Self(programmer) reflection 🙄

One of my theoretical CS teachers always complains and makes it sound like everything around him is an annoyance to his existence
- being late or in a bad mood? His pregnant wife is very tiring (good ol' haha women are hormonal much?)
- having to create and correct exercises for us (students) is a nuisance because it's so much work and we're not supposed to be spoon-fed (which makes the whole learning experience very demotivating)
- every explanation start is continued by at least 3 changes in the explanation itself, which makes everything super-confusing
- all his helpers are incompetent and not rising up to his expectations

Someone needs some self-reflection

Haven't been here for a long time, kinda amazed I still had an account to be honest. There used to be a bunch of people I chatted with regularly on here, but my mentally ill self decided at some point to self sabotage (surprise surprise) and cut contact with almost everyone.

That said I've gone through quite a bit of therapy, which has definitely improved my outlook on life and allowed me to do some much needed self reflection. Has that made life better? Hard to say, but I like to think I've got a grasp on my mental health now, with the occasional relapse, because shit's a 🌈process🌈.

I'd like to apologize for the hurt I've caused some people here, you know who you are. My behaviour at times has been inexcusable. There's no sugarcoating it.

The past years have been a rollercoaster to say the least. Switched jobs multiple times. Went from doing frontend exclusively, to fullstack, then backend, and now engineering lead responsible for all architecture and infrastructure, learning a lot about myself and people around me along the way. Somehow I managed to get into a somewhat stable relationship, which is still a big WTF from time to time. The company I currently work for has had a metric fuckton of layoffs, just like the company I worked for before that. I can tell the lack of stability in work still affects my mental health a lot, but seeing how I've been growing a lot personally while the market seemingly has gone to shit gives me some level of confidence. I'll be alright.

This is mostly a sign of life to whom it may concern. I'm alive, existence is dreadful but manageable, shit's hard, but it's all gonna be okay in the end. I may or may not post a rant from time to time, as management loves unrealistic deadlines, and the PM can't say no to the CEO for some reason so her work ends up on my plate most of the time as well. Oh and of course the primary product of the company had a codebase which made me want to gorge my eyes out. So yeah, plenty to rant about.

- Launch the new version of the system I have been refactoring for 2 years and counting, then ceremoniously burn (literally) the legacy code as well as the cluster fuck of hardware it runs on.

- Decrease my stress + bus factor by bringing another up to speed on my code & the new version (his cluster fuck now).

- Pay attention to & take better care of health, my wrists in patricular.

- Find a mentor and mentor someone else.

- Get out of crisis management mode and find the time to write tuts, experiment and live a little.

- Find & join a local dev meetup, maybe make a local dev friend.

- Book leave and actually take it, preferabbly without having to take my laptop to the beach - actually, preferabbly at least have the choice to take a offline vacation.

- Sort through the drives containing ALL the code I have ever written, migrate the usefull interesting bits to Github.

Phew, that bit of self reflection was intense! I'm adding a cron to my server to sms & email me this rant in a year to remind me what hope looks like.

I don’t know if I would call it a quirk of the language or serious abuse of it :P

But I managed to get a null ref exception when comparing a local int variable to an int parameter to the same function in C#.

Since a local or parameter of type in cannot be null and I compared the variables them self and dud not try to access any property on them (and no extension method or implicit case or similar) my first thought, along with all colleagues that chipped in to help, was that this should not be possible.

Turns out the method was called through reflection and in that part it injected null as the base object to call the method on.

Since local variables actually are referenced through the parent object this was what was causing the null ref.

That took some time to figure out.

I've realized that I was acting like an annoying asshole in the past on devRant and I apologize for that behavior.

Some people deserved it and some didn't. Some companies deserved it and some didn't.

I guess the time for a change has come. I will be more careful from now on.

On a side note: I have a different username now.

It was a very depressing experience with you, -ANGRY-CLIENT-. Have fun on the other side. :)

I am living my dream.

I have a nice fam, enough capital, a job I enjoy, I'm enjoying the life in this world every day now. And yesterday I caught myself in a moment that 10 years ago I thought only happens in movies. An engineer participating in a meeting with the client while riding on a motorcycle.

I mean, how cool is that! It may not seem like much now, because it was a necessity - I had to be at 2 places at once. But a 10 years younger me would wet his pants if he knew I would one day be doing that IRL.

How about you? How would a 10 years younger you feel about the _now_ you?

Today I just considered that Excel isn't just a random spreadsheet product name, it's the *word* excel. To _excel_ at something

I need to do more self reflection 🪞

I would not consider myself an overachiever by any means, but I must say, I'm quite satisfied with my contributions this year at the new (relatively speaking) job. I got to go back to writing code almost every day, all day, and that sure as hell beats being in meetings all the goddamn time.

!Rant:
Why did you guys decide to become a developer?

I became a developer after finding out that I loved wrecking my brains on complicated puzzles to keep me from getting depressed. After a while I figured out that I'm the person that needs to be challenged to actually be able to enjoy something and start to overthink the little things.

Here are the things I wreck my brains over on a weekly basis.
- programming
- research on complicated subjects
- magic the gathering

After doing some self reflection today, I realized that I could finish college (I passed every exam), but the amount of time I spent for college (basically the whole day each day) is too much to handle for me.

Note to future me: If you blame yourself for why you didn't continue, it's because of the lack of time, freedom and calmness of your mind. Otherwise you would have went literally insane.

Trust me, your early version is in that phase right now, and I know it better than you do.

I know a few fascinating people. They didn't invent anything historical, they didn't start a revolution, they didn't even get their names on a newspaper. They are just very very smart. And they use their intelligence to improve the world. Each have their own companies or projects, which don't do anything magical but they work really well. And these are nice people. People who have a lot of friends, and whom their kids look up to, not because they're heroes but because they're so bright and kind that those capable of self-reflection feel inferior in their company. But most importantly, I appreciate these people because, while being conscious, intelligent and aware of civilization's problems as well as their own, they are still satisfied and sometimes even happy.

I lost my cool and got into a trembling furious mode yesterday. The outcome is an ugly pile of mess. After calming myself down and reflecting, this is what I end up telling myself this morning.

I let myself touched shit. When someone was throwing shit at me, I went and touch it and throw it back instead of avoiding it. I created a shit storm instead of a cleansing rain. And now not only me, everyone around me has to breath in shit air.

As a developer who loves to do back-end work, I pause and do some self-reflection every time I'm asked to make some user interface decisions. It's not as easy for me.

The number of concurrent transformations impacting more than half of the codebase in Orchid surpassed 4, so instead of walking the reference graph for each of these I'm updating the whole codebase, from lexer to runtime, in a single pass.

In this process, I also got to reread a lot of code from a year ago. This is the project I learned Rust with. It's incredible, not just how much better I've gotten at this language, but also how much better I've gotten at structuring code on general.

Interestingly though my problem-solving ability seems to be the same. I can tell this by looking at the utilities I made to solve specific well-defined abstract problems. I may have superficial issues with how the code is spelled out in text, but the logic itself is as good as anything I could come up with today.