Last year I built the platform 'Tindex'. It was an index of Tinder profiles so people could search by name, gender and age.

We scraped the Tinder profiles through a Tinder API which was discontinued not long ago, but weird enough it was still intact and one of my friends who was also working on it found out how to get api keys (somewhere in network tab at Tinder Online).

Except name, gender and age we also got 3 distances so we could calculate each users' location, then save the location each 15 minutes and put the coordinates on a map so users of Tindex could easily see the current location of a specific Tinder user.

Fun note: we also got the Spotify data of each Tinder user, so we could actually know on which time and which location a user listened to a specific Spotify track.

Later on we started building it out: A chatbot which connected to Tinder so Tindex users could automatically send a pick up line to their new matches (Was kinda buggy, sometimes it sent 3 pick up lines at ones).

Right when we started building a revenue model we stopped the entire project because a friend of ours had found out that we basically violated almost all terms.

Was a great project, learned a lot from it and actually had me thinking twice or more about online dating platforms.

Below an image of the user overview design I prototyped. The data is mock-data.

Well here's how I see things going:

Intel and AMD ditch their assembly architectures for Scratch, because drag and drop is very popular lately.

The Boolean is renamed to the biggot by SJW leaders for only supporting binary views.

You must first ask consent to add an item to a linked list, because forcing two items together promotes rape culture.

Apple removes the "h" and "7" keys on all laptop models and gives no reason for their actions.

Linus Torvalds grows an extra middle finger, and it still isn't enough.

Nintendo makes Mario gay and Luigi black to be more inclusive.

LG makes a curved monitor that curves away from you rather than towards you. People buy it in confusion.

Everyone makes the same ad revenue on YouTube, and it is rebranded to OurTube. Luckily, they were able to keep the color scheme.

People finally realize that machine learning is just math, and stop using it everywhere. (Just kidding lol)

AMD and Gucci merge. Nobody understands why.

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.

Client : Can you make some adblock?
Me : Why? There is a lot of good things already...
C : I mean... Listen carefully.
M : ok
C: i have some google ads and user blocks with adblock
M : yeah, that is normal
C : so i implemented adblock blocker which blocks adblock so that i can show the webpage plus ads when the user disables adblock.
M : i bet users hate that.
C : yeah, so users found out a way to disable adblock blocker which disables adblock blocker which i implemented to show the ads! So i cant earn revenue..
M : so what?
C : Can you make ad block block block block?
M : Sure. How much will you give me ?
C : 20 to 30 dollars
M : great ( the most generous client ever seen)

*couple of years later*

Client : can you make ad block block block block block block block block block block?
Me : i cant understand
C : count the number of block
If there is odd number of block i means to block ads.
If there is even number of block ads, it means to show ads making user to disable ads.
M : so just tldr your request this time
C : even number
M : ok how much will you pay
C : 20 to 30 dollars

*next day*
C : can you..
M : offline

Who in the fucking world made ads, made adblock and made adblock block?

I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.

So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?

This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:

1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!

2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...

3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.

But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.

There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.

After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.

So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".

So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".

So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.

So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.

If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>

I am currently working for a client who have all their data in Google Sheets and Drive. I had to write code to fetch that data and it's painful to query that data.
I can definitely relate with this.

PS: Their last year revenue was over US$2 Bn and one of their sibling company is among Top IT companies in the country.

The 1st of July, it'll be a year ago since my father passed away.

I made him a promise as he explicitly told me; "Please grow our company, I wouldn't have put you in the CTO position if you sucked at what you do" - so I said I would keep pushing the boundaries.

As per now we've officially broken our set target. Our revenue thus far in 6 months of time has reached to last years total revenue. I take great comfort in knowing that he would have been god dang proud.

July the 1st will be a day with both a smile and a tear. Had to get this off my chest!

Today I became the lead developer of a system, which annually generates about 30 million in revenue.

I just finished uni. I have no idea what I'm doing.

I feel like this guy.

Oh boy, the startup managers are writing a roadmap today. Can't wait.

5 mIlLiOn DaIlY aCtIvE uSeRs By EnD oF Q1! (2022!!!)

1 MiLlIoN dAiLy ReVeNuE bY tOmOrRoW!

zErO bUgS aNd KnOwN iSsUeS iN sYsTeM bY 5Pm ToDaY!

tHoUsAnDs Of NeW cUsToMeRs WiThIn ThE nExT hOuR!

WWDC was not about developers this year. It was a conference call with shareholders and investors. No bold moves, just several consecutive "this product will no longer suck" and "look at what you can do now, big companies" announcements.

watchOS will work now (it's too slow ATM). tvOS will just be less cumbersome. macOS still lagging behind (I mean, I already have great third party apps that clean my hard drive, but thank you for solving a problem I didn't need fixing). iOS 10 is simply about messages (it's not going to make me ditch Telegram, because it doesn't have an Android client, regardless of how large you make emoticons appear on screen). Apple Music will still suck, especially if you have more than one Apple ID. And Apple Maps will continue to be useless outside of the US.

Where did the bold moves go? Where's the "we're breaking up iTunes into several distinct apps that serve their purposes really well"? (Guess iTunes is too valuable a trademark...) Where is the "we will end the WKView vs UIView vs NSView nonsense"? (You know, OOP is about creating classes, which are abstractions and whose instances deal with the particularities of their environment; a View is a View, regardless of where they live; an instance of a View should care about being on a watch or on a phone, not the developer.) Where is the "we love indie developers and will help you"? They showed off a lot of integration with well established apps, that don't really need to stand out any more. They showed that video of "normal people" who have developed apps, but no one knows about them! And then they changed the AppStore so you can pay to advertise your app, but who has the means to do that? Indie devs are surely on a tight budget, so who's that helping again?

For me, this WWDC was sugar coated with a "we love you developers" BS, but was a business statement to large companies ("see what you can do now Uber, Lyft, WeChat, WhatsApp, Doordash, all the P2P payment apps, ESPN, WSJ and so on?"). It's already a known fact that the bulk of the AppStore revenue goes to the top 1% apps. And what's the point of having tvOS be open to developers if it is very unlikely I'll ever develop anything for it unless I work at CBS?

It's great that they want to make it easier for kids to learn Swift. But there's very little point in that, if those kids' apps aren't going to be used and are simply going to make the "we have 2 million apps on the AppStore" announcement look shinier for shareholders. Without a strong indie community, the Swift Playgrounds app for the iPad is just manufacturing workers for large corporations.

And without a strong indie community, things get tougher for indie clients as well. Who will have the money (and therefore the time) to implement all those integrations in order to even dream about competing with heavily funded apps?

Yeah... So thanks, Apple, but no thanks.

!rant

So I have been recently hired at my current job for leading a product team. We're a small team working in a big company which have other teams working on other projects. I like my work and I have been appreciated for my work which I did since my stay here.
So I and my manager were discussing about how more can we automate our workflow to reduce the time to get the final builds. It was late in night. Suddenly someone asked, 'did I hear automation?'. We turned to see our CTO listening to our conversation. He told us that he's having trouble with automation in his project. I was new, so I didn't know what did he work on, so I asked.
Me: So what did you guys work on?
CTO: well, we work on automating stuff for clients and save them money. We earn 100x revenue than your product (In a more humble tone). I am currently looking for someone who can lead a team of developers for handling the automation scripting part. *Provides description of the candidate* Do you guys know someone like that?
Manager: (pointing towards me) It looks like his description.
CTO: I want him in my team then.
Manager: That can't happen, he's required in very important stuff and you're not allowed to poach.
CTO: I think I have the right to poach 😉
Me: OK, so how much raise am I going to get to switch teams (to the manager) and how much am I going to get to stay? Whoever gives me more I am theirs.
CTO: I like this guy

It's day three, I am still awaiting for one of them to tell me who won 🙁

PS: They both are friends with each other.

Maybe if Forbes and Business insider would show something like this, they'll get more revenue.

In the begining of time, when The Company was small and The Data could fit in some fucking excel sheets, Those Who Came Before implemented some java tool to issue invoices, notify customers and clear received payments.

Then came the Time Of The Great Expanse, when The Company grew to unthinkable levels. Headcount increased with each passing day, and The Data shows that everything was going great!

But when the future seemed bright, came The Stall-Out. The days when The Company could not expand as fast as it did before. And Those Who Came Before left, abandoning their Undocumented Java Tool to its own luck.

Those who came after knew nothing of the inner workings of the Undocumented Java Tool. They knew only that the magical Jar would take a couple fucking excel spreadsheets and spit out reports and send emails like magic.
And those were The Dark Days.

In the darkness, The Data grew to be a monster. Soon a fucking excel spreadsheet could not hold The Data contained any longer. Those Who Came After, fearing the wrath of The Undocumented Java Tool, dared not mess with its code. Instead, they fucking cut away the lowest volume transactions from the fucking input spreadsheet, and left the company to report the unbilled invoices as "surprise losses". Fucking script kiddies, were Those Who Came After.

Then, at The Darkest of Days (literally, Dec 21st), marched into the project The Six Witchers, who fear not the Demon of Refactoring.

This story is still unfolding. Will The Six Witchers manage to unravel the mysteries of The Undocumented Java Tool? Will they be able to reverse engineer the fucking black box, and scale it's magic into a modern application?
Will they decrease revenue forecasting error by at least 2% in a single strike?

Only the future will tell.

# 3 weeks ago
customer informed us that the app will get quite some load since the beginning of July

# this monday
last spare hdd on database's SAN died.
I told everyone another hdd is to follow it very soon eithet whether nothing is done at all or if anyone attempts to touch the san array [cuz that's what redundant raids do...]. No fucks given by anyone, no attempts to have maintenance and planned outage within 24 hrs....

# this morning
another hdd has failed and now 1tb of data is lost. No way to restore backups cuz there is no database to restore them to....

# 20 minutes later I head out to get some popcorn. It's gonna be a fun week!

So... The planned heavy load [and revenue along with it] is not gonna happen... I guess they are gonna ha a week long outage.

That's what happens when you ignore warning shots fired at your face.

Fellow developers,
For all people asking u to be partners of their "billionaire" idea, and to be paid from revenue ONLY when the plateform goes live or shit like this, BEWARE.
For all of them i had the same answer: "ok, ill share with you the project, but until it goes live, i am the only one who is giving sacrifice, and since we are partners, i want us both to do same level of sacrifices in order to deserve later the share of revenue... That being said, u have to pay the hours of devlopment, all of them, and when it goes live, from the revenue ill get, ill pay you back what you paid on dev cost"

It is the only way to be really even...
And if he refuse, ask them again "why? I taought u where 100% sure that your idea will work and become a billionaire why u think it is risky tp pay few thousands????"
... Now he is having second thaughts

Why even bother with article sites now? Try to search for a quick answer to a question and the only resource is some article and the user is met with:

- "Hi, here's where all your data goes. Please unsubscribe from our 937 partners and continue."

- "DO YOU KNOW WE USE COOKIES?" (Covers 60% of the page).

- "It looks like you're using adblocker. Mind whitelisting us for the 2 minutes we're in your life for? "

- "Before we show you the single sentence answer you're looking for let us promote our shitty content that you'll never click on because we hired the guy who makes shady porn links on every z-list site possible."

- "This article is in multiple parts to spread ad revenue. Click next to continue."

There's probably an extension that stops most of this but christ, it shouldn't be this bad.

Well, fuck. The CTO of our startup decided to migrate data of our hundred thousand customers from a stable functioning platform to an in-house unstable platform with severe performance issues, to "save" costs, despite our repeated requests. He made us not have any contingency plans because he wanted to "motivate" us to complete the migration.

Result- we have a thousand customers reporting major issues daily, which is causing loss of revenue to both us and them. The company ran out of funding. Most of the team members were fired. And he's expecting the rest of us to magically fix everything. Dunno what kind of office politics is this, in which you're sabotaging Your Own company.

Looking for a new job now to get out of this hellhole. I really used to love this company. Feels sad to see it ruined like this.

Once a CEO is 24*7 a CEO. For me it's Chief Experiment Officer

And only dreamers can have that title. One who dreams at night and work it out the following day.
Having a startup is much more than just having an idea
It's about revenue,
It's about value,
It's about team,
It's about impact,
It's about growth,
It's about compliance,
It's about being finance, marketing, HR and tech expert at the same time.
It's about respect the supporters,
At the end it's about the money you earn as an individual.
For playing all the above roles, you need to dream real big.

To me startup is about falling in love with your work first.

-
By an Indian CEO

Big boss: Last year we had much more revenue and profits than our expectations, and this success is thanks to all of you. Thank you! You made an excellent work! Impressive!
Some employee: Can we all get a raise?
Big boss: Wtf that question again? No way!

Boss giving a me a lift to work cause he wants to start work earlier since our ad revenue plunged during the weekends. One fucked up day coming up.

Why does almost everyone act as if the world they live in is perfect, or is supposed to be perfect?

This is about approaching IT infrastructures, but goes way beyond IT, into daily lives.

Daniel Kahneman wrote about the "Econs" - a mythical creature that behaves according to rules and rational thoughts, that everybody is guided by, as opposed to Humans, who are irrational, intuitive and emotional.
My beef is with a wider perception, beyond economical analysis, profit, investment and so on.

Examples:
Organization A uses a 15 year old system that is crappy beyond description, but any recent attempt to replace it have failed. Josh thinks that this is a crappy organization, any problem lies within the replacement of that system, and all resources should be devoted to that. Josh lives in a perfect world - where shit can be replaced, where people don't have to live with crappy systems. Josh is stupid, unless he can replace that old system with something better. Don't be Josh. Adapt to the fucking reality, unless you have the power to change it.

Peter is a moron who downloads pirated software with cracks, at the office. He introduced a ransomware that encrypted the entire company NAS. Peter was fired obviously, but Sylvia, the systems administrator, got off easily because Peter the moron was the scapegoat. Sylvia truly believes that it's not her fault, that Peter happened to be a cosmic overgrown lobotomized amoeba. Sylvia is a fucking idiot, because she didn't do backups, restrict access, etc. Because she relied on all people being rational and smart, as people in her imaginary world would be.

Amit finished a project for his company, which is a nice modern website frontend. Tom, the manager says that the website doesn't work with Internet Explorer 8, and Amit is outraged that Tom would even ask this, quoting that IE8 is a dinosaur that should've been euthanized before even hatching. Amit doesn't give a shit about the fact that 20% of the revenue comes from customers that use IE8, what's more important to him is that in his perfect imaginary world everybody uses new hardware and software, and if someone doesn't - it's their fault and that's final. Amit is a fucking asshole. Don't be like Amit.

React to the REAL world, not what you WANT the world to be. Otherwise you're one of them.
The real world can be determined by looking at all the fuck ups and bad situations, admit that they happen, that they're real, that they will keep happening unless you do something that will make them impossible to happen or exist.

Acting as if these bad things don't exist, or that they won't exist because someone would or should change it, is retarded.

Dev: So we need around $50-100 a month to activate and use some key services that would greatly reduce our backend complexity. Would this fit into our budget? Actually, we've never really discussed in general what sort of tech budget we have to work with...

Management: UNTIL WE HAVE SUSTAINABLE REVENUE, OUR TECH BUDGET IS 0

FullStackClown: 0? Are you serious? You can't spare a few hundred dollars TOTAL over the next 3 months until our next round of funding clears?

Management: ALSO WE ARE REALLY GOING TO NEED YOUR HELP TO FIND PRODUCT MARKET FIT FROM THE TECH SIDE

FullStackClown: Oh no... we've gotten to the classic point where they think tech is the thing that will solve their problems... abandon ship...

Fuck big tech companies. Fuck their surveillance capitalism. Fuck their monopolies and anti-competitive bullshit. Fuck their tax dodging. Fuck their fighting against the right to repair. Fuck their worship of revenue above all else. Fuck their 30% cut on everything. Fuck their world-destroying revenue models built on heartless AI and zero customer service. Fuck their automated banning systems with zero explanation as to why the fuck they've banned you, with zero fucking recourse. Fuck their amoral psychopathic CEOs and their fucking space rockets. Fuck all this shit. When I'm done with this IT project I'm fucking done with tech.

Okay I'm done now.

Most successful project... What is success?

My first computer at 8 years old was a Commodore64. There was no internet yet, so I used the manual to learn about BASIC and assembly, sound and sprite registers, and created a pretty elaborate RPG. Mostly text, some sprite art, soldered some eeprom cartridges, optimized the code. Spent almost a year on it. An enthousiast magazine picked up on it, revised, QA'ed & published the game, sold a little over 10k samples. I got ƒ0.25 per sale, and I was completely overwhelmed how much candy one could buy for ƒ2500 ($2k corrected for inflation).

More recent:
I was employee #3 at my current company, started when it was worth nothing and the website redirected to a set of Google Forms containing all the logic. I wrote a large part of the first, monolithic backend.

Now there's teams in a dozen countries, and an estimated revenue of a quarter billion.

So obviously my current "project" is more successful.

Still, my current job sucks, the company turned into a desolate passion-free wasteland full of soulless fake hipster zombies and managers who seem to derive sexual pleasure from holding extremely ineffective meetings, endlessly rubbing their calendars together in their bureaucratic orgy of ineptitude.

So, I'm more proud of my C64 game.

Fuck Optimizely.

Not because the software/service itself is inherently bad, or because I don't see any value in A/B testing.

It's because every company which starts using quantitative user research, stops using qualitative user research.

Suddenly it's all about being data driven.

Which means you end up with a website with bright red blinking BUY buttons, labels which tell you that you must convert to the brand cult within 30 seconds or someone else will steal away the limited supply, and email campaigns which promise free heroin with every order.

For long term brand loyalty you need a holistic, polished experience, which requires a vision based on aesthetics and gut feelings -- not hard data.

A/B testing, when used as some kind of holy grail, causes product fragmentation. There's a strong bias towards immediate conversions while long term churn is underrepresented.

The result of an A/B test is never "well, our sales increased since we started offering free heroin with every sale, but all of our clients die after 6 months so our yearly revenue is down -- so maybe we should offer free LSD instead"

I'm not enjoying my current experience with the web.

I feel sad, alone most of the time.

Let me disclaim first that I don't have like an apocalyptic view of the world, I actually think it's improving (in very broad terms).

I also understand that the web is a complex thing and everyone being happy with is going to be very unlikely, specially as more and more people use it, since the entropy will naturally increase.

I don't have solid evidence of what I'm saying next and I'm not even entirely what exactly I'm saying, but maybe I'm onto something.

I feel that when the internet first started, businessmen were like "meh, geek stuff".

But slowly, things changed, and every greedy person tried to just fucking unload his greed filled cum onto it

And now it feels like 1984. And I hate when people reeeee 1984. But it does feel like it.

The ads are like "ok, I know you like that other shit, but CHECK THIS SHIT OUT".

It's AI driven to maximize profits, with little care for people happiness.

I miss when youtube had related videos. The algorithm wasn't perfect but at least it was exactly that, related videos.

Now though, youtube likes to be smart. But not smart in a way that enriches your youtube experience.
It's smart in a way that maximizes ad revenue.

"what? did you think we were going to use AI to make you happier? that we were going to enrich your youtube experience?
NO MOTHER FUCKER! OF COURSE NOT. We're gonna use it to show you whatever shit that will make us richer faster."

Controls for customizing the recommended videos behaviour? Pff, no.
They're gonna decide for you what it is that you like
They're going to decide what you should be watching.

Everytime i turn on my samsung tv, the youtube app recomends me watching "BETTER THAN SEX EYE LINER". Jesus christ, what the shitcum, I'm the only motherfucker on the house that uses youtube, and I couldn't care less about this cunt's disguised ad video, let alone fucking eye liners.

Why youtube, why do you promote whatever porn video VEVO uploads?

Why do you ruin every youtube rewind?

Why do you pander to the lowest common denominator?

Why can't you be shining beacon, a moral company considering you're a cultural icon?

Fuck you youtube, and while we're at it, fuck you too samsung, I must have been drunk the day I bought this shitty closed source software piece of shit "smart".

And these are just 2 companies. The internet is FILLED with these greedy bastards. They have no passion for their products, for making people happy. They only have passion for the MUNNNEY.

Thanks a lot business schools, thanks a lot CEOs of the world, thanks for making the world a happier place.

Ok, now that I said that, I want to back up a bit.

Youtube may bot be perfect, but it's ad revenue system enables some youtubers I love to be able to make that their careers.

I appreciate that, so maybe youtube isn't that bad... so sorry for saying those horrible things man!

My first job was actually nontechnical - I was 18 years old and sold premium office furniture for a small store in Munich.
I did code in my free time though (PHP/JS mostly, had a litte browsergame back then - those were the days), so when my boss approached me and asked me whether I liked to take over a coding project, I agreed to the idea.

Little did I know at the time: I was supposed to work with a web agency the boss had contracted to build their online shop. Only that he had no plan or anything, he basically told them "build me an online shop like abc(a major competitor of ours at the time)"

He employed another sales lady who was supposed to manage the shop (that didn't exist yet). In the end, I think 80% of her job was to keep me from killing my boss.

As you can imagine, with this huuuuge amout of planning and these exact visions of what was supposed to be, things went south fast and far. So far that I could visit my fellow flightless birds down in the Penguin's republic of Antarctica and still need to go further.

Well... When my boss started suing the web agency, I was... ahem, asked to take over. Dumb as I was, I did - I was a PHP kid and thought that Magento, being written in PHP, would be easy to master. If you know Magento, you know that was maybe the wrongest thing I ever said.

Fast forward 3 very exhausting months, the thing was online. Not all of it worked yet, but it was online and fairly secure.

I did next to everything myself, administrating the CentOS box the shop was running on, its (own) e-mail server, the web server, all the coding required for the shop (can you spell 12 hour day for 8 hour pay?)

3 further months later, my life basically was a wreck, I dragged myself to work, the only thing I looked forward being the motorcycle ride home. The system worked though.

Mind you, I was still, at the time, working with three major customers, doing deskside support and some admin (Win Server 2008R2 at the time) - because, to quote my boss, "We could not afford a full time developer and we don't need one".

I think i stopped coding in my free time, the one hobby I used to love more than anything on the world, somewhere Decemerish 2012. I dropped out of the open source projects I was in, quit working on my browser game and let everything slide.

I didn't even care to renew the domains and servers for it, I just let it die without notice.

The little free time I had, I spent playing video games and getting drunk/high.

December 2013, 1.5 years on the job, I reached my breaking point and just left, called in sick at least a week per month because I just could not see this fucking place anymore.

I looked for another job outside of ALL of what I did before. No more Magento, no more sales, no more PHP. I didn't have to look for long, despite what I thought of my skills.

In February 2014, I told my boss that I quit. It was still seven months until my new job started, but I wanted him to know early so we could migrate and find a replacement.

The search for said replacement started in June 2014. I had considerably less work in the months before, looks like he got the hint.

In August 2014, my replacement arrived and I got him started.

I found a job, which I am still in, and still happy about after almost half a decade, at a local, medium sized ISP as a software dev and IT security guy. Got a proper training with a certificate and everything now.

My replacement lasted two months, he was external and never really did his job - the site, which until I had quit, had a total of 3 days downtime for 3 YEARS (they were the hoster's fault, not mine), was down for an entire month and he could not even tell why.

HIS followup was kicked after taking two weeks to familiarize himself with the project. Well, I think that two weeks is not even barely enough to familiarize yourself with nearly three years of work, but my boss gave him two days.

In 2016, the shop was replaced with another one. Different shop system, different OS, different CI. I don't know why and I can't say I give a damn.

Almost all the people that worked at the company back with me have left for greener pastures, taking their customers (and revenue) with them.

As for my boss' comments, instructions and lines: THAT might not be safe for work. Or kids. Or humans in general. And there wouldn't be much left if you put it through a language filter...

Moral of the story: No, it's not a bad thing to leave a place if you're mistreated there. Don't mistake loyalty with stupidity!

And, to quote one of my favourite Bands: "Nothing matters when the pain is all but gone" (Tragedy + Time by Rise Against).

After mass layoffs my team went from 10 engineers to 4 with no drop in expectations. This was a ridiculous ask, everyone was burnt out and could not keep up. For some reason the geniuses in management gave me a bad performance review despite me doing 2 to 3 full time workloads.

That day I put in applications and got an offer in less than a month from one of them. Put in my notice and suddenly it was surprised Pikachu face. Now they are down to 3 engineers and admitted it would be months before they had the revenue to even backfill my position.

Good riddance.

Lots of oof in one image.

I like how they had the audacity to say (and I fucking quote): "this is good news!"

I don't like to complain about sites generating revenue. I understand it is important and I even feel morally obligated not to use an adblocker. But all I will say is that the site has sustained itself for a very long time without the use of poor-quality and unrelated ads, and this feels like a lot more of a money grab than something the site actually requires.

Anyways, happy to see a -400 score on it. And I guess I can't wait to get Amazon ads on SO.

So my client is (was) paying 3500$~ a month to that service that has also an API and we have been now fighting atleast 2 months for them to raise the rate limit higher. (because the new features pull in a lot more records, to basically make their shitty old dashboard obsolete at some point)

He's even willing to pay more, but the ticket and calls just get thrown around from one level to another, when he threatened to quit, all they changed was to send him to another level that was suggesting 3 months 10% off and when he declined it just got thrown into the pool again lol

So what we end up doing is register his wife on same service (there's not really any alternatives that actually have all that weird shit he needs and his wife was co-owner anyway, so it was just a name change basically), but just tick the higher API rate limit and it worked, he's now quitting the old one.

What's funny though, the new contracts for the same thing he was paying cost just ~2450$ (would have been even less, but hes too clingy on that one page I can't recreate without having the data) so they just lost that revenue, just because they didn't want to raise the API rate limit and the client also decided to give me the difference of one month on top of my contract, once the new contract kicks in and the old one expires in 6ish days (at best) or 12ish days at worst

well done support and assigned engineers, not only did you just lose a client with an old contract paying you 12000$/year more, but you also gave me a great free bost in money lol

btw: I hope I put everything in again, I this time decided to be brave (read as "stupid") and wrote it in the devrant webapp, then accidentally clicked twice outside the borders, making everything disappear..

This isn’t gonna be a random because I do eventually get to a Tech and YouTube related topic.

YouTube is actually killing itself with all of the dumbass rules they’re implementing. Trying to child proof or limit educational content is genuinely a shit policy. The reason so many gaming channels are switching to twitch because it doesn’t try to censor you.

But now I don’t know if you’ve heard but YouTube updated their guidelines and they’re no longer allowing content that teaches people about Hacking essentially (and I hate putting it like that but I can’t remember the exact words they used Hacking just summarizes it) which is fucking ridiculous like what the fuck else, are they gonna stop allowing lock picking videos?

YouTube has always been an amazing FREE resource for people learning Programming, Cyber Security, IT related fields, and even shit like lock picking, cooking, car stuff, and all that stuff. Even sometimes when the tutorials aren’t as detailed or helpful to me they might be exactly what someone else needed. And Cyber Security can be a difficult topic to learn for free. It’s not impossible far from it, but YouTube being there was always great. And to think that a lot of those could be taken down and all of the Security based channels could either lose all revenue or just be terminated is terrifying for everyone but more so them.

A lot of people and schools rely on YouTube for education and to learn from. It’s not like YouTube is the only resource and I understand they don’t want to be liable for teaching people that use these skills for malicious purposes but script kiddies and malicious people can easily get the same knowledge. Or pay someone to give them what they want. But that’s unfair to the people that don’t use the information maliciously.

It’s the same for the channels of different topics can’t even swear and it’s ridiculous there’s so many better options than just banning it. Like FUCK kids nowadays hear swearing from their older siblings, parents, friends, and TV it’s inevitable whether someone swears or not and YouTube is not our parents, they aren’t CBS, so stop child proofing the fucking site and let us learn. Fuck.

TLDR YouTube is banning educational hacking videos and are being retarded with rules in general

Difference between && and || - 1,7K damages

So last Friday we released a my mistake, which resulted in 1,7 K losses for the company. I feel like total idiot, because I messed up if’s and instead && used ||. Testing did not noticed, pull req was approved, nobody noticed it for four days. But that’s because of complex nature of the function and it’s application, but in the end - it was me who put it there. How do you cope with that? I am leaving next week for a better position in another company and it totally messed things up in my head.

Our company makes 70k in revenue so I doubt it’s gonna put a big dent in finances but I feel completely hopeless and like shit.

Harsh truth:

My side SaaS project made more money in its first month (built late winter last year, MVP released after ~3 weeks of development) than the sTaRtUp I work for over its total lifetime so far (built over 3+ months, MVP released in May last year)

...is it time to rage quit?

Often I have dreams of going full-time solo dev, leaving every idiotic, clueless, fumbling clown behind, but I feel like I just don't have the financial runway to do it. However, even from just a few months in 2021 while I was on the job hunt, I created some side revenue streams which I'm still receiving decent revenues from (selling courses, saas products, minor freelancing). I'm just not 100% sure if I was "lucky" during this time period, or if a few more months going at it I'd be able to scrape my way towards a meager (though livable!) income.

Give me biased views, devRant!

I work for a web agency.
Over the last 18 months a company asked us about 5 different quotes for rather minimal changes to their website.
While being minimal changes, estimating costs for them still requires several hours of work for research, meetings, correspondance and writing the damn things. They never even gave us a response (neither positive nor negative), except once where they told us that they wouldn't pay for project management because their instructions are so clear that PM isn't necessary.

As a response to the last one, after several months, they send us a 10 pages long pdf with requirements for a new website (or a "restyle" like they call it, even if it has absolutely nothing in common with the current one).
We inform them that we can't permit ourselves to continue studying new solutions for free and therefore tell them that a detailed offer would cost them something like 300$, and that amount would then be discounted from the eventually accepted job. We also roughly estimate a price range of about 15k - 20k for the new website.

We get an email back, from the CEO (until now it was a secretary), with essentially 3 arguments written in condescending form:
1. he brags about his revenue being over 9 billion $$$ a year, and that being a part of a global holding for which "communication is essential" (sic.) means that they need to coordinate and "can't simply accept an offer" [even if it's 400$, for specific change exactly requested by them, I guess...]

2. 15k is too much [... for the website representing this 9 billion dollar holding on the internet, for which the requirements are written in the 10 pages long pdf]

3. He asks for a meeting

We accept the meeting, we go to their office.

When we arrive there, the secretary informs us that the CEO will not participate. So we talk the her and the head of the "Communication Dept" in videoconference.
I explain them that if the sum, which we thought would be appropriate (~15 - 20k), is too high, the Pareto principle would allow us to, theoretically, achieve about 80% of the features and quality for about 20% of the cost. Their genuine response is:
"So your estimate was wrong! You can do it for much less!".
I try to explain them that the most money in a project goes into "attention to detail".
The "Communication Dept." person, who is "doing this job since too much time" (sic.), refuses to believe and insists that "details" don't exist on the web.
I tell her: "In any kind of work, the more effort you put into something, the better it tends to get, with diminishing returns".
She insists: "I don't understand this".

So now I'm here, doing the 6th offer, free of charge, for a 5k website, for a company that generates 9kkk revenue each year, trying to define a "Definition of Done" that works out.

FML I guess.

Sorry for the long post.

Why the fuck does Apple hate developers so much? I just want to test and play around a bit. Why do I have to own a fucking Mac? Why do I need to pay 99$ a year just to install a debug build on my own device?! It's literally impossible to get into ios development without being rich or having some kind of plan for revenue...

Testing my app on Android:
Install Android studio -> plug in phone -> run code in Android Studio or simply install the resulting apk on your phone.

Trying to test my app on my iPad:
Google how to build app for iPad -> reading that you have to own a Mac to run xcode when you want to build Code for iOS -> searching for a workaround -> find a way to build my app online -> setting the tool and building it -> Trying out 5 different tools to sideload the app, no one works -> finding out that you need a developer account to sign the app for testing purposes on MY OWN DEVICE. I really would appreciate it if I would be able to install personal stuff for testing and LEARNING without being forced into insolvency. Why are people putting up with this kind of bullshit?

Do you know whats worse than someone reach you for an idea " Lets create X existing app, but..." ?
Its "Lets clone that app, we will sell the service cheaper than the cloned app, you do all the job, se urity, hosting, administrating, and we will split the revenue 50/50."
Just happened.

"Smart" home gym equipment: expensive hardware for some grand, proprietary software, and ongoing subscription fees in the $50/mo ballpark.

The SW is usually designed so that even shit that could have been local is instead stored remote as to make the subscription look more worthwhile. The large front-up cost serves not only as revenue, but also to anchor the vendor lock-in.

Open source hackers could potentially unchain the HW so that users would actually own what they purchased, but there is a catch: the HW is sold at a loss, and the subscription is the business model.

Freeing up the HW would render the subscription rather useless, and ramping up the HW sales prices to profitability would destroy any demand.

Basically, it's products that are technically feasible, but not economically viable. Which is why they are not the future of home gyms.

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.

This is what you're in for when you go for THE state-of-the-art "React stack". What you see in the screenshot below is the hellofresh.be website (it's the same as .com). It uses Next.js, React, emotion & styled-components (2 CSS-in-JS libraries). It uses 140MB of RAM for a single tab with some product cards and a slider, logs 70 console errors in production, and fails to load 3/4 times on Firefox.

On mobile, opening a meal card to view its recipe literally takes up to 10 seconds (and I have good connection and performant devices) and you can't choose the last meal card because a f*ing overlay hides the "add" button. And this is a global company with millions in revenue.

All this bugginess has already resulted in incorrect or missed deliveries and they're not doing anything about it. F* you Next.js & F* you HelloFresh IT management

My only nemesis are sales people.
* They try to sell the impossible to the customer.
* They think even the biggest change takes only some minutes to implement, and tests do not even exist.
* They promise to deliver an app within half the time which means we have to cut out animations or some tests to deliver when due.
* They often get a commission (sometimes not as part of profit but revenue!) for calling their pals and asking them if they wanna buy something new (some say they also take the risk, but they don't, the company does).

There may be exceptions, but my perceived ratio between good and bad sales is about 1/20.
Now I am in a very small company with only one sales guy. Guess what, he is a good one! I hope he stays forever.

I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.

Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')

How does devRant make revenue?

@dfox whats the revenue model of devrant? if you dont mind me asking

I’m LOLing at the audacity of one of our vendors.

We contract with a vendor to build and maintain a website. Our network security team noticed there was a security breach of the vendor’s website. Our team saw that malicious users gained access to our Google Search console by completing a challenge that was issued to the vendor’s site.

At first, the vendor tried to convince us that their site wasn’t comprised and it was the Google search Console that was compromised. Nah dude. Our Search Console got compromised via the website you maintain for us. Luckily our network team was able to remove the malicious users from our search console.

That vendor site accepts credit card payments and displays the user’s contact info like address, email, and phone. The vendor uses keys that are tied to our payment gateway. So now my employer is demanding a full incident report from the vendor because their dropping the ball could have compromised our users’ data and we might be responsible for PCI issues.

And the vendor tried to shit on us even more. The vendor also generates vanity urls for our users. My employer decided to temporarily redirect users to our main site (non vendor) because users already received those links and in order to not lose revenue. The vendor’s solution is to build a service that will redirect their vanity urls to our main site. And they wanted to charge us $5000 usd for this. We already pay them $1000 a month already.

WTAF we are not stupid. Our network service team said we could make the argument that they do this without extra charge because it falls in the scope of our contract with them. Our network team also said that we could terminate the contract because the security breach means they didn’t render the service they were contracted to do. Guess it’s time for us to get our lawyer’s take on this.

So now it looks like my stakeholders want me to rebuild all of this in house. I already have a lot on my plate, but I’m going to be open to their requests because we are still in the debrief phase.

You know what fkn sucks? I was so fkn excited to join the company. It was a dream job for me. I loved everything about it. The stack, the concept, the core values, everything.
Fast forward 3 years and I no longer recognize the company I joined. Went from customer first to revenue first. No other vision than increase sales. Heart fkn breaking...

This is a story about the shitty client who managed to ruin everyone's day, consistently....

So this client, its our biggest revenue source (about 33% of total) and our boss is total wuss when talking to them because of that... Each meeting he has with them he ends up bending over nd just takes it all...

So after each meeting with those shit heads, it's always the same...

It's our fault for going over budget (them changing their mind like 10 times during a project over key issues has of course nothing to do with it, because hey, we're a flexible company and all we do is modular and extendable right?)

Its our fault for not meeting the deadline, because of course our boss keeps accepting last minute projects like there we're otherwise sitting on our thumbs

And than their fucking contact person... Biggest ass ever, always involving us in his own office politics... I'd throw him through the window

Nice to see all my new app's advertisement stats go up :)
Pageviews: 1316 (+41%)
Impressions: 1142 (+24%)
Clicks: 7 (+500%)

Except the only one that matters :(
estimated revenue: €0.03 (-25%)

Fuck you Admob!

My workplace just lost a contract that would bring us a €20000 revenue because the CEO refused to spend €5.

So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.

I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.

Here's my problems with this place:

1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.

2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.

3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.

4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.

5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.

6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.

7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.

8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.

9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.

10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.

11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.

Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.

My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.

I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.

Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?

Love you DevRant <3

caution: just some dude sharing a random story.

started my own small business around half a year now. a month earlier from that my cousin also started his career as a self employed dev with his own small business and we work together.

next year we we will start a company together, where we merge our existing small businesses into one. we are developing software on our own and we design and implement software for our customers.

seems like we are doing something right because we are reaching our capacities almost all of the time.

we plan to hire apprentices (hope it's the right word) and to teach them all we know to be able to then increase our possible workload.

you know, I do not have a degree or some form of education in the field of IT. And here in germany it was almost impossible to land a job as a dev. needed my cousin who studied cs to get me my first position in that field - and even with his reputation it was not easy.

this shit will not happen on my watch. If I see someone with fire for development I will give them a chance, irrespective of their background. And I will be more than happy to let that person grow and to give every kind of support I can.

we also plan to have something like "if the employee has a good idea for software that sells, we will support it and share revenue". got to figure out the details on that one, but I want to give the employee the possibility to grow some passive income out of their normal job - because for me this was never an option. and I think that this will motivate in some way 😅

just wanted to get this out of my head 😣

!dev

I have a couple of thoughts about social justice controversies from these last years.

I think it's hard to have a good opinion about these events for several reasons.

One reason is that finding good information in 2019 is very hard.

Revenue based sites (thus unneutral) dominate the search results. You search about something and you find thousands of sites basically saying the same thing (because they copy each other).

That's why the existence of a free and open search engine is so important, so it's easier to find neutral hence good information on which to base your opinions, but they are prohibitively big for small groups to build.

Another reason is that controversies generate shock and shock curtails rational thinking. Maybe that's how the primitive brain works?

I'm not much of a scholar to feel confident to say that, but it's so recurrent that it's not too much of a wild guess.

When a controversy happens, a natural reaction is to pick a side. This means that:
a) we assume that there are only 2 sides, and
b) we must pick one of them

So, maybe the human is a bad politician by nature?

Also, because of the shock controversies generate, peaceful dialogue is very rare.

I have yet to see peaceful dialogue online about what patriarchy means to feminists and a lot of other terms they use.

I don't care much about feminists that vandalize or interrupt talks (yelling over someone else is abuse in my opinion).

But for the rest of them, I think discussing their ideas would be good.

I say this because most feminist discourse I see online is not open. Or maybe there are such instances but the web is so big that it's hard to find such instances.

I think some part of the modern feminist doctrine is bullshit, and some part is true.

I for one hate when some men I know in life expect their wives to be their cooks+cleaners (unless they want to do that, willingly). Personally, I'd encourage my wife to get a job (rightfully so, not just to meet some minority quota in some company).

I don't mind either calling a trans person the pronoun she wants.

But other ideas are awful, like the idea that meritocracy is patriarchy, so you need to force minorities to meet a proportionate quota. That's terrible reasoning.

Or the excessive self appreciation culture, like saying to yourself "you are pretty, you are beautiful, you are perfect". I think that grows arrogance and black-or-white thinking.

And some other ideas as well.

I guess the same you can say about any doctrine with different degrees. Some part is bullshit, some part isn't.

Some right wing people hate everyone who isn't white by default, but some want to have more immigration control.

I sure don't like the experiment of separating children from families like the current us govt did, but I wouldn't be happy either to know that by '99 50% of gangs members in the us were hispanic.

With this, I'm not going to say "embrace everyone's ideas" like an idiot. I hate when people do that. It's a stupid and weak reaction to radicalism.

In fact I think the way you fight radicalism and bad doctrines is that you listen to them and maintain good dialogue and counterargue in a respectful but insightful manner.

Making snide remarks, insulting or trolling won't change anyone's mind. That is just throwing fire to the fire.

In fact, when someone gets harassed because of something they believe in, usually it results in even more adherence to their beliefs, because of the usual assumption that success or goodness is full of strife.

So by telling a "sjw" or kkk member that they are idiots over twitter, you are in fact making them stronger believers in their doctrine.

Think of Daryl Davis, a black guy that made 200 members leave the kkk. How? He didn't tell them they were assholes, he somehow made friends with them.

I feel bad now because I've been trolling new devrant users a lot because of how they worsen the quality of the site, but maybe I should tell them that they are ruining the site somehow in a nice way and maybe they'll listen? I dunno...

Regarding Article 13 (or 17 or wherever it moved to now)… Let's say that the UK politicians decide to be dicks and approve the law. After that, we need to get it engineered in, right? Let's talk a bit about how.. well, I'd maybe go over it. Been thinking about it a bit in the shower earlier, so.. yeah.

So, fancy image recognition or text recognition from articles scattered all over the internet, I think we can all agree.. that's infeasible. Even more so, during this lobby with GitHub and OpenForum Europe, guy from GitHub actually made a very valid point. Now for starters, copyright infringement isn't an issue on the platform GitHub that pretty much breathes collaboration. But in the case of I-Boot for example, that thing from Apple that got leaked earlier. If that would get preemptively blocked.. well there's no public source code for it to get compared against to begin with, right? So it's not just "scattered all over the internet, good luck crawling it", it's nowhere to be found *at all*.

So content filtering.. yeah. Nope, ain't gonna happen. Keep trying with that, EU politicians.

But let's say that I am a content creator who hates the cancer of joke/meme because more often than not it manifests itself as a clone of r/programmerhumor.. someone decides to freeboot my content. So I go out, look for it, find it. Facebook and the likes, make it easier to find it in the first place, you dicks. It's extremely hard to find your content there.

So Facebook implements a way to find that content a bit easier maybe. Me being the content creator finds it.. oh blimey! It can't be.. it's the king of freebooting on Facebook, SoFlo! Who would've thought?! So at that point.. I'd like to get it removed of course. Report it as copyright infringement? Of course. Again Facebook you dicks, don't make it so tedious to fill in that bloody report. And look into it quickly! The videos those SoFlo dicks post is only relevant in the first 48h or so. That's where they make the most money. So act more quickly.

So the report is filled, video's taken down.. what else? Maybe temporarily make them unable to post as a bit of a punishment so that they won't do it again? And put in a limit to the amount of reports they can receive. Finally, maybe reroute the revenue stream to the original content creator instead. That way stolen content suddenly becomes free exposure! Awesome!

*suddenly realizes that I've been talking about the YouTube copyright strike system all along*

… Well.. maybe something like that then? That shouldn't be too hard to implement, and on YouTube at least it seems to be quite effective. Just imagine SoFlo and the likes that are repeat offenders, every 3 posts they get their account and page shut down. Good luck growing an audience that way. And good luck making new accounts all the time to start with.. account verification technology is pretty good these days. Speaking of experience here, tried bypassing Facebook's signup hoops a fair bit and learned a bit about some of the things they have red flags on, hehe.

But yeah, something like that maybe for social media in general. And.. let's face it, the biggest one that would get hurt by something like this would be Facebook. And personally I think it's about time for that bastard company to get a couple of blows already.

What are your thoughts on this?

I don't understand working in FAANG. As an engineer, who inherently has an ultimate say in how the computer worlds you construct work, how do you live with acceptance that you have no say whatsoever in how your company is run? how do you accept doing work that you don't always see the product benefit of?

Yes, FAANG pays a lot to ordinary engineers, but when you were dreaming back when you were a STEM student with fiery eyes, did you really want to be an ordinary engineer, no matter the bankroll? After all, it's not the total company's revenue, it's at least the revenue divided by staff count. In Nintendo, salaries are way higher than in EA, because there are way less people working at Nintendo.

Take any unicorn startup that survived. If you work there, you will have a say, you have an impact, you see the results of your work, and you will earn much more.

I wanted to work at Google as a student, but now I feel like it's just a plastic dream pitched to those inexperienced who don't know any better.

Note that above I don't even touch ethics, like anti-suicide nets in Foxconn factories that make Apple devices, let alone Facebook's and Google's surveillance.

Maybe, if you're somehow an engineer who has proficiency but not care, or if you cared, but was broken, with fire in your eyes extinguished, and now you see your work as "just work", FAANG might be a good choice.

But I can't relate.

I rarely tell this story because it's hard to believe and would show me in a bad light if people don't believe its details. I know there have been foolish moves from my part, and more stuff should have been agreed to in writing, and I did step into a legal grey area. However I am pleased with what I did and how it all turned out, and this is as close to the truth as possible without needing to explain too many details.

I was once a team lead in an outsourcing company. We had a flexible payment plan depending on results. That helped me motivate myself and my team. Things worked great.

But then the boss started acting like shit:
1. Flexible payment means minimum, right?
2. Promises are made to be broken, as long as your employees have hope and work overtime for a whole month just to finish an important project before schedule, right?
3. Who needs a good, comfortable, SAFE work environment when you can save 30$ on not buying a new crappy chair in place of the old broken crappy chair, if it can be maintained standing by just a bit of duct tape and careful balancing on it? It's not like that developer who earns 30$ per hour has anything else to think about than balancing on a broken chair, right?

I'm a very calm person at work. I never ever raised my voice at anyone for 10 years of my career. Except this situation. I pulled the boss out of the office so his secretary wouldn't hear what I had to say. I threw this everything into his face.
A guy from sales got out of the office to go to the bathroom, and when he heard me, he carefully snuck back into the office (I didn't see him. He told me this over a beer after he left).

Of course I quit on the spot, convinced most of my team members to leave (wasn't hard, I just had to offer a secure plan, which I did), and helped my team members to get good positions elsewhere, and assisted others in starting their own business, by stealing customers from this company (the asshole did not foresee this when he prepared the labour contracts), after he accused me of plagiarism (that I stole code from somewhere else) and used that excuse to not pay me what we agreed upon.

I didn't want litigation. I just used karma, while remaining in the legal realm.

Within a month after this, more than half of his company was gone, and he was left with only a fraction of the revenue he was making before, since the only ones left were people that did not produce value (sales that had nothing to sell, accounting that had nothing to account, etc.), and just one person maintaining one remaining contract that was bringing barely enough money to sustain half of these people.

Now I want to congratulate you for actually finishing reading this :)

On iOS 11, Apple is no longer allowing you to open apps that are 32 bit. Apple should have given all the developers with 32-bit apps free access to the developer program rather than forcing them to pay a $99 fee to publish a 64-bit version of their app.

This would’ve made better business sense for them as publishers would have had an opportunity to create new apps and see more revenue coming in from upgraded apps. Ultimately more money for Apple. Not sure what dumb fool at Apple HQ thought this was a good idea.

When your company is sinking, and you keep suggesting to pivot, trying something new or different enough, having some meeting to think about new levers to increase revenue... and the only answer is "we don't have enough time for this. Let's try tweaking <insert random feature here>".

WE ARE LOSING 30.000€+ EACH MONTH!!! WHO FUCKING CARES ABOUT CHANGING THIS FEATURE NOW!!!

Today it's been more than 7 months since "we don't have enough time". Still nothing intelligent has been tried. The company could be closed down in 2 month. FUCK YA ALL decision makers!

Now I'll probably lose my job just because you're too fucking stupid to get your finger out of your ass! The company is in the exact same state since 7 months!!! Go burn in hell!

Of course the shouting episodes all happened during the era I was doing WordPress dev.

So we were a team of consultants working on this elephant-traffic website. There were a couple of systems for managing content on a more modular level, the "best" being one dubbed MF, a spaghettified monstrosity that the 2 people who joined before me had developed.

We were about to launch that shit into production, so I was watching their AWS account, being the only dev who had operational experience (and not afraid to wipe out that macos piece of shit and dev on a real os).

Anyhow, we enable the thing, and the average number of queries per page load instantly jumps from ~30 (even vanilla WP is horrible) to 1000+. Instances are overloaded and the ASG group goes up from 4 to 22. That just moves the problem elsewhere as now the database server is overwhelmed.

Me: we have to enable database caching for this thing *NOW*

Shitty authors of the monstrosity (SAM): no, our code cannot be responsible for that, it's the platform that can't handle the transition.

Me: we literally flipped a single switch here and look at the jump in all these graphs.

SAM: nono, it's fine, just add more instances

Me: ARE YOU FUCKIN SERIOUS?
Me: - goes and enables database caching without any approvals to do so, explaining to mgmt. that failure to do so would impair business revenue due to huge loading times, so they have to live with some data staleness -

SAM: Noooo, we'll show you it's not our code.
SAM: - pushes a new release of the monstrosity that makes DB queries go above 2k / page load -

...

Tho on the bright side, from that point on I focused exclusively on performance, was building a nice fragment caching framework which made the site fly regardless of what shitty code was powering it, tuned the stack to no end and learned a ton of stuff in the process which allowed me to graduate from the tar pit of WP development.

Spent 2+ months this year building two new software courses. They've netted me a total of... $17.00

That's 5 cents per hour at 40/hours a week, not bad!!!!

also please fucking tell me how a $49.99 course with 92 enrollments this month earns me a grand total of $93 (even rounding up here for generosity)

creator: $93
udemy: $4506

udemy: "instructor gets 37% of comissions"

yeah okay then where is my fucking $1000+

I mean what in the literal FUCK is going on here

better put: i average a single fucking dollar for each $50 course I sell?

Please kill me and end it all in this mindless race to the bottom

taking a deep dive on this revenue share and then i'm going to fucking get the money i deserve

999 dollars = 835,20 euro
Launch price of iPhone X, 1179,00 euros
Maybe it's because Apple pays too much revenue tax in EU , oh, wait...

A few Challenges at my job:
- a CEO with zero tech skills and zero memory.
- a sysadmin with literal brain damage and epilepsy (but he's great, we just have had to learn how to deal with it)
- another (volunteer) sysadmin who we call @God on Slack and who usually only shows up in extreme crises.
- the budget of a tiny organization, the web traffic of a huge site.
- incoherent business logic subject to the whims of volunteers and the loudest users
- a main revenue stream that contradicts our main mission.

it's fun! woot.

I have been commenting a lot recently on linux ranters who rant about windows for stupid reasons.
To all these people who think linux is better and they are smart(er) than windows users, i say:
We use windows in the company I work for. And if you are a linux user, you're just not welcome and your skills are just a waste for the company. And yes it is a successful company with 100s of millions of euros as net revenue.
Our users have windows machines and we offer topnotch Microsoft solutions for them.
When you ask me to switch to linux because of a problem i had in a Windows machine, it makes me feel that you are a stupid person who knows about linux and gives solutions based on his stupidity and on zero knowledge of the scenario.
Please be professional and think about the solution you are offering. It would be best if you did not offer any solution at all in fact.

fuck wordpress... Got a request to improve wordpress site speed + pagespeed score. 20-30 plugins, 15 or more additional ones off. Improved the score and noticed that my adblocker is blocking a lot of urls. Sure enough theres a hidden iframe in the bottom with 10 ad network scripts and bidding get requests. Someone is making ad revenue from this shit.. wtf. I've only had problems with shitty wordpress sites being hacked for some reason. It's always a shitty experience. Any tips on fixing hacked wordpress sites?

This might be a long post. I need some serious advice.

For the past 6-7 months, My friend and I have been working with these two guys "Managers" on their startup idea. He managed the backend and I was managing the 2 frontend systems for them. The Managers are non-technical.

For the longest time, the Managers were very stubborn on how they wanted things to be implemented in my code or how they wanted something to look. Initially, this was not a bother as we thought that their experience bought some insight that we lacked, but after changing dozens of things back to how we originally made them, we started feeling unhappy. I specifically was more affected by this as most of their changes were related to the front end.

This caused a lot of rifts between us and sometimes led to heated conversations. I won't say that it's all on them. I do have an attitude issue. But then, it's the same with them.

Other than that, one of the Managers is very condescending. He used to talk badly, discredit my work and even say things like "Ohh, so you can't do it" for things that I said will take too much time to implement. This was seriously affecting my mental health.

Nevertheless, we completed the system, which was originally supposed to be just an MVP, over the course of these months and now have our sites up and running with almost 100-200 daily hits. But because it's an e-commerce site, that too with a very different model, the revenue has not started yet.

Yesterday, one of the Managers called me and in so many words told me that I should exit, because of my attitude, with my current equity which is just 3% which amounts to nothing as the company has no value right now. On top of that, I, an idiot, had not taken any remuneration for the first 4 months.

Although I too want to leave, now that I have seen their real face and also because of my mental health. I feel that the system I have made is worth more than 3% equity, way more than that. One of them is a multi-featured seller dashboard to manage products, finances, orders, and a ton of complex features like bulk uploads using excel, image cropping for products, and region selection. The other is a highly optimized dynamic site using Nuxt which is used as the store, with SEO good enough to often list it as one of the top results of various google searches. I'll drop the dev links in the comments if you are interested.

But I don't know how to go about it. I do have complete control over my code and have not signed any formal contract with them, but I feel bad about jeopardizing the company at this stage. Not to mention all that work will just go to waste as well.

I was working as a software dev contractor at this company providing specific e-learning services for a specific industry X.

One day the CEO posts on Linkedin about an interview discussing the potential of gaining $100k per year working in industry X after getting specialized training for 6 months (using our e-learning platform of course) .

My gross income at the time was $65k. My experience was about 7-8 years. Now the thing is you might say "gee that's pretty low for a dev, especially a contractor", and yes I agree, but you have to understand a few facts:

1. I am from eastern Europe (cheapish labor - which btw for all of you out there from the West, including Germany and whatnot, it is xenophobic to consider easterners cheap and it personally insults me and my ability - but that's another story)

2. I was happy to accept the offer since it was the best I had up to that point :))

Now, by the time the LinkedIn post I was heavily invested in the product development. I personally had written 30% of the code (frontend and backend) compared to the whole development team (about 15 devs)... and yes you might argue that performance is not measured by number of lines of code... but trust me when I am saying I did the most on that product, and I am not saying this to brag, I actually care about the stuff that I work on.

When I saw that post on Linkedin I thought to myself "what kind of BS is this? I am a dev and devs are supposedly the best paid workers out there, and a guy from industry X that just got trained for 6 months would get more than me?! WTF?!"

So I messaged the CEO ...

Me: I noticed the post from linkedin about $100k by working in industry X, I am curious how does one get to that revenue per year? What is your advice?

CEO: The best way to obtain value is by creating value which you maximize continuously.

Me: and how does one maximize value?

CEO: it does not matter how hard your work but how large of an impact you make!

Me: ... and how do you measure impact? (me thinking about performance reviews for contract negotiations - and because performance reviews should be SMART -> meaning it should be measurable somehow)

CEO: Simon Sinek says ... << insert motivational quote here because I don't remember and don't care >>

I just lost if after reading the name "Simon Sinek" ...

So you see my dear friends ? It is all fairy dust, smoke and mirrors, in the end it is about maximizing profits, lowering costs and maintaining the illusion of opportunity... when there is none.

Lord is my witness... I hate hypocrisy and quackery ...

You can imagine that my contribution on that product immediately lowered, doing the bare minimum to meet the contract demands AND I FEEL NO REGRET.

%&#$ YOU SIMON SINEK.

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.

We use a third party paid company to produce a service and give ongoing support for it, which all our revenue streams depend upon. They are shit and their service is shit. Here's how my conversation about testing went today.

Me: 'hey X wrote an integration test project for the service. It shows the service is broken 50% of the time. We should give their team access to it and have them run it as part of CI'

Colleague: 'They are too shit to setup CI'

PM: 'we are stuck with them so there is no point. It is what it is'

Boss: just ignores me. Not even a reply.

Some days later

Head of QA: 'Hey Dev and QA are broken'

Me: 'because their service is broken. I made so and so suggestion before but it was rejected. We will just have to accept Dev and QA are broken 50% of the time'

Head of QA: 'no we cant'

Me: 'ok so we should setup the tests to run by giving them access'

Head of QA: 'No we shouldn't. The tests can only be used by us and if they break it tells us so we can act on it, or choose not to'

Me: 'We would not want to act immediately on all our revenue streams breaking? Yes we can reverse engineer their client and fix errors as they occur, or we could just have them run the tests and a team our company pays for can stop adding breaking changes to their own API every other day. Right now it has been broken for 2 weeks.'

Head of QA: 'in an ideal world we would have an internal team so you're wrong'

Me: :)

I really don't understand how they can come to such a conclusion. Am I missing something or am I surrounded by total fucking idiots?

One of the devs was let go after his probation period. Today was his last day. I didn't review a lot of his code, but it seemed to be fine. I'm not sure if his output was just slow.

Either he wasn't working out or the startup decided maybe they shouldn't have hired new people yet. There's been a freeze for a while and this guy started in October. The company's revenue targets keep slipping. Profitability was moved from 2026 to 2027.

We're on a slowly sinking ship.

The agency I own built a WordPress plugin for a client using a freelancer developer. The client, out of ambivalence, withheld information that would have drastically changed the design of the plugin, but by the time we found out it was much to late to start over. The developer moved overseas in the middle of it all and from then on was not very responsive to communications about the project which delayed things by months. I tried to find a replacement developer but nobody else had experience with the third-party API. The live version of the API ended up not being able to support what we were trying to get it to do with the plugin even though the test version of the API was fine and the vendor was unhelpful. And because we spent so much time and money on the plugin, we weren’t able to even begin on another part of the project. The client complained of over $30,000 in lost revenue due to these issues. Complete fail all around. I’m never doing another custom software project again. It’s all just website design from here.

Alright so I’m