get a raise. So I now work on projects that people I like ask me to. Ignoring the other pm's while looking for a better job.

Reporting server connection to database is down, probably due to a user access restriction.

reported the issue to the India sql datacenter and got back: Yes, We see that the connection is down. ( I sent them screenshot of it including the error message ) There is no such database available.
Me: Yes, well I'm in the db working right ( send screenshot) now.
India: ..... disappear offline.

Pm orders me to integrate data from several closed systems into a new CRM, problem is... corporate security won't allow me to push data between these networks as there are extremely sensitive data on these systems. So I disobey PM or corporate if I do it and ive told both the issues. 4th round with this exact issue now.

Today I've caught as more pokemon than functions written.

Came back to work while being sick due to lack of sickdays. I'm near comatose from headache and coughing going zombie around the office.
PM: How you doing?
Me: Underpaid, overworked and sick. Can't do shit about the latter.

Some days when I'm really effective and create good solutions and deploy it at high speed to the praise of users.
I can't help but raise my arms in victory and announce: "Damn I'm good!".
Screw the olympics, this is winning in real life.

Ordered to implement Old functionality in New system, not allowed to fix it, refactor or change the underlaying mess.
Wrap old system in a wcf, hardcoded some values, done.
3 weeks estimated so I feel ahead and got more time to look for a New job.

My best project was a digital forensics project back in uni, digging through raw data the police forensic guy / professor gave us. Rarely Ive been so enveloped by anything as digging through raw data finding the clues as to what the guy had been up to and how he hid it.

I love meetings I got a valid reason to skip. Like today I got to skip standup and department meetings because I had actual work to do.

Changes in the sales process enabled users to break it. I fixed the problem and suggested how to corrected those broken sales. PM wants to make tomorrow a day of meetings with stakeholders and other PMs to discuss if I should get to spend few hours fixing it.
Guess Ill tell them then that I already wrote a app on my way home that fixes it.....

Spent 3 hours on SO and google to find out why a listview is missing data. Finally I delete it from form and recreate it, works flawless on first compile.

I wanted to work on my new project this weekend, Friday I started good with a case of beer, chips and... fell asleep. Saturday I started good as well then breakfast happened and evening ended with shots. Today is sunday and I started fresh with deleting and fixing the drunk code from previous days. 2 screens made and 20 lines of code, pretty good weekend.

Don't you just love it when there is no formal spec. you get a few mspaint slides and told a delivery date, scope and slides are changed by management weekly, not necessarily informing you of it. Then when your failing, deadlines pass you by you still have no clear spec 2 weeks before release, partial backend because core business devs are busy doing support on the legacy systems. No frontend cause it's been changed, redesigned and you've been forced to change frameworks and technology so many times due to corporate policy and legacy systems with another dev group holding your balls with what they allow you to do and use. Id complain but at least we've been told to be agile. This is my life now, we lost all hope and stopped caring. And management wonders why the deadlines and estimates are all off.

For 10 years I've been a back end developer. Now I'm going full stack with react and angular4 front end development in my new job.

Unused to the new dev ui I just spent 3 hours debugging a redux state issue when I realize I used uppercase in the name of the value.....

N00b front-ender.

A guy while in college, he did the work I hated and left me to do the design and coding. Straight A projects every time due to our excellent teamwork.

Started signing my internal emails:
<Name>
<Department>
Systemsomethingsomethingdarkside (title)
<Contact info>

Day 8 and noone has noticed.
I've been accepted into the mail herd.

I have nightmares about the new project already....

I just met real life Wally from Dilbert.
Semi retired, works a few hours a week with excellent pay because he is the only one who understands the legacy mainframe.
Learning from his example we now plan to obfuscate all code before check-in. Only readable code version will be on our encrypted personal drives.

Our newest project has 8 leaders / managers pluss project owner and dedicated process manager and 1 developer to do the actual work.
The developer is a rented consultant.

Running on energy drinks and coffee from one emergency to the other finding solutions to problems noone thought of.

Weekend really can't come fast enough.
So I can get work done.....

Major release today, went badly of course. None of it was my fault, still I have to fix it. Best release so far.

What did the Dorito farmer say to the other Dorito farmer? Cool Ranch!

There was a big concert event after work last night I couldn't go.
Noone is at work but me today....
and there is a ton of empty bottles in the cantina as well as quite some mess in a meeting room.
And noone has said they were taking the day off. oh well I'm going early then.

Ever had ransomware get into the network? Every shared drive, which is basically all your files except the os drive as everything personal and development must be stored on the all access network drives encrypted. Then it turns out the backup had failed and noone had noticed for days due to IT being on vacation.

public Person Birthday ( Person Me ) {
Me.Age++;
return Me;
}

Almost got away this year, quitting time before collegues caught it.

Had a Long discussion with stake owners and PM. Ended in despair over corporate guidelines and impossible demands from the board / CEO.
PM finally said: Fuckit, let's get a beer, i'm buying.
Best day so far this week.

I was just ordered by PM to remove my class wrapper and explode the massive contents into a function....
Why do I feel like I just had a dirty discussion with my parents... Perverted methods.....

Commodore 64 and manuals when I was 5. Then qbasic on a 286 my dad got from work when I was 6. Been programming since, to Borland c/c++, php, html etc. Worked with most languages since.

I figured out how to skip 2 months of development so we could launch Long ahead of schedule.
Question is should I tell them or do it? I don't feel like it really as I've been treated like shit and am looking for a New job.

It will take the stress off collegues, perhaps as a goodbye gift when I leave I'll put it on a thumb drive and give it if I feel bad.

It's 8 am, just got Home from christmas table/gathering sober with an open bar for the nth time.
Wow us in support functions always get way shafted in recogniton, we made your ideas work and worked late to make it happen and you get the prize and money for coming up with the same idea I've seen 100 times already implemented before?

4 hours until major release goes live, should I be worried that the lead dev on handling releases called in sick today? If it goes badly I have no access to fix it until tomorrow.

I have to work against the mainframe ancient cobolt expecting fixed length input and filler chars depending on type, there is hundreds of fields and 40 vars in a function call.... deadline tomorrow at noon.
Awh... hell no!!!
ragequit!

Corporate bureaucracy:
How I know, within 30 mins of starting a New day, that I'm perfectly capable of torturing and killing another human being.

And I still have to get 3 more approvals before they will even look at actually doing the task.....

I was seriously considering eating whole coffee beans today, running on fumes.

Having to work with a legacy system is often hard enough, adding New features content when it's a ancient access system is worse. Secretly started remaking the entire CRM system in .net instead of stabbing myself with a plastic fork to get out of the project.

Completing the Big Nerd Ranch Android book.

Understanding management talk:
Customer centric = Who we are focused on fucking.
Family oriented = employees should not have one.
Performance focused = f... You, your family and your paycheck.

Startet programming when I was 6 on my dad's 286 in Qbasic and learnt other languages as I grew up. It was always this, hacking or psychology for me. In the end the ex told me she was pregnant while I was doing my thesis.
So then I knew I had to be a dev.

Found bug in legacy code with comment "4 days to release workaround, works predictably".
Added "No, it doesn't!" and committed to main branch before I start reworking the entire spaghetti mess of a codebase

Deploying tons of new features and changes to the SYST enviroment for user testing only to find out that changes you did last year somehow aren't there anymore and so it breaks everything. Waiting for central IT guys to respond to request for a additional deployment while the users hangs on your back.

PM: what can we do to avoid users abusing the loop hole until we could patch it?
Me: I recommend whipping repeat offenders. As a teambuilding exercise of course.

public void DailyLife(bool sleep)
{
While( WaitingForCompile && !sleep)
{
BrowseDevrant();
FindNew("Girlfriend", "tinder");
RefreshIfCold(coffee);
}
DebugCodeIfErrorFound();
DailyLife(Datetime.Now >= Sleep.Time);
}

My code check-in today contains comments like "Last resort methods, never use except explicitly ordered by lead".
Gotta love legacy code hacks...

Whenever I play a game, I don't cheat but I find the loopholes the dev didn't patch.

Teaching coworkers performance tuning, we have the memory enough that you don't need to write to disk... Really the data isn't Even a MB....

Tried to explain to the department lead that having devs spend more time documenting what we spend time on, asking for permissions to do anything doesn't make the project go faster.

Leads might feel good about having better overview for themselves, but in reality you just slowed down, demotivated and annoy the entire team of people doing the actual work. Noone wants to or will do overtime because we have to ask for permission first. And you took away one good dev to spend his entire days in meetings instead of actually doing any real work on the project.

#releasethedevs

I keep earplugs in underneath my headset when I expect E-meetings to be less than interesting use of my time, which it usually is.
What's your little secret to surviving a day?

!rant after struggling with version control in a very restricted enviroment where nothing can be installed on the user's machine.

I finally found a way that was allowed after days of digging, so simple yet beautiful, thy name be clickonce.

!rant.
When should you get a senior title? After x years in the industry, at y age, having worked there for z years or what do you guys think?

What did the Dorito farmer say to the other Dorito farmer? Cool Ranch!