*Builds a web component for a client website*

CLIENT: I don't like it, can I have it a tiny bit over to the right more

ME: Taps the arrow key a few times making it look like I'm doing something.(Which actually does nothing)

Client: 👌Perfect

😂😂😂 Wut 😂😂😂

So this fucking happened today.

Me: *sees support ticket coming in about some kind of login issue*

Me: *opens issue*

"Hello, I can't seem to login. There's an error"

Me: *sighs and thinks "at least give me that FUCKING error message then." *kindly replies with asking if they could send me the error message*

"Here it is. I don't understand what is going wrong
and what I have to do"

Me: *looks at error message*

"Invalid customer ID. Please make sure that your ID is correct. You can find it in the activation email we sent you when you registered".

😐 😶 😦

Me: *thinking okay what the fuck, are you fucking retarded or something?*

Me: *kindly replies: "It seems that you are not using the correct customer ID. You might want to look for it in the activation email we sent you!"*

"Oh okay thanks, how did you figure that out?"

Me: 😵 😐 😶 😭 🔫

Seriously what the actual fucking fuck.

This is what happens when you listen to clients

Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

I'm at my seat during the regular morning routine of checking emails, planning the things I need to complete/study when my phone rings.

HR: Good Morning, can you come over to the conference room please ?

Me: Sure

I enter the conference room and on the other side of the table, I see a group of 3 HR Managers (not a very nice feeling), especially when it was 10 months into my first job as a Trainee Software Developer.

HR: The company hasn't been performing as expected. For this reason, we've been told to cut down our staff. We're sorry but we have to let you go. You've been doing a great job all along. Thank you.

Me: ---- (seriously ?!)

The security-in-chief 'escorts' me out of the premises and I hand over the badge. I'm not allowed to return to my desk.

This happened about 16 years ago. But it stuck with me throughout my programming career.

A couple of Lessons Learnt which may help some of the developers today :

- You're not as important as you think, no matter what you do and how well you do it.
- Working hard is one thing, working smart is another. You'll understand the difference when your appraisals comes around each year.
- Focus on your work but always keep an eye on your company's health.
- Be patient with your Manager; if you're having a rough time, its likely he/she is suffering more.
- Programming solo is great fun. However it takes other skills that are not so interesting, to earn a living.
- You may think the Clients sounds stupid, talks silly and demands the stars; ever wonder what they think about you.
- When faced with a tough problem, try to 'fix' the Client first, then look for a solution.
- If you hate making code changes, don't curse the Client or your Manager - we coders collectively created a world of infinite possibilities. No point blaming them.
- Sharing your ideas matter.
- Software Development is a really long chain of ever-growing links that you may grok rather late in your career. But its still worth all the effort if you enjoy it.

I like to think of programming as a pursuit that combines mathematical precision and artistic randomness to create some pretty amazing stuff.

Thanks for reading.

Dear Client.

Please don't whine why your site is down, you haven't paid us in like 3 months, and its on the contract that you signed, we only have limited patience.

sincerely yours,
developer

so i just got fired 🔥 🔥 🔥 because i wanted a 200 fucking dollars raise after 1 year of work and sacrifices and feeling like shit.
200$ because i live in the 3rd fucking world, working with a stupid motherfucking boss (you know the fat old tone deaf cunt), he's american, and he brings projects from the US from clients paying thousands of dollars, and he pays us 300$, and by the fucking way he used to pay us 100$ (we are 3 developers, a dick who does nothing but report our behavior, and a shit who does shit. we are a development company and we are the only developers and we got fired because he thought we didn't deserve the raise and that he sees no reason in giving us more money because we're already wasting the company's money and time).
So now the only people left there are the dick, the shit and the fatass boss who's in the states rn.
the funny thing is after we left by an hour or so we got calls from many other companies that we refused to work with because of our loyal-fucking-ty.
the motherfucker thinks we're conspiring against him, that we don't trust him, well of fucking course we don't, he lies about having a company in the US, well it's there but it's suspended (we looked it up), he says he's a microsoft, intel, adobe, dell, lenovo partner, and he's not.
well fuck i'm kind of happy that i left, i'm sitting with my friends in a cafe right now thinking about finishing our personal projects.
forgot something: the projects we were working on are unfinished, and there's not a single fucker to finish them, so he's ball deep in shit. hope this rant is relatable

FUCK WORDPRESS TO DEATH!

Seriously, I have a degree in computer science and I can't for the fucking lfie of it understand the fucking architecture of fucking WORDPRESS!

How many fucking times when developing fucking shitty wordpress sites for clients you spent 66% of the time debugging some stupid fucki9ng shit related to the retarded monolithic fucking stupid architecture of this huge retarded abomination which should be killed in a fire with dragonfire.

How many fucking times while using trellis sage bedrock mother fucking super uber framework bubblegum you find yourself struggling with the fgucking broweser shit sync or some other fucking stupid bubblegum fix shit to make wordpress even remotely a decent experience to work with?

Even when buffed with a fucking shitton of boilerplate shit code from people who want developers to not fucking kill themselves while working on this fucking piece of shit framework the developing experience with wordshit makes me want to blow my fucking brains out with a desert eagle.

I seriously can't fucking stress how fucking shit this whole framework is and I seriously hope people stop using it for good. Wordpress was made by a bunch of fucking retarded monkeys who barely knew how to write afucking hello world.

This is the last fuckign time Im ever going to accept a wordpress project from my clients this fucking framework has driven me mad for fu cking years and i've finally had it with thsi fucking piece of shit framework and i fucking hope it gets buried 1000 km down and never dug up ever fuckign again.

Wordpress is the single most fucking horrid abomination that has ever been created in the fucking history of the tech industry.

The Perfect Storm:

My worst coding mistake? Yeah, let me tell you about that. I pushed a simple JavaScript/HTML change without knowing that the stupid header was shared with another "not so important" section of the site called "My Account" where people go to pay for their services. I call it the perfect storm because I left early that Friday for a weekend cruise and right before leaving I pushed the change, sent the request to push for production and left. When they noticed that clients were complaining about not being able to pay they started reversing most changes of all teams trying to fix it but they never touched mine because they knew I wasn't working on the backend. My whole team worked over the weekend trying to find the issue while I was having fun in the cruise. They ended up reversing all changes by Sunday night and it took us about 4 more days to figure out that my simple JavaScript/HTML change broke the site and prevented 30 million customers from making payments that weekend plus it broke the whole 2nd release of the month.... yeah, nothing major.

/facepalm .................

*meeting with boss about a quick site for one of her clients*

Boss- "okay so basically I just want you to copy the content from -already made site- and put it on the new one"

Me- "okay sure do you want it verbatim or "

Boss-"no but something similar"

Me-"okay so you want me to paraphrase this list that's on the homepage?"

Boss-"Well no we dont actually need the list at all as it isnt relevant to us so just take that out"

Me-"okay well that is the only thing on the homepage so what should I replace it with"

Boss-"I dont know, something similar to the list. You can figure something out"

Me-"....I dont know anything about the clients business. I am not going to just make up content, you guys can at least give me some direction there"

Boss-"i didnt think it would be that hard"

Me-"it's really not hard. You're making it harder than it needs to be for me though. Anyway, do you wanna keep the same exact pages as the other site or only transfer some of them or"

Boss-"something that resembles that website but isnt exactly it so some of the pages but not all"

Me-"which ones"

Boss-"the ones relevant to client's business"

Me-*closes notebook, stands up, starts to leave room*

Boss-"where are you going"

Me-"I'm going to get another two cups of coffee cause I didnt have enough this morning for this bullshit"

Boss-*raises eyebrow*

Me-"dont tell me to copy paste a website at first and then continue to tell me its going to be "similar" but different and then further continue to be as vague as possible about what is expected of me to be done in order to make it different! Take the time to decide what it is you want exactly and then tell me, with detail, what you're criteria is so I can do the thing!! I cant read your mind."

Boss-"..... I just didnt think it would be that hard to jot in a few sentences here and there"

I left the room at that point. Irritating as fuck. You dont know tech stuff, don't expect me to know enough about YOUR job to write about it as if I'm a professional. I cant fucking read minds, I have no interest in researching anything just to create the site content myself, and its fucking rude that they wont even take the time to sit down and decide what they want for a website that THEY are paying for. For fucks sake people get your fucking shit together

I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.

Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.

It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...

I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.

Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.

Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.

He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.

I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.

I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.

If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.

Windows
Best for handling stupid clients

Mac
Best for looking professional

Linux
Best price.

What seems to be the problem? Oh, is your wordpress site hacked/infected with malware?

So I guess you decided to disable updates because it might break your shitty little site? And I guess you thought those warnings you got from me and multiple colleagues about what could happen when you didn't update your wordpress bullshit weren't that serious?

Hold on, you want *US* to restore *YOUR* hosting backups?

Hahahahahaha-no.

Go clean up your own fucking bullshit. But, before you click that restore button, please take a cactus, carve 'I am a stupid wordpress cunt' into it, dip it in a bathtub of with blood mixed-infected cum and shove it up your ass.

Oh yeah I'm aware that that won't help your situation but it might keep you from reproducing and at least it'll give me some satisfaction.

Wow this one deserves a rant. Where should I even begin? I got a new job for over half a year now doing work in an agency. We're building websites and online shops with Typo3 and Shopware (not my dream, but hey). All fine you might think BUT...

1) I have been working on the BIGGEST project we have all by myself since I started working at this company. No help, nobody cares.

2) If something goes wrong all the shit falls back to me like "wHy DiDnT yoU WoRk MoRE?". Seriously? How should one dev cover a project that's meant for at least two or three.

3) The project was planned four years ago (YES that's a big fat FOUR) and sat there for 3,5 years - nobody gave a fuck. I got into the company and immediately got the sucky shit project to work on.

4) I was promised some time to get familiar with the projects and tech we use and "pick something I like most to get started". Well that never happened.

5) I was also promised not to talk directly to our customers. Well, each week I was bombarded with insults, a shitload of work and nonsense by our customers because (you guessed it) I was obligated to attend meetings.

6) The scheduled time for a meeting was 30 minutes, sometimes they just went on for over two hours. Fml.

7) Project management. It does not exist. The company is just out to get more and more clients, hires more god damn managers and shit and completely neglects that we might need more devs to get all this crap finished. Nope, they don't care. By the way: this is not like a 200 employee company, it's more like 15 which makes it even sadder to have 4 managers and 3 devs.

8) We don't use trello (or anything to keep track of our "progress"), nobody knows the exact scope of the project, because it was planned FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.

9) They planned to use 3 months on this project to get it finished (by the way it's not just an online shop, it has a really sophisticated product configurator with like 20 dependencies). Well, we're double over that time period and it is still not finished.

10) FUCK YOU SHOPWARE

11) The clients are super unsatisfied with our service (who would have guessed). They never received official documents from us (that's why nobody knows the scope), nor did they receive the actual screen design of the shop so we just have to make it up on the go. Of course I mean "I" by "we", because appearently it is my job to develop, design and manage this shit show.

12) My boss regularly throws me in front of the bus by randomly joining meetings with my client telling them the complete opposite of things that we discussed internally (he doesn't know anything about this stupid project)

13) FUCK YOU COLLEAGUES, FUCK YOU COMPANY, FUCK YOU SHOPWARE AND FUCK YOU STUPID CUSTOMERS.

14) Oh btw. the salary sucks ass, it's barely a couple of bucks above minimum wage. Don't ask me why I accepted the offer. I guess it was better than nothing in the meantime.

Boy that feels good. I needed that rant. But hey don't get me wrong. I get that dev jobs can be hard and sucky, but this is beyond stupidity that I can bear. I therefore applied for a dev job in research at a university in my dream country. Nice colleagues, interesting projects, good project management. They accepted me, gave me a good offer and I can happily say that in 6-7 weeks my current company can go fuck themselves (nobody knows the 10.000+ lines of code but me). Just light it up and watch it burn!

How the fuck did clients convince themselves they can have a developer build an Amazon, booking.com, Facebook, Airbnb or site of the sorts for 500 bucks on FUCKING WORDPRESS?!

That's it. I fucking quit.

Over a month of unpaid work, developing your stupid course, only to get a high-quality outline rejected because "it's not what we wanted" again.

First outline, fuckers ask to do something with a Raspberry Pi and Yocto. Fine, but no Yocto as I don't know anything about it and the coworker doesn't even have a Raspberry Pi to flash the images on. Micromanagement guy (god I hate that word) agrees, fine no Yocto then. So no Yocto it is.
2 weeks later... Course outline is finished. Review stage.. rejected. Needs moar Yocto.
Fine... I'll include Yocto. Coworker was put off the course, I'm exclusively on it now. Time to do it well and get my feet wet with Yocto.
2 weeks later... Course outline is finished and looks pretty good. Review stage.. rejected. Needs less Raspberry Pi. Do it without the Raspberry Pi.

An embedded systems course whose core component is that fucking Raspberry Pi. Omit it they said. WHAT?!!
"Oh yeah but there's this other course that's selling like hot pockets, we can just redo that in videos. Make it more like that course."
You.. you can't be for real, can you? If students want to take that course... What makes you think that they wouldn't just pick.. *that damn course* then?

"But hey" micromanager said, "don't loose hope and confidence, I'm here🤪"
🤪. That describes your level of competence pretty well, you stinking piece of apeshit.
Go back to your micromanaging, at least you don't completely fucking suck at that.

2 times rejected because YOU fucking company's board can't describe your desires in a course properly. You know what, I think I'm starting to understand why web devs keep on complaining about indecisive clients now. Because you know company's board, you seem a lot like those clients from hell. Eat shit.

🖕

My whole team was a circus:
- Dev 1, the senior: he will be spent his days coding his personal projects and will convince management that everyone else needed to prove themselves so he will have nothing to do and we will do all the work.
- Dev 2, the junior: he was convinced that his mission in life was to be friends with his team. He's desk was far from the rest of the team so he will show just right after lunch EVERY FREAKING DAY with a list on his phone of random things he wanted to talk about like music, artists, art, news, etc., he really thought I didn't notice the list.
- Dev 3: the vegan: you will hear on every chance how she was so awesome for being vegan.
- Dev 4, the expert: if you ask him anything he will stare at you in silence to make you feel like you are a stupid for not knowing the answer and then turn around like nothing.
- Dev 5, the ghost: he will show early every day, code without mouthing a word and leave at 5pm, I think I heard him saying "hmmm" once but I might be wrong.
- Dev 6, the coder by accident: he was a graphic designer and ended up doing front end so he hated his job.
- Dev 7, me: the one who didn't care about anything but doing his job and leave.
- The project manager: she didn't knew anything about technology but will attend meetings with clients on her own, commit to deadlines and then inform us that the project that we estimated for 8 weeks will have to be done in 2 with new additions to the features.

You know the drill, here's your potato :/

I... uhm... I... I can't... I ... I can't even.... THIS IS LIVE IN THE CLIENT'S SITE WHERE ANYONE CAN CREATE A LOGIN WITH NO VERIFICATION WHATSOEVER AND SEE THIS WHICH IS LINKED TO A BIG RED BUTTON THAT RESETS THE WHOLE DATABASE, YOU FUCKING DUMB PIECE OF SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

// This event clears the entire solution in all active clients, truncates the database and also removes any stored PDFs in the server folder
$(document).on('click', '#resetDB', function () {
// This event only happens if the user correctly enters the password, this is to prevent other users than the admin from performing this action
var answer = prompt("Please enter the password required to perform this action.");
if(answer == "-REDACTEDBECAUSEHOLYSHIT-") {
socket.emit('resetDB');
} else {
alert("The password is incorrect, please try again!");
}
});

AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!111!!1!!11!1!!1!1one!one!!!11

(I'm not inventing this, even though the "site" is internal only and not accessible through the web. That does *not* make it any less stupid!)

tl;dr stupid clients with their stupid requirements.

Client: (on Monday) hypothetically could you implement "A"?
Me: (on Monday) yeah I could do that by Friday, let me know if you want me to start it.
Client: (on Thursday) hey remember we talked about "A" well do "B" instead and I'll need it by Friday still.
Me: "B" is completely different than "A" and will take probably twice as long.
Client: but you told me you could do it by Friday.
Me: ............ I want to smash your face.

Once upon a time in Devland, there were two best friends @Alice and @Michelle and they worked together at The DevCo company as developers.
After a tough day handling an @-ANGRY-CLIENT-, they thought that they had to go and @RantSomewhere and so they went to a café. At the café, they ranted about some stupid clients, and @theItalianGuy at the third floor of their office building who never picked up calls, and @thatJavaGuy from the second floor who, they thought, was @notarealDev, and the usual stuff about their work. Somewhere in between, @Alice thought it would be @funvengeance to @hack @theNSA; “@karma is coming to get them”, said @Michelle.
To do this, they knew they’d have to take help from none other than @Gandalf who lived in a nearby @cave. So, the next day, taking a leave from work, @Alice and @Michelle embarked on journey to meet @Gandalf. After about an hour’s drive, they reached @Gandalf’s @cave. @Michelle went ahead to knock on @Gandalf’s rusty cave door. Being a lazy @necromancer, he magically opened his door 2 minutes later. “Who is't dares to disturb me in mine own catch but a wink?” shouted a voice from the back; “We’re two developers from DevCo and we need your help in our mission to @hack @theNSA”, shouted @Michelle. After a few seconds, he replied, ”Hmm… N'rmally I wouldst sendeth thee to mine own cousin @Hagrid, but in thy case, I sayeth thee shouldst visiteth the detective who is't goeth by the nameth @S-Holmes”. @Alice replied back, “Thank you, Sir @Gandalf, we’ll get help from this @S-Holmes, I’ve heard that he’s an @exceptionalGuy”; “Mine own pleasure, Farewell!” said @Gandalf, and the door closed shut.
So, @Alice and @Michelle went back to their car, and that time @Alice raised a question, “How are we gonna find this @S-Holmes? We don’t have a phone number or anything so we could contact this guy.”
“We should call @thatJavaGuy from work, I’ve heard he is a man of resources, he must know how to contact @S-Holmes”, said @Michelle.
And it was true, after a call with @thatJavaGuy, they were able to obtain @S-Holmes’s phone number.
“Howdy, this is @S-Holmes, what can I diddily ding dong do you for?”
“Hi, I’m @Alice, I’m from DevCo and I was hoping that I could get your help in our mission.”
“What kind of mission?”, asked @S-Holmes.
“We want to @hack @theNSA.”, replied @Alice.
“Okay… I think I might be able to hel-diddly-elp you! There’s an old and abandoned laberino noodly-near @stacked Street. It was made in @1989 and since then, it houses a magical computeroo that can hel-diddly-elp you in your mission. So, you just have to connect the computeroo to the Internet and you can diddily ding dong do your programmeroo thing and then you'll have access to the the noodly-nsa diddily ding dong database!”, answered @S-Holmes.
S-Holmes continued, “But I shall warn you, there's a riddly-rumorino that the laberino was abandoned because of an @electric-ghost that lurks there, but I bel-diddly-elieve it is just a computeroo program that was diddily ding dong designed to try to @stop hackers from accessing the top secret stuff!".
“Okay, thanks for your help! I bet we can handle whatever this @electric-ghost thing is, so… Goodbye!”, replied @Alice.
“Goodbye!”, said @S-Holmes and that ended their conversation.
Luckily, the @stacked Street was just a couple of miles away from them, so they reached the lab quickly.
As they got close to the lab they saw something that really surprised them…
--------
To be continued in part two...
(Do you want a part two? :/)

My first ever story is a little special because it is kind of dev related at it has "cameos" by various devranters, as you might have noticed.
How many did you count?
More in Part Two.

Thank you for reading and please, any feedback is welcome. Did you like it?
I haven't really revised it once, it is straight out of the keyboard.
Should I drop the "@" ?
But then it would impossible to spot some of the devRanters .
Let me know.

PS
What should be the title?
1)Alice in DevLand?
2)Adventures of Alice and Friends: Hacking the NSA?
You decide..(or maybe I'll pick the second one :D)

Ok, so I don't work yet and so I've never had to deal with any clients but based on the rants i have read this is how stupid I imagine most of them are.

Dev: Hey, would you like a chocolate bar?
Client: Yeah, sure.
Dev: here:
*hands chocolate bar over*
*client holds it in his hands, opens it and eats it*
Client: Tastes great
Dev: Ok, nice. So about the payment of the project...
*Clients face is swollen and he falls to the ground*
Dev: uhh, what are you doing?
Client *coughing*: Were.. were there nuts in the chocolate bar?
Dev: uhmm, yes. didn't you look at it?
Client: why didn't you tell me??!?!?!? I am allergic to nuts!!
Dev: uhh, I didn't know that. But srsly, did you not look at the wrapping of the fucking chocolate bar??!
Client: I am going to sue you!! You will go to prison!
Dev: Fuck off *leaves the room*

Image of the chocolate bar:

I vehemently despise the popular image of developers as borderline autistic savants living on junk food and working 24 hour days!

You see, I bought into that vision and became that person. When I first started working as a developer, I would work crazy long hours, eating junk food while neglecting my health and personal life. This behavior was encouraged by my boss and co-workers, and became expected, with the sales people boasting about it to the clients, like is somehow proved I was a better developer.
It's no big surprise that this kind of life comes at a cost and can not be sustained. I burnt out, my life fell to pieces and my body fucked out on me.
It's taken me years to repair the damage and I am still doing so.
I now work at a company that understands the importance of a healthy work/life balance, and I take full advantage of that.
Perhaps if I had a wise mentor when I first started, I could have worked smarter instead of harder and respected the needs of my mind and body.
I am that mentor now.

Developers are smart people, we should stop glamorising a stupid lifestyle.

End users - the verb seems better than the noun!

Dear Clients,

You are always correct and stupid.

Send this to stupid clients

One time was in a meeting with clients from abroad (big company with some offices in the US). After the meeting we went to a restaurant with the clients. Then one hour later our CEO shows up and starts tanking beers like crazy and gets super wasted. Then starts asking the client if they have a job for him in the US. He doesnt want to run his company anymore because all his employees are fuckung idiots blahblah. Then he asks me you understand right you have seen my employees they are fucking stupid. Uhm yeah dude I work for you... *awkward sillence, continues chugging beers, changes topic*

WEB FUCKING THREE

Ok, some of this shit is interesting, let's get that out of the way:

Crypto - great for doing illegal things, great for financial speculation, interesting mathematically. But as likely to replace actual currency as I am to replace the fucking Queen.

NFT - should be written on the headstone of humanity. Entirely fucking useless, planet-roasting bro-wank dressed up as a revolution in...pretending to own shit. The only difference between a Bored Ape owner and my nephew pointing at a castle and insisting that it's his, is that he isn't thousands and thousands of pounds out of pocket by doing so.

Metaverse - AR and VR have been around before this dogshit rebrand, and they'll outlive it.

No, it's not that. It's that we now have a new species of parasite - the "Web3/Metaverse" LinkedIn guru insisting that this shit is even needed, let alone the next big thing.

Web 2.0 was a stupid fucking term alright, but it did represent a new generation of technologies that were badly needed, and adopted by the entire community. Web3 is a bunch of shit that some cunts think they can get rich off, so insist that we need. I wouldn't even give a fuck but I've already spent hours of my life explaining to clients and peers that this is UTTER FUCKING BOLLOCKS, there's no need for a blockchain in your app, there's no need for a blockchain in virtually anything. Yeah if you want some fucking 3d in your app or your page I'm your man, but if you keep saying 'metaverse' I'm going to fill it with easter eggs.

None of this shit was needed before and none of it is needed after. Have you looked at web3 games? It's Steve Buscemi asking 'how do you do, fellow computer games?', it's a fucking gambling app pretending to be something a human would do. Clash of Clans and Candy Crush already cornered the market for that type of fucking mug, right now you're making the Candy Crush business model look responsible and efficient. You CUNTS.

This fucking kid has the audacity to ask for me to decompile someone else's work and recompile it for a newer version. Wtf man

“Arya” and I were classmates in college. We were in the same year and did the same major. We’ve known each other for 16 years and have worked together twice; one time she was my manager and the other time I was hers. We often attend the same work-related conferences and exchange thoughts on articles that appear in industry publications. Our relationship is a professional one, although I did attend her wedding because her husband was in the same fraternity as me, and she did introduce me to my future husband at a networking charity event. Besides her wedding, we have never talked outside of work or a networking event.

I was hiring for a position and one of the promising candidates was working for Arya and had put her down as a reference. Arya sung her praises and told me she was the best employee in the department. The position I was hiring for would be a promotion for the candidate, and Arya said there was no room for promotion in her department at the moment. Based on Arya’s glowing review and the same from another manager there (and her strong resume), I hired her.

It was a catastrophe. Her work was sloppy and disorganized. She struggled to do basic tasks, missed deadlines, and was sometimes cold to her coworkers and clients. She was asked to take point on a project because her resume listed a similar project, and it went so far off the rails we had to bring in outside help to get it back on track. I know a promotion and new company can be an adjustment, but she was incompetent beyond having to adjust to a new place. Her mistakes cost us so much money she had to be fired.

When I spoke to Arya the first time, she played dumb. The second time, she admitted to lying about how good the candidate was because she was tired of dealing with her mistakes and wanted her gone. She told the candidate she wouldn’t fire her if she quickly left on her own and promised a good reference in exchange. The other manager agreed to do the same thing when Arya asked him to. Arya also told the candidate to lie about how long she worked there to make it seem like she was there longer and to put the project on her resume even though she wasn’t point on it. Arya said it was business and nothing personal.

After she was fired, my boss told me the bad candidate is being investigated by federal authorities for regulatory violations from her time at Arya’s company. The investigation started just when we were interviewing her, and Arya knew about it and didn’t tell me. The other manager is also being investigated for the same violations, which is how Arya got him to lie about the candidate. If the candidate had not left her job there, she would have been fired when word of the investigation got out. We had another candidate who worked for Arya, and Arya told me he was a mediocre employee who does the bare minimum. He just won two different prestigious industry awards. Arya also admitted to lying about him because she didn’t want him to leave. He still works at the same company as her.

I’m angry. She knowingly lied to me. I put stock in her opinion because of our relationship. I feel stupid and duped. I’m afraid making such a bad hire and passing up a good candidate will make me look bad and affect my career. My boss and her boss are upset about this debacle, and everyone knows something is up because the regulators came in when they found out the candidate worked here. They haven’t found anything yet but everyone is still nervous. The other manager who lied about the bad candidate has already been arrested and, based on what the bad candidate is accused of, she will likely be arrested soon also. (Arya cooperated with authorities, isn’t being investigated, and isn’t accused of doing anything against regulations.)

I don’t plan on talking to Arya again beyond being arms-length and professionally cool if I run into her at a conference and others are present. I’m not even sure if I can go to her boss because I don’t have any proof beyond her telling me verbally. Whether I knew her or not, the lie was egregious. Do I tell her boss? Do I confront her or leave it alone? She didn’t show any guilt or apologize to me.

The worst part about being a web developer is when clients ruin a perfectly good website by asking for dumb things, even though you told them it's either:
a) near impossible
b) not useful/helpful to users
c) deprecated/no longer used code/techniques
e) will harm performance and SEO
d) just plain stupid

A lot of engineering fads go in circle.

Architecture in the 80s: Mainframe and clients.

Architecture in the 90s: Software systems connected by an ESB.

Architecture in the 2000s: Big central service and everyone connects to it for everything

Architecture in the 2010s: Decentralized microservices that communicate with queues.

Current: RabbitMQ and Kafka.

... Can't we just go back to the 90s?

I hate fads.
I hate when I have to get some data, and it's scattered on 20 different servers, and to load a fucking account page, a convoluted network of 40 apps have to be activated, some in PHP, others in JS, others on Java, that are developed by different teams, connected to different tiny ass DBs, all on huge clusters of tiny ass virtual machines that get 30% load at peak hours, 90% of which comes from serializing and parsing messages. 40 people maintaining this nightmare, that could've been just 7 people making a small monolithic system that easily handles this workload on a 4-core server with 32GB of RAM.
Tripple it, put it behind a load balancer, proper DB replication (use fucking CockroachDB if you really want survivability), and you've got zero downtime at a fraction of the cost.

Just because something's cool now, doesn't mean that everybody has to blindly follow it for fucks sake!

Same rant goes for functional vs OOP and all that crap. Going blindly with any of these is just a stupid fad, and the main reason why companies need refactoring of legacy code.

So just finished the presentation for my internship project. I'm free now!(and can sleep normal times too) But I have a few things I need to get off my mind. Dunno if it'll seem a bit stupid to some of you..but yeahh....
Anyway, during my demo yesterday
Lecturer: So this project of yours uses some open-source stuff?
Me: Yeah.
L: And if the company wants to use if for commercialization they need to pay for the license?
M: Thats basically it. Yes.
L: Well, see..thats the problem with your project. You need to think of all this things. If there's no other options then just code the whole shit yourself. Or maybe discuss with the management on this.
Yeah...see, I doubt the management here cares about us anyway. Oh, you're working on your intern stuff. Not important. Just resize the pictures in my powerpoint will you? Oh and you want to use the company computers for your project? No can do..confidentiality stuff. But make sure the thing will work on our system anyway when you're done with it. And even if you use our computers, they restart everytime you open Word anyway..hahaha. You want access to this thing so you can learn a bit on our company's work. Sorry but no. EVERYTHING is confidential so you can't access it since you're interns, eventhough our company is the one that took you inanyway.
Manager: Oh, the thing you're making is pretty cool. You know,all of you can just give your systems to us later.
Friend: Yeah well, maybe we can ask the company for payment? Haha.
Manager: Hahaha well the company can just take your systems for free since you're doing it on our working hours.
Fuck. You. When we ask to do our stuff you said noooo its the company hours. Do our work. And do your stuff back at home or something. Oh, but then we'll drag you around the state to see the clients, and you'll reach home at 8-9pm or something, but of course you're not tired right? So just code then. Or you're not going anywhere today? You're still not allowed to code here eventhough you don't have any work though...so just sit there and be quiet. Or maybe shred my papers for me. Fuck your working hours.
Lecturer: And well, thats the problem with some students *looks pointedly at me* they want to go to non-technical companies so that they can have it easy. Your friends who go to other companies will learn a lot more.
Do you think I fucking want to be here??? This is the only company I got so fuck that. Even when I get different offers and apply to change companies, you go nope. No can do. Stick with your current company eventhough we know that its shit for IT students because its a big company, see? And we have our university's reputation to upkeep. I came here to learn, not make you the No.1 university or something. And its not like you, or the staffs here, help us with anything.
So fuck all of this. We're gonna tell the other lecturers to stop sending students here. You don't learn anything. I'm done with this shit, not gonna think or worry about it anymore..I'll just, go get cake or something. Yeah.

!dev

Just went to the pet asylum to look for a cat. There was a shy black one (eh, maybe not a good first but Moar Blacker, Moar Better 😋) and a black and white one which was very open towards me.

Probably I'll get the latter, and build some food, water and litter dispenser systems for it with motors and my esp8266 boards 🙂

The lady who was volunteering there and showed me around had an interesting story though.

Apparently both of those aforementioned cats were wild cats (so they don't come from a proper household or anything). Except that black and white one which apparently came from some rather retarded people.. think average Facebook user.

According to her those previous owners came there with 2 cats including the black and white one as "extremely wild, we found them in the forest, put them in cages (because everyone carries cat cages in their car every day, right?) and brought them here". Nice excuse for average Facebook user level of retard I have to say 😜 but it's not very waterproof, you know?

But on average the people that they get there are even worse than that.. some get a great initial meeting with a cat, but then leave them there because they don't like the stripes on a paw or something stupid like that. As she put it: "you're not fitting pants in a clothing shop, are you?! 😑"
Had to try hard to not burst out in laughter from that description 😂

Point is, the average customers there are awful.. apparently she was very grateful to have a rather down-to-earth customer like me and my home supervisor (who helpfully drove me there 🙂) for once. So terrible clients.. they're everywhere!

It really taught me to be mindful of the hardships of people in any profession who deal with clients.

So I am at the client's location for onsite consultation of their projects.
The HoD asked me to create an application to accept feedbacks from multiple points urgently. Although I was there just for consulting, I thought why not, I am anyway getting bored here.
So after explaining the functionality, she asked me, when can she accept a working app. I told her that it would depend upon a lot of factors, so give me till evening to figure it out.
When she insisted I told her, that it can take at least a month with all the APIs, logins, UI, QA etc. She was surprised and told me that she expected it in 4 days since the requirements can be fit into a single page of her notebook. (That's how she measures project duration).

I told her it's impossible, given that I am the only one working on it. So she told me that her team can do it in two days. I probably have more experience than her entire team combined, but still I thought they might know some simple magic or faster way, that I might not, so I asked her to discuss with the team and then decide.

After explaining the requirements, when she mentioned that it should be done in 2 days, everyone was kinda frozen. One of them said that it's going to take at least 4 months.

I couldn't hide my smirk 😉

Aaaah, I fucking love it to death, when customers spontaneously decide to hire a separate, unrelated company to add new content pages to the website developed by our company.

That furuncle of a company must have had real pro devs to just create a new /html folder, dump their shit content in there and just manually add links in the existing CMS pages.
HOLY FUCK!
As you might already have expected, the /html folder contains:
- static *.html files for every page
- inline CSS in the *.html
- the crappiest PHP mailing script I have ever witnessed
- images with random resolutions, mostly too small

The layout of these puke-ridden pages obviously doesn't fit neither the existing color palette, nor has anything common with the current layout or typography at all.
These bastards don't even use Git!

Come on, dear customer, could you PLEASE fucking NOT hire a completely separate company to do OUR job?
PLEASE? PLEASE?!

I had to compare the whole deployment folder with our repo to find out what else these brain-damaged cunts changed in our code!

Why are clients so ignorant and stupid?!

Send them the software with specific instructions WHERE to install it. Location is important as it is a plugin for AutoCAD.

First mail with complains about the plugin doesn't work. Find out (in the mail they sent internal) that they installed the plugin somewhere else than I instructed them.

Sent an email back with (again) an explanation why it doesn't work and where to install the plugin.

Email from client: So I put the plugin here [incomplete and invalid location] and create the last folder myself...

FOR FUCK SAKE SRUPID ASS IGNORANT DOWN SYNDROM (sorry folks) MOFO CLIENT!!!!
I SENT YOU UP TO 3 TIMES WHERE TO PUT THE GODDAMNED PLUGIN!

I signed up to devRant with the same handle I use everywhere (firstName+lastName).toLowerCase() and now I feel like I can't really rant here, cause you never know who might read it...

Fuck these stupid frustrating trends. It drives me fucking crazy. Scrolling a website and sections overlap each other, text flying in as you scroll, stuff fading in, images moving over text panels. FUCK OFF!!!!!!!!!! I want to read the content, I don't want to feel sick and confused. Clients - DO NOT SEND ME A LINK TO THIS KIND OF WORTHLESS SHIT, SAYING 'I WANT IT LIKE THIS'.
Used sparingly and intelligently, animation can add to the UX, but it rarely is.
Remember the 90's when lazy designers used the photoshop bevel and emboss filter on every fucking thing, the web was contaminated. Cunts.

The manager and selfperceived omnipotent cult leader was the worst kind of businessman. Slimey and trecherous, zero sense of ethics, but felt holier than the pope because he "helped" his weakling herd of piteous employees.

These employees were smart kids, most of them in their late teens. All of them legally disabled. There was this kid who gobbled up ritalin like candy, a boy who had received his measles shots and turned socially awkward (/s), a chubby girl who could name all the hex colors of her chocolate stained shirt... you know, what we call skilled developers in the industry.

Fiftyfive of them.

They were awesome, awkward highschool dropouts, like I had been a decade earlier. They worked 50h a week. They had great humor, were passionate, devoured information about new technologies, and they built custom websites from scratch in no time. I had to lead this flock, and felt honored to work with them.

Then things started to smell funny.

I discovered all 55 of their workstations ran pirated software, from Windows to Adobe CS. I'm not without sin in that regard, but as a company it's just plain stupid.

Clients were treated like shit. I mean, we all feel like punching a client in the face sometimes, but I'm taking about unjustified debt collections paired with death threats.

Then I found out these kids were often disappearing for a few months, only to return months later.

I started digging, and discovered they were all working reintegration internships (because they were on below minimum wage disability payments), at almost zero cost to my employer.

After 6 months, my boss gave them a negative recommendation, they were all too "sick" to function in normal jobs.

Then they were rotated to a shadow company, doing the same work for another 6 months, and so on to a third company.

He broke these kids, talked them down, made them feel worthless. He threatened the ones who understood what was happening.

I ended up bringing the company down, with the CEO and two government officials jailed for fraud and corruption.

Some employees were quite mad about it, at least at first — I was the shepherd who abandoned his sheep. Luckily, most found better paid positions in no time.

Truly one of the most fucked up and difficult situations I've been in.

Some clients are just assholes!

I secretly wish everything at work fails because everyone is so fucking stupid every time it makes me cringe when I have to talk to someone or watch someone explaining something to me.

Everything seems to lack planning and focus, our PMS act more like clients than like managers, its a total fucking mess and I have to clean some of it this week.

It's getting so much on my nerves that I had to open my whiskey for the first time this year, damn.

Coming back here after years to rant about... myself.
TLDR: I fucked up and now have to call a thousand people as a dev, I'm not even getting paid for it and they all get crazy about a random ID that got assigned to them, so now I want to throw away all my electronics and become a skilift operator.

Stupid me deployed a project shortly before we have the largest amount of orders in the year. (Like 90% of yearly orders in a couple minutes cause they are sold out fast and people wait to order first)

I got this horrible legacy "plain self written framework php" project which I tried to upgrade state of the art.
There was one piece missing to upgrade everything and nicely deploy it to some fresh new servers which can handle the high load which peaks at the time orders open.

So I did it the day before orders open and... everything worked well! Nothing crashed.
I wrote my client to wait a little before he confirms the orders, since after confirmation each of the people who ordered will receive an email where they can choose a unique number which they'll receive as a sticker with the order.

Since it's an event my client is promoting, people will meet each other wearing those unique stickers and being able to identify each other online and in person with this number.

Suddenly my clients call me that "customers are complaining about that there is something wrong"
Turned out he confirmed all orders straight away and that part of the application which makes the number unique was broken on the update.
So everyone could chose any number (also taken ones) as his "unique" number.

In my panic, I told my client "It's my mistake, I'll deal with it of course and call the affected people in my free time, since it's my mistake you don't have to pay for it". (it's my largest client by far, am a freelancer)
Realizing when people can chose any number it'll not be a few ones who have the same, it's like almost everyone did chose "69", "1", "420", "88 (a scary amount of people)",... (with 69 being the number being chosen by most people btw, even more then "1")

So now I have to call about a thousand people telling them a new random ID will be assigned to them. I thought of course about mailing them, wrote a script that deals with the issue automatically, and FUCKED IT UP TOO so everyone is confused and the only way to deal with it is by a call basically.
And while I'm sitting here now for 2 days straight calling people in my free time about their random ID will have to change, I realized that some people are quite crazy about random ID's.
I'm talking about yelling and threatening because "is it too much to ask for a working website when ordering this expensive product".

I hate my life right now and am getting quite serious about throwing all my electronic devices away and become a skilift operator instead. Fuck the higher pay, it's not worth the shit, I wanna have only responsibility about one button to press while watching people fall on their face.

This one ticked me off because of the sheer rudeness of a demand they made of me. I had been building a personal freelance brand around myself and my skills for many years. I had in the prior 3 years developed it from a freelance to a lean agency model. That was running in parallel with full time work and the FT employer was happy to allow it. Eventually that employer downsized me and almost everyone else on staff. But they liked me and gave me mini-projects to do on a contract basis. I began interviewing for FT work with other companies.

One agency I applied at gave me a phone screen interview. The main hiring person was also an investor in the agency. He noted my lean agency and said that a second interview would be contingent on my dropping my clients that I was working for on my own time, disposing completely of my personal brand, and even giving up my domain name.

I told him I’d think about it. But the more I thought about it the more angry I got about such a stupid request. Why does this new company I don’t even know I will like working for get to tell me to abandon my “Plan B” option for if I quit or they decide to lay me off?

They never called back but I wished they had so I could have had the satisfaction of telling them no.

"Oh, let's delete no-reply@domain.tld because that's not needed by anything"

Stupid fucking clients...
Now users can't verify their accounts. Nice!

Project management site, exclusively for use by our team and clients.

- The client creates a new project.
- They list the requirements, supplying all the necessary files and content.
- We challenge any stupid stuff by offering alternative solutions.
- We all sign off on the requirements and no more are allowed to be added or modified. If they forgot anything, it's on record who's to blame.
- We estimate time and cost to complete the build.
- If they accept, we finally begin the work
- At each stage of every requirement, we mark the status as pending, in progress, ready for testing and delivered.

Much less stress due to minimising change requests. Plus easier to follow than an email chain and easier for them to use than a jira portal.

When I request that a client sends me the images they would like on their website. I do not expect 25 Emails each with one fucking image.

Sins? I don't want to keep you up all night, so here are some highlights.

Fucking with clients and employers who fuck with me first, or waste my time.

Occasionally not documenting my code (I'm actually pretty good about this), then bitching about poorly documented code.

Honestly wishing other people in the office would *actually* explode, or die engulfed in flames.

Working drunk and/or stoned.

Getting pissed off when I have to do something in a stupid way, or use a workflow that I don't like.

Seriously fucking up out of either arrogance or stupidity, then blaming it on something else.

Zoning out, skipping work, or sleeping in and billing for it (see sin #1).

But my greatest sin? That honor's got to go to becoming a developer in the first place.

I wasn't always a professional asshole, but I fucking am now.

Ideal job?
The one that give me a roof over my head.
And pays my bills.
And bring food on the table.
And give me a lot of free time for my hobbies.
And avoids me to discuss with stupid clients.

Ok, maybe the last one is a bit unrealistic..

Biggest challenge was to accept that no matter where you go, what you do, you will have to deal with stupid people.

They come in all ranges, starting from hr, interns, juniors, coworkers, code reviewers, seniors, managers, boss, clients.

And in order to grow in life, you have to learn to deal with them. Better even if you could make them a little less stupid.

So I’ve been working for this company for +4 years. When I started we were 6 dev. Now we are 1. It’s just me. Thankfully I’m leaving next week to start at another company. But right now I’m kinda loosing my mind. I have a deadline tomorrow and I’m super stressed because I’m not done. I have bugs to fix, documentation to write and all that stuff. I’m pissed off because people don’t understand what I do, why it takes time, why I want to be alone at home just coding instead of sitting at the office being interrupted with stupid ass questions about html or upcoming project. I don’t give a fuck about their clients or upcoming projects. I’m only working for them 7 more days and then they have 0 dev left. Fuck them. Fuck the CEO, fucking piece of shit. Can’t wait to flip them off leaving next week.

The biggest lesson I learned in Frontend Dev is: listen to users, not clients.

There are so many rants about stupid ass clients on here, and when you let clients treat you like that, it's kind of your own fault. Look at how people use your interfaces and you will immediately see what's bullshit about them. When you have user behavior as an argument basis, clients will listen to you.

I'm a stupid twat. Spent at least three hours today, all wasted. I had to update a user manual and change all the branding for a system I've licencesd and going to resell to my dumb clients. There was no original to work from only a pdf. Managed to convert it to word but all the formatting was fucked. So set up some heading and paragraph styles, proper header and footer and auto generate TOC's. I did all this without actually reading it, thought I'd get the formatting and branding out of the way first. So after all that I started the job of editing it and updating it. Quickly realised that PDF I converted was for a different but similar system. Tommorow is Groundhog Day.

I know I'm only an intern. But what in the actual sideways fuck. Are clients really this stupid?! They want to push the app into the app stores a week earlier AND add MORE functionality? FUUUUUCK ME.

"Architect"(A) - Hey, StrucN, we have a bit of a problem on the module you are working on (which the previous "developers" seem to have given it roofies)

Me: Okay, what seems to be the problem?

A: There is a need to add some functionality to it, we need you to ...

Me: I see, well it can be done but it wouldn't be so simple - the module is a mess and the change would need to be well tested

A: I fear the clients deadline is for tomorrow

Me: Well he'll have to wait, rushing it is the worst possible option

A: I'll talk to him about it, thanks

After around half an hour A rushes back

A: Hey I passed a ticket to you about the additions we spoke about, it should be ready for tomorrow

Me: It won't be ready, it's too complex to complete is in such a shirt notice (considering it's already the end of the day and all the changes need to be pushed tommorow to prod)

A: I know *programmer from useless team B* did something similar so as it is close to what we need you should copy it.

My inner voice: FUCK YOU YOU USELESS FUCKING CUNT! THERE SHOULDN'T BE ANY COPY PASTE SHIT FROM SOME UNRELATED MODULE! YOU SHIT STAINED MEAT BAG ALREADY DID SUCH A SIN IN THE PAST AND I HAD TO FIX ALL OF IT. THE MODULE SHOULDN'T SUFFER ANY MORE AS IT IS ALREADY A GODDAMN RAPE VICTIM!

WHERE DID PROPER PROFESSIONALISM WENT? WHY IS IT THE INDUSTRY FILLED WITH STUPID WANNA BE "ARCHITECTS" WHILE OTHER MORE COMPETENT FOLK SHOULD ALWAYS BE IGNORED BECAUSE IT'S ALWAYS SHOULD BE READY FOR TOMMOROW?!

For fucks sake I miss my old Architect, he could really understand the essence of program development

Fuck google cloud platform. My server has been down for last 4 days. Stupid reason google gives me is that it does not have resources available in my zone. Why the fuck do you start a hosting company if you cannot provide RAM and CPU. On top of that their support is so bad that after 20 emails, 4 chat tickets, 3 phone calls nobody knows the issue I am facing. They just give the links to their ultra stupid documentarion.
Now all my 6 projects are down. Clients are getting impatient. I cannot do any work and googles support is the worst.
They dont even want to understand the issue, dont know how they will solve it.

I have created AWS instance now and migrated to AWS. But i have old backups which are useless on AWS. To get the latest backups i need google cloud instance to get started but stupid google does not have resources. How hard it is to add 1 CPU and 1GB RAM?

Everything about the company is a mess. The only thing that is decent is the people. And by that I mean they aren't shit.
Workflows are fucked.
Clients are fucked. You're pressuring me to get this shit production ready before new year's eve and you still don't know what the text should say and want to make changes to the UI? The fuck?!
Design is a complete shit show. There is a design team. They only make a fucking psd to show clients how an interface would look like. No mobile version (but it's still expected to work!), no markup. Resolution is fucking inconsistent and whenever a change is requested, they are nowhere to be seen so I have to actually do designing on top of having to use this worthless fucking framework I hate it so much.
Codebases are turbo-fucked because of said framework.
Databases are an inconsistent, fucked up mess. No foreign key constraints because every single fucking table is using the MyISAM engine.

And the thing that really makes me incredibly angry is all the "custom systems" look the fucking same at the database level. Like 30 fucking useless tables made for stupid HR workflows that make no fucking sense.

I had to migrate ~100+ svn repos to git that were "useful" according to the client but found out that there were a lot of projects (+6yrs old) with only one commit message "--no-commit-message" and i'm not even joking...
And then I had to explain to these "devs" how to use fucking git with eclipse (+they all use light theme...) cos' terminal or gui client is too complicated

And then I saw their "Java libs" with ~3k line of spaghetti

Do you even dev bro?

I think that two criterias are important:

- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind

1) Some simple anti examples:

- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-

2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.

E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.

Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.

When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.

It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo

Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.

Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.

My worst enemies....

Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(

Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.

I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.

Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?

XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????

Receive several documents of blog posts from a client, each one titled "Blog $n - $category - $title." Cool, the client gave them to me in order and I just have to plug them in.

Enter blogs on site starting with Blog 1.

Client sees the blogs on the site and loses their shit. "I specifically numbered the blogs so you knew what order to put them in! How hard is it to put them in numerical order? Blog 1 is the newest blog and should be first on the page."

The site displays the newest post first, but because any normal person would have named the oldest blog "blog 1" and counted up from there the blogs are in the reverse order the client expected.

What the hell kind of dense motherfucker numbers their blog files in a manner which requires them to rename every file each time they write a new blog post?

It was around 2013, I was working on a project that had a great business idea, a really really bright feature (to this day I state the same) and all I was getting was around 400e/month of salary. (still was a junior dev)

So, I've been going on vacation to Spain for almost 1.5 month, everything was settled, there were no more pending jobs for me as I've finished everything that I could until more things would be done on the application and design that were needed.

It was 2nd week there, I didn't have a laptop with me as it was full vacation mode, no internet connection as it was almost 100e/month at that time, house I've lived in had no internet either. Then, one morning I receive a call that I must be on a skype meeting in any case - it was live or die situation. Me being me - went to a local internet cafe that was around 3km away from the house (on foot) - logged in to the call and proceeded. (I knew something is going to be fishy).

And there it was - I was needed to go back to my laptop and code a huge ass functionality so that we could present it to our testing clients. It was estimated to take around 3 weeks of full working days. No future payment, no compensation was offered but as stupid as I was - I went on with that and worked half of my vacation on full-day schedule... The functionality was delivered... Only after 4 months since the delivery date - the functionality was tested and after total of 9 months - was presented to the testers... I was pissed and asked for compensation as it was my vacation but all I heard was - NO, you took too long of a vacation and therefore it's your own fault. Soon after that I've started to receive every bit of blame if I was even 1 hour off the set deadline that was set by the manager that didn't have a single clue how programming works or even how to use the internet properly....

All in all, I'm still hurt of the 3 weeks that I've missed but since I've left the job 4 years ago (my salary had increased but I've quadrupled it since then) - I tend to see that it's a common practice to require things NOW and only deal with them MONTHS later...

Morale of the story:
Avoid working on your vacation at any means. If that will mean a lost job - then be it, you'll find a new one, presumably a better job.

I have been burnt out for over a year and a half now combined with mental health issues.

I was working an underpaying job, doing senior-dev work for a less than junior-dev pay, with an incompetent understaffed team. The work was so mundane and most of the clients were stupid. I hated work, my colleagues, and most of all I hated programming.

I finally quit the job and quit programming as well. I couldn't touch or see a terminal window without panicking. I've been spending my time binge watching series and movies.

Recently though, I've started picking up coding again. I've been blogging and doing some changes to my blog beside other light stuff.

This is the story of my first burnout and it's taken its toll on me. I hope it's the last one but who knows.

Why do clients always try to use our lingo? They sound stupid. I read a post yesterday that said "no coding necessary. Just HTML and CSS" . Um. What? I also have a client that always tells me "I just need you to make some updates to the CSS with programming" . 😐🔫

My wife often listen my rants about stupid clients, she thinks that I hope to much from them. Like image as actual image not fucking embedded in word document.
Today she agreed to help her friend and make name cards for tables. Got list of names ;) one photo of paper with hand written names on it :D

5 years ago , when I started coding and problem solving things , my IT teacher said "you need to be patient, to learn coding"
Nowadays I found out why you need to be patient.
To deal with stupid clients ..!!!!

FUCK YOU $CLIENT_NAME !

You tell me I've spent the last 6 months molesting and hacking your piece of garbage multistore prestashop?

Just for you to yet again, change the specifications, saying "I don't want a multistore anyway please split them up"

What an imbicile moron, you want me to duplicate the codebase/database 7 times? just to start "downgrading" each one individually? To make a few adjustments to each one.

What the fuck have you been smoking? I wasn't born with enough middle fingers to let you know how I feel about you.

There's little irritations that happen when working with clients over time that let you know that they're stuck in the past and definitely not the kind of client you want to have long term.

My personal favorite example:

"Can we put an icon that shows the weather on the banner of the website?"

Note: I don't make "websites," information portals, content pieces, etc.

It doesn't to matter what type of application it is; time tracking, HR, mortgage application, industrial control system, etc. I don't know why, but every single client I've ever had where I've been saddled with one or more people who have no business being anywhere near the term "stakeholder" asked for this stupid, banal, 1995 web portal fuckery. Their shitty little mushroom stamp contribution wasting everyone's time.

What's worse, they want it be prominent in the screen real estate. It can't just be a responsibly sized waste of space like the screenshot's top example (from a company whose entire business is weather, nonetheless). No, it has to be the busiest fucking thing in the control space, as in the example inferior.

Or maybe I'm just wrong and people desperately want to know if the sky is going to piss on them if they leave the cave.

Anyone else have a pet peeve in regards to recurrent, pointless functionality?

If only this button could make this shitty work week end & launch me in to paradise. I've had it up to here with PMs, clients, sales and stupid people. Any one else? 😖🙋🏼👋🏼

A little and sweet rant about RANTS! What the hell guys, I can finally think about a social network happily, but I have the feeling that I'm not a part of this awesome community :'( I mean, everyone is getting problem with some clients or whatever. But I'm currently unemployed, and never really get through that kind of problems. Ok they lied to me on the job, ok I paid 15000 euros 2 years of school where there were still people who doesn't care about the work, ok I left my girlfriend, ok I have a fucking hard time to go back to work with that... But all of this is not really juicy, my life is simple and mostly happy :'(
Maybe I should hope that my next job will be with stupid people :o
I love you guys <3

My weapon against clients who asks for stupid changes.
"That will increase your cost of maintentance and it takes atleast 2 months to make changes" .

What the fuck is clients' problem? This woman comes to me after one of the last bids I saved and spent on her stupid task! She asked me to come on skype and I said I didn't have the ID and maybe we can go ahead with a phone call or whatsapp call or even Google hangout! She stopped responding to my messages when I had sent her 3 options! It's not like I was willing to back out but hey, I DON'T FUCKING USE SKYPE ANYMORE! What a waste of my precious last but one bid!

When designers or clients design the smallest visual features that acording to them "should not take long" and they wont budge when you tell them it's stupid. I still charge more but its so fucking anoying.

Follow up to previous rant:

Now after I realised that I'm a stupid motherfucker, today was release day. Or so it was planned.
Because turned out my colleagues/supervisors didn't tell me to test the app on Android 6 devices and I was sure that if it ran on the device they gave me (which I assumed was the only device of our clients) it'd be sufficient.
Now it was tested on an android 6 device and crashed constantly.
Wow... I mean... Just wow... Now because I don't have a working android 6 device (a colleague of mine is on vacation and locked our development devices for a different app into a drawer) I have to get the emulator working which took me about 2 hours because that dumb shit face of a laptop first didn't have the android-sdk-root set (took me a good hour to realise) and then the kernel for the avds was missing.
Also: windows updates.
FUUUUUUUUUUUU....

(PS: yeah I should have tested it on various devices and made sure it worked on at least most of them without being told so. Another example for my stupidity.)

EDIT: Now I don't have enough disc space for the kernel I need to install. Absofuckingfantastic

Every now and then I attend to previews with clients, and almost every time the clients make me think : "they can't be so stupid? Can they? And I start thinking that there should be some kind of minimum brain use time to allow people to wake up the next morning."

The worst part for me : the clients should be engineers... They might even have some kind of engineer degree...

Depresing afternoon.

On the bright side, one of my mentoree handled a denied of service error so fucking swiftly! He's amazing!!

Stupid fucking client force us to deploy our nodejs codebase on windows server fucking 2016 because that the only version their security team has audited, and in their word: "open source oses like linux are more vulnerable because anyone can contribute????"
I fucking hate digital transformation projects with a passion because of stupid fucking client with their stupid fucking red tape problems

Recruiter answered me

Rejected

They decided to choose another candidate because... [the reason will be announced at the end of this rant]

...

I was working on my project

I am learning new tech

And shitting 10 times a day from these jobs and recruiters, the usual me

HE the recruiter contacted me a few days ago

HE offered me nodejs position

I AM the one who was HONEST and told him i dont work in nodejs i work in java

HE then continued the conversation

HE offered me a java spring boot backend position

I AM the one who read the requirements

🔥🔥🔥
REQUIREMENTS: 3+ years of experience
🔥🔥🔥

I AM the one who told him i have 5+ years of java spring boot and 8+ years of java experience.

HE said great I'll contact the clients and let them know

TWO WEEKS LATER OF SILENCE

"unfortunately they chose some other candidate because they need someone with 10+ years of experience for this role"

---

Are you fuc

Fucking

Ki

Wasting my Fucking time?

You decide to slam into my peace and offer me a job position with ALL THE REQUIREMENTS I FULFILL, JUST TO RANDOMLY REJECT ME FOR AN INVALID FUCKING REASON?

If i said i had 10 years of experience

They would reject me because i dont have 15+

If i had 15+ years of experience i would get rejected for not having 30+

If i had 30+ years of experience fucking your whole family and bombing them to dust like in palestine till their bones die and worms eat your fucking down syndrome brains, they would say i need 160+ year of experience

Fyck you

Truly.
From the bottom

Of my fucking balls and cum

From my fucking dick

From my fucking shit and asshole

From my vomit

I wish you death.

I wish karma to kill all of their family members (the clients who rejected me) slowly one by one. Final destination accidents type of deaths. Truly i hope you and wish you the worst.

[Here the intro continues]

I will repeat again:
- REQUIREMENTS: 3+ years

I have:
- 8+ years

They rejected me because:
- I don't have 10+ years

I told all of this to recruiter now. Politely but because im losing my patience i was very very passive aggressive with my response. In the context of

1. I TRULY dont give a fuck for your rejection (which is the truth)

2. Your clients are low IQ dumb as fucking retards because they choose people based on the YEARS OF EXPERIENCE

3. Explained him: IF YOU ARE SO FUCKING STUPID TO UNDERSTAND THIS COMMON SENSE, I'LL EXPLAIN IT TO YOU: CHOOSING DEVS SOLELY BASED ON THE YEARS OF EXPERIENCE MEANS YOU ARE FUCKING STUPUD. There are devs with 2 years of experience who are WAY smarter better efficient and more knowledgeable than some devs with 5-7 OR MORE years of experience. Thats because some people progress better faster or more efficiently in 2 years while others need 5 years. Etc. You're fucking stupid as shit for this sole decision

4. Indirectly let him know that i am not pissed off for rejection. I am pissed off for my time being FUCKING WASTED.

5. Also pointed him out: your job description says its looking for a dev with 3+ years of experience i told you i have 8+ and you reject me because I don't have 10+. Are you Fucking stupid? Fuck you. Truly fuck off. Get the fuck off my dick and eat the shits i shit straight out of my asshole. I'll shit in your fucking mouth you fucking bitch. Your wife also probably fucks some other guys while you're at work and she doesnt respect you or love you. In the matter of fact give me your fucking wife/gf and I'll Fucking fuck her to death

To the clients once again: Truly i hope Hamas fires a missile at israel but misses and hits your fucking home and your whole fucking family blows up to atoms and particles. Completely erased from existence.

We've got a big legacy app which we have to rewrite. The current client applications are only working on XP(!). We have to move the clients to the browser so we can finally get rid of all XP vm-s. The db schema is complex but still 1000+ stored procedures and functions and about a hundred tables with 13 years of data.
So I ask the guy responsible for maintaining the DB code. (he is ~25 years older than me)

me - Where is the source of the database. Which project?
he - Where would it be? It's in the db.
me - So we've got a huge db without VCS, upgrade/downgrade scripts, etc?
he - Yes. I don't get why young developers always want to use shiny new tech like git just because it is cool. It has nothing that an external usb backup drive can't do.
me - VCS has been around since the early 1980's...
he - If you really want, you can put it under git or whatever, so you can sleep better, but I still think it is stupid and a waste of time.

I get that it's hard to keep up, but getting personal...

Today I had to write some shitty code that should work on ie in compatibility mode which is like ie in Version 6. I only coded on the clients system and never backed up. Silly me. Every think worked so I continued with another clients project. Suddenly my colleague came in our office and told me that the client deleted my code by accident. I never will keep code on client systems only again in the future.

My leader was yelling at me cause i couldn't relate two tables, the first has a decimal(15,5) PK and the second has char(20) as a FK.

WELL TELL ME HOW THE FUCK SHOULD I RELATE THEM YOU STUPID FUCKING CUNT ??

Decimal !!! I could not believe my fucking eyes ! And Fuck keeping the clients satisfied!

Well, sorry, i just wanted to let it out.

So our sales rep got this email from some random dude yesterday (jan 12) saying he wants a simple webpage with a video background and some shit and that it's upmost important that it's done by jan 21.
Ignoring the fact that we are busy af, i thought well yeah it's doable. A simple onepager with some nice elements and some shit, ez pz.
In the email he also sent a link to a website simmilar to what he wants (as an example i presume) and it turned out to be a fully functional blog, a medium sized webshop (by the looks of it) and a whole lot of other stuff.
He didn't state a budget but seeing his demands I'd say his budget isn't much more than a couple of hundred €.

I haven't felt an urge to post on here in a while just because things have been going so well. But this month, is just not that kind of month anymore.

I'm upset. I'm upset by how I've been uprooted from my routine. I know I shouldn't be that bothered by it and things always change. But what the fuck is this company thinking to be using it's own fucking home baked ticketing system!

WHAT THE EVER LIVING FUCK IS THIS SHIT!

Let's go over the issues it has
1. I can't fucking email my clients through it
2. all emails are not recognized automatically. In other words each new email creates a new ticket if it does not have the tracking number attached to it.
3. I have to fucking hunt around in my inbox that is now bombarded by every email that is created for this ticketing system. Slap on a fucking tracking number. And then HOPE TO FUCKING GOD that the person on the other end doesn't erase the subject and cause the system to create a new ticket just for it.

Let's go over Zendesk which they've decided to decomission.
1. I. DON'T. HAVE. TO. DO. ANY. OF. THAT. FUCKING. SHIT.
2. That's it. It's fucking simple

Seriously. They forced me off of my original platform because this company already had a "ticketing system", if you can even fucking call it that, working.

And just if you weren't aware, all of this change happened because my company got bought out. It got bought out by this behemoth company that isn't willing to let me continue using a system; that has been very efficient, mind you, and instead make me use their system.

I. FUCKING. HATE. THIS.

Every fucking day! I have to do this stupid bullshit of emailing clients from my personal work email instead of on the direct ticketing system.

When I first started using this thing I actually thought I could use it to email the clients. For a solid two weeks I was "communicating" to clients through their ticketing system. Only to find out that the entire time those clients were not getting my actual fucking email! WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?

Then these guys tell me after the fact. "Oh that's strange... We never noticed that you can't send emails through it... We always just had used our work emails."

Are you fucking jerking my chain! You guys have literally been sitting in this slimy pit of hell for so long that you don't even know there are better options out there!

You don't have to fucking live this life!!

I don't think I'm going to make it. Something needs to change. And I know upper management isn't going to do it, because I fought hard to try and keep Zendesk. They are not keeping it. After this next quarter it is officially gone.

I'm trying to think of coding solutions to make my situation better... But I shouldn't have to fucking do that! There are perfectly good working solutions out there, and this company doesn't want to budge because "that's the way we've always been doing it"

I'm going to fucking rip out my hair.

What Universities Doesn't Tech You Is, How To Deal With Annoying/Stupid Clients... 😐🙄

Constant calls from clients who want to talk for hours about every little detail of the project.

Guys, I need to be able to work on the projects. I can't do that if you nail me to the phone. In the end, I'm the stupid one if the deadline was not met.

New favorite statement/question: "OK, but WHY?"

When co-workers want access to something, when clients request stupid features, when clients say almost anything really.

If you can't tell me why, then I probably don't need to waste my time on it.

FUCK people that romanticize all nighters. I'm here stuck at 04am waiting for my colleagues to finish because you told us 3 days prior to release the most important features. Or you don't listen to the clients or you're just plain stupid. HOPE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD that the next place won't be like this.

(Sorry for the caps, having a mental breakdown here)

I developed an Android app that authenticates users via HTTP. Because it's an internal use app for employees only, we are in charge of unsubscribe the users that have access to the app in case they leave the company; all we have to do is update a bit column in one DB table and that's it, nothing complicated. My manager thought it was a good idea to develop an entire "front-end" website to make this task "easier", and yes, I am the one he put in charge of doing this, even though I work in the company as an Android dev, not a web dev. Making this site would be really simple and it'd only take a few hours of effort, but I find it really stupid and a waste of time coding a whole website to achieve a goal that only takes one freaking SQL sentence and no real clients using it. I don't know if, in fact, this is a stupid and useless idea, or I'm being a dick and have no reasons to blame my manager and bitch about it.

Been a mobile developer since April, liking the experience and the amount of projects that I've been a part of.

And one of the things that I've learned about this is that sometimes the client doesn't even know what he really wants. I mean for fucksakes, we implement everything, and new functionalities and there's always something that works on every other app (and is basically a standard) and he thinks is not suppose to be like that...

And another thing. Fuck Apple Store. At the company we've developed an app that practically shows information that only users should see (in our logic is sensitive information from our clients) and they DECLINED 4 FUCKING TIMES THE APP. Reason? Since the app's purpose "isn't correlated" with the basical information we show, the user can navigate through the app without going through login.
We basically added an "explore option" that shows basically nothing and they've accepted. FUCK APPLE FOR WAISTING OUR TIME AND THE CLIENTS TIME

The moment of decision whether to hardcode something or keep it dynamic ...cause knowing your clients ...they're definately gonna come back with more requirements

!rant

I'm having an awkward episode of excitement-fear-shock, so I don't know why I'm exactly writing this; I just needed to tell this to someone.

Few hours ago, I found out that, in a hardly believable turn of events, I have been accepted in a PhD program in the exact field I wanted, computability theory, in one of the top universities in my country. I would say this is a dream, to have the chance to study what I like most in this world, now I see I just got the opportunity to make this dream come true.

With an absurd feeling of joy and sadness, it also means that I have to let go of programming, at least as a career. I really don't know if I will have to crave for the job I have right now ever again, but I know that I won't regret this decision; this is what I want.

But anyway, I enjoy to code, and I will enjoy it any time.
dev4Life

So today was a normal day at the office. My brain stopped functioning after helplessly trying to debug ES6 code for IE 11. So I put my headphones on and went to the loo. (Mind you my headphones have a heavy bass, so they are quite larger than other traditional headphones.)

As I was coming back to my desk, my project manager laughed, pointing to my headphones, and said, "What are these?"

"Headphones!", I said, silently judging him.

He said, "Can't you even put those down for two minutes? You wear them even in the loo!"

Baffled by his utmost stupid sentence, I did the most obvious thing, ignore him.

After about 10 minutes, the manager came to my desk and said, "See, when you walk around with these headphones, people get 'distracted' and are unable to work. So I'd suggest you wear them while still on your seat and remove them when you have to leave the seat. Even the clients might think of you as a weird guy. Okay?"

And I couldn't do anything. I just sat there, nodded and went back to work.

Disclaimer: This is all theoretical. Neither me nor my friend (with whom I discussed this) are stupid enough to even try to pursue this, but as an idea, i believe it might generate cool/new ideas/ways for handling secure communications across social groups.

Let's do some role play. Let's design a delivery app for drug dealers, think Seamless or Uber Eats, but for drugs. Not for big deliveries, like kilograms of coke, but smaller stuff. Maybe a few grams of it or something. The clients could rate dealers, and vide-versa. This would build a level of trust within the system. There would be no names, just anonymous reviews, ratings, and prices. Only the info you'd need to know.

The biggest (only?) problem we found (besides legality) was that, how would you prove that you're a client and not a snitch (or cop). This would have to somehow be handled both on signup, as well as when ordering (let's imagine that all who are clients are pure and won't ever snitch).

One of the ways we found to combat this was to have the app invite-only. This would, in theory, do away with the problem of having snitches signing up. However, what if the phone got stolen/breached by a snitch, and they also got full access to the account. One way we thought we could combat this would be with a "dispose number" or something similar. Basically, you call a number, or send a text, or message a Signal bot etc, which would lead to the account's instant termination, no traces of that user left. Hence, a dispose number.

The flow of the app would be as follows:
A client wants some amount of heroin. He opens the app, searches for a dealer, sends the him the desired amount, and in return gets back a price from the dealer. If both parties agree on the amount and price, the deal would start.

The app would then select a random time (taken from the client's selected timeframe and the dealer's "open" time) and a location (within a certain radius of both them, somewhere in between them both for convenience). If both of them accept the time and place, they'll have to meet up at said time and place.

The actual delivery could also be done using two dead drops - the client drops the money at one of them, the dealer drops the goods at the other one. Yes, this might be subject to abuse, but it wouldn't be that bad. I doubt that clients would make huge orders to unknown/badly rated dealers, as well as dealers accepting offers from badly rated clients. My idea is that they would start small, just so if they do lose their money/goods, the actual loss wouldn't be as big for them, but for the other party, having bad ratings would mean less clients willing to buy or dealers willing to sell.

A third way would be to use crypto, but the reason I left this as the last one is because it's not that wide-spread yet, at least not in local drug dealing. With this method, the client would initiate the order, the crypto would be sent to either the dealer or an escrow account, the dealer would then drop the goods at a random place and let the client know where to go to get them. After the client has gotten the goods, they could both review/rate the quality as well as the overall experience with that dealer, which would either make or break the dealer's upcoming deals. This would be pretty much like other DNM's, but on a local scale, making deliveries faster.

So far, this would seem like something that would work. Are there any ideas that might improve this? Anything that might make things more secure/anonymous?

My reason for this post is to spark a conversation about security and anonymity, not to endorse drugs or other illegal stuff.

Cheers!

PS. Really loving the new PC design of devRant

There is no fucking holy grail of programming. It's better to use the right tools for each task instead of wasting hours to make the wrong tool do a horrible job. But noooooo. Even since this co-worker got here, he bragged how good Drupal 7 is for everything, and he never even ised it once before! Now we have 2 fucking projects beyond schedule and a new one coming ing, each of which tries to use a fucking CMS as if it was a fucking framework. Fucking idiots who believe setting a couple of options via gui to generate random code means programming. Fucking bosses who believe using 3rd party community modules and hacking around them to have them do different stuff is better than coding what we need. I fucking gave up and started using raw php to be able to finish this fucking project, but my damn co-worker refuses to. He keeps swearing and punching the desk, saying it's our clients' fault for asking stupid features, and if you dare to mention how it may because we're using a cms like it was a framework, he just goes full bigot about Drupal. Bloody Hell, it would have taken lass than 3 weeks in Rails. I could just headbutt a kitten right now.

Not 100% hackathon, but I was once in one of those weekend coding challenges - aka: have idea, implement MVP, present to a Juri and get a chance to win a prize.

So, to start things off, you had a few months to prepare the idea, gather a team (minimum of 2, maximum of 5 per team) and register.

I gathered a few friends from university, that was cool. We were 5, I had the idea already, they agreed. I started talking business with some partners/governmental stuff (no time to explain all, ask in comments if you want to know).

2 weeks pass by after registering, still 1+ month before the event, 2 of the team members let me know they want to focus on university, so they cannot spend a weekend on this competition. Well, ok, still 3 people, no worries.

Fast forward, 1 week before the competition, another one says he won't be in town, we're 2. Still enough, we meet the requirements, it's just for the fun anyways.

Day 1 of the competition, I'm there waiting for my other teammate. Call him countless times, doesn't pick up. Later tells me he's sick.

I tell the organization about it. They asked: You can continue, but it's fine if you give up now.
> Yo, dafuck you mean give up? I'll die before I give up. It's for the fun anyways, worst case scenario I spend a nice weekend doing what I like *shrug*

So there I am, all alone, doing a first MVP of the mobile app in Android (without any prior android experience, and don't ask me why I chose to do mobile app for that project, was stupid back then).

Lots of nice things there, overall a good weekend, networking, food, gadgets and stuff like that.

Juri day, put on pretty clothes to present my super idea alongside my super MVP of the ugliest mobile app I've seen.

Judge 1: likes the idea, ugly app.
Judge 2: likes the idea, ugly app, could improve and work on the concept, etc
Judge 3: Lots of business questions, to which I came prepared with already potential clients and partners, liked that part although seemed a little confident of it working or not.
Judge 4: "Yo, that's the most stupid thing I've heard, not even gonna ask questions, that's just stupid"
Judge 5: A teacher in my university, the one to actually tell me about this competition, kind of like that meme from "How to train your dragon" where he does the thumbs up thing. Obviously the app sucks, but understandable, no one in the competition has much experience, bla bla bla

---

Final decision: No prize, fuck the idea, got a participation amazon voucher of like, $10 usd. *shurg*

--

Fast forward a few months, my aunt who shared the idea with me and who i was working with before the competition, sends me a link for an article on FB messenger.
The company where that MF judge worked at build a system exactly like the one I presented, claiming it was a very innovative idea. Never heard of them again, it was a consultation company (Deloitte), so I assume they didn't sell it well and dropped it also.

Moral of the story: I guess there's no moral, just have fun.

Please please stop asking me every time I present some new feature if this is something we can patent - I have no f*cking idea and you’re missing the point!

Everytime I applied long leave, my client and PM will plan for important feature, but they say start the sprint and for other new people i have to give KT, and they will take care. I know how that will screw up the system. So at the time it's nightmare​ late night at office, in office time KT, no weekends, stand-up for 1hr(every time QA will ask, what we get after this sprint). Stupid clients changing the requirements after stand-up.

Everytime code base screwed and need to refactoring. So as much as possible core functionality I'll complete and only bug fixing for newbie. I hate those days.

So Docker is pretty amazing, but I'm finding myself immensely frustrated at all the stupid shit devs do with their Dockfiles and stacks. Like the surprise of finding out Jenkins clients aren't setup for SSH or stacks opening up 5 public ports when all they really need are a bunch of private ports. Or how Jenkins deployments expect crazy tags so I have to add some really stupid tags to my own nodes.

How is it so hard to comprehend Docker for devs? It's so easy that I'm in utter bliss when I stop trying to use 3rd party stacks.

While I appreciate the effort, gdpr has some very stupid parts which clearly show that it wasn't properly discussed with experts.
For example: Information that somebody had received can never be reliably deleted, any attempt to do so will only make people use alternative clients. The only part of the service that I control is the server, especially in open source, and if people accept that others will see their data, it cannot be "unseen". I can delete it from my side so no one else will receive it _from me,_ but please don't make laws that enforce me to write client features no one wants because anyone familiar with the market knows that this will simply produce an alternative.

Sure, boss.. All charts will be changed to 3d so that your clients can spend a Fuck ton of ink printing that report page.. That's become fucking ugly cause of your stupid nonsense. Why the Fuck should 3d plotted charts be more readable? 😤

Some clients are down right stupid, the guy send me a shortcut to a video to upload to a site, this is man who wants the WordPress user manual

Electronic companies nowadays are no different than ranchers that force their slaves to earn money to buy new stuff cause people can’t repair old electronics or fix software bugs cause it’s not theirs or it’s not maintained and source code is not existent.

Damn you software and hardware corporations.

You tell everyone that you care about environment, yet you don’t fucking support your software and hardware as long as people use it. When you stop support you don’t make everything open source but keep it on your private repositories as intellectual property and fuck your clients.

Literally all electronics and software should be mandatory made open source to the people who purchased product so they can use it as long as they want not as long as corporate assholes want. This is insane law that is splitting our world and making it burn. If I could fix my laptop in nearby shop I wouldn’t have to purchase new one.

If it won’t change we will end up with <10 corporations that would rule world economy, everyone who will work for those corporations will be rich and happy and everyone else will be poor and unhappy . Mind me if this is not already happening and this planet slowly becomes Elysium movie nightmare.

Stop buying new stuff you stupid people cause this make things worse.

If it won’t change in 10 or so years there will be connected to cloud robots all over the world guarding us and some dick shit rich John Conor kid will hack them to exterminate humans by executing order 66. After that there will be big power outage that will put us into the role of battery and we would be closed in the barrel full of pink shit connected to matrix.

Get me out of here you asshole.

Stupid timeline, there is this company I was working for. It was sub-contracted by another company to do a government project. Government only pays after you deliver in my country. It was a complex system I must say. We were to work with my buddy on this project...now the timeline we were given were not feasible since another company had been given the same project and were not able to deliver. We had a meeting and discussed with our CEO about the project timelines. From the workload the feasible timelines were around 8months if we were to work as two devs. My CEO said that was not going to happen.. The only timelines that was allowed was not more than 3 months. So we suggest use an existing system to customize. .The meetings with the clients were to be weekly demos. So we choose to go with google docs api for the document management part. We were working around 20hrs a day to be able to achieve the target deadline..we management to complete the project within the given timeline..on the commissioning date of the project we faced a government panel and this was my worst disappointment. At the point of login we had to use Google email for business to obtain the API. Just as I was logging in the guy noticed and yelled. "Is that google account ?" and I replied yes..and he said "no need of proceeding since it will be of no use and they won't approve the system". That was my lowest moment in programming. I thought I had done the best project in my life as a programmer only for stupid man to declare my project as null. I felt like calling him son of a bitch but I knew that would have made me more angry...i just walked out. I went to the toilet and all I did was cry for the first time as I can recall.. My question was I was doing weekly demos. Why didn't they raise any questions by then so as to change the entire system??? Later after that demo we went and discussed about the issue and there was time extension. I redid the project using 'open office' but just before deploying the system I got a better job. I wasn't feeling like working on that project anymore. I want to release that project as open source. Recently after one year they haven't yet deployed the system. They are calling for my help. And I don't feel like helping after the humiliation...

Enterprise projects can go to fucking hell. Clients are stupid ass morons. Zero fucking humanity in their money veins. OH LOOK THIS BUTTON DOESN’T WORK WITH OUR PROVIDED SOAP SHIT API. Oh really? I don’t give a flying fuck. Get that fucking soap from the ground and tell your external company to fucking start communicating like human beings. Fuck. A day will come when I will tell the fucking truth and I don’t care if that will cost me a workplace.

One thing I realized about my workplace: when you're given a new template to be used for an existing website project, do NOT use the included CSS files. Seems like it would be better to just manually change the looks of the website to make it similar to that template, lest you want some alignment stuff to break.

Plus, it seems that I don't even need to meet all the design requirements, because whenever I try to do that, clients tend to forget the design they originally gave and request for all these changes.

One more month... One more month and I'm off to bootcamp to properly learn.

my stupid ass workplace use the same build server for production and dev. we daily deploy broken shit to out clients. what the fuck

Me: Yay! I’m getting more clients which means more income which means my accountant won’t look at me funny anymore when I say I’m still running a business and not a hobby! Go me!

Also me: I need $1400 worth of project management software subscription for 2 years (to get a discount) so I can manage the Agile workload among the developers and writers. I also need to recover $700 of accidental ad spend for that stupid Yelp account I forgot I had a “free trial” on. Guess I’m still running a hobby for a bit.

Today marks the second day of me having to build an email template and I never hated anything more in my life than that. WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE SO COMPLICATED? WHY CAN'T THEY UPGRADE THEIR STUPID RENDERING ENGINES SO WE CAN USE MORE MODERN METHODS?!? Sorry but I don't want to create an E-Mail and having to pretend its 1995. The table view is so outdated and I'm aware of the fact that some clients support divs but not Outlook (Outlook itself sucks pretty hard but thats another story). I just wanna be able to use grid, flex, etc. to build my template.
I HATE MY LIFE

So, there is this one client, who wants a website to be made for his hardware shop, and wants the inventory display and has given me their brochure's PDF and that fucking PDF contains Images and no text and he fucking expects me to write that shit down >:(
Tried all techniques to get text from the brochure , parser , OCR , everything.
None worked.
And the PDF is 100 pages long and I'm dire need of money .
FML :(

Do you ever feel your job is too demanding compared to other software engineering jobs?

I've worked in two companies for now.
First company, Kotlin microservices and we had QAs, didn't have to write a lot of tech specs and no post mortem or on call at all (not yet atleast), it was just talk to PO, he tells the business requirement, we work together to make tickets, no legacy code so was easy to know what to do for tech, no monolith to handle or anything, much easier, just code and meetings.

Current job is meetings with PO telling you what he wants, have to write a full on tech spec and also know business requirements and product knowledge as the current PO doesn't know anything about how the products work, writing huge tech specs, communicating on requests sent my clients on slack, pretty much always firefighting, the system is so fragile and legacy, coding is actually less its mostly spending hours finding out how this shittt legacy flows work (no docs) , PO pretty much does fuck all, just wants meetings and wants us to do very very stupid tedious low impacts projects. This bundled with oncall and onpoint and the absolute sheer amount of incidents our team is involved in (on average we have 4 a week LOL, varying size but they're all very annoying) and the overtime oncall benefit is so bad too, if you do get paged out of hours, you just get that hour back during work hours. In other companies like friends, you get paid for the whole time you're oncall, whether you get paged or not. I can't go out anywhere on weekends or anywhere at all during on call in case I get paged, which happens a lot. Its a cluster of a mess. This bundled with manager stoll not wanting to promote me to IC3 despite all I've done so far.

My question is, is this more normal than I think it is? Is this just how crap our career can be? Mind you I'm in the UK so not getting those mind boggling US wages sadly either. Have US colleagues in same team doing same job but obviously getting more

I’m at my last hair with this job; I report to 3 (two mid-level; one senior) project managers. The senior PM decided not to fix up the company’s jira and has encouraged “I’ll tell you what to do by mail, text, call. Even outside office productivity apps,” and I didn’t mind it but it’s become unbearable. Each of these PMs manage at least one client that I have to work with — in essence, any given day I’m reporting to these PMs, for multiple tasks for at least 2 clients, especially for MVPs. One of the mid-level PM (let’s call her T) has taken it upon herself to make me look bad. I’m the only developer at the company; when I joined the only two developers had already left a week prior, so I was their replacement (no one mentioned this to me during any of the 3 interviews).

T reports to the senior PM and senior PM, who is friends with T from outside the job, would also give T instructions to provide me in regard to Senior PM’s clients. To made this clearer, Senior PM’s client would request for a feature or whatever, Senior PM would prepare a lousy document and send to T to send to me, just so, T can have things to say in standup daily like “I reached out to the Dev to fix xyz’s something something,” so this means I have had to tolerate T twice as much as the other PMs. (She’s new to the job, a week after me — Senior PM brought her in — they both do not have technical experience relating to work tools for programming but I can say Senior PM knows how to manage clients; talk shop).

Anyhow, T gets off by making me look bad and occasionally would “pity” me for my workload but almost in a patronizing way. T would say I don’t try to reply messages in 5 minutes time after I receive them (T sends these messages on WhatsApp and not slack, which is open during work hours). T would say, “I can’t quite get a read of this Engineer — you(me) are wired differently,” whenever one of T’s requests is yet to be completed because I’m handling other requests including T’s, even though T had marked the completed ones as Done on her excel sheet (no jira).

In all of this, I still have to help her create slides for our clients on all completed tasks for the week/month, as senior PM would tell me because “T is new to this.” We’ve been at the job for roughly 4 months now.

I have helped recruit a new developer, someone the company recommended — I was only told to go through their résumé and respond if they are a good fit and I helped with the interview task (a take-home project — I requested that the applicant be compensated as it’s somewhat a dense project and would take their time — HR refused). The company agreed with the developer’s choice of full WFH but would have me come in twice a week, because “we have plenty live clients so we need to have you here to ensure every requests are handled,” as if I don’t handle requests on my WFH days.

Yesterday, T tried making me look bad, and I asked, “why is it that you like making me look bad?” in front of HR and T smiled. HR didn’t say anything (T is friends with HR and T would occasionally spill nonsense about me to HR, in fact they sit together to gossip and their noise would always crawl to my corner; they both don’t do much. T would sleep off during work hours and not get a word for it — the first time I took a 10 minutes break to relax, T said, “you look too comfortable. I don’t like that,” and HR laughed at T’s comment. While it was somewhat a joke, there was seriousness attached to it). As soon as HR left, I asked T again, “why is it that most of the things you say are stupid?”, T took offense and went to her gossip crew of 4, telling them what I had just said, then T informed senior PM (which I’m fine with as it’s ideal to report me to her superior in any circumstance). Then I told those who cared to listen, T’s fellow gossipers, that I only said that in response to T’s remark to me in front of them, a while back, that I talked like I’m high on drugs.

I’ve lost my mind compiling this and it feels like I’m going off track, I’m just pissed.

I loved the work challenges as I’ve had to take on new responsibilities and projects, even outside my programming language, but I’m looking for a job elsewhere. My salary doesn’t not reflect my contributions and my mental health is not looking good to maintain this work style. I recall taking a day off as I was feeling down and had anxiety towards work, only to find out HR showed T my request mail and they were laughing at me the next day I showed up, “everybody’s mental health is bad too but we still show up,” and I responded to T, “maybe you ought to take a break too”.

I'm currently working as a IT Specialist for this company, we have lots of important clients and it's a bit understaffed. This is not my passion at all, don't get me wrong I'm pretty good at it but it's just not my thing. I used to be a student until last year when a hurricane came by(I live in Puerto Rico btw) and after that I found this job, they took me in without finishing my degree or not knowing anything at all. At first I was ok with but as time dragged on it just made me feel pretty shitty. Now I've been taking a like into web development even before this year but once again got interrupted by the hurricane from last year, that didn't stopped me and I got selected to the Grow with Google's Front End Web Development Udacity nanodegree, I've also started doing some of Wes Bos courses to help me get around. Now I've been thinking about quitting my current job, taking some time to develop myself more and try getting into the web dev industry.
I guess I got a couple of questions:

Does my idea sounds stupid?

How hard is it to get a job for web dev remotely, mostly Front-end?

Currently trying to get good at React.
Any other technology you would recommend learning?

Any open-source projects you might know about that includes React and have beginners issues? I guess I'm still not as confident as I should

I'm stuck in a really difficult spot in my office and I'm not sure if I should start looking elsewhere. Tldr; there's no defined hierarchy or career path in the web department leaving no position to be promoted to.

We've got 2 offices with now 150+ employees and for the last 2 years I've basically inherited the responsibilities of an IT manager. Planning and deploying our networks, firewall config, VPN setup, keeping users' systems functional, track equipment, order/setup systems for new employees. All of this in addition to my original job description of web developer, which has basically turned into maintaining client WordPress sites while the other developer builds sites.

I've spoken to our CTO (my supervisor) about how much time the IT stuff actually takes and some of my suggestions for the future to make sure we protect ourselves and future proof our systems the best we can and one of my suggestions was that we needed to create the IT manager position because he is usually in meetings or building out API integrations. He's behind the idea, or at least says so to me, but leadership doesn't believe it's needed because we "manage just fine as it is" (this does require 60 hours a week of work along with much automation that I wrote/built). But we're trying to open a 3rd office which means another 50+ employees and systems to manage as well as more websites as we sign more clients.

My pay has never been satisfactory where I am and based on the maximum raise each year it would take me another 10 years to make what I would like (that's calculating without cost of living increase) but they claim this is because I lack a formal degree (self taught). I love most of the people I work with, don't really have an issue with any of them (outside that they're stupid but that I can let that slide if they're trying), and they work with me and my health issues which cause me to miss significantly more office time than I would like. I've been here for 4 years and I've learned a lot but I don't feel like there's any upward mobility here. The only position I see in my department above me is the CTO (or possibly the new PM but that's not a position I want) and he's not going anywhere, and I firmly believe we need someone who can full-time stay on top of our infrastructure before we expand further.

I fantasize occasionally about leaving and finding something else, and there are plenty of opportunities online that I appear qualified for which pay more, but I worry that I'd be trading in something that really isn't all that bad for something that sucks and the only real perk is more money. I'd hate to go somewhere else and start back at the bottom again and have to prove myself yet again.

Pwortes!!
Yes let's call non-developers Pwortes.
Proposed by @Peekaboo
Explanation in comments.

Me: You will have to do this at every restart.
Client: But I just switched on my laptop after shutting it down.

*facepalm*