Last day on the contract from hell. I'd written a project with one other person in our spare time that performed a critical business function. The following conversation was had between myself, the job thief who was handed my job and their manager, with the 10 other IBM GS "dev domain experts" assigned to that team sitting silently on zoom:

Moi: hey all, what seems to be the problem?
JT: how to update the java for requirement?
Moi: I would assume a text editor, have you tried intellij
JTM: she's talking about ticket BS-101, the data is wrong
Moi: ah, well, you might want to fix that
JT: how to fix?
Moi: update the database and update the logic that depends on it
JTM: what changes are those?
Moi: the ones described in the ticket, I would assume, I'm no longer on that project
JTM: didn't you write this application?
Moi: yes.
JTM: ok, so do you know how to fix the issue?
Moi: definitely
JTM: ok... ... Can you tell us how to fix it?
Moi: yes.
*The sound of silence*
JTM: *will* you tell us?
Moi: I would, but I'm already off the clock, and as of an hour ago I no longer have a contract. And even if I did, I don't have a contract or authorization to work on that system. I'm not actually being paid for this call.
JTM: ... What are we going to do about this?
Moi: I have no idea
JTM: ok, so we can look at getting a 1 month contract to support this
Moi: I'm sure our firm has someone who can definitely help you out
JTM: *heavy raging* ... Can you do the work?
Moi: Unfortunatley, I'm already committed to a new contract at another customer. I also don't do one month contracts. I'm an engineer, not a car wash employee
JTM: well, I don't understand how you can just leave us in the lurch like this?!
Moi: well, respectfully, it was your decision to cut me from the budget because you thought you were close enough to end of the project to get it across the line with junior resources.
Interjecting-JT: I am senior!
Moi: Right. So, basically, you took ownership of the product before go live. We advised against it, in writing, numerous times. We also notified you that we would not carry a bench, so the project resources are now working on other things. We can provide you with new resources for a minimum 6 month duration who can help you out. Also, since we've cycled out, our rate has increased per the terms of our MSA.
JTM: we don't have budget for that! How are we supposed to do this?!
Moi: *zoom glare at JT* that question is more appropriate for your finance officer and the IT director. I can send a few emails and schedule a call with your account representative and the aforementioned individuals so you can hash this out.

-_---------------
I'm free! 🥳 That said, still plenty of residual fodder I need to get out of my system on these guys. Might need to start my own Dilbert.

So, I grew up on the US/Mexican border, in a city where saying there's no opportunity is like saying the Titanic suffered a small leak on its maiden voyage. There were two kinds of people in said town: Mexicans trying to find something less shit than juarez and white trash reveling in their own failure. I came from the latter, for whatever that's worth.

I graduated high school when I was almost 16 years old. Parents couldn't really afford to support three kids and pay the rent on the latest in a long line of shit holes we migrated in and out of. If being a serial eviction artist is a thing, my family were savants.

I applied to college and got accepted only to be told by my father that he didn't see the need. Turns out the only reason he'd helped me graduate early was so I could start working and help pay his bills. I said okay, turned around and tossed a bag and my shitty af spare parts computer into the back of the junkyard Vega I generously referred to as a car and moved cross country. Car died on arrival, so I was basically committed.

Pulled shifts at two part times and what kids today call a side hustle to pay for school, couch surfed most of the time. Sleep deprivation was the only constant.

Over the first 4 months I'd tried leveraging some certs and previous experience I'd obtained in high school to get employment, but wasn't having much luck in the bay area. And then I lost my job. The book store having burned down on the same weekend the owner was conveniently looking to buy property in Vegas.

Depression sets in, that wonderful soul crushing variety that comes with what little safety net you had evaporating.

At a certain point, I was basically living out of the campus computer lab, TA friend of mine nice enough to accidentally lock me in on the reg. Got really into online gaming as a means of dealing with my depression. One night, I dropped some code on a UO shard I'd been playing around on. Host was local, saw the code and offered me a job at his firm that paid chump change, but was three times what all my other work did combined and left time for school. Ground there for a few years until I got a position with work study at LBL that conflicted too much for it to remain mutually beneficial. Amicable parting of the ways.

Fucking poverty is what convinced me to code for a living. It's a solid guarantee of never going back to it. And to anyone who preaches the virtues of it and skipping opportunity on grounds of the moral high ground, well, you know.

devRant is really cool for us students because it gives us an insight into the real world of developers, something which a lot of schools simply don't give you. I would recommend anyone studying software or hardware (be it at school or in spare time) to get involved.

Thanks @dfox and @trogus

My old employer used to used a highly complex people management system, made up of around fifteen or so different tools and packages. Apparently this had been the case for decades, so in my spare time, I wrote an entirely bespoke, extensible HR web application that could be easily modified without changing the code. It even supported the weird spider web management structure.

I took it to my area manager, who pushed it up the chain. Apparently the country representative liked it a lot, so decided to bring me on board for an implementation and test case. Fast forward a few months, and people are singing praises. I get a huge promotion, with a sizeable pay bump to match.

Sadly, most of my country was sold out to another org, who decided pretty much straight off to make 90% of us redundant. Last I heard, though, my app is now in use in almost every operating country around the world. Not bad for something I wrote in my spare time.

I'm waiting for them to need modifications, because I never had time to complete the documentation...

Been reading devrant posts for a month or so, this is my first actual post. I'm hoping it will be therapeutic. ☺️ I need something to keep me from killing my boss when I see him again tomorrow..

Some backstory: Currently working in HR for the last 7 or so years with complete shit for brains boss, even worse when it comes to anything related to technology. For almost two years I've been working to get another bachelor's degree. This time in computer sciences, to make a career switch to systems and software engineer. Last week I roughly had the following wonderful conversation:

Boss: we've needed new Recruitment software for a while now. Can't you make us one as a school project?

Me: 'Make us one?' It's not really that simple.. I'm barely halfway through my education, maybe I could do it, but it would take me quite a long time even if I could work on it fulltime.. Combining a halftime job with a fulltime education is taking up enough of my time as it is and I have more than enough school projects btw..

Boss: it would be a win-win. Work a little harder in your spare time and when you graduate you have a real-life project on your resume.

Me: I'm sorry, i'm failing to see the 'win' for me here.. I work 10 hours a day, 7 days a week on average, trying to combine work and studies. I'm pretty much maxed out..

Boss: Your coworker(also extreme dumbass) told me you wrote some quick code the other day that helped him out. Don't underestimate yourself, I'm sure you can do this.

Me(in complete disbelief by now): I wrote him an Excel-macro! They don't even teach me that at school. It's a very very very long way from actual software development! I'm sorry, it just can't be done.

Boss: Thats too bad. I expected you to welcome an opportunity like this and be more motivated towards this company..

Me: ***more disbelief and silence, just staring at him***
I'm sorry you feel that way.
***walked away***

WTF, I work my ass off for 7 years for this fucking shithead.. Even before I started this bachelors degree I had at least some understanding of the work developers put in their software. It blows my mind, no, it fucking angers me how people think making software is so simple.. Why do you think it's a 3-year education you fucking cunt?

Please, someone tell me how I can keep myself from ramming his fucking head through a wall tomorrow...

Some 'wk306' highlights from different people:

Walk around the office in his underwear, because he forgot he left his trousers in the bathroom

Run a red light outside the office due to not wearing his required glasses. When questioned by co-workers, replied "I don't follow those facist rules"

Asking if we work less will we get paid more, because the project will take longer to do (while in a startup with no funding trying to secure some)

Tell a senior dev to stop testing in his spare time, as we won't be able to release on time if he keeps finding critical security bugs

Telling me "your timezone is not my concern", when asking for help with new tooling so we don't have to be online at the same time

Blaming my team for requesting too much help, leading to his team missing deadlines, in a meeting with very senior managers. When the reason we were requesting help was the handover doc we were given was filled with lies about features being finished and "ready to ship" and lacking any unit tests

Being accused of bullying and harassment to the CEO, because someone asked "did you follow up with X about the partnership they emailed us about". The person who was responsible, forgot 4 times, and saw it as an "attack" to mention it in team meetings

Telling an entire office/building mid November they've secured funding for at least the next year, then announcing in January after the Christmas break that its cheaper to move to India, so they are closing the office in 30 days

Around 27 hours at new customer location.

They had a server failure due to incompetence.

They had fired their own IT guy and called us 6 months later because the server stopped responding.

First diagnostic. 2 drives are dead in a raid 5 with one hot spare. Raid controller then proved to be broken once the disks was replaced.

Waiting for new raid controller and installing.

Backup non existing, no one changed dat tape during the 6 months without IT. The tape was just a transparent plastic band, no media left.

Raid config is stored in static ram on controller, no backup!

Several hours in tech support to find out how to rebuild raid config from existing disks.

Proves to be impossible to rebuild raid set due to some checksum failures.

More hours with support to enable some diagnostic read only mode to mirror low level content to external drive.

Then many more hours to copy parts of the tree until it gets an error, restart after that and go on.

In the end we got around 70% back.

During this time I manage to be in contact with the raid manufacturers all support centers, one in europe, one in the us and one in Taiwan, switching each time one if them closed for the night.

The customer later declined a steady support contract due to us being to expensive ;)

Some just don’t want to learn.

# 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.

What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!

I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.

Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.

So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.

Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!

I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.

After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:

"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."

So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".

While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.

Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.

There was a guy back at uni who, I'd have to say is just manipulative SOB,

I say this because of two situations:
We started uni, first week of programming homework, I helped him out, second week rolls around and this happens:

SOB: hey can you give me the answers to homework for this week?
Me: no but I can explain my idea process, which I then in painstaking detail, break down everything needed to do the homework, I thought maybe he'd understand the process and get the hang of it, he answers me with this
Me: so now that I explained everything did you understand what to do?
SOB: yeah yeah I do now could you give me the answers

But that ain't the only time, nope, at the same time for another class he was part of our team, where we decided to some ambitious project combining 3d printing + an Arduino to make a turret, needless to say my team mates knew nothing of Arduinos or 3d modelling, I did some 3d modelling in my spare time so I handled that other team mates made the Arduino rotate a motor :/ best they could do, SOB does nothing, assessment days rolls around and lecturer goes around the room we show him the turret, the Arduino and proceed to say SOB has done nothing, never contacted us through the last 6 weeks, despite us trying to do so, he begins to complain saying we lied, lecture takes him out of the room because we were starting to make a scene, and he starts crying! The lecturer gives him a B+!

I then hear him one day joking to this guy that he managed to pass Class A by doing nothing and managed to get a higher grade than the rest of his group, at the time he was copying homework from a person for the first programming class because he failed!

Later I hear in my final year he was hanging out with some first years, a friend of mine sees him and says hi, why you hanging with first years, the group of first years look at him and ask how he knows them, and proceeds to question why they were told he was a first year also...

Not only this but I heard despite failing so many papers (heard he was repeating first programming class 3-4 times) he somehow managed to graduate.... I just can't understand why, oh and he has a job too, managed to get one from a guy he knew working in IT he doesn't deserve his bachelor's degree at all!

Development plus laboratories is kind of my expertise, so I ended up in a little grimey HR office looking out over the factory floor of a cocoa processing facility. I was applying for an automation job, a temp thing for three weeks, updating some ugly scripts which took readings from machines and threw them into excel sheets.

"We don't think a developer like you has enough experience working in an environment like this. Safety and working in sterile conditions is very important to us"

I had sent them my certifications in advance, plus references to the work I did in a biosafety level 3 lab for JnJ and cleanroom work at an aerospace company.

There were fat sweaty guys on sneakers, taking cocoa paste samples right next to the window.

They ended up hiring a friend of mine with zero experience, for minimum wage.

Just be fucking honest, don't waste my time with courtesies and lies. If they had just told me about the low salary indication, I would still have done the work. I was in between jobs anyway, bored, trying to fill up some spare time.

I used to do audits for private companies with a team. Most of them where black box audits and we were allowed to physically manipulate certain machines in and around the building, as long as we could get to them unnoticed.

Usually when doing such jobs, you get a contract signed by the CEO or the head of security stating that if you're caught, and your actions were within the scope of the audit, no legal action will be taken against you.

There was this one time a company hired us to test their badge system, and our main objective was to scrape the data on the smartcards with a skimmer on the scanner at the front of the building.

It's easy to get to as it's outside and almost everyone has to scan their card there in order to enter the building. They used ISO 7816 cards so we didn't even really need specified tools or hardware.

Now, we get assigned this task. Seems easy enough. We receive the "Stay-out-of-jail"-contract signed by the CEO for Company xyz. We head to the address stated on the contract, place the skimmer etc etc all good.

One of our team gets caught fetching the data from the skimmer a week later (it had to be physically removed). Turns out: wrong Building, wrong company. This was a kind of "building park" (don't really know how to say it in English) where all the buildings looked very similar. The only difference between them was the streetnumber, painted on them in big. They gave us the wrong address.

I still have nightmares about this from time to time. In the end, because the collected data was never used and we could somewhat justify our actions because we had that contract and we had the calls and mails with the CEO of xyz. It never came to a lawsuit. We were, and still are pretty sure though that the CEO of xyz himself was very interesed in the data of that other company and sent us out to the wrong building on purpose.
I don't really know what his plan after that would have been though. We don't just give the data to anyone. We show them how they can protect it better and then we erase everything. They don't actually get to see the data.

I quit doing audits some time ago. It's very stressful and I felt like I either had no spare time at all (when having an active assignment) or had nothing but spare time (when not on an assignment). The pay also wasn't that great.

But some people just really are polished turds.

So apparently I own land in dubai. Like three separate mortgages based on the email I received.

Your request (Mortgage Registration)
with request number xxxxx / 2024
has been completed
and you can print your issued certificate from this [link]

I've stripped out the numbers and link.
After confirming it was safe I followed through on a old spare cellphone, and yep, I own three mortgages for properties in dubai.

Except obviously I don't.
Someone used my name, an american, to register mortgages in dubai. *Nice* properties according to the pictures.

What started out as a scam email, or what looked like a scam email, went to an actual government of dubai website, with real mortgage registrations.

How in the fuck does that happen?

The only thing I can think of is someone committed identity fraud, and/or an alphabet agency went through the list of known political dissidents, set up a bullshit mortgage in a questionable territory, and are now using that as a pretext to monitor 'extremists with foreign ties.'

All that for some guy on the west coast that hasn't attended a political rally in his entire life.

Must have been that sign I held at sixteen years old by the side of the road that said "bush lied us into a war, and people died."

or maybe it was that time I told a really enthusiastic obama supporting police officer that it amazed me obama had time to win the nobel peace prize what with all the bombings he carried out against foreign civilians.

oh, it got better!

One year ago I got fed up with my daily chores at work and decided to build a robot that does them, and does them better and with higher accuracy than I could ever do (or either of my teammates). So I did it. And since it was my personal initiative, I wasn't given any spare time to work on it. So that leaves gaps between my BAU tasks and personal time after working hours.

Regardless, I spent countless hours building the thing. It's not very large, ~50k LoC, but for a single person with very little time, it's quite a project to make.

The result is a pure-Java slack-bot and a REST API that's utilized by the bot. The bot knows how to parse natural language, how to reply responses in human-friendly format and how to shout out errors in human-friendly manner. Also supports conversation contexts (e.g. asks for additional details if needed before starting some task), and some other bells and whistles. It's a pretty cool automaton with a human-friendly human-like UI.

A year goes by. Management decides that another team should take this project over. Well okay, they are the client, the code is technically theirs.

The team asks me to do the knowledge transfer. Sounds reasonable. Okay.. I'll do it. It's my baby, you are taking it over - sure, I'll teach you how to have fun with it.

Then they announce they will want to port this codebase to use an excessive, completely rudimentary framework (in this project) and hog of resources - Spring. I was startled... They have a perfectly running lightweight pure-java solution, suitable for lambdas (starts up in 0.3sec), having complete control over all the parts of the machinery. And they want to turn it into a clunky, slow monster, riddled with Reflection, limited by the framework, allowing (and often encouraging) bad coding practices.

When I asked "what problem does this codebase have that Spring is going to solve" they replied me with "none, it's just that we're more used to maintaining Spring projects"

sure... why not... My baby is too pretty and too powerful for you - make it disgusting first thing in the morning! You own it anyway..

Then I am asked to consult them on how is it best to make the port. How to destroy my perfectly isolated handlers and merge them into monstrous @Controller classes with shared contexts and stuff. So you not only want to kill my baby - you want me to advise you on how to do it best.

sure... why not...

I did what I was asked until they ran into classloader conflicts (Spring context has its own classloaders). A few months later the port is not yet complete - the Spring version does not boot up. And they accidentally mention that a demo is coming. They'll be demoing that degenerate abomination to the VP.
The port was far from ready, so they were going to use my original version. And once again they asked me "what do you think we should show in the demo?"

You took my baby. You want to mutilate it. You want me to advise on how to do that best. And now you want me to advise on "which angle would it be best to look at it".

I wasn't invited to the demo, but my colleagues were. After the demo they told me mgmt asked those devs "why are you porting it to Spring?" and they answered with "because Spring will open us lots of possibilities for maintenance and extension of this project"

That hurts.
I can take a lot. But man, that hurts.

I wonder what else have they planned for me...

tldr:
first year in college we programmed 24 hrs straight to fix somebody's mess before the deadline. Decided not to screw him over, instead he claimed to have done everything and we failed the assignment.

Long version:
var group= new[]{"Mike", "Gavin", "Gus", "I", "Ben" };
var client = "Jack"';

First year of college we had an assignment to make a web program for somebody.
Ben wanted to join our group and he already knew a client so we let him join.

After joining Ben wanted to be project lead, but we already decided Mike based on his experience.
Ben claimed to be much better in every way than Mike at and kept coming with stuff the following weeks why we should make him project lead. He kept pointing out when Mike did something wrong and he even came with an audio file where he clearly made jack say that he wanted Ben to be project lead .
After that we were all a bit pissed and told him that he should get it in his head that he was not going to be project lead and just start working on his part of the assignment.

We also found out that Ben was a documentation addict, what we could write in a small paragraph, he wrote a whole page about it. No joke, I rewrote a page of his in 5-6 rows with the same information in it.
No problem you thing, wrong! Because of this he kept bothering us arguing and claiming that our documentation was wrong because it was to short.

In the week of the deadline we asked Ben if he was also done, and told us that he was done for a while now.

The day before the deadline we came to school thinking we only had to do some merging and finishing up documentation.
Then we found out that Ben has almost nothing, and what he had the IDE was screaming that it was incorrect, spaces in Id's and css class names for instance. A really good programmer, my ass!
We were so pissed off at this point, but we had 24 hrs and needed to come up with a plan to fix it.

We decided that Mike and I were going to fix Ben his shit in the coming 24 hrs and Ben was going to make our last bit of documentation because we would not have the time for that, Especially if we had to argue with him like we had to do for each bit of documentation. Gus did not have time and Gavin could not program on his own yet, he wanted to help, but helping him help us would cost more time than we had.

We all went home after that and Mike and I started to program 24 hours straight while in a Skype call, making what Ben had 2 months for. Shortly before the deadline Mike looked at our finishing up documentation received from Ben and told me it was "Okay" and zipped everything up and uploaded it to school with a few minutes to spare.

After that we thought everything was good, we made Ben's part work and delivered it in time. We also decided not to throw Ben under the bus, because this would hurt all our grades because we did not work good as a group since we should have noticed it earlier.

A few weeks go by till the assessment.
The assessment start with asking if we want individual grades or as a group when you all think you did equal amount. We choose as a group, because if we chose individual not only Ben but also Gavin would get a lower grade and we did not think that was fair because he tried so hard.

We demo the product and the teachers are positive. When the teachers start about the documentation, the first thing they tell is that they found something interesting in the documentation, and they read it to us:

"I, Ben, have made all the documentation because my group did not want to."

That was so far from the truth, we all did make our documentation about the parts we made. Yes he did do overall a little bit more because every single bit of documentation we had to argue with him, so every time he volunteers to make it, we would all agree. And he made Mike's and i's last bit of documentation.

Telling the teachers on that point would not have mattered, it would only have hurt is in another way, so we did not and all failed the assignment. And we all felt like to strangle him.
This is now a few years back, but i still want too.

So this just happened,

Me and my co-worker (we are junior developers) were working on the same bug, it was a post call throwing a server exception.

We had asked for help to debug this issue from a senior developer the day before, he was quite busy with his own tasks.

He is one those kinds who would keep working even if the entire bay is wasting their time, always keeping to himself, needless to say I haven't seen him smile.

Back to my story, he couldn't spare time yesterday so we tried to squash the bug ourselves thinking he might have forgotten we had called him.He then comes out of nowhere, he firsr checks the button bindings, params sent and the call being made.

He then went through the backend code strategically placing the break points, clicks and debugs a few times and then opens the console. BAM!!!!

" D' hell yo !!" Shows up in the console, not just once but multiple times. Turns out I forgot the logger I had placed in the catch block.

He turns to me in super slo-mo looks me in the eye and whispers "what the hell yo!" and kept quite for some time, meanwhile the sense of cringe was slowly creeping on me. That was when he let out a loud blurt and the entire cabin turned to us. Needless to say it was awkward.

His smile was creepy though :/

hey ranteros! i like to dream and i know many of us dream of a nice machine to do anything on it, if you want to post the specs of your ideal build(s) (even a laptop, pre-built pc, space gray macbook pro... doesn't matter). and your current one.

here's mine:

ideal: {
type: desktop-pc,
cpu: intel i7-8700K (coffee lake),
gpu: nvidia geforce gtx 1080ti,
ram: 32gb ddr4,
storage: {
ssd: samsung 960 evo 500gb,
hdd: 2tb wd black
},
motherboard: any good motherboard that supports coffee lake and has a good selection of i/o,
psu: anything juicy enough, silver rated,
cooling: i don't care about liquid cooling that much, or maybe i'm just afraid of it,
case: i accept any form factor, as long as it's not too oBNoxi0Us,
peripherals: {
monitor: 1080p, maybe 1440p, i can't 4k because of the media i consume (i have tons of shit i watch in 720p) + other reasons,
keyboardmousecombo: i like logitech stuff, nothing fancy, their non mechanical keyboards are nice, for mice the mx master 2 is nice i think, i also don't care about rgb because i think it's too distracting and i'm always in darkness so some white backlight is great
},
os: windows 10, tails (i have some questions about tails i'll be asking in a different post,
}

i think this is enough for ideal, now reality:

current: {
type: laptop,
brand: acer (aspire 7736z),
cpu: pentium dual-core 2.10ghz,
gpu: geforce g210m 2gb (with cuda™!),
ram: 4gb ddr3,
storage: hdd 500gb wd blue 5400rpm (this motherfucker stood the test of time because it's still working since i bought this thing (the laptop as it is) used in late 2009 although it's full of bad sectors and might anytime, don't worry i have everything backed up, i have a total of 5 hdds varying from 320gb to 1tb with different stuff on them),
screen: 17 inch hd-ready!!! (i think it's a tn panel), i've never done a test on color accuracy, but to my eyes it's bright, colorful, and has some dust particles between the lcd and backlight hah,
other cool things: dvd player/burner, full-sized keyboard with numeric keypad, vga, hdmi, 4 usb ports, ethernet, wi-fi haha, and it's hot, i mean so hot, hotter than elsa jean and piper perri combined,
os: windows 10, tails
}

if you read this whole thing i love you, and if you have some time to spare on a sunday you can share your dream rig and the sometimes cruel current one if you dare. you don't have to share them both. i know many will go b.o.b and say "what you're hoping to accomplish, i already did bitch.", that's cool as well, brag about your cool rig!

Oh yeah 🙌🏼 So here is the other thing! Many of us work on side projects where we build awesome stuff in our spare time. We don't get much publicity, userbase or conversions as we are not marketing people. So go ahead and write short desc about your product along with website link if you have any. Product screenshot is most welcome 😜 Don't forget to tag post with "mystartup" 🙌🏼 Looking forward to see awesome projects.

Just my luck that I get the best wk76 story ever on wk77. Either way:

So some of you may know that the current project I am on has some shared code components with one of the other projects in the product line. And we have some differences in our processes. This leads to a lot of fun.

So, I was working on converting one of our shared components into a more modern language. It would save us time, money, and sanity by allowing us to more easily maintain our product. Sounds like a win-win right? That's what I thought. Until I had a meeting with the other team. THEN THE QUESTIONS ROLLED IN. Well who is going to integrate our product with yours? (You?) Are you changing the interface? (Not really.) Are you going to generate a design document? (Absolutely not especially since the interface isn't changing for the most part.) Well you are changing the type of one parameter in one method from an undocumented unmanaged type to a well documented managed type that we control. Shouldn't you generate a document to document that change? (Again absolutely not.)

So first they basically browbeat my lead into putting me in charge of their integration effort. Its fine though, as they gave me an account to charge. However, when I was finally able to get a machine with their build environment on it (at least two months later), they then told me that that account was closing and I had to wait until next quarter. So fuck me right. And because of their process I would break them if I were to check my changes in.

So fast forward to today. They are translating some shared components for the same reason that we are. However, they are changing code that while shared is technically "ours" and that will DEFINITELY break us if they do this work since this is the code that controls our algorithms. And while we have a fault tolerant process, or at least more fault tolerant than the other group's, we are currently doing a huge amount of development in the part they want to change. And when we ask them "who is going to do this work to integrate our product with your changes?" they stare at us slack jawed. Like "um, you right? it doesn't affect us." Like MOTHERFUCKERS!!! YOU LITERALLY JUST FOIST ALL THIS WORK ON US TO INTEGRATE WITH YOU BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T HAVE THE PEOPLE TO SUPPORT IT!!! BUT YOU CAN PAY THIS GUY FOR SIX MONTHS TO DO ALL THIS WORK THAT WILL BREAK US BUT CAN'T SPARE HIM TO INTEGRATE WITH US!?!?!? EVEN IF WE'RE PAYING HIM AND NOT YOU!?!?!

I will let you know how this goes when we have the discussion. I am drinking right now because it it easier and better for my emotional and physical health than bum fights.

So I'm making an app with a classmate at school, but there's one huge problem. All the PC's and laptops at school are shit. The ICT departement at my school blocks almost everything on them. I can't install any program, open any file and I can't even open the command prompt! So I can't install Visual studio or any other IDE and basically can't do anything besides browse websites that aren't blocked. And they expect me and my classmate to make an app. Fortunately, my classmate has a spare laptop we can use, but it's really difficult for two guys to code on just one laptop. I asked my school if they could buy new laptops or if they could remove they restrictions on two laptops, but they don't want to do any of those things and now we're stuck with just one laptop. I don't know what to do. I fucking hate this!

(This doesn't have anything to do with the topic of the rant, but I just want to complain.)
There are a couple more things I hate about my school. At my school, everyone is forced to use iPads. I don't know why they don't just give us laptops instead of iPads (maybe just because there lazy). So my iPad's headphonejack and homebutton where broken for no reason and I had to get it repaired. But instead of going to an apple store or a repair shop, you need to go to the school's ICT department and get it fixed there. If you don't do that and go to a apple store or something, they will take your iPad and keep it forever! Even though you pay €200 for it every year! Also, the ICT department at my school is lazy as hell! You expect them to repair the iPad themselves, but they just send it to a repair shop. So it wouldn't even matter if I would go to the store myself! 😠 And they even do a really bad job at checking if the device even works after the repair, because I needed to get it repaired three times in a row! And don't even get me started on the bad WiFi connection.

Allrighty, so we have a huge migration upcoming. The planning started early this spring. We've split the whole process into separate tasks and estimated each of them. Also marked all the tasks client should take care of itself so save funds and time. All-in-all the whole thing estimated like 4 months if we did it [single dev, tremendous amounts of communication with various parties, buy and prepare the infra, adapt app to the changes, testing, monitoring, etc.] and like a month if client did the tasks we shouldn't be doing. The funding for migration is time-bound and can only be used before December. Cool! We got notified that by the end of April we should be good to go! Plenty of time to do things right!

April comes. Silence. Mid-april we resch out to the client. Since there's plenty of time left migration is getting lower priority to other tasks. Well allright, sort of makes sense. We should migrate mid-July. Cool!

July comes. Client replies that everyone's on vacation now. Gotta wait for August - will do the quicker version of migration to make it on time. Well allright....

August comes. Everyone's vusy with whatever they've postponed during summer. Hopefully we'll start migration in September. Mhm...

September comes. We're invited to a meeting by project funders to explain tasks' breakdown, justify the time needed to make the migration. We're being blamed for surreal estimations and poor organization of tasks as nothing's happened yet... [they were the ones who always were postponing things....]. Moreover, they can only spare 20% of infra resources required for data alone anf they want us to make that enough for all environments, all components, all backups, all databases,... You get the pic.
The leader of the meeting semi silently mumbled to other participants 'Well then I'm afrsid we can't make a full migration in time.. Only partial. That's very unfortunate, very. That's why we should not have incopetent vendors [*glancing at us*]'

somehow we agreed we'll get the resources mid-November and we should be thankful for him bcz he'll have to pull some strings for... us..

I left the meeting with my fists squeezed so hard! But it's okay, we got smth useful: resources and start date. Although it leaves us with less than a month to do smth requiring a month for a sunny-day scenario. Nvm, still doable.

Last week we get an email that resources will be available at the beginning of December [after deadline] and we should start a full migration no sooner than Nov 12. Which leaves us with 50% of our estimated fucking optimistic scenario time and not enough resources to even move a single db.

Fuck I hate politics in dev... Is it wrong for me to want to tie them to a pole, set them on a veeery slow fire and take a piss on them while they're screaming their shitty lungs out? I'd enjoy the view and the scream. I know I would. And while enjoying I might be tempted to take a burning 20cm diameter wooden stick and shove it up their assholes. Repeatedly. Round-robin. Promissing them I'll take it out in 5 seconds and pulling it out after 2 minutes.

Can I?

I know there has been a million stories on people asking developers for free/cheap work, and having this happen constantly is probably one of the biggest ways coding has impacted my life, but it happened to me for the umpteenth time this morning and I'm still reeling from it.

A close friend of mine asked me to create a bespoke website for her new business. I currently work as a Software/Web Developer so I assume this made sense in her head to ask her friend first.

She gave me some requirements and seeing as I already had a figure in mind, I asked for her budget. She says - 'I don't want to say a figure and insult you with it being too low'.

I tell her I'll work out a figure that benefits both of us, seeing as I would be using this as experience to try out some new stuff and she doesn't want it done until January. Because of this I was already going to give her a great deal on it anyway (in comparison to what it would be if I charged her through the company) because it would practically be a project I'd work on if I had a spare evening.

She said, and I quote: 'We preferably don't want to spend more than £200, and if it's less that is even better'.

I think I was actually more insulted that she thinks something I do for a living is worth £200 or less.

She thinks that designing, programming and writing content for a website is worth < £200.

I think she'll be shocked when I give her the quote that I had in mind. Looks like she'll be getting a WiX website or something for that kind of money.

Help. I work with a guy who really wants to learn programming (he’s sales/support rn) and is even taking some courses on it. He seems eager enough to learn, the problem is he is just so fucking stupid I don’t know whether to encourage him or level with him.

He somehow managed to pass a course on Java (which I still don’t believe since I had to help him put his lines of code in the right order ffs), but now he’s signed up for C++ and data structures and I honestly don’t know how he’s going to do it.

This is the type of guy who loves “coding” but thinks debugging is a waste of time.

Normally I encourage anyone who wants to learn programming do so, but let’s be honest it does take a modicum of intelligence and this guy has zero common sense at all. We’re talking about a guy who sent me a *screenshot* of an Excel file that I needed to copy some activation codes from. And then had absolutely no idea what was wrong when I replied “are you fucking with me right now?”

*sigh*

And that’s not even scratching the surface. I sent him a zip file containing some updated code and walked him through how to update them on Slack (really basic, copy/replace files stuff). Then the VERY next day when I sent him a second update he asks “is there something you want me to do with this?”

The instructions were literally the last thing we talked about in the chat log.

I actually fear the stuff this guy would unleash upon the world if someone were actually able to teach him how to write a whole program.

What should I do? Right now my plan is to be vaguely supportive but secretly hope he will realize he’s in over his head and drop out before any damage is done. But my worry is he may just be SO dumb that he actually thinks he can do it. At that point I guess I just have to put my faith in his school and pray that they aren’t just giving degrees away to whoever can afford them. Because fear the day this guy ever gets a degree in programming.

So, it looks like I'll be hitting age 30 when I finish college, and my heart is torn in two places. On the one hand, a part of me wants to say fuck it and look for a job outside the US, maybe take up a second language. I have the spare time to work at it a couple of hours per day while in school and working on my capstone projects.

But, there's another part of me that says just stay in the homeland and just find a job somewhere in America. This is a huge country with a lot of options for backend/frontend/fullstack development. But I've been doing the same thing and seeing the same sights forever and I'd like something new. But I'm still relatively young and ignorant of countries outside the US. I could end up in more hot water then I bargained for leaving.

I don't know, and that's in a way okay. All I know is I want something different from my status quo. Something that justifies all the education I had to go through.

Some humans are calm and thoughtful, some annoyingly complicated, while others with behaviours too difficult to comprehend.
I got a call from the office (former from 6 months ago) and it's from the G.M herself.

** Phone rings **
Hmm see who's calling...

Me: * Picks up phone and set it on loud speaker, so my partner can also listen *

Me: Hello Ma

G.M: Hey (calls me by my full name)

Me: It's really nice to he...

G.M: Why would you move the YETI server hosted on AWS to Azure! We have been faced with lots of challenges ever since and that has cost the company a lot.

Me: Pardon me Ma, but that...

G.M: That is a very bad and unacceptable behaviour from you and I can have the company sue you for this.

Me: Excuse me Ma, but...

G.M: I have spoken with the director of C.M.D quaters (A sister company) and explained the situation on ground about what you did before leaving without having any prior permission. What nonsense!

** At this point my partner let's call her "CC"... was more confused than me**

CC : **Panicking** Who's that? What did you do? I thought you said you no longer work at that firm, what's going on?

Now I'm confused cus I don't even know who to reply.

Me: **Signals CC to calm the fuck down**

G.M: ** Still talking and spitting out millions of threats to the guy who left the company with evil deeds in mind...**

CC who literally hates suspense and also a half cool and half crackhead kind of person... Tries stealing the phone from me so she could pour out whatever is on her mind to the caller because of how disgusted she felt, mostly for reasons I quite understood but nevertheless i kept the phone far from her reach while we both enjoyed the suiting voice of *a threat giver*

Honestly at this point my closest guess was "Joe, who must have fucked up big time" because Joe is the company's SysAdmin and has a lot of fucked up records (One time Joe tried to convert all system OSes to Linux even with our hydra servers with pre-installed windows running smoothly, his action caused a noticeable server down-time all for the reason of Joe being a Linux freak). He and only he has the power to transfer/switch/off/on servers at will. I really don't know what Joe must have done but sure thing is there is a fuck up somewhere.
Talking about me, I was only a developer enthroned only within his desk and secondly I no longer worked there. Who fucking calls a retired soldier about a lost battle after six freaking months later! Just fucking sink with your ship captain!

But how can I explain all of this to G.M without implicating Joe and also not look like snitch, I thought to myself.

While I was pondering within myself and the call which has long been disconnected, CC broke the silence.

CC: Giddy, Can you honestly explain me why your old company is calling talking about lawyers and suing you? Have you been lying to me about your work?

Me: *Explained the situation to CC*

CC: But why was she that saucy and acting a bitch? You should have spare me a minute with her.

Me: She wouldn't let me speak but we good CC. We good.
The woman that just called is the G.M. of the firm I had formerly worked with and she's also the wife to the M.D of the same firm which was my former direct Boss whom I respect a lot. Having a disjunct with the wife can also affect the relationship with the husband, which I don't want to lose. So we cool!

Maybe I should text her or maybe not... But before then
** Another call comes in **
It's her again.

GM: Hello Giddy (Sounding calm)

Me: (WTF. She called me by my first name and also sounds cool... More confused than a stray dog) ...Yeah Hello

GM: I just called to let you know that my accusation was wrong because I was misinformed. Joe Nosa was in charge on Systems but why didn't you correct me on that during our last conversation?

Me: ... 😲

CC: (Drags the phone) Hello and Good morning whosoever...

G.M: Sorry who am I speaking with?

CC: (Introduced herself) I overheard your last conversation with Giddy, and I demand you appogise to him both in written and in verbal because not only did you accused him falsely, you also almost bridge the trust between us which may have cost the relationship.

Me: ...
** Long awkward silence **

G.M: Hey Giddy, I'm sorry. Just angry about what went down recently.

Me: All good ma'am

CC: ** Hangs up **

I hate those "simple DIY" instructables. Just had to build something I had to get. Found out one "simple DIY". It requires owning a power drill with a table mount. And a pipe threading machine. Yes, I surely have a drill mount for drilling thru some steel, I know how to use a CNC machine, and maybe have a little metal foundry in my flat. But hey, it's a DIY not 'go to nearest store and buy that friggin piece you need' so you should have prepared yourself for some difficulties.
It's not supposed to be easy!
I still wonder why the author not assumed everyone own a metal foundry, after all. It would be much easier for all of us.

And I ended using PCV, glue, and a spare bottle. Had to buy drill for glass, less than $3. Wasted few bottles to cut out what I wanted. Beer was quite good, thou.

Emotionally painful dev learning experience: My laptop (and only computer I had in the area) broke at the worst possible time during university and the guy fixing it fucked it up meaning it took even longer. Combine this with:

*Stuck having to learn Android Studio in two weeks to make a whole-ass app with a professor who didn't know how to make a Hello World and gave us no resources. Pair project so I had someone depending on me to do my part, meaning a lot of sharing their computer just to be able to use Android Studio.
*Having to work on another solo project by using various public and awfully specced university computers. Said project involved real-time 3D graphics and was running at about a third of the speed it should on every machine.
*Realizing how much I depended on my laptop for entertainment and that I basically had nothing that could help me de-stress and relax at home.
*Not knowing when the laptop's spare parts would arrive or if the repair man would give me bad news and even more delays.
*A very poorly timed issue in my relationship.

I know university can be stressful even though it never really affected me before or since but man, those couple of weeks broke me.

So, I get this super awesome machine, a hardware which was my dream to use for gaming...

2.2Ghz i7, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 4GB Radeon Pro 555X, and SSD.

But...

Its a Mac. Nevermind, CSGO is there for Mac.
The IT dept has some weird shit on this laptop that can sense if I'm doing something wrong 🙄

Why could they not spare us?

-- Have you ever self hosted a Linux/Free Bsd server at home?
-- What was the maintenance like in terms of operation and cost compared to an online service?

I and my partner are planning to self host our Ubuntu server locally because currently though we spend less than $1100 a month on Azure with moderate CPU usage but we plan to scale out with believes that the server cost might sky-rocket.

We made a budget of $25k for the setup which includes cost of hardware, bandwidth and power.

We also made some research concerning most used hardwares for home servers because we really are newbees talk of hardware. What we found are options related to the Intel Xeon as CPU, some others say use NAS, while some are more of advertising.

$25k on the desk,
we care more about speed than of space. How can we make the setup totally worth it? You don't have to spare us a change, just some headlight and way to go.
Your advice are needed. Thank you.

While the sidenote of explanation regarding the business process being added up front without much useful detail is all nice etc

Expecting some overblown explanation about fixing a mistake from a middle aged man as to motivation is just stupid

What else is stupid is directing a person to the same things when you people are supposedly supposed to spare us that

What else is stupid is people processing literally 10s of 1000s of man hours of the PRECISE same work over and over again letting themselves be psychologically programmed and handicapped

And what is really dumb is when vital data that can make a large difference in a payment getting processed or a claim being accepted or rejected is just allowed to pass through entirely on the premise that it allows a broken ass system to bite some in the ass and give a break to someone else instead of FIXING THE FUCKING SYSTEM

As a college student, I find it hard to take out time from the college schedule just for studies. And it's not just the 9-5 but the time after that I am unable to spare. I have a personal learning goal that I will learn some xyz technology before the end of this semester. But in this entire week I have been able to dedicate only hour of time to my actual learning. There's college quizzes, assignments and my juniors come to me for help as well.. I help out as best as I could but them being new devs, it's like they haven't discovered Google yet. Everytime they face an error they're like, "please help us senpai". It's really time consuming.