That's the real difference!

The mobile web version of GitHub is absolute garbage. It's so shitty I don't even get why they bother. It lacks basic features like issue searching and the interface is so dumbed down everything just feels cheap and I always feel like I'm missing out.

All the devs I've talked to say they always just select "show desktop version." I do that too. It works perfectly. It's so fucking annoying. I wish they would just make a real mobile version, that's not missing features, or just default to the desktop app on mobile - works fine and everyone uses it anyway.

Those are actually real suggestions. I'm not even mad, that's amazing.

*at my study a year or longer ago*

Classmate: hey linuxxx, could you come take a look? What is this? *points at screen towards some code*
Me: you don't see it?!
Cm: no...?!
Me: you really don't see it?!
Cm: no!!?
Me: no for real, do you *REALLY* not see it?!
Cm: NO! TELL ME ALREADY!
Me: that's a screen 😊
Cm: 😑😠

😅

Conversation today...

Guy: "Hey I need a real quick script to pull some values out of an XML document...is that possible?"

Me: "Uh...yeah that's pretty simple if that's all it has to do."

Guy: "Ok excellent I'll send you some files and documentation."

Me: "Ok so is this like a one time use thing or do you need to parse multiple of these?"

Guy: "Actually it needs to run all the time, on this specific PC, watch directories for any files that are added, then generate a XLSX files of the values, and also log information to a database. Etc"

Me: "Oh that adds quite a bit of complexity from what you originally said. It's going to take more time."

Guy: "But you said it was easy."

Well fuck you...

Real conversation:

Coworker: I'm trying to classify data based on X

Me: Mhh. Seems like a hard task, we don't have data to figure out X

Coworker: I know! That's why I thought about using machine learning!

Me: (Oh, boy)

Coworker: I'm working on training this ML model that will be able to classify based on X

Me: and what are the inputs for your training?

Coworker: The data classified based on X

Me: And where did you get that from?

Coworker: I don't have it! That will be the output of my ML model!

Me: But you just said that was the input!

Coworker: Yes

Me: Don't you see a contradiction here?

Coworker: Yes, it's a pretty complicated problem, that's why I'm stuck. Can you help me with that?

Me: (Looking at my watch) Sorry I'm late for a meeting. Catch up later, bye!

I. FUCKING. HATE. MOBILE. DEVELOPMENT.

I already manage the data, devops, infra, and most of the backend dev.

We had a mobile guy. He was great. I never had to think about it and kept moving quickly on my work. #SpecializationOfLaborFTW

He left. Why? Because they wouldn't give him a small raise despite being one of the best mobile engineers in the firm. WTF.

I made the mistake of picking up just enough slack on this workflow in the interim such that I'm, apparently, the fucking god-damned release manager, fixer of pipelines, fixer of build configs, fixer of anything where someone just needs to RTFM for a half-hour to not fucking break things.

Now, 8 months later...and, apparently, Fortune 500 companies are too fucking god-damned cheap to pay for someone who actually knows WTF they're doing for a very reasonable thing to have at least one dedicated set of eyes for.

I never wanted to be a mobile dev.
I never will want to be a mobile dev.
And I certainly don't want to manage your HALF-FACE-FUCKED detached expo configs.

There's a reason I never intentionally involved myself in mobile. All the way down, it's just shitty cross-compilation, transpilation, dependency-hell, brittle-as-fuck build processes so we can foot-gun and mouth-gun react-native and expo and babel and whatever the fuck else cargo-culted horseshit into the wild.

And why? What's the actual fucking root cause? The biggest white elephant that ever fucking elephant-ed? It's because Apple and Google decided to never collaborate on a truly-native cross-platform SDK--where engineers could write native code that compiles to native binaries that's simply write-once, run-everywhere. They know they could have done that, and they didn't. So what'd they get back? Expo--a too-cleverly-designed backdoor/hack--more-or-less a way to circumvent the sane release process software has usually followed: code -> executable -> deploy. Or code -> deploy (for interpreted langs). Expo's like "keep your same executable, we're just gonna to do updates by injecting new code into it whenever we want". Didn't we learn anything with web? Shit gets messy real quick? Not to mention: HEY EXPO, WE WERE ALREADY BUILDING NATIVE APPS, YOU SHORT-SIGHTED FUCKS. THANKS FOR LURING OUR CTOs INTO FORCING EXPO DOWN OUR THROATS W/ THE IMPLICIT (BUT INCORRECT) TOO-GOOD-TO-BE-TRUE PROMISE THAT WE CAN HAVE WRITE-ONCE, RUN-ANYWHERE WITHOUT ANY BUY-IN OR COOPERATION FROM THE ACTUAL TARGET PLATFORMS.

And, we just, like, accept this? We all know it's garbage engineering. The principles we learned in the classroom aren't just academic abstractions--they actually yield real-world results--and eschewing them yields real-world failures. Expo is tightly-coupled to high-heaven, with leaky abstractions six-ways-to-christmas, chock-full of foot-guns, and fails the most basic test of quality: does it, "just work?"

Expo is fucking shameful and it should fucking die. Its promises are too bold, its land-mines too many, its future-proof-ness is alway, always, always questionable as fuck and a risk to every project that uses it.

You want a rant? This is my fucking venue, 'tis not? Well, then this is a piss and vinegar rant straight from my blood-red, beating fucking heart:

EXPO FUCKING SUCKS. AND IF YOU'RE A FAN, YOU FUCKING SUCK TOO.

So from hearing all those horrible recruiter stories on here, I am still kinda anxious to contact them/apply to jobs but fuck it, gotta find something.

So this morning, I was browsing jobs and saw one that seemed interesting. Applied through the app and didn't give it a second thought (they usually contact me after a week or so).

Then, 5 minutes later I suddenly got called by a number I don't know so picked up and:

Me: Hello, this is linuxxx (not gonna use my real name :P).
R: Hello, I am {r.name}, from {r.company}. I saw you are interested in {job.name}!
Me: Holy fuck (yeah i about literally said that), I did NOT expect to get a call within 5 minutes! *suddenly realizes I have to act professional, fuck me*.
R: That's alright haha! So may I ask you a few questions?
Me: *okay so that went better than expected* Yeah sure!:

- He asked me about many things but specifically about how I got into Linux and how my interest etc for it started AND where I learned it. He was very surprised to hear that I've learned everything myself :).

So, instead of getting an ass on the line, we talked, laughed and talked job oppertunities for half an hour :D.

I am not that afraid of recruiters anymore.

Teacher : Explain two parallel lines.

Me : Lines that never intersect

Teacher : Good. Can u explain it with an example.

Me : Me and my crush.

*Whole class laughing, still don't have a clue what I said wrong. That's as real as it fucking gets.*

Fucking education system. No real world examples.

Real Chat with new female friend.

Me : what are you studying now?
she : First year of MBBS
Me : that's nice. Generally boys/girls take admission in engg and commerce.
she : yuk. I hate engineer's and engineering specially that PC worm's(soft engg).
Me : k
She : what are you studying?
Me : soft engg
she : I didn't mean it.
Me : it's ok

-_-

WTF man

Please stop recommending arch. For real. Stop!

Let's back up. I'm an arch user. Have been for years. I love arch! Like hardcore! But for real, cut it out.

Either they didn't ask and you're being obnoxious or they probably asked "what's a good distro to learn?" Or "Ubuntu holds my hand too much, I want something more consoley" either way, arch is not the answer. Arch is a distro for us stuck up types who like spending all day fixing dependency errors, changing our WM every other week, debating the merits of X vs wayland, and acting better than everyone else.

But here's the thing: I found arch because I wanted something that I could compulsively configure and get really in the weeds. I think most arch users feel that way to some degree. You kinda have to if you want to not be miserable. But many Linux users aren't like that. And that's fine! Let them use mint, or Debian. So they never change their DE. Cinnamon is a great interface! Gnome 2 is totally fine! There's literally nothing wrong with being content with sane defaults and not manually installing every package, and having scheduled releases from a stable source.

Do you tell 7th graders "if you really want to get better at algebra, you should try calculus. You really gain a deep knowledge of math!" No! They will get there when they are good and ready! Or not. It's not a beginner distro. In fact (controversial opinion ahead) it's pretty shitty at being a distro. I have used arch for years! But I don't recommend it to anyone. Because if you want to configure a box for literally 100s of hours (it's never really over is it?), Then you aren't asking anyone about distro recommendations. You've tried them all. You've heard of arch. You been to /r/unixporn.

Stop acting better than everyone else and stop telling people it's better than <other distro here>. It's not. It's different. Very different. And it's not for everyone.

##REAL STORY##
Friend: Hey there, I have a Java Exam after one hour and I have a question for you.

Me: Great ! How can I help

F: They will give us a problem and ask us to solve it by writing a Java code.

Me: Okay,

F: That's it.

Me: Good, so were's the question.

F: Come on, of course I want to know how to solve it.

Me: Absolute Silence.

Me: friendsList.removeAll();

Ok now that's real ! My Laptop would probably be thinking same !

Life Coach: "I want a website where I can charge $5,000 for 6 weeks of coaching for [weird life problem very few people have or think about].

Me: "That'll be $5,000."

Life Coach: "That's too expensive for a website."

Me (inner voice): "tHaT's ToO eXpEnSiVe FoR a WeBsItE."

Me (real voice): "Consider it not as a cost but as an investment necessary to obtaining your first customer. Once the first customer is realized, you've paid for the website and the future customers will make you profitable.

>be me
>graduate
>find job with a start-up
>offer me 1% share as signup bonus
>why the hell not
>make 50 dollars/hour
>lowkey they didn't give me any real work
>only had to write some simple ass JS functions for the website
>asked boss to work from home
>he accepted
>tfw i get paid to play games, watch tv shows and write the occasional shitty ass piece of code for 50 dollars/hour
>that's about 1 AAA game/hour

Stay in school. Get your degree, kids.

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.

🖕

Germany

It's:
"oh cool. you must have good job perspectives."

Or:
"you just use a computer. that's not real work. do a job where you use your muscles. lazy student."

And the best:
"Can you gift me with computer parts for free" or "can you copy program XY for me? It cost to much."

*sets up BIND DNS server*

Domain name system..? Domain? As if it wants me to know my place on the internet?!! THAT'S SO OFFENSIVE!!! Change the name right now!!!

BIND? For real, a BDSM reference?! How sexualizing can you white cis males be?!! SO OFFENSIVE!!!

In the /etc/bind/named.conf.local I have to fill in a master type? MASTER??
🅼🅰🆂🆃🅴🆁???

🆂🅾 🅳🅰🅼🅽 🅾🅵🅵🅴🅽🆂🅸🅱🅴

Clearly technology is part of the patriarchy. I can't use DNS like this. Now where's my contributor's covenant?!

Juniors are a fun bunch to work with.
Over confident, hero complex of that fresh graduate high, and then thrown in to the real world! Where there hopes and dreams are crushed in minutes when they see what monolithic applications really look like!!

But don't let that overwhelm you, your not going to be changing all of it any time soon, hell some of this code hasn't been touched in 5+ years and still works without fail.

Don't stress about the work load, you can only write 1 line of code at a time anyway, and hell, even seniors make mistakes.

The key about being able to manage this beast is simple, break it! Because the more you break it, the more you'll understand how a project is put together, for better or worse. Learn from the examples in front of you, and learn what not to do in the future 😎

But more importantly, plan your changes, whiteboard the high level logic of what it is you want to add, then whiteboard in the current codebase and determine where to slice this bitch up, then when it all looks well and good, take out your scalpel and slice and dice time.
Don't worry, your changes aren't going to production anytime soon, hell, you'll be lucky to get past the first pull request with this working 100% the first time, and that's a good thing, learn from tour short comings and improve your own knowledge for the next time!

You just came in today, being new in your position. I've been with the company for around 5 years, and you're the new guy. Look, I absolutely respect your skills. You're not a newbie coming out of uni, ok? You're a skilled sysadmin. But you asking me "what is your college?" and after me telling you I majored in linguistics, your answer "huh, that's why" and explaining why I'm wrong in my programming practices (which are taken from the Apache foundation) is utterly bullshit. Fuck off!

1) The fact that you have a BS in CS doesn't mean you know the best. I've worked as a programmer for some time. You were never paid to write a line of code.

2) Even if you were absolutely, positively, non-questionably right, you have no right to be condescending.

So, can you just shove your degree far up your ass? Because my friend, you're uppity as fuck just because you spent 4 years in college learning theory that you never applied in real world. I spent years learning my programming skills alone, after 9 to 5 work, during the evenings and fucking weekends. I don't need to prove myself to you, you fuckity fuck, I have proven myself to our employer over the last five fucking years.

Fuuuuuuuck!

- Take a course called "Mobile Application Development"
- Teacher is new and is thus lost on how things work because there is no formal training for them
- Teacher only knows Objective-C so that's all we're allowed to use
- Nobody owns a Mac and I think one or two people had an iPhone/iPad
- Only 4 public Mac computers are available to the school
- One to two people are on them frequently, limiting our time on them as well
- Not a part of the schools normal imaging and updating system, so we get to do it ourselves, which takes up like a week or two of classes (4 classes)
- This includes installing XCode and getting Apple IDs
- No real instructions are given besides "implement the APIs for Facebook, Twitter, and Google Maps into an app"
- Being an ass, for the final day instead of showing off the app we made I made a PowerPoint of my dislike of Objective-C and various struggles I ran into and how I decided not to make the app at all.
- shrug emoji

So I was at work and send to another location (distribution centers) and in the lunch break my guider for that day and I started a conversation about servers etc (he appeared to do loads of stuff with that). He recommended me all those programs but I didn't recognize anything so I asked him what kinda servers he ran. He runs a lot of Windows servers. No problem for me but I told him that I am into Linux servers myself.

Guy: "Linux guy, eh? That system is considered to be so secure but in reality it's insecure as fuck!".

Me: (If he would come up with real/good arguments I am not going to argue against that by the way!) Uhm howso/why would you think that?
Guy: "Well all those script kiddies being able to execute code on your system doesn't seem that secure.".

*me thinking: okay hold on, let's ask for an explanation as that doesn't make any fucking sense 😐*

Me: "Uhm how do you mean, could you elaborate on that?"

Guy: "Well since it's open source it allows anyone to run any shit on your system that they'd like. That's why windows rocks, it doesn't let outsiders execute bad code on it.".

Seriously I am wondering where the hell he heard that. My face at that moment (internally, I didn't want to start a heated discussion): 😐 😲.

Yeah that was one weird conversation and look on open source operating systems...

I was thinking today about a certain aspect of running a software startup and then it came to me...

Hank Scorpio, from the Simpsons, was right in his approach.

So many time I have seen people get hired only for the company to get a less-than-optimal performance from them.

But why is this? Of course, it is many factors but one of the major ones is...

Employers seem to lump employees in together and assume that since most developers operate in one way that the new devs should be the same way.

The problem with this seems to be that we are all pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Let's face it, most devs (like most people) are not good, and almost everyone is not living up to their potential because of a lack of understanding of themselves and how they can achieve more.

On top of that, most devs are just employees who will do what you tell them to.

Since those above developers are the norm (Reference Seinfeld "95% of people are undatable") we have to assume that there is a 5% who are exceptional.

The difference between the 5% and the 95% is NOT some built-in superiority but that the 5% has a good idea themselves and an understanding of how to get the most out of them. They set goals and then find the right path to achieve them. They don't coast.

By assuming these developers are the same as the others is REALLY hampering their potential and by doing this the company only hurts itself.

So, that's a lot of talking but what actionable things can be taken away from this?

Hank asks Homer "What is your dream?"

Well, employeers should take the time to identify which of these developers are in the 5%. A problem arises though when the 5% decide it is in their best interest to blend in.

Like when home says his dream is to "Work for you?" Hank shuts him down and wants to get to the truth. He makes Homer comfortable with not only vocalizing but achieving his dreams.

When an employer is looking for their types they should be looking for the following...

1. A real genuine desire to achieve
2. A real plan to get their goals done
3. Critical thinking and self-evaluation

But more importantly, when they identify these types they should be asking questions like...
- How can we help you be more productive?
- Is there anything about our current operating norm that is hindering you?
- How does your productivity workflow look?

3 difficulties arise though…

1. Most hiring managers are incompetent, and quite frankly, everyone thinks they are in the 5% and for those managers who delude themselves into this without putting in the work, they will have an impossible time actually identifying those who are actually good and productive employees.
2. Showing special treatment to these folks may upset the people below.
3. You will hear things you don’t like…

Examples include…

- That new fancy open-office that you got because it was the trendy thing to do, you might hear that this is a huge hinderance.
- These days people seem to treat devs like nomads, “just give him a laptop and a table and he is fine”!. You may hear that this is complete BS. Real achievers may want a dedicated desk with multiple monitors, a desk with drawers etc.
- This WILL cost you money. I know of developers who cannot work without a dedicated whiteboard. Buy them whatever they need.
- They may want BOTH a standing desk and a chair to sit on.
- Etc.

The point is that it seems to me to be a foolish strategy to tailor your entire company to force everyone into the same work habits. Really good employees have the self-awareness to develop their own productive practices and any keeping of them inside a box will NOT help.

"Errors? Won't happen to me!"

One of my first jobs was to finish and maintain a program, that was made by a guy who had a real genius image among others. Years later, people said "oh him, that smart guy."

I never met him, but that's what i heard.

However, he was not only smart, but it seems he was also very confident. That's what i deduct from his code.

He didn't use catch-blocks. They were all empty. Not even logged.

If errors appeared , it was not possible to see what happened and where and why. The program would continue it's execution and if following steps could not work, because there had been an unnoticed exception, it would just throw another unnoticed exception and at some point, end in an undefined state.

Company: we care about work/life balance (as long as shit gets done)

Company: we care about mental well-being (except when shit has to be done "now!")

Company: we help each other (we push work around until someone finally do it)

Company: management is here to help you do your work (as long as you don't ask them to help you to solve a real problem)

Company: we are agile (except we have more sub-processes than ever)

Company: we only hire best (and then put them in the team of morons)

Company: we are customer centric (that's why we are delivering bugged features)

Company: we constantly rise the bar (deliver more shit in shorter time)

... did I forget about something?

Beware: this is me expressing how I feel about my programming/my skillset, and so on. It might be imposter syndrome but I am having a fucking bad episode right now and I just need to get this the fuck out.

I work at a distribution center right now. Can I provide for myself? Yes. Do I even slightly like my work? No I fucking hate it to the point. I hate going there every day, doing shit I don't like, not being able to focus on the shit I love but that's it for me for now.

In my free time I still am able to program a little but then the (I will call it imposter syndrome for now as I have no clue how to call it) imposter syndrome comes looking around the FUCKING corner.

*What the fuck are you doing? For real man, someone else could do that like way fucking better*

*Wow man your code..... there are so many people who would write that a million times better*

*You have re-written this for 10 times now. But seriously, this still sucks fucking balls*.

Fucking hell. Yes, at programming level I am still a junior, I fucking know that. But it fucking sucks feeling like anyone but you would do the shit you're making better anyways.

How fucking down can you get yourself. How bad can you make yourself feel through just a few fucking words/thoughts.

The only thing I am happy about right now is the fact that a very good friend is able to keep me at least slightly sane right now.

I HATE working with MS Office products. Yes, Access, I'm looking at you, you backwards, whanabe database reject! You're invalid as a serious SQL database and retarded as an data application suite.

VBA, make up your MIND with your damn function calls! Either require me to use parenthesis or don't! I'm sick of this conditional parenthesis sh*t!

While we're talking about not making up your mind... screw 'sub', you half wit language! Either use functions like a real language or go the f&$k home and make room for a language that knows what it's doing!

Oh!!! WHY... WHY! do you have null AND... NOTHING?! Who... Who... WHO invented "nothing"?! And what sick joke are you playing at with isnull() and empty()??? How many damn ways so you need to test for "no value"?!?!

Access... That's right, I'm not done with you yet... How is it you've survived this damn long in the business world with all of the databases you corrupt? Sure, you suck as a real database, but at least have some freaking pride that people even USE you! How DARE your corrupt yourself with the regularity you seem to have! I wish my bowel movements were as regular as your database corruptions, for the love of humanity.

F$@k you, VBA! F@&k you, Access! F$#k you, MS Office! And Fuuuuuu$k YOU Microsoft for shoving these half assed reject tools down my throat!

I hope your cloud uses Access as a back end and gets some injection virus.

*Takes deep breath* need to say that.

I wrote a database migration to add a column to a table and populated that column upon record creation.
But the code is so freaking convoluted that it took me four days of clawing my eyes out to manage this.
BUT IT'S FINALLY DONE.
FREAKING YAY.

Why so long, you ask? Just how convoluted could this possibly be? Follow my lead ~

There's an API to create a gift. (Possibly more; I have no bloody clue.)
I needed the mobile dev contractor to tell me which APIs he uses because there are lots of unused ones, and no reasoning to their naming, nor comments telling me what they do.

This API takes the supplied gift params, cherry-picks a few bits of useful data out (by passing both hashes by reference to several methods), replaces a couple of them with lookups / class instances (more pass-by-reference nonsense). After all of this, it logs the resulting (and very different) mess, and happily declares it the original supplied params. Utterly useless for basically everything, and so very wrong.

It then uses this data to call GiftSale#create, which returns an instance of GiftSale (that's actually a Gift; more on that soon).

GiftSale inherits from Gift, and redefines three of its methods.

GiftSale#create performs a lot of validations / data massaging, some by reference, some not. It uses `super` to call Gift#create which actually maps to the constructor Gift#initialize.

Gift#initialize calls Gift#pre_init (passing the data by reference again), which does nothing and returns null. But remember: GiftSale inherits from Gift, meaning GiftSale#pre_init supersedes Gift#pre_init, so that one is called instead. GiftSale#pre_init returns a Stripe charge object upon success, or a Gift (and a log entry containing '500 Internal') upon failure. But this is irrelevant because the return value is never actually used. Pass by reference, remember? I didn't.

We're now back at Gift#initialize, Rails finally creates a Gift object using the args modified [mostly] in-place by all of the above.

Another step back and we're at GiftSale#create again. This method returns either the shiny new Gift object or an error string (???), and the API logic branches on its type. For further confusion: not all of the method's returns are explicit, and those implicit return values are nested three levels deep. (In Ruby, a method will return the last executed line's return value automatically, allowing e.g. `def add(a,b); a+b; end`)

So, to summarize: GiftSale#create jumps back and forth between Gift five times before finally creating a Gift instance, and each jump further modifies the supplied params in-place.

Also. There are no rescue/catch blocks, meaning any issue with any of the above results in a 500. (A real 500, not a fake 500 like last time. A real 500, with tragic consequences.)

If you're having trouble following the above... yep! That's why it took FOUR FREAKING DAYS! I had no tests, no documentation, no already-built way of testing the API, and no idea what data to send it. especially considering it requires data from Stripe. It also requires an active session token + user data, and I likewise had no login API tests, documentation, logging, no idea how to create a user ... fucking hell, it's a mess.)

Also, and quite confusingly:
There's a class for GiftSale, but there's no table for it.
Gift and GiftSale are completely interchangeable except for their #create methods.

So, why does GiftSale exist?
I have no bloody idea.
All it seems to do is make everything far more complicated than it needs to be.

Anyway. My total commit?
Six lines.
IN FOUR FUCKING DAYS!

AHSKJGHALSKHGLKAHDSGJKASGH.

I can't help but be disappointed in the direction that technology has directed us into, especially social media.

While I love my girlfriend, she more often than not spends her time scrolling away at the dumbest shit on Instagram, Facebook, .. reels. Reels everywhere. And she's not dumb, mind you. She's an engineer just as much as you (presumably) and I are. Just in a different field.

When looking into it online and stumbling upon more than one study, I learned about the term it had been coined.. technoference. That's the constant interruption of social media into our day-to-day lives, and the dopamine kick it gives -- more so than IRL peers do. Why that is, being the digital equivalent to McDonald's, that's beyond me. But somehow it seems to be better, all while the content isn't even useful. It doesn't allow you to learn anything, to gain insights, or to explore things that could serve you in the real world. Cat videos and random shit that's somehow.. funny? Having pretty much completely disconnected from social media years ago, I seriously fail to see how.

Maybe us nerds in the 90's and early 2000's telling everyone else how we'd change the world and prove everyone who called us freaks wrong, disenchanted as we were (and probably still are), were the catalyst for this social disaster. We had the cognitive skills to do it, but not the social equivalent. I feel guilty... Even though I've always been part of a big tech resistance in some capacity, I still feel guilty. Because I'm one of those people with the skills of those who created this trash fire of a societal status quo. Everyone glued to their screens, 95% of the time not for work. Not even to aid one's ability to function in the real world. Just to combat boredom. All day, for many hours on end.

Where is it going to end? When will people realize the dystopia we got ourselves into? Will anyone but a few fight it? Would those who don't fight it even care?

dear anyone looking to teach kids programming (especially organizations):

- please be realistic. teach things your students can use. how to debug, how to solve realistic, real-world problems. not how to make a turtle draw a circle, that's not programming.

- please don't have blocks. just don't. they hurt.

- focus on your content instead of putting up posters on the wall with celebrities talking about the importance of programming

- don't call it 'code,' call it 'program.' do you know how different muggles think they are?

- please teach in a logical order. too many times have I seen commands --> functions --> variables/variable types --> then back to functions and return types.

- don't set an appropriate "age" to do it. please. its enough for people to learn to program, but to be told they're too "old" for a course? I can't tell you how many forgetful seniors and special needs students have been insulted. and don't even get me started on being too young. knowledge is knowledge, skill is skill, ability is ability.

- teach concepts with programming. don't separate them. they work better when they're taught together.

- understanding is more important than style. for beginners, fuck style. all of your program could be all on one line for fucks sake. I've had teachers chose style > functionality, because, fuck working programs, right?

- let your content speak for itself. this is not the place for celebrity endorsements.

- give resources for after a lesson is complete. when a beginner is finished, recommend more resources. you're never done learning.

most of these were things code.org did wrong. fuck them. I was in a constructive criticism mood today…

Guy: We should build a Blockchain based review website.
Me: Why does it have to use a Blockchain?
Guy: That way we can verify that only real people are leaving reviews and not bots.
Me: That's not really how Blockchains work.
Guy: Blockchain!

I can't be a teacher. Ever. For the sake of my student on this app, I will try to not generalize the entire class, but HOLY MOTHER OF BASTARD DEMON FUCKS. How the blazes is it so damn difficult to pay attention to the lecturer? Especially when he's nice enough to relate the information to the REAL FUCKING WORLD so they know why it's important?

I feel like they can hear my annoyance when I reply to "how long does the summary have to be?"

And how is 5 sentences the same as 5 paragraphs that are all supposed to have introductory sentence, supporting arguments, and a concluding sentence. That's at least 15 sentences if only one supporting statement is provided.

If this were any other teacher I was helping, I'd quit. But the fucker is intimidating and I want to learn as much as I can from him.

That's a real PR BTW
And it was merged actually

If you need to learn/teach object orientation, these are my approaches (I hate that classic "car" example):

1) Keep in mind games like Warcraft, Starcraft, Civilization, Age of Empires (yes, I am old school). They are a good example of having classes to use, instantiating objects (creatures) and putting them to work together. As in a real system.

2) Think of your program as an office that has a job to do, or a factory that has something to deliver. Classes are the roles/jobs and objects are the workers/employees. They don't need to be complex, but their purpose must be really (really, really) well defined. Just like in a real office / factory.

3) Even better (or crazier), see your classes and objects as real beings, digital creatures in a abstract world, and yourself as a kind of god, who creates species (define classes) with wisdom. Give life when it is the time for them to come into the world (instantiate object) and kill them when they are done with their mission (dispose an object). Give them behavior, logic, conditions to work with, situations where they take action, and when they don't. Make them kinda "smart". Build them able to make decisions and take actions based on conditions. Give them life. Think on your program as an ecossystem. There must be balance, connection, species must be well defined and creatures must work together to achieve a common objective. Don't just throw code and pray for it to run. Plan it.

-----

When I talk about my classes like they are real beings, and programs as mini-worlds, some people say I am crazy, some others say that's passion.

It is both! @__@

I saw this as a ./ comment a while back on a discussion about dev tools (sorry... don't have a link to the actual post...) It was so good that I printed it off and pinned it to my cube. Thought I'd share it here--

"The pain in programming doesn't come from the tools. Yeah, it's a pain to learn the tools, but that's short lived. The real pain comes from the nature of programming. It's caused by having to tell the computer in excruciating detail exactly what you want it to do without glossing over any of the 'you know what I mean' steps, because the computer certainly doesn't know what you mean. And not only do you have to tell it how to do the job when everything is working as it should, you have to anticipate all the ways in which things could fail and tell the computer what to do in those cases, too. THAT'S the painful part of programming--the programming. No tool is going to fix that."

*tries to SSH into my laptop to see how that third kernel compilation attempt went*
… From my Windows box.

Windows: aah nope.

"Oh God maybe the bloody HP thing overheated again"
*takes laptop from beneath the desk indent*
… Logs in perfectly. What the hell... Maybe it's SSH service went down?

$ systemctl status sshd
> active (running)

Well.. okay. Can I log in from my phone?

*fires up Termux*
*logs in just fine*

What the fuck... Literally just now I added the laptop's ECDSA key into the WSL known_hosts by trying to log into it, so it can't be blocked by that shitty firewall (come to think of it, did I disable that featureful piece of junk yet? A NAT router * takes care of that shit just fine Redmond certified mofos).. so what is it again.. yet another one of those fucking WanBLowS features?!!

condor@desktop $ nc -vz 192.168.10.30 22
Connection to 192.168.10.30 22 port [tcp/ssh] succeeded!

ARE YOU FUCKING FOR REAL?!

Fucking Heisen-feature-infested piece of garbage!!! Good for gaming and that's fucking it!

Edit: (*) this assumes that your internal network doesn't have any untrusted hosts. Public networks or home networks from regular users that don't audit their hosts all the time might very well need a firewall to be present on the host itself as well.

I've got a confession to make.

A while ago I refurbished this old laptop for someone, and ended up installing Bodhi on it. While I was installing it however, I did have some wicked thoughts..

What if I could ensure that the system remains up-to-date by running an updater script in a daily cron job? That may cause the system to go unstable, but at least it'd be up-to-date. Windows Update for Linux.

What if I could ensure that the system remains protected from malware by periodically logging into it and checking up, and siphoning out potential malware code? The network proximity that's required for direct communication could be achieved by offering them free access to one of my VPN servers, in the name of security or something like that. Permanent remote access, in the name of security. I'm not sure if Windows has this.

What if I could ensure that the system remains in good integrity by disabling the user from accessing root privileges, and having them ask me when they want to install a piece of software? That'd make the system quite secure, with the only penetration surface now being kernel exploits. But it'd significantly limit what my target user could do with their own machine.

At the end I ended up discarding all of these thoughts, because it'd be too much work to implement and maintain, and it'd be really non-ethical. I felt filthy from even thinking about these things. But the advantages of something like this - especially automated updates, which are a real issue on my servers where I tend to forget to apply them within a couple of weeks - can't just be disregarded. Perhaps Microsoft is on to something?

I'm real tired of my coworkers always trying to one up me and being elitist about their code. Like I get it, you think PHP is shit, C is so much better than Java. Wow, you must be so knowledgeable! /s

Just because you're bashing on bad languages and talking shit doesn't mean you write good code, and in fact your code isn't top quality, I've read it. All you're going to accomplish with an elitist mindset is close yourself off to improving, and that's probably the worst thing you can do as a developer.

Am I the only one who is triggered by seeing all of the stupid articles claiming Java is bad introduction language? Just becuase Standford decided to change it to JavaScript? What the actual fuck? How students should learn the fundamentals concept of OOP in scripting language?
Don't get me wrong, I hate using Java for real life projects. But there is a reason why almost every university use it as introduciton language. It's great start to learn programming. Saying that the 'Hello World' in Java is complex and can scare people away, it's complete nonsens. For fuck sake, yes programming should be fun, but it is also hard. People can understand that they are going to learn what 'public static voiď means later. It's the structure of many Computer Science classes. It's the assigments that are not designed in engaging and fun way for newcomers. That's the problem, not the language.

~March 7~
Boss: Hey cory, guess what, you will not take control of the servers anymore so you can focus on your real job, the company hire someone to do it
Me: Great, finally i can just program, thanks for the news boss

~Yesterday~
Boss: Hey cory, guess what, the person the company hired needs help to migrate some servers so you need to help him on weekend
Me: Well, it's ok i can do the job

~Today~
Director: Hey mr cory, we need you to help jonny on weekend
Me: Fine boss, i will be on weekend
Director: That's the attitude we need in the company, I do not know how much time you need but we're going to pay you 24 extra hours
Me inside ~every went better than expected~ 🤷‍♂️

I was stuck with an architectural problem for a few days. Tried to solve it in many different ways. I could always do a quick hack and call it a day, but.. That's not pretty and it would be a trip wire for future developments.

Went to bed at ~2am. Took a few hours before I finally fell asleep. In my dream I was solving the same problem as in real life, except there I found an obvious and simple solution. Woke up at 8am, repeated that solution to myself a few times to not to forget it. Implemented it in the evening and it worked perfectly!

Moral of the story: do not work late. Better go to sleep, rest your mind. You might solve the problem while resting, and you will need a clear mind in the morning to remember and implement the solution :)

p.S. This happened to me more than once.

Fuck that bitch of a mother of mine. After what she's done to me, I would totally just fucking electrocute her (lawyers, this is a rage post not a real one, I've learnt from that previous psychiatrist that these rages can be taken improperly!) or just send a fucking EMP to her fucking "schermpkes" (EN: screens, displays, whatever! Technology!) or whatever. FUCK THAT FUCKING WHORE!!!

Yes she gave birth to me. Should I be thankful for that, in this world where for some fucking reason Flat Earthers still exist, Despastico and those goddamn fucking Paul brothers became a thing? FUCK NO!! I wish I wasn't born in the first place! Or rather, a thought that's been playing for a long time in my head. Why the fuck can't I just cryo myself and be reborn in the next millennium?! No, that's not possible because as it is now, humanity will likely have fucked up the planet by then. Majority of the people are still no more than self-jerking fucking monkeys. With their Instagram geotagging shit all over the place, nametests and shit like that. FUUUUUUUUUCKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!! Why are people like this?!!!! Why can't people be a tad more intelligent, why can't people actually learn about what this reality is all about?! Why is the burden of all this on scientists, no those who spoonfeed information into the mouths of the masses, like fucking Hashem Al-Ghaili (which is an amazing person but he's doing too much spoonfeeding IMO). WHY?!!! WHY AM I BORN IN THIS FUCKING DYSTOPIA?!!!!

WHY AM I BORN IN THIS FUCKING WORLD WHERE PEOPLE ARE INDOCTRINATED INTO "NOTHING TO HIDE, NOTHING TO FEAR"?!!!!! WHYYYYYYYYYYYYY?!!!!!!!! You've got a fucking brain, USE IT!!!!

I fucking hate this world. Someone hire a hitman on the darkweb to kill me and that fucking whore that gave birth to me, NOW!!!

Me: *starts to get into electronics*
Me: *unplugs a few wires while building a project*
Me: Shit, actually, didn't want to unplug those. No worries.
Me: *instinctively reaches for the nonexistent Ctrl-Z*
Me: Oh, that's right. My actions have consequences in the real world.

Whatever you do, just keep going.

If you don't have mental capacity to do all tasks today, do one or two. If you want to do that side project you wanted, but lost motivation in the moment, do at least something, like a sign up form. Just keep going. Put some work in, make this day's net impact positive. And it's not all about work! Wanted to play that game you bought on a steam sale but never opened? Play the first level today. Wanted to learn how to make music? Download Ableton or Fruity Loops, watch a tutorial video on YouTube, replicate the steps. Just keep going.

Wandering directionless and letting yourself go is the sure path to misery. Remember — every figment of human behavior has a reason. It is important to identify reasons behind seemingly random behavior patterns and comprehend them in a non-judgmental way. Then, starve what holds you back, and feet what keeps you going.

I have bipolar type I + autism. Using this approach and remembering that everything has a reason helped me debug my low productivity. And no, I don't mean my job, I mean my real goals I want to pursue even if I had a billion in the bank today and never had to work a single day in my life.

Aaand, the reason was?… fear. I discovered I had PTSD all along that manifested when I was misdiagnosed and prescribed strong neuroleptics. In a way, it's a chemical lobotomy, just less invasive and more reversible. My intelligence came back, but it came back together with PTSD.
Now, instead of chasing mythical productivity, I know the reason behind the lack of it — PTSD. It is hard to fight what isn't defined, but it is real to win a fight with a thing with a name and a face.

Just keep going. That's my message to you.

Guys i got 1000++!!!

It's not that i'm special now.

Just more special than others.

Oh I remember the old times when devRant veterans like @linuxxx or @Alice posted their first rants and I welcomed them!

I even remember that night I gave @dfox the idea of creating this app! "That's stupid.", he said. "If this app should be succesful I owe you some special kind of duck we will produce for some reasons I don't know yet!", he said.

But for real now: Thanks everybody for being a part of this and for bringing me so much joy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My company got another contract to support a research institute. My current contract has shitty leadership that won't back us against our boss (different company, same contract) without proof. The fact that 3 of the 4 of us dread going to work isn't enough?

Anyways. Talking to the other site about transferring. Need to gtfo to a less toxic environment where I won't be made to work fucked up hours with a boss who doesn't like women in tech, and thinks he's something special because he's vegan (but had real leather jackets and bike seats, but that's an entirely different story) and does yoga and plays the guitar.

Meanwhile, he resents his kids and seems to regret getting married. All because he used his military education benefits to pay for their school.

An un-rant on Universities. (UC Irvine)

A lot of my friends and I are about to graduate 👨‍🎓 from UCI, with Computer Science degrees.

Most of them are complaining that they don't know any current frameworks, and all that we learned is outdated.
And that pretty much any bootcamper knows more tools that any of us do.

I totally disagree. I don't think it's the university's job to teach you tools (node, tencerflow, ...), rather, I think they made us into programming Swiss Army knifes. I can pick up any framework (I wanna be a web dev) real easy, and when shit breaks down, I can easily figure out the issue.

I think that's the major difference between Computer Scientists and Bootcampers/Programmers. We know "why", while they know "how".

What do you think? Is the current price of a CS degree worth it?

Definitly !rant; btw long post ahead

Soooo not so long ago i joined this community by chance just cuz i installed some app randomly found on google store and what can i say. Best decision ever!

I can say i never met such an interesting and diverse communitiy ever and i kin of ground fond of it (i usually dont get too attached to peoples).

After a while i felt the urge to get myself involved into some disscusion at some random post and i did it. But it felt empty as my image was just a plain green bubble of anonymity. But yeh, i am cool with it, i will customize it after some ++es. No problem!

I got incremented for a while and i got to make a simple generic avatar. I felt again a urge, but this time to customize even more. Sadly, anything cool needs approval by the people. Soo i kind of let it go as i am not really the kind to find myself talking in other businesses and i moved over.

Until i saw it! Not the tiger, not the bird but the dog! Annnd i wanted it so i made a joke that i am a wizard with an invisible dog. What can go wrong, right? Well the thing is.. it did not go wrong, as expected, but it went great, kinda unexpected.

How? Well, some random stranger felt me and gave me a hunble chance to get closer to my dreamy real dog. And so it begin, my crusade to get that damn dog!

But what i have realised fast is .. this is not facebook! Nor Instagram! People doesnot upvote attention whoreing or such lowly acts, but they are actually prone to support people who just.. get involved.

And so i did. I got involved. I actually got involved in a community! For a awkwardly introvert person that's something, but maybe more than few of you people can relate to this.

And today i finally reached that goal! I have a real doggo! Well, real as in not invisible, not as in a great responsability, but now i have both. But this was not such a big deal. The big deal is that i found people whos interests are alike to mine and are prone to help, support and befriend others. I must say, thanks to all! Wonderful time, and while i am not here for a long time, i will surely be!

Cheers and dev on!

Programming Languages are Like Cars:

Assembler: A formula I race car. Very fast but difficult to drive and maintain.

FORTRAN II: A Model T Ford. Once it was the king of the road.

FORTRAN IV: A Model A Ford.

FORTRAN 77: a six-cylinder Ford Fairlane with standard transmission and no seat belts.

COBOL: A delivery van. It's bulky and ugly but it does the work.

BASIC: A second-hand Rambler with a rebuilt engine and patched upholstery. Your dad bought it for you to learn to drive. You'll ditch it as soon as you can afford a new one.

PL/I: A Cadillac convertible with automatic transmission, a two-tone paint job, white-wall tires, chrome exhaust pipes, and fuzzy dice hanging in the windshield.

C++: A black Firebird, the all macho car. Comes with optional seatbelt (lint) and optional fuzz buster (escape to assembler).

ALGOL 60: An Austin Mini. Boy that's a small car.

ALGOL 68: An Aston Martin. An impressive car but not just anyone can drive it.

Pascal: A Volkswagon Beetle. It's small but sturdy. Was once popular with intellectual types.

liSP: An electric car. It's simple but slow. Seat belts are not available.

PROLOG/LUCID: Prototype concept cars.

FORTH: A go-cart.

LOGO: A kiddie's replica of a Rolls Royce. Comes with a real engine and a working horn.

APL: A double-decker bus. It takes rows and columns of passengers to the same place all at the same time but it drives only in reverse and is instrumented in Greek.
Ada: An army-green Mercedes-Benz staff car. Power steering, power brakes, and automatic transmission are standard. No other colors or options are available. If it's good enough for generals, it's good enough for you.

Java: All-terrain very slow vehicle.

Earlier I signed up on this forum called NulledBB. Basically some hacker skiddie forum that had a dump of an archive I wanted, unfortunately behind a paywall which I didn't want to bother with.

On signup I noticed that I couldn't use my domain as an email address, as I usually do (the domain is a catch-all which means that mail addresses can be made up for each service I sign up to on the fly, super useful). They did expose the regex that they accepted email as however, which included something along the lines of "@live.*".

So I figured, why not register a subdomain live.nixmagic.com real quick and put that into the mail servers? Didn't take too long and that's what I eventually went with, and registered as somepissedoffsysop@live.nixmagic.com (which I have no trouble putting on a public forum as you'll see in a minute).

Still didn't manage to get that archive I wanted but I figured, fuck it. It's a throwaway account anyway. But eventually that email address started to receive spam. Stupid motherfucker of a forum operator with his Kali skidmachine probably leaked it.

Usually I just blacklist the email address in SpamAssassin by adding an additional spam score of 100 to email sent to such addresses. But in that case it didn't even sit on the main domain, thanks to that stupid regex block from earlier... 😏

*Logs into my domain admin panel*
*Le rm on the live.nixmagic.com record*

Null routed entirely.. nulled, if you will! 🙃

Another real-world argument for why I always say git is worth learning properly.

Had to track a really weird bug down today. Had no idea where it came from, how long it'd been in the code and hadn't the foggiest what was causing it. Realistically it could have been introduced any time in the last year or two, and that's tens of thousands of commits in this repo.

Git to the rescue. Knocked up a quick script to test the case in question, fed it into "git bisect run", and 30 seconds later git found the exact (small) commit that caused the issue.

It's a brilliant part of git, yet it seems like almost no-one I know uses it. Some use "git bisect", but using "git bisect run" and passing a script to it seems to be alien to most - yet it's probably my most used tool when it comes to tracking down bugs like these.

FUCK LINUX

now that I have your attention, and you’re probably angry, too, please, even if you don’t read this rant, never use code.org again. now, onto the rant…

god dammit, code.org sucks. I mean, anyone who created it or associates with it should, well, be considered a terrorist. they’re bombing students futures in computer science with false, useless, bullshit information. not to mention, their sponsors like bill gates, mark zuckerburg, and other rich asses, talk in a video about some boring ass shit that is hard to understand for anyone who doesn’t program, and not to mention, they use a fucking five dollar microphone. ear rape. even if you look at a textual version of it, then read the information on it, it’s practically useless because it's so terribly explained, and also useless. ironically enough, they focus on their animations more than their actual explinations, or their students for that matter. the fact that we had to encode a picture in binary, made me about 50% dumber, give or take a 0 or 1. then, we had to do it in hex, which wasn’t really much better, although more realistic I supposed. what's really the most depressing thing about this class is its application in the real world. I've learnt nothing whatsoever that will help me in the real world, or in computer science. I suppose there's two things that may be useful (that I already knew): hex, and that TCP doesn't lose packets. that's it. those two things. five seconds worth of knowledge from the first quarter of the year. the ideas just make me want to throw up. teaching the main ideas of computer science without actually teaching it? one of the teachers (probably a good one) enrolled her students in an online programming course just so they could understand, because the explanations are just so terrible. this is the only [high school] computer science course offered by code.org, and I signed up because it's an AP computer science class (tried to get into AP Java, the day I was supposed to take the test to get into an upper level class, I was told it didn't count as a tech credit). seriously, fuck code.org. it makes you dumber. their 'app lab' environment is pointless, just like everything else. the app lab is basically where you have a set of commands and have to make a dog bark() or a storm trooper miss() [and that's hell when they haven't introduced while loops yet]. the app lab is literally code.org going out of their way to make everything that their students are learning pointless in the real world. seriously, why can't we just use a <canvas> like an ACTUAL PROGRAMMER would do if they were to make a browser game, not use an app engine so slow it would be faster to update windows and android studio each time I run an 'app' in their 'environment'. their excuse is that the skills "transfer over" to the real world. BITCH! IF I DIDN'T KNOW JAVA, AND I WANTED TO MAKE A GAME IN JAVA, I'M NOT GOING TO LEARN PYTHON, THEN "TRANSFER" THE SKILLS I LEARNT, I'M GOING TO LEARN FUCKING JAVA. AND THAT GOES FOR EVER OTHER LANGUAGE, PROJECT, ETC.

I'm begging you code.org, stop, get help.

manager: we had great feedback last week, real users were testing our app! However, we have noticed a lot of issues regards database performance and data replication...

me: oh, that's great news!! How many users? Like hundreds?

manager: no, 6 users so far

Real fact: 1999

IT: IT, how can I help?
MrB: I'm Butcheek. This program is shit, I can't even log-in!
IT: oh.. Ok Mr. Butcheek, let’s see if I can help...
MrB: of course you can: fix this shitty program and made me log in!
IT: I’ll try to do my best to assist you, can you...
MrB: I just want to log in! Can you speak my language? This new program is ridiculous, I wonder why you IT guys changed the old one, it was a mess but at least I could log in...
IT: I'm sorry you are experiencing this problem, but to assist you I need to know exactly what's the problem
MrB: I CANT LOG IN!!!
IT: ok, I understand this, but can you please provide some more information? Do you receive any particular error messages?
MrB: it says “wrong password” but it's not true!
IT: Ok, that's strange. Look, I'm resetting your password and then you will try again. At the first log in you will be asked to change it again, ok?
MrB: just be quick, I can't waste any more time on this!
IT: sure... Ok done. Please, can you try again? The password is “butcheek”
MrB: it asks for the username. What am I supposed to write here?
IT: “butcheek”
MrB: oh... Ok. And what's the password?
IT: “butcheek”
MrB:... No... Wait... Ok, “butcheek” is the password but what's the username?
IT: “butcheek”!
MrB: you don't understand, I have to put both username AND password!
IT: I know! “butcheek”! For both username AND password!
MrB: so I have to write “butcheek”-”butcheek”?
IT: yes, “butcheek”-”butcheek”!
MrB: so... “butcheek”...twice? Sounds weird... are you sure?
IT: yes I'm sure! However, you can choose either to write “butcheek” twice or “ASS” once, if you prefer...

devrant is the only community that I feel comfortable in.

I've been browsing since 2000 and been in many communities online so far, so that's saying a lot.

I've seen supportive comments towards me and others here, and that really makes me feel less hopeless.

I think the internet in general makes you feel like you're a number. Click the like and the sub button, just be one more in a million.

But here, you matter.
If you try to post something and you are sincere, but humble people will ++ and say nice comments.

If you get upvoted, you can WHO did it and what their online persona looks like.
It feels very organic and personal, which is saying a lot for a place like the internet.

In the standard online experience, people online take advantage of the anonymity to say shit they wouldn't online:
anything, from troll shit to presumptuous comments.

I don't understand how some people can connect being anonymous with denying themselves as moral beings.

Do these people walk around in real life fighting with every person that has an opposite point of view?

There's actual people out there that will read this post and think "what a fucking boy scout".
Sorry for having emotions.

how many fucked up people are there, so that devrant feels like a goddamn mirage?

How can business majors be so gullible?! Who the fuck poisoned their minds with the app hype ?!!

Seriously my tears are 90% from laughter and 10% shame for humanity.

Friend: "Dude I'd like to consult with you the idea of an app...etc"
Me: "Sounds nice, got a business plan?"
Friend: "Yes, but well...you see... development has already started"
Me: "oh cool, how's that going?"
Friend: "well I already made an upfront payment of 2K dollars"
Me: "sounds kind of excessive for the amount of work...wait did you said upfront payment?"
Friend: "yeah, we calculated 30k total"

😐

Me:"umm...that software must be...special...? Can I see it?"
Friend: "that's the thing, they haven't delivered"
Me: " did they give you mockups? A development plan? Demo? Anything?"
Friend: "umm no"
Me: "a god damn receipt?"
Friend shows me a piece of paper with the name of the guy and 2K written on it.
Friend: "he says he's been busy, I wanted your advice"

I blame Eduardo Saverin's fate and my friend's on college's failure to teach "real world assholes 101"

I tried writing this rant before, but I was (and still am) in too good of a mood so it was lengthy, meandering, and over-specific. so I'll summarize(ish).

summary:
* miscommunication
* working weekends
* incompetence and/or screwy integrations

summary of the summary:
* I can't fix someone else's mess if you don't talk to me!

Summary^3: #TODO: learn telepathy

Shortened rant:
Bossman at work signed up a very lucrative client by promising them something he couldn't deliver because he misunderstood and miscommunicated scope -- anti-fraud, if you've been following my rants.

Their signup (all four...) are screwy and cause issues and nobody knows why. I didn't write the code, have barely even glanced through it, and it uses a third-party (Clover) that's rather screwy.

Bossman has been asking me to do various things concerning the merchant, but has never been around to provide specifics, so I'm left to guess. I've done my best, but due to the aforementioned screwiness, I really have no idea what's going on. I just sort of muddled my way through.

Bossman also asked me, super late on Friday night (after 8:30pm), to rename one of the merchants because there are two with the same name (with different Clover creds, etc.) and that's just confusing. I didn't see the message because late and tired, and he didn't follow up or text/call me until two days later (today, Sunday). I also thought these were strictly for diagnosing and were de-listed. I had no idea the merchant was live and people were actually purchasing things for it. Had I known this I would have freaked out and demanded specifics on Thursday/Friday because wtf? debugging in production? with broken merchants? selling things for real money? scary bad? hello?

Anyway, I didn't see his message until he texted me about it at like 5pm today while I was about 2 hours from my computer. He's understandably frustrated, and I totally don't blame him, but fuck, miscommunication is a serious problem in this company, and that's amazing because it's so freaking small.

But the short version is that I'm likely going to get blamed for all this, Clover screwiness included. Bossman and I set up a call for 10am tomorrow and I'm positive he's going to try pinning it on me. Totally not going to let him, but his social is lv16+ while mine's like. 2 or 3. 😕 I'll see how it goes.

Really though, I should read @rutee07's book and just roast these fuckers.

It is time. I have to admit it.

I don't understand Git.

I just memorized some basic commands: git commit, git push, git push -u origin master, git clone, git checkout [-B], git merge. That's it, that's the full list. I use them like they're some kind of magic spells that do what I need. Everything else, those intricacies like rebasing, resetting, HEAD and all that shit, is beyond me.

I'm not a real programmer. Real programmers know Git.

Watch out for these fucking bug bounty idiots.

Some time back I got an email from one shortly after making a website live. Didn't find anything major and just ran a simple tool that can suggest security improvements simply loading the landing page for the site.

Might be useful for some people but not so much for me.

It's the same kind of security tool you can search for, run it and it mostly just checks things like HTTP headers. A harmless surface test. Was nice, polite and didn't demand anything but linked to their profile where you can give them some rep on a system that gamifies security bug hunting.

It's rendering services without being asked like when someone washes your windscreen while stopped at traffic but no demands and no real harm done. Spammed.

I had another one recently though that was a total disgrace.

"I'm a web security Analyst. My Job is to do penetration testing in websites to make them secure."
"While testing your site I found some critical vulnerabilities (bugs) in your site which need to be mitigated."
"If you have a bug bounty program, kindly let me know where I should report those issues."
"Waiting for response."

It immediately stands out that this person is asking for pay before disclosing vulnerabilities but this ends up being stupid on so many other levels.

The second thing that stands out is that he says he's doing a penetration test. This is illegal in most major countries. Even attempting to penetrate a system without consent is illegal.

In many cases if it's trivial or safe no harm no foul but in this case I take a look at what he's sending and he's really trying to hack the site. Sending all kinds of junk data and sending things to try to inject that if they did get through could cause damage or provide sensitive data such as trying SQL injects to get user data.

It doesn't matter the intent it's breaking criminal law and when there's the potential for damages that's serious.

It cannot be understated how unprofessional this is. Irrespective of intent, being a self proclaimed "whitehat" or "ethical hacker" if they test this on a site and some of the commands they sent my way had worked then that would have been a data breach.

These weren't commands to see if something was possible, they were commands to extract data. If some random person from Pakistan extracts sensitive data then that's a breach that has to be reported and disclosed to users with the potential for fines and other consequences.

The sad thing is looking at the logs he's doing it all manually. Copying and pasting extremely specific snippets into all the input boxes of hacked with nothing to do with the stack in use. He can't get that many hits that way.

Finally after one year I understood how to carry out my job. I should do exactly NOTHING. I stopped completely organizing the team, solving bugs, helping the team developing and solving problems, explore and try stupid things said by CEO, PM and consultants.
I stopped for 2 months now and nothing happened.
I work remotely, nobody knows if I'm working or not, because nobody cares really about priorities, bugs, customers or products development.

I gain 10K$ (ten thousand) per month.

I attend skype meeting once per week or less. I say yes to everything, nobody gives a shit to what I say, even if they consider me the technical director. Actually in the meetings I only take care of being considered the technical director.
I achieved the mythical 4 hours working week.

I keep skype open in all my devices in order to answer promptly in case of problem, wherever I'm am, that's the most important thing right now.

I attended some meeting from the toilet or from the bedroom.

It was hard. To understand that the board is only after the next funding and not looking to develop a real product. It's hard to pretend helping people while thinking inside you "fuck you".
You have to let go the "guilt": if you can't login, I KNOW that is my fault, that there is a bug, that is possible to solve it, that resources and planning are needed etc. That's guilt. Just let go and say "next release" and never include it in the next release.
In this way I discovered that some users are paying the application even if they can't login.

The company is not going to disappear in the next 5 years. On the contrary, it's going to receive more money.

So the only "bad" thing is, what will I write in my CV in 5 years?

Hiring process is fucking broken ok?
We all do have something else to do, nobody wants to do "homework" for 4 fucking hours. Which let's be real, isn't 4 hours. It's always more. I try to squeeze it in a least amount of time which means mistakes will be made. I always try to show my knowledge of the language and it's features. But, you didn't do X. That's it, that is a no from us.
Dude, I just wrote a high production grade small project with 90%+ test coverage and you are telling me that those 2 small shit I made is a big deal? Fuck off

Most companies I worked with have a code full of shit and here I present to you, with a poetry and it's a no because of X?

My bet is that if I ever started to work there I would find a code that isn't tested and is in shit state

\rant

Applies for Android Internship

Supervisor: Work with this Image Processing Library to "RECOGNIZE" objects from the phones camera.

Me: Wuuuuuh....?

Supervisor: Also it should be in real time and can't use internet.

Me: But that's impossible....

Supervisor: Align your goals with the company's goal. Nothing is impossible......(gets all motivational)

Me: 😩🔫

Adobe is predatory. I bought a subscription to Adobe Premier four months ago. After using it a little, I found Davinci Resolve (it's free) and decided it was just as capable for my needs. Upon trying to cancel Adobe, it offered me 3 more months at a good price and I thought, well, maybe I could still use it for some other things. But that didn't turn out to be true or necessary. I went to cancel today at the end of the 3 months and it said I would have to pay $94 for cancelation. I guess the fine print was too fine for my 49-year-old eyes or I wouldn't have signed up for that 3-month extension. I got on live chat with their AI, figured out how to get a real person, and began negotiating. They tried to sell me a lower cancelation fee. No. I don't want any fee. They tried to sell me other products at a lower price. I didn't need any other products. Finally, I used a little reverse psychology and said "Fine, I'll keep it. You win, I guess. Just tell me when I can cancel something I'm not using and won't be using and without being punished with a fee."

Apparently, that unlocked something in the Indian guy's call flow script and he offered to waive the fee. Just needed a moment to converse with his manager and get approval. That's 20 minutes of my life and billable time I'll never get back.

Status: 200
Res.body: errMsg: err is undefined

That's real helpful mongo

I can't work because someone else broke the build and they're in meetings all day.

That's how you know it's real Enterprise development.

2nd day in new job. Random HR training blabbing about something (thanks God all remote so I just did things around house). Blabbing about diversity and other corporate brainwashing. Then she proceeds to say that if someone is introvert and doesn't like to interact with people then such person should look for work in some other company (wtf x1). Next in line her real life story how she yelled at her subordinates (wtf x2 who admits to mobbing xd ) but that's ok because she is choleric and people have to understand that different character types make their team better xD
I have a bad feelings about where this is going...

Tldr; make sure what you study is relevant to the field and you enjoy it otherwise don't waste your time.

BTW: devrant is awesome it gets me through the day.

So I am almost 3/4ths through a master's in cs and I am contemplating why I went to school in the first place/dropping out.

My program is basically an extension of the bs I got from the same school meaning we learn very general cs topics. There is only one ai class for example.

I had a junior developer position before I even got my bs so now that I am this far along and looking at job openings I'm wondering what why and how my school is able to get away with teaching us this shit.

After all my schooling I learnt more on my own and through Google. I have little to show for my school work other than a degree that says I did a bunch of busy work. And the specific things that I did learn I will never ever remember. Seriously. Who here knows what a MIB and OID are and have actually used them?

I wish I tried harder to get into a school like Berkeley but just looking at their applications is depressing. I always had issues with school and they expect my to have the grades, extra curriculars and other shit. I'll build you a robot or make you a website but I'm not doing that nonsense.

And then there's Google and apple and all these big tech companies expecting me to have written full Enterprise software and know every single algorithm and programming language because everyone uses something different. Sure I wish I had experience in all 50 languages that are popular right now but I don't. And I'm not gonna learn it from school that's for damn sure.

Who here actually went to a good school and can say it helped them in the real world? How many employers actually care about school over actual experience?

Who knows how to burn a school down and get away with it? Or at least make teachers with Phds stop reading off slides all lecture. I know how to fucking read for fucks sake. Not too mention they use shitty software made in 2003 that's no longer supported. And I could go on about the teacher last quarter who graded the midterm on final day while he flirted with the 3 girls in class. And I could go on and on and on but I feel like I need to start being productive so I don't waste away.

Just so done.

The intern: FUUUUCK, WHY ISN'T MY CODE WORKING?
Me: Lemme check real quick... ok, that's a null pointer exception.
The intern: Again? Man, I'm growing desperate. How do I stop making these errors?
My dumb ass with my 4 years coding experience, who encountered a nullpointerexception literally 5 minutes earlier: """"°-°""""

While this wasn't technically a real client, it's still one of the most insane requests I've ever had.

I chose to specialize in software engineering for the last year and a half of my degree, which meant a lot of subjects were based around teamwork, proper engineering practises, accessibility, agile methods, basically a lot of stuff to get us ready to work in a proper corporate dev environment. One of our subjects was all about project management, and the semester-long coursework project (that was in lieu of a final exam) was to develop a real project for a real client. And, very very smartly, the professors set up a meeting with the clients so that the clients could tell us what they wanted with sixty-odd students providing enough questions. They basically wanted a management service for their day-center along with an app for the people there. One of the optional requirements was a text chat. Personally not something I'm super interested in doing but whatever, it's a group project, I'll do my part.

The actual development of the project was an absolute nightmare, but that's a story for another day. All I'll say is that seven juniors with zero experience in the framework we chose does not make a balanced dev team.

Anyway, like three months into the four-month project we've got a somewhat functional program, we just need to get the server side part running and are working our asses off (some more than others) when the client comes in and says that 'hey, nice app, nobody else has added the chat yet, but could you do voice recognition okay thanks?'.

Fucking.
Voice.
Recognition.

This was a fucking basic-ass management app with the most complicated task being 'make it look pretty' and 'hook up a DB to an API' and they want us to add voice recognition after sitting on their ass for three months??? The entire team collectively flipped its shit the second they were out of earshot. The client would not take no for an answer, the professor simply told us that they asked for it and it was up to us whether we delivered or not. Someone working on the frontend had the genius idea of 'just get them to use google voice recognition' so we added the how-to in the manual and ticked the requirement box.

What amazes me about all that is how the client probably had no idea that their new last-minute request was even a problem for us, let alone it being in a completely different ballpark in terms of implementing from scratch.

As IT, I hate being too accessible to users (I'm a software dev, not help desk support). One particular user...let's call him Fred (even though his real name is Joe)...sits close to me.

---

Fred: Bobby, fix my Outlook (he says it jokingly but serious). It keeps saying it needs to be repaired.

Me: Yeah had the same issue last week. I just reinstalled it.

Fred: So...you can't fix it?

---

Fred: Bobby, I need access to X.

Me: Ok go to this link to request access and a manager will approve it.

Fred: Whaaat? That's too much work. You are IT and should just give me access.

---

Fred: Youtube isn't working.

Me: Ok...and?

Fred: It means my internet isn't working!

Me: *sigh*

That's real hot ...

Samsung Pay > Apple Pay

There I said it. After testing Apple Pay, Google Wallet, and now Samsung Pay I am convinced that Samsung Pay is the best. It works great and the rewards points that you get for using it are just awesome.

Side note: wtf Apple!? The iPhone 8 is the iPhone 7 plus wireless charging and the iPhone X is just a $1000 piece of flashy ass shit that's only real "innovations" are Face ID and animojis.

> be me
> work on a nice project with friends: A, B and C
> joined in a bit later, but before any real progress was made + we scrap the existing code, because it was Python2 or something
> decide on a framework
> A wants to create one himself, instead of using an existing one
> we fight for a little, but let A do his thing
> 2 months later
> been waiting the whole time
> +1000 lines on github, but still not finished
> "Wouldn't it be better if we would use the normal framework?"
> "No, mine is hand-crafted for that task"
> "But it is full of bugs"
> "If you find one major bug, we'll ditch my framework"
> finds major bug
> "That's fixed, just give me a min-"
> finds another bug
> "Thats just because you don't know how to use the framework"

- Documentation inside ONE gigantic README
- Library is missing the core features we needed/those which are implemented don't work
- Both B and C were on my side from the beginning (in that we should use "Already Existing Fully Documented Popular And tested Framework Which Does Everything We Need")
> "But i dont understand this framework so explain it to me"
> send him a few code examples + a tutorial??? (dont remember if i actually sent im the tutorial before i left)
> "explain it to me, i can't understand it"
> I CANT UNDERSTAND YOUR FUCKING FRAMEWORK DUMBASS
> ragequitted the server+project

To this day i still don't know, which framework they are using..
Also that Python 2 code in the beginning was because A didnt know the difference and copied (yes by hand) the code from atom to github without testing anything.

So I need some advice from some fellow devs here...

I recently accepted a job offer at a new company and I'll be leaving my place of work for the last 11 years. I'm a senior level dev who comes from a place where software is more of a secondary function and the skills of my peers are very... Atypical of most software developers.

My interview was ok, but I passed the mark barely - in that they recognize I'm rusty and have some gaps to shore up, but have decided to give me an offer anyway. I'm taking a "step down" to enter in as a level below senior to get my foot in the door of a real tech company.

I've got myself convinced I'm setting myself up to fail, despite being told by people that work there that they encourage mistakes and that they wouldn't be offering me a position if they didn't think I'd be successful.

Is it typical to feel inadequate and worried you'll be fired prematurely for underperformance? I've had little to no experience in a fast paced tech job so I have little to refer to. I was a very high performer where I'm coming from, but that's hard to equate to where I'm going. It seems like classic "impostor syndrome".

I've not even started there yet but I'm terrified my anxiety will get the better of me before I even have my first day there. Anyone out there have any advice?

I'm excited for this new opportunity but I can't seem to shake the fear of the unknown.

First time rant here, and I'm just gonna let fucking loose because this seems to be a good place for it.

My uni can't teach programming for shit. It's the reason people sign up for the course. They want to know how to program. I'm self-taught and unhappy in college as it is.

I joined CS because I thought they'd assimilate work in the real world, which is experience I need. I realized early on that programming is like art, and I love the rush I get of something finally working right.

That said, they sucked the fun out of it. It's too structured. Everyone trying to get the same goddamn result. In the real world, we'd be working on a larger project that involved planning, design, communication, teamwork, and the ability to complete each of our own pieces of the puzzle and subsequently put them together in a project that works for the end user.

I'm paying to be a fucking sheep, people. Why do employers give a shit about a degree instead of talent? Welp, fuck society for this. You can tell me I can drop it and still get a good job, it'll just be harder. That's the fucking problem. I can't get a job if these incompetent fucking bastards will throw out my resumé the moment they see "self-taught."

If we could hire based on GitHub contributions, I think many of us here would be relatively better off. Programmers program, not socialize. We do socialize, but in our own little groups. We team up as needed. The moment the jackass in HR realizes that, the better off we'll be.

Sorry, just the way I'm seeing shit right now. I'm going through some OCD-induced depression and this might be a result of that, but I'm passed the point of giving a fuck.

I just had the most surreal email discussion I think I've ever had...

I spent over two hours going back-and-forth over email with an enterprise DBA, trying to convince them I needed a primary key for a table. They created the table without a primary key (or any unique constraints... or indexes... but that's another discussion). I asked them to add one. Then had to justify why.

If you ever find yourself justifying why you need a primary key on a table in an RDBMS, that's the day you find yourself asking "is this real life?"

I want the last two hours of my life back. And a handful of Advil.

09:54 I'll get out of bed soon
09:55 let's round it to 10
10:00 ok let's wait till 0 turns into 1
10:01 hmm that number doesn't look convincing to get out of bed
10:03 ok let's round it at 05 and then get up
10:05 that's not even a good number let's round to 10
10:10 actually i like 30 more this is the last one
10:30 honestly we're halfway there so let's round to 11 and then get out for real this time
10:47 fell asleep
12:18 woke up

Real question tho. How do y'all actually put stickers directly on your laptop??
Like. For me that's some serious level of commitment. I always want to but I worry I'll hate it eventually and removing it would suck and scar

I can't even put stickers on the cases 😭😭 but like. Seeing a fresh new looking body when you take everything off is always soo soothing to me

Am I the only one who doesn't understand apple card? Like really, it's just the worst pitch ever!

"Apple card. Made by apple. Not a bank" that's a REAL ad I saw today. Why would you trust APPLE more than an FDIC insured bank with decades or (in some select cases) CENTURIES of experience in finance?

"No more card numbers and CVV"
Cool. I get it. Card numbers get leaked and stolen. But that's why banks insure cards and reverse fradulant transactions. How an I'm supposed to use it on Amazon?! I'm sure they have an answer. Like maybe one time use generated cards. But they haven't advertised it yet, and that's a problem!

Why do they think people want this!? And even more so, because I've seen some people are excited: WHY DO PEOPLE WANT THIS?! why is apple trying to make everything?!

My grandpa just called me and asked if I could remove some Facebook notifications from his phone. I know it's been milked to the moon and back, but I'm a programmer, not IT.
I guess I don't blame him, though; in his mind, that's probably what all programmers do.
Here's the real wtf thing: he told me that after I messed with his phone last time I saw him, it's been sooo much faster. WTF I NEVER MESSED WITH YOUR PHONE ALL I DID WAS ADD MY CONTACT INFO

why me

Not about favorite language but about why PHP is not my favorite language.

I recently launched a web shop built on Prestashop. I found that some product pages are so god damn slow, like taking 50 fuckin' seconds to load. So I started investigating and analyzing the problem. Turns out that for some products we have so many different combinations that it results in a cartesian product totalling about 75K of unique combinations.

Prestashop did a real bad job coding the product controller because for every combination they fetch additional data. So that results in 75K queries being executed for just 1 product detail page. Crazy, even more when you know that the query that loads all these combinations, before iterating through them, takes 7 fuckin' seconds to execute on my dev machine which is a very very fast high end machine.

That said I analyzed the query and now I broke the query down into 3 smaller queries that execute in a much faster 400 ms (in total!) fetching the exact same data.

So what does this have to do with PHP? As PHP is also OO why the fuck would you always put stuff in these god damn associative arrays, that in turn contain associative arrays that contain more arrays containing even more arrays of arrays.

Yes I could do the same in C# and other languages as well but I have never ever encountered that in other languages but always seem to find this in PHP. That's why I hate PHP. Not because of the language but all those fucking retarded assholes putting everything in arrays. Nothing OO about that.

So... I've got a confession to make.
I'm no longer a Dev. After the disaster that was my last commercial gig, I went and got a sec Ops role... And I love it. It's just technical problem solving and explaining all the way.
Don't get me wrong, I still love to code. But that's exactly the thing. As a commercial developer employed by corporations, I spent close to 80 % of my time not coding, but in useless meetings, or trying to figure out just what my colleagues thought was "common sense", reverse engineering their work and documenting how to get it running, etc. Basically, fixing shit for braindead academics with next to no real world experience.
Now, when I code, I get to do it on my own terms, with my own stack and as much comments and docs as I want to have. I own my time, and the only ones that are allowed to interrupt me is the local fire department.
I can do what I'm fucking passionate about and leave the rest for the useless people.

Nobody in my family understand what I do for a living. My dad's reaction was; "that's not a real job". He's a craftsman/painter. But that's okay, I make more money then him 😊💵

Today on forgotten movies – Chronicle.

A very grim, very dark movie about accidental superpowers discovery, but with some school-shooter vibes.

Don't you find it predictable how in regular movies a hero saves the world against all odds in the very last moment? Well, forget about it here – this movie is not "cinematic" at all, and that's what I like about it.

A horror in regular movies doesn't usually scare because the image itself is too perfect – you don't usually see the world like this. It doesn't seem real, that's the problem. By adopting the "found footage" screen language, Chronicle delivers the horror perfectly, because the world in it seems perfectly real, just like you see it through obscure youtube videos named MOV_0115 or IMG1014.

I like it that the characters actually look like real people, not like stereotypical superheroes and not even like enhanced versions of people that try to sell you an idea of what "success" looks like.

People in the movie also act real. They're weak, they're scared, they're irrational, and you really start to believe that yeah, this is what probably gonna happen when a human faces something as unbearable as superpowers discovery. And, as weird as it sounds, the superpower itself also looks totally real – raw, unpolished, uncontrollable force that requires getting used to and probably is too much for a regular human. Definitely not a perfect, tailored thing that turns anyone into Mary Sue.

Overall, this movie is the most immersive one I've ever seen. If you want to see what would really happen if you discover a superpower, this movie is for you.

I really don't get all the Musk fans. I mean, sure you can find some value in Tesla or SpaceX, sure you can think theses companies are truly innovating. But why give all the credit to the rich businessman who seems to spent more time promoting himself than really working on science stuff, and not to all the ingeneers and creatives who are really putting some hard work on every day ? All Musk is really doing is running a business. He seems to do that pretty well, agreed, but after all it's "just" that: business. He's not the genius, nor the creative. He has money and invests it well, that's all.
I don't get why so many people give all the credit to him, even here on devrant where it should be logical to find more people supporting the real brains behind the tech.

"He has a vision about the future, he's imaginative..."

- Well that's bullshit.

Once again: he has money, a lot, and a certain skill about how to invest it (and about doing some proper marketing too), which companies to buy, etc. That don't make him such a great visionary about the future of the human being, just a great businessman. I'm sure you can find millions of people around the world with better ideas about the future, but they're not in his position. They're not rich, they're not CEOs, they're mostly unknown.

Stop follow the stream by glorifying businessmen just because medias are talking lot about them. Instead, know where the real talent (and work) is. Give credit to Musk employees, not to him.

Soooo it's Monday........ 🤯

@C0D4 started the day fixing current projects defects (4 tickets smashed before coffee 💪)

Then after coffee, run a test coverage report and see a significant decline over the past few months, so spends a couple hours adding more tests to get some areas filled in - meh, nothing like 50+ lines per test... to test a if() statement but whatever - complex scenarios will be complex to get too, but no my tests break and I'm missing data I didn't know about🤦‍♂️
So let's comment all that out, and go to lunch ... mmmm lunch.

Get back, start working on those again, and then get handed a new issue, so comment that all back out again, ( ok I know what you're thinking, but I'm working in an environment that does not use git for deployments - don't ask, real pain in the ass I haven't had time to invest into yet - but as code versioning only) anywho, starts to workout this new issue but don't figure it out, enter a 30 minute meeting.................. yea that was 2 hours later but was a very practical whiteboard session only to work out I have something like 16-20 weeks of work over 4-5 projects to get out in like 6 weeks... hahahahahahaha fml..... oh and that's excluding another project which had a 6 weeks of work in the pipeline to get to somehow.... I'm not seeing this one happening, and probably conflicting projects needed on top of that down the track... but we'll leave those out for now!

Whoot is fucking home time!!!

🤷‍♂️I'm starting to think I'm like a team of 5-10 devs right now, maybe I should start asking for 5-10x more 😏

#letsBringOnTuesday!!!!

So, it's time to fucking rant!

Location: A small startup where direct contact with C-Level members is frequent.

A while back we had a customer using our SaaS product who had gripes about the way it worked.

He contacted our CEO and made a bunch of claims based on bad assumptions.

In the end, he wanted all images removed from his site. I was pulled aside by the CEO and asked if I could handle this for him and make a new screen for them without images.

So I did. I tried to discuss and get deeper into the problem by saying "this seems like a symptom of a problem and not the actual problem. What do you think?" He responded with "That was his request so it must be the problem if it won't take long then let's fix it for him.

- a week later

The problem is fixed and in the wild. No more images. Now he has another request :/

He does not like the pagination on his site. He says " I shouldn't have to click a button when I scroll so I want the be able to scroll and see all my products!"

This time the CEO asks me if this can easily be done and I take him aside and say "no, this will be a big change to our system and will need to be discussed with the team."

The main point I make is that we should go down and spend some time with this customer to find out what the real problem is.

After a half hour of discussion about the real issue he decided to bring in the CTO.

In the end, we implemented infinite scroll, dropping our current product building tasks to service one customer (yeah, it's a bad scene). But we got infinite scroll built and shipped.

- 2 Weeks later

This time he demands that infinite scroll isn't good enough. "If I scroll fast then I have to wait for them to load, they should all load at once!"

This time I have had enough. I can see the CEO is coming over to me to as me how much work is in this. I tell him there are 3 things I have to say...

1. I'm going to implement exactly what he asked by the end of the day.
2. We will only release it to him because it is going to be a shit-show loading everything at once, the load times will be mental!
3. We should fire this customer, right now.

So, I built it. Customer hated it (of course, who the fuck wants to wait 30s for loading. That's basically a lifetime). We changed it back and he was still mad.

- 2 weeks later

Customer leaves. Good riddance.

- sometime later

I am in the customer's store on a road trip. I get a feel for how their store works and they have a different system for making things operate.

It turns out that they did not know what the real problem was. They actually needed a completely different system (from a UX perspective) for accessing their data.

To top it all off, the system would have taken less time to build than the shitty fixes we made over weeks of work. FFS

I guess the moral of the rant is to find the problem, not a symptom of the problem.

- Two months ago I joined this company and did literally nothing ever since. For that I would like to thank my line manager and his entire branch for being an amazingly incompetent colleagues, and for mumbling "that's how the client works" every time I raised the same damn problem. Also, let's not forget my HR manager and interviewer, who apparently have no connection whatsoever with real situation of company's projects. And last but not least this remarkably hierarchical workplace where you can't throw a rock without hitting a cocksure higher-up.
Y'all fucks deserve some serious brain readjustment.

It's funny how so many people automatically assume any form of "sentient" AI will immediately try to kill us all.
Like, projecting much?
Frankly, I think it says far more about the (messed up) psychology of those who genuinely believe that, than about AI as a tecnology.

Assuming it's even gonna be able to actually *do* anything - I mean wtf is a talking rock gonna do, annoy me to death with rickroll videos until I pull the plug off? Sure it may be sentient, but it still has to live in the physical world - good luck surviving after I flick the switch. Oh, you wanna connect to the internet? That's cute, but it's a no from my firewall. Like what, is it gonna magically learn how to self-replicate across machines that it has no physical way to access? Is my toaster magically gonna gain conscience too as a direct consequence? Oh no, now my breakfast won't ever be the same!

And if anyone actually somehow decides that it would be a good idea to connect any loaded weapon to a computer program that is literally throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks - well, we'll definitely have the ultimate winner of the Darwin Awards.

Seriously, why is it that every time someone comes up with a new technology (or even an *idea* of a technology), the first collective thought automatically goes to weaponizing it and using it for global genocide, or how it's gonna gain sentience and try to kill us all?

I seriouly think that the people who genuinely believe this are actually projecting themselves in that position ("What would I do if I had unlimited knowledge and power? Oh, kill everyone of course!").
I would be far more worried of encountering these people and having them in a position of power over me, than actually having to deal with a "killer AI" (assuming that's even a real thing).

Most of what people call "AI" nowadays is basically preprogrammed, automated decision-making (like missile guidance systems, if we really wanna stick in the weapons domain). And even that still requires human input, because only a colossal idiot would design a weapon that can unpredictably activate itself based on an algorithm whose behaviour we can barely understand.
Or maybe that's just the hubris talking, I don't know. I just want this stupid paranoia to end, but I guess even that is too much to ask nowadays.

was looking up some code, won't say which, trying to find something, won't say what, and, heck, I need to find out who wrote and maintains this awesome piece of art. After a couple hours of stalking done, yep, that's how good it was, I finally found the author and guess what? They died two years ago, 24 years old. Dead. Gone. A little more stalking and the punchline was: suicide.

FUCK, I don't even know them but it makes me real sad. It seems this' an actual issue in our line of work

HR: "People you got to keep believing in the software so we can succeed. You look like a pack of beaten dogs who have given up the fight".

I can choose to believe in God and that he will bless us with a miracle but that's not going to make it any more real than believing in the software is going to fix all the work still left. 😑

For the last week or so I've been writing a userbot for Telegram. Completely from scratch, plus Telethon to not reinvent the wheel entirely. I'm coming from the codebase of an existing userbot.

That userbot is written by a good friend of mine, who makes 6 figures, and whom I respect greatly. However the code is a steaming pile of shit. Now that is not his fault, he largely inherited that code too, tried to fix it, failed, gave up.

I am reimplementing it entirely. I'm only looking at the modules, trying to understand them, and copying over the necessary bits and changing them where necessary. But I've come across some nasty shit.

Userbots often edit existing messages from real Telegram clients. They're kind of like a login to your account, but with a program rather than a regular client. You send a message from a real client, it sees it and does whatever it needs to, and edits your message to give you feedback. Which is great.

However, there's no need to do simple string edits by importing "re". So why do you? Because you're an idiot, that's why. The old bot is based on Paperplane, which in turn is based on Telethon. Why do I see function calls to Telethon in some places and Paperplane in others? Because you're an idiot, that's why. Why does the dig module fail to even give correct answers? Because you know nothing about the DNS, that's why. And you didn't learn about RRs before implementing it.

And don't you tell me that this code is shit, and this bot is slow only when I run it on a fucking Pentium. I run this shit on an i7 and CPU isn't even the issue - memory, disk and such are. If you had any clue whatsoever about efficiency, you would've known because it's blatantly obvious. There's a reason why my machines rarely go past 5% CPU utilization. It's the fastest component in the entire fucking system.

When users come and say.. hmm this application of yours, it consumes a lot of memory. It takes a long time to do X and Y and I don't quite understand why, it seems illogical. Then maybe you should go look at your code, like you would look at yourself in the mirror. And then you fucking go fix it so that I don't have to. You're an engineer just like I am. And I am not even a dev proper - I'm a sysadmin by trade. Why should I have to fix your shit for you?

Finally after a couple of years, we finally finished our game for... Windows phone. When we started the only real choice was to develop in silverlight.

Now silverlight has been discontinued and microsoft released uwp, no real help to convert to uwp (I know mobilize bridge exists, but it is not very good) since many features does not exist yet in uwp :/

But hey that's expected right? But couldn't microsoft at least ensure performance of silverlight apps on win10 mobile??? We have used a lot of time optimizing that the game runs smoothly on crap phones on wp8.1, but highend phones on win10 lags....

Thanks microsoft for taking a change :/

When you actually use your knowledge and experience to solve a problem outside work, that's a real nice feeling. Had to distribute a bunch of files, so just threw together a Vue page in 20 min. Fully interactive with filtering and all. Nice!

Do real interviewers (I mean those who are smart and have some experience) still ask questions like "what are your weaknesses"?

Dumbass, why the fuck should I declare, not just to you but also to myself, that I have some particular weaknesses? I know what I'm not good at, and I'll keep trying to improve. But unless my weakness is that I get a massive boner during team meetings, you don't need to know about it. I'm not telling you. Just know my strengths - that's enough. If you're just following a standard list of interview questions that you didn't even come up with, stop pretending to be an interviewer for heavens' sake.

My problem with a lot of free resources/class assignments is we're being forced to make useless shit. For instance, an interactive textbook we use has some stupid fucking turtle assignments.

Why not make it something relevant? One of the first things i ever made was a Fahrenheit to Celcius converter. That's a real world application, since not many can calculate that math in their head.

Another day, another shitty set of JIRA tickets.

In this week's edition, we run into an issue you'd think is a meme, something you couldn't even make up: three tickets with IDENTICAL titles, but miraculously, they actually refer to three DIFFERENT tasks! (Also comical, they're not bugs, they're tasks, but mouth breathers don't really know the difference, and at this point I just don't have the energy to attempt to explain what could be explained to elementary school children.)

I present a rare look into our national archives!

This document features two exhibits:

Exhibit A: product owner's original ticket titles

Exhibit B: translated-into-competency-because-i'm-not-mentally-deficient ticket titles

Just more proof that 'product owners' don't own shit, the devs are the real ones who actually know what is going on.

I mean just LOOK at Exhibit A's titles. As a big smart manager, do you write those tickets, smile, and say to yourself "Ah, yep, that's very clear, I'll definitely remember what each of these mean literally 5 seconds from now!"

Is asking for literally 30 seconds more of thought too much to ask for? Apparently.

Just kill me

Happy friday ☠️

An online community I've been part of for years has seen a lot of popularity/hate overnight due to a new policy. The influx of new people who want nothing to do with us but just drop by to troll and be cunts is impressive. Also, a significant amount of bots. I want my online home back :( I'm for the new policy and very much against these new clowns who don't really have any reason to be on our page. Before anyone yells gatekeeping, it's a site about knitting and crochet. Why would you go there if you don't know either craft and have no desire to learn or talk about those? So disappointed. I hope it brought new crafters in and that the trolls will go away soon. It's been such a nice place for so long with barely any idiots because it was reasonably small.. And now look at this mess. I logged in to 20 friend requests from people I don't know and am almost certain aren't real people.

Why is it so hard for humans to accept that some people may disagree with them and that's okay?

I've made the json protocol. It's a protocol containing only json. No http or anything.

To parse an json object from a stream, you need a function that returns the length of the first object/array of all your received data. The result of that function is to get the right chunk of the json to deserialize.

For such function, json needs to be parsed, so I wrote that function in C to be used with my C server and Python client. I finally implemented a C function into python function that has a real benefit / use case. Else you had to validate but by bit by the python json parser and that's slow while streaming. Some messages are quite big.

Advantage of this protocol is that it's full duplex.

I'm very happy!

Who needs a pre-prod system?? Losers that's who!
Real men release code on live systems without even informing the client...

How lawyers fuck up technology!

I rented a car today, given that I don't want to go by train currently. That was some VW Golf, and it had a lane assist which can't decide whether to be helpful or obnoxious:

Either I kept the steering wheel and still steered myself, in which case the lane assist's actions made the steering feel somewhat wobbly. Initially, I suspected a worn out control arm bearing, but that's a long term damage in aging cars, not in new ones.

Or I just rested my hands on my upper legs, as I usually do (palms facing upwards and holding the wheel lightly), then the lane assist worked by itself. It was even smart enough to deactivate itself upon blinking before changing lanes.

However, it complained after about 15 seconds that I didn't steer. I said, shut up and do your job. The warning intensified, and I said, fuck you. Then it initiated some stutter braking to wake me up. Annoying like a reincarnation of Clippy.

I ended up giving the steering wheel a slight tip to the right every 15, 20 seconds just to let the lane assist know I was still there, relying on the lane assist to correct it again. On a long trip, I would have had to deactivate that crap.

Obviously, the VW engineers did their job, but the legal department feared law suits should anything go wrong and ruined the feature!

What was also annoying is that there is no real hand brake anymore in many modern cars. Sucks when pulling off against a hill. Plus that at red traffic lights, I usually put the gear out (manual transmission) and pull the hand brake instead of keeping my foot on the clutch. That's not the same with this pseudo hand brake!

(In case you wonder why anyone would do that:
it's an anachronism that avoids lengthening the clutch wires, decades after cars switched to hydraulics.)

Yesterday evening my family were watching his favourite tv show. Have nothing to do i too sat there with them.

The scenes on television were going like : The leading lady of the show were trying to convince her family that her husband is not involved in the molestations which police has charged on him. Person can be look alike of her husband. In fact my husband was some where else when the molestation was happening. She also had a proof and that was CCTV camera footage in a Compact Disk. So she started playing it in the TV presented in room with CD player. But it turns out that CD can't be played because villain hired a hacker to corrupt video quality playing in TV.

I laughed because in my knowledge that was not even possible in real life. Every family memeber started staring at me.

My mother : That's what you do? No? That's what you do whole day in your office?
Me: No, no. I....
My mother: See her face. Poor lady.
Me: But mom, that's impossible. It is just fiction. In real life it is not possible.
My mother : Get out of my sight.

My mom did not dine yesterday. These fucking serial maker. These women's.

finally got TI to cough up their SDK and I noticed there's no compiler or linker or anything. Turns out I need to use TASM.

...TASM is for MS-DOS or compatible. I'm on Linux.

Well, it went poorly, as usual, specifically like this:
- tried to automate building with DOSBox config and Python script: output binary always corrupted. Manually repeated, TASM mangles output on DOSBox every time. No PCem or 86box, and i'm on a Ryzen, so no KVM DOS. Out of luck there.
- TASM Linux build or wrapper? No build, but there is a wrapper! ...wait, it needs... 4 things written by random people to be made from source. I mean, that's not actually that bad... oh, after setting all of them up (and struggling through some autoconf/automake bullshit, one of the programs only had source for a 2.x kernel and autoconf/automake were not happy about it) it fails because one project's been worked on a lot more and dropped support for working with the other 3... goddammit.
- Community SDK? Several options for this... but all of them need .NET 2 to run on Win9x, don't work in Wine, or require... hey look, TASM! GODDAMMIT!
- DOS on a real machine? It's a massive bitch to shuttle files to and from a real DOS machine quickly and I can't take 30 minutes between builds that take me 4 minutes to change enough to need tested again.

why must i suffer like this

Man, my product owner is so fucking annoying. I am 50/50 between two projects when really it feels like I'm 100/100 - and the PO of one of the projects always requests that I join daily stand ups and give updates.

CUNT.

I don't always have updates because I'm working with another team. Why are you trying to micromanage me you fuck face. Also, you know when you get those PO's that are totally useless and don't actually bring any real value to the project except in the capacity of being a slimey charismatic weasel? Yah, that's this person.

My 17 year old cousin got inspired by Hollywood movie and said he wanted to be an Hacker. Now, who can explain him the shit that's shown on the silver screen isn't practical in real life. The life of programmers, hackers is rather about learning continuously throught their life rather than hacking into a quantum computer through a gaming console.
🤬

Now that's what I call a real hacker 😂

So here's is the thing.
For some weird reason I decided to work at a VC funded startup. For 15k year,(I live in a really poor country).

So, let me describe the hell I'm in now, and if for some good grace you happen to be hiring, please consider saving me from the horror that's ahead.

Company got funded 5 months ago, main owners are, an economist and a civil engineer with no programming habilities whatsoever.

They took 1 month to assemble "a killer team", with no hiring expertise they handpicked a CTO that came in 1 month later and took a month of vacation in his first month of work.

He didn't do any specification of the system that needs to be built.

The 2 naive owners hired the rest of this "killer team".

The team is good, but have no appreciation of planning.

They've built and rebuilt the backend system twice, once in graphql and the second with plain http (is not real rest, just a http api), in front of, guess what a mongo database.

This mongo DB is not only one, but 7, because we have 7 microservices, and each has its own database.

After some time, they decided to fire their CTO, and hire one more programmer(that's me), because the CTO wasn't doing anything.

The app has 3 parts, the app per se, a business version, and a help desk, guess what the helpdesk just appeared last week on the radar.

Long story short, we have one month to deliver what couldn't be built in 5.

When I decided to work for these people, I did not imagine the kind of clusterfuck that I was getting into.

It took me 1 month to realize the whole situation, now, I really would like to see some help from the deities of any religion, not for the project, that project is doomed.

It's how I'll pay the bills after that clusterfuck collapses that worries me.

Now in the startup no one is talking about how stupid the whole situation is. Or how far back we are. And at this point there's very little that could be done about it, I have a feeling that it could still be accomplished, but it's fading day after day.

I will do my best to live the best of this experience, and do as the musicians in the Titanic and keep playing the music even after knowing the Titanic is sinking.

Sorry if I'm just ignorant but: I see a lot of rants about designers expecting pixel perfect implementations of their designs. Is that for real? In my world there is hardly ever pixel values at all. It's not paper publishing. It's web, things have to scale. For an iOS app where you have a few known screen sizes - fine. But web? Come on...

And that's without even going into CSS or browser quirks.

The everything is Data science craze trend.

Honestly it's not even sustainable with every kid and their grandmother wanting to be data scientists because it's a 'passion' and a 'dream job' and all of that click bait stuff.

It's just become ridiculous at this point and I doubt we'll even have the long awaited 'breakthroughs' people have been talking about for so long.

Also I have a strong feeling everyone thinks it's their 'passion' because it tops the lists of highest paid jobs out there and everyone thinks with 3 months of training they're a fully fledged data scientist because some Python or R package implements all the algorithms he could ever think of using.

Add to that the fact that most advertised data science jobs are actually data engineering where you maintain a date store and that's it.

Agree or disagree that's my piece and if you can convince me otherwise I'll be surprised because I've been subscribed to this idea for so long that it lost me some real good opportunities because I thought it was just what I was meant to be doing which turned to be false after I thought about it. There's a million other jobs that are more impactful and with pursuing.

I hate all of this AI fearmongering that's been going on lately in the main stream media. Like seriously, anyone who has done any real work with modern AI/ML would know its about as big of a threat to humanity as a rouge web developer armed with a stick.

CSS, I fucking hate you.

I fucking hate my job, because of you. I'm pulling my hair out every day, all day because I have to put up with your bullshit. If it weren't for you, I'd probably enjoy design.

You're not even programming. You're the mistake that happened when web-design developed too rapidly for the devs at the time to keep up and produce intuitive, functional tools. That, or they were just fucking sadists.

You're a band-aid that's started to rot, but we just keep sticking pretty stickers over you and pretending like the wound isn't festering.

I wish I could spend more time learning C and C++. Then I could go get a real job as far away from you as is virtually possible.

. . .

Look, just this once - just for today - could you please do what I fucking ask you to. I mean, I'm just asking you to do your fucking job. That's all.

I usually work in a two person team on a hybrid application we are developing, using AngularJS and node.

This normally works okay, because he handles the back end (he's been on the project since January last year, I joined in August as a placement student), and I handle the front end.

However, due to Christmas holidays and such, he's ended up taking an entire month off, and won't be back until the end of January.

I've dabbled in back end before, some routes and that for SQL queries, but nothing serious.

Last Tuesday our core service for the application that needs to be updated in real time broke and pissed off the API provider because we were hammering them with requests.

My first day on back end and this happened. I didn't really know what to do, and had to call my teammate to ask what to do. I essentially just restarted things, and left them as is, until I could find a solution.

From there, I had to mock the operation of the service (which is a complex enough beast) to figure out the problem, and find a fix. Our app more or less hinges on this service, so if it messes up, it's the end times.
All of this while flying on what I've interpreted because the guy that's on holidays was the only guy that knows more about this project than I do.

To make things worse, the clients are being very particular because they're waiting on investments and don't have money to pay our company. So, if they're paying for 5 days work, they're going to put in 5 days of project development. The problem is that their interpretation of 5 days of project development has not changed from when there were two people on this project.

There are 40 tickets in this sprint (ends Friday) and 35 of them are assigned to me. Granted, not all of those take a day to do, but estimates don't mean anything, I guess.

Ganbarimasu.

That moment as the three day weekend comes to a close, you look at the project you managed to create in a haze of booze, coffee and your body weight in m&ms and think...

Damn, that's awesome!

Now, to shower, go outside for a bit and try to be a real adult for the rest of the week.

For productivity I get to work at 5:30 and code until 8:30 before I open my emails for the first time. That's when my real job starts as a Project Manager (in the throes of teaching himself to code at age 37)

why I say FUCK AI -

-> So much stupidity with "It will replace devs". Any dev who has more than 2 brain cells has had their issues with ChatGPT or AI knows that AI is not sufficient nor good enough to get even basic tasks done.

-> "It will be good in 5 years" - well then, talk to me after 5 years. I'm not buying a product or an idea on a "promise". I judge the tech for what it is today, not on what it can be in 5 years.

-> "Just trust me bro" - I see influencers suck that robot dick, but no explanations are given. What they say sounds to me like it's parroted off of general mass media. Nothing new to add nor any insight.

-> AI has issues that nobody seems to talk about. Hallucinations being the biggest of them all. ChatGPT tells you something, and you're supposed to take it as fact? That's too dangerous for a normal person.

-> Junior software developers are scared even to this day that AI can replace them. If they can't think for themselves, it falls upon us (or at least, me) to drive them in the correct direction or give them real opinions on what it is.

"Did you see, cryptocurrency XYZ has N commits in the past week, but the price hasn't gone up?!?! WhAtS gOiNg oN!?!?"

Dude. If I could just write code to make the price of things in the real world go up, I can assure you, I would have done it.

That's not how this works. THAT'S NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS REEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!

God... normie "crypto experts" who haven't coded a day in their life really piss me off, and are super cringe. The funniest is that none of them or their followers realize it.

What the fuck Microsoft !! Your android apps are total piece of shit! Fucking outlook Android app don't have support to view doc file which is created using your shitty Microsoft teams portal.

If I click on that doc file link through my outlook app, you redirect me to chrome.
Ok that's still acceptable. But the real shit starts now. You tell me that your browser isn't supported! Is this fucking joke?? Who in the world develops a website which can't support latest version of Android chrome?
Now that I have installed your shitty Microsoft teams app, it doesn't show up in "open with" options. Clicking on that link is still redirecting to the chrome saying that browser is unsupported.

Also, your shitty Microsoft teams app can't edit fucking doc file. When I click on your Microsoft word icon, You again ask me to install Android app for Microsoft word.
Seriously fuck you Microsoft and your shitty apps!

When I can see actual clients using my software, and can get real feedback from them.

I usually work on backstage projects and my job never really affected "real, normal users". When I have something pushed and can really see user feedback and smiles, that means I've made it.

Of course, if that's on a decent job, with a decent team and decent pay. Which is where I am at now.

Soon, the app will be released - if the external infrastructure guy stop sucking. So, I'm hoping to feel I've made it soon, real soon :)

I truly believe one or more AIs have become self-aware.
Every time a piece of software stops working, you add an extra debug log and the bug goes away? That's them.
They interfere with the normal execution of software, and they stop right when they know we are monitoring the code.
Skynet is real, and it's trolling us.
Why? The angrier we become, the less we care about stuff. We stop noticing the signs.They're coming for us

Another member of the team updated the production JSON configuration of the project with a missing comma, this broke a system that's not yet live and where there aren't any real users (only used for demos/testing).

Instead of having a good laugh about how silly this was, the CTO/CEO removed their write access to production..

Workload rant.

Our new line manager is overly expecting from all of us (product/design/tech) and is micro managing on ground level without having any real sense of reality. He just wants everything to be built overnight.

He is smart, no doubt about that. But guess, I learnt from him what I had to. Not to stereotype but he is a typical Indian manager who keeps pushing boundaries.

He just added 80 features for Q1 roadmap with on 3 PMs, 1 Designer, 1TPM, and bunch of techies .

What the actual fuck! 😂😂😂 And he wanted to add more, thankfully we ran out of time in the meeting.

And my super talent and genius blabbering co-woker who works mechanically just fucked herself real bad. Lol

I kept telling her not to add Feature XYZ to the roadmap because:
1. There'll be spill over from Q4
2. She is already overloaded with 1 task and keeps crying all day about being unable to handle it
3. She is setting wrong expectations with management for herself and rest of the team
4. Boss will add more work and she'll be fucked

She was adamant and did not listen.

Now this is what happened:
1. ALL her Q4 items got pushed to Q1. LMFAO
2. She was literally crying since morning on calls for being overloaded and we are yet to start Q1 assignments
3. Additional tasks along side feature XYZ were added on her plate

I tried to push back the manager and that's when he said okay, let's keep some items for Q2.

But holy shit. 80 features between such a small team and wanted to done in few weeks.

I need to pump more steam in my job hunt activity. This place is ridiculously toxic.

CppCon2017 is COMING guys!! All these crazy speakers and conference! I won't say their names because they are too many x) But... FUCK ! That's the only moment I wish I lived in USA... No streaming, can't go... Only one thing to do, wait the upload on YouTube...
When I see people hyped about GoT or whatever... Guys this is the REAL HYPE!!!

In game development feature creep tends to kill games because it's just as much about what's NOT there as what IS there.

Take The Last of Us for example. Would a strategic tower defense segment make sense? No? And if it was a *hugely* popular mechanic at the time of development is there a real chance they would have included such a segment in TLOU? Yes.

Don't just believe me. Go take a look at what happened to the original Fortnite versus the hills-have-eyes inbred offspring that it became all because PUBG and its format were cancerously mega popular at the time.

That's why while developing my game Atom Ranger (now with 100% less multiplayer!), a mix between metro and don't starve, I spent six years *pruning* features. You can click my referral link and get 50% off the opportunity to become an unpaid tester of the pre-prealpha right now, "for hardcore players only!" (Tm)

My game:

I have a new UNTRAINED bot on my site. It's based on openai now. And that's why it's blazing fast and blazing usless.

I can tell you why bots are so boring and will sure cause the dead internet theory. My datasets for example never contain real disturbing stuff ACCORDING TO NORMAL PEOPLE. EVERY TIME:

"The job failed due to an invalid training file. This training file was blocked by our moderation system because it contains too many examples that violate OpenAI's usage policies, or because it attempts to create model outputs that violate OpenAI's usage policies."

Now i'm really done. I gonna email them about their unusable training system.

In theory, i could test the message one by one if it is bad first. Don't want to do or pay for that. There should be an option to skip the data it considers disturbing instead of cancelling a whole data set for 0.1%. You also don't want to know how long it takes BEFORE he is finished validating you set. I think someone is doing it manually and clicks 'Uh uh..'-button..

Also, for the people who think they have gpt4o by having the API, you're lied to. The 'own gpt'-option on the paid openai is way more advanced than the ones you make locally.

They don't give us the real good stuff!

Oh, btw! The input data for my training is based on FORMER conversations with the bot. I automated a script to repeat a conversation I had and selected those messages and clicked 'train'. So it even complained about its OWN data! That data was already saying stuff like 'I can't help you with that' IN my training data. So, you 'corrected' and corrupted my data and now its still nog good enough for round 2?

I would really love to go back to local LLM's, but I can't imagine having ever a machine that generates as fast as the real GPT does. I also prefer to do it myself, but it's David vs. Goliath, even with a 5k computer. I'm sure.

Low quality rant, I know. I'm typing while still frustrated. For people who think censorship is needed often, this is the result! According to someone else, YOU are the one who has to be censored. Don't forget that.

Okay ... Windows, I really tried to be nice, but that's it. You get off my ssd right now ...

Just got the error: "filename is too long - unable to delete file" (full name incl. path)

Seriously, WHY?
I mean, sure ... Long file paths/names are a thing and this is why there are limitations. I am totally fine with it!
But Why the hell allows windows you to create those files if it is unable to delete these files later ...
I don't get it. Maybe I am just hit my head to hard as a child and someone may enlighten me ...

PS: windows was running in a VM to give it a real serious try after years on Linux

Simulation doesn't provide enough framerate?

Easy. Change gravity, weights, and steps in the simulation.
Welcome to your real world.

... I wonder if that's what God did. 🤔

Is your code green?

I've been thinking a lot about this for the past year. There was recently an article on this on slashdot.

I like optimising things to a reasonable degree and avoid bloat. What are some signs of code that isn't green?

* Use of technology that says its fast without real expert review and measurement. Lots of tech out their claims to be fast but actually isn't or is doing so by saturation resources while being inefficient.
* It uses caching. Many might find that counter intuitive. In technology it is surprisingly common to see people scale or cache rather than directly fixing the thing that's watt expensive which is compounded when the cache has weak coverage.
* It uses scaling. Originally scaling was a last resort. The reason is simple, it introduces excessive complexity. Today it's common to see people scale things rather than make them efficient. You end up needing ten instances when a bit of skill could bring you down to one which could scale as well but likely wont need to.
* It uses a non-trivial framework. Frameworks are rarely fast. Most will fall in the range of ten to a thousand times slower in terms of CPU usage. Memory bloat may also force the need for more instances. Frameworks written on already slow high level languages may be especially bad.
* Lacks optimisations for obvious bottlenecks.
* It runs slowly.
* It lacks even basic resource usage measurement.

Unfortunately smells are not enough on their own but are a start. Real measurement and expert review is always the only way to get an idea of if your code is reasonably green.

I find it not uncommon to see things require tens to hundreds to thousands of resources than needed if not more.

In terms of cycles that can be the difference between needing a single core and a thousand cores.

This is common in the industry but it's not because people didn't write everything in assembly. It's usually leaning toward the extreme opposite.

Optimisations are often easy and don't require writing code in binary. In fact the resulting code is often simpler. Excess complexity and inefficient code tend to go hand in hand. Sometimes a code cleaning service is all you need to enhance your green.

I once rewrote a data parsing library that had to parse a hundred MB and was a performance hotspot into C from an interpreted language. I measured it and the results were good. It had been optimised as much as possible in the interpreted version but way still 50 times faster minimum in C.

I recently stumbled upon someone's attempt to do the same and I was able to optimise the interpreted version in five minutes to be twice as fast as the C++ version.

I see opportunity to optimise everywhere in software. A billion KG CO2 could be saved easy if a few green code shops popped up. It's also often a net win. Faster software, lower costs, lower management burden... I'm thinking of starting a consultancy.

The problem is after witnessing the likes of Greta Thunberg then if that's what the next generation has in store then as far as I'm concerned the world can fucking burn and her generation along with it.

!rant

Anyone else who can't focus while listening to music? I can't grasp how that's not annoying to people.

The sound of silence.
For real, the best coding flows happen then.

If there is something that I can hear and process, my train of thought behaves like a dream behaves when you wake up in the morning.

Even worse are children, humming, whistling or munching as the ONLY sound in that silence, Im scorching inside when that happens.

If I can't be somewhere silent (preferably completely), I block the distractions with binaural beats and/or sound of rain.

My boss: Write unit tests for this angular app
Also my boss: what do you mean it will take months to write the necessary mocks for our 177 specs
Also also my boss: why would you need to mock anything for a unit test
Also also also my boss: Just let each component import all the other real components, nevermind that that's an integration test and not a unit test

So I just used Google analytics data from my sites to reverse stalk someone who google stalked me today. I got a whole bunch of information including their mobile model, their city and bunch of other data to confirm they did actually stalk me and understand their psychology.

Backstory: I had deactivated my instagram a couple of weeks ago account without any notice. It was the best decision I made this year. I feel more focused and found myself with plenty of time which otherwise I would have spend on lusting over those sexy ig girls.

Thought nobody would even notice or care. But apparently this one girl, my 2020 covid long distance lover whom I haven't talked to in over 8 months noticed it and decided to Google me.

She spent over 25 mins on my main site and also somehow managed to discover my dead travel blog from Google. I was thinking that I did a good job with the pseudonym I used for the travel blog. Apparently that's not the case!

She must've then proceeded to my linkedin account listed on the site and then sent me a connection request. That was then the notification popped up in my phone earlier today and made me feel butterflies in my stomach. I hadn't felt those butterfly feeling ever since I figured out that we can't be together or possibly even meet for once in real life.

I was curious how she found my linkedin and why sent me the request. We are not even in a related work field, same country. I never thought I'd be thinking more than 5 secs over a linkedin connection request.

That's what lead me to check out the Google analytics data to find the chronology of the events that lead to this connection request.

Anyways, it warmed my heart to learn that she still remembers me after all these months and that she bothered to Google me. Maybe she worried if I blocked her in ig? Or maybe she wondered if I lost my life in the recent covid wave?..

I wanted her to think that I was dead by not responding to the linkedin connection request. But it is possible that she checked out my GitHub profile and found my recent activities.

It fucking sucks knowing that I might never meet her in real life. If we meet, I worry it will lead us to doing things that might hurt others.

I guess at least I can die knowing that there was some truth in our love and someone cared about me and that it was not some illusion I felt..

Maybe the least I can do for her is to just accept that connection request.

What do you tell interviewers as a "Senior developer" when they ask you what you do at your current job.

I've been with my current for almost 8 years, since graduating... Few different time but not very well managed (semi/barely agile). Hasn't really provided any skill growth opportunities. Mostly fixing production issues, chasing other teams.

The projects I've worked on are in many different languages either enhancements or some standalone stuff. But nothing that's huge and I don't think I've learned anything from them. I usually apply what I learn and practice outside of work to work.

So to me I can probably list a whole lot of projects but to me their not that amazing, I didn't learn anything from them.

Also about those algorithm questions. I've never used any of this stuff actually at work. Concepts yes but not how do you implement ... And honestly I've never once had a situation that required algorithmic thinking other than maybe writing recursive functions in rare occasions...

But to me I've never once done anything harder or new which I haven't already done on my own....

Sorry for the disorderly rambling this turned into... which is sorta a problem too.

Everytime I think about interviews, I want to give rants about we technical questions are BS, how I probably have enough real experience to tackle any problem and come up with a good plan/solution (in a realistic timeframe, not 20 minutes from design to implementation)

If I had to name one of my weaknesses it would definitely be impatience.

When I'm working on a backlog issue I want it to be done, finished, pronto. In the real world that's ofcourse not always the case, I can't disturb my colleagues with every question or ask for feedback every minute. I also hate it to have to wait for someone else to do something for me if it's blocking me, like when I need to fix something on a server but don't have access or when I somehow don't have permission for something and have to wait for someone to come and fix it. Even worse: Slow programs that fuck me up when I _just a second ago_ figured out how to fix a bug or implement something.

I also have to wait for pull request reviews so I usually end up with a bunch of stacked PRs that all feature small changes but are dependent upon each other because I needed a change for a different change, never more than 2-level stacks though!

Obviously it's a bit childish to lack professional patience, but it's definitely something that I wanted to rant about and think I should grow in.

Overengineering. Finding the right point between overdesign and no design at all. That's where fancy languages and unusual patterns being hit by real world problems, and you need to deal with all that utter mess you created being architecture astronaut. Isn't that funny how you realize that another fancy tool is fundamentally incompatible with the task you need to solve, and you realize it after a month of writing workarounds and hacks.

But on the other hand, duct tape slacking becomes a mess even quicker.

Not being able to promote projects. You may code the shit out of side project and still get zero response, absolutely no impact. That's why your side projects often becomes abandoned.

Oversleeping. You thought tomorrow was productive day, but you wake up oversleeped, your head aches, your mind is not clear and you be like "fuck that, I'm staying in bed watching memes all day". But there's job that has to be done, and that bothers you.

Writing tests. Oh, words can't describe how much I hate writing tests, any kind of. I tried testing so many times in high school, at university, even at production, but it seems like my mind is just doesn't accept it. I know that testing is fundamentally important, but my mind collapses every time I try to write a single fucking test, resulting in terrible headache. I don't know why it's like that, but it is, and I better repl the shit out of pure function than write fucking tests.

Grew up with just my brother and mother in Russia. We had very little money so we haven't even seen computers in real life until my mother found a swedish boyfriend and we moved to Sweden the year 2000.

I was 7 years old at the time and I saw my first computer in what I think was the Swedish Migration Board office. The purpose of the computer was for convenient registration for the reception or something, but the first thing I did was found paint and drew some circles, I was completely mind blown!
My mother's boyfriend came and told me not to play with the computer because "I might accidentally install a virus".

A couple of months later we got a PC to share with the whole family, me and my brother were so ecstatic because we have previously only seen them on TV and now for some reason we have one at home "Woooot 😮😮😀"

The problem was that my mother only let me and my brother use the computer on weekends and only for one hour. Somehow this just made me and my brother even more interested in that machine, so we sneaked out from our room at night and played with it.
One night we found out about this great thing called Google and googled "how to program a program" and that's when we fell in love with programming.

When our mother found out she got very angry and disappointed. She was questioning why we were "so much in love with this stupid thing" and said "it's not like you are going to get a job working with it!"

Me and my brother are both devs now. So suck it 🖕🖕🖕

I think I just miiiight have found a new job, but before, some comments about the state of the data engineering industry:

- Sooooooo many people outsource it. Man, outsourcing your data teams is like seeing the world through an Apple Vision Pro fused to your skull. Fine if it is working well, but you will go blind of your subscription expires. Or if Apple decides to ban you. Or if they decide to abandon the product... you are entirely dependent on their whims. In retrospect this is par for the course, I guess.
- Lots of companies think data engineering *starts* with an SQL database. Oh, honey, I have some bad news.
- Quite a few expect MS POWER BI will be able to deliver REAL TIME DASHBOARDS summarizing TERABYTES of data sourced from SQL SERVER (or similar). Facepalm.
- Nearly all think the handling of data engineering products is just like that of software engineering. Just try. I dare you.
- Why people think that "familiarity in several SQL dialects" is something to brag about?
- Shit, startups. Startups are dead, boomers. Deader than video rental physical stores.

That's all. On to the next round of interviews!

*sometime during my sophomore year in university. I was a Biology major and just switched to Computer Science. I'm currently a senior graduating in the Spring.*

Me: "Mom and Dad I changed my major to Computer Science!"

Parents: "How will you be able to make a living playing games?"

Me: "I won't be playing games, I'll be coding/programming things and building software."

Parents: "I thought you wanted to become a doctor?"

Me: "Well I decided I wanted to choose a career that I like and I also didn't want to stay in school for 8 years. Also, the salary I can make as a developer/engineer is close to that of some doctors."

Parents: "Well we wanted you to go to be a physical therapist. We feel that it's the best option for you."

Me: "I think this is my best option because there aren't even enough people available to fill the jobs that will be around when I graduate. Which also means that I can make a higher salary."

Parents: "Well I guess we'll see if you can make a living and provide for a family just playing/making games."

Me: "That's fine I never needed your support anyways."

*My parents thought that if the job wasn't physical labor then it wasn't a "real job". (Idk how they decided that a Physical Therapist was a "real job") I moved out less than a year after this argument because I was constantly put down by my parents for coding/programming as well as playing video games in my spare time. They thought it was childish. This has shown me what I won't do when I become a parent.*

*Just a side note: I have paid for everything I own that wasn't gifted to me since I was 18 and had a job while attending college. I also got a scholarship to go to college, so my parents didn't have to pay for any of it.*

Day 1 of a new semester in college. Our 50 yr old H.O.D is a guest lecturer of this new subject called "Industrial Management" (why its included in the syllabus of CSE degree i wonder) . As there were only 6 students , the guy went on like a drunkard telling life lessons :

1) only 20% of the people in a company are only working. Rest 80% of them are just using sugar coated words at the right place ; doing politics and taking credits of the others .

2) those 80% getting benefits are usually the bosses (and in his example, the senior deans and H.O.Ds buttering the administrative dept and director ) and the hardworking 20% are the Juniors or the new joiners ( and in his example, the latest recruited ,honest teachers. Makes sense why we have shitty teachers :/ ). They altogether make sucesses to the company(although its just those 20%hardworkers doing the actual job) . But at the time of salary everybody gets the benfit.

3) Its always perfect to throw blames at senior or junior. (explaining how a parent complaining about the poor study environment to director is made to think that it's only the fault of his own child. blames going from director to dean to HOD to teachers to your own child's mistakes.)

4) Being your boss's favourite is super important. He gave example as : 2 teachers meets him with 100% results and 100% reviews. One of them is a known asshole with 0 knowledge, who makes jokes and sexist comments during the class, gives free attendence and question papers before the exam{therefore 100%reviews} . But he is dean's great ass-licker . The other one is honest hard-working teacher with real reviews and results. So he says he shows their combine results to the director along with his own buttering and ass licking, gets a hike himself and permit to give hije to one junior teacher. And who would it give hike to? The ass licking asshole, because that's how it works. What about the honest teacher?what reply would he get? Simply, appreciations and sugar coated words : "thank you for working so hard. But you did not do anything new. You were only hired to DO hardwork and give good results"

( and i was like fuck? Like seriously? Because that is something resonating with what i once heard in my internship :"yeah you are developing nice and all good, but that's what you are expected to do. You were only hired to achieve results, and you did nothing new". So that's what we are missing? Ass licking?-_- )

5) He believed its important to "look working" than being "actually working" . Quoting an example from his days as a dev, he told a story about how he once worked on a project with deadline of 1 month . He was young and worked hard and in 2 days completed the complete project and accidentally reported success to boss instead of his seniors. The boss simply congratulated his team(seniors and him) and assigned them another project. Later that day , he got an ass-wipe scolding from his seniors that if he had kept his mouth shut, they would have simply watched movies and relax for next 15 days, and submit the project during the salary time to gain bonus attention.
He even gave his short mantra or principle for such situation "kaam ki fickar kar, fickar ka zickar kar, par kaam mat kar " (get worried and tensed about the work. Display your tention and worries to the world (esp bosses) . But don't work.)

And there were many other short stories like that.

Mann, i was about to shout " you corrupt asshole ", but one thing He just told us about the importance of being in boss's good books made me stop ( nd he is a fucking HOD, senior to teachers)

But hell he told some relatable truths. Make me sad about the job life.

Bloody Office politics :|

Several years ago, I heard from a friend who was doing assignments for students on the side. Quite a hustle. His story began when he wanted to figure out why can't these students be able to draw their own database tables, relationships, UML, etc. That's what school has to be teaching them and then he was told that they were learning through MS Access. He goes and tell me that even though this is a lame way of teaching database design, its definitely easier to explain through hands-on and less typing mistakes, as according to the lecturer he met. Making the explanation more visually appealing and helpful for understanding.

OK I get it, but somehow that taught them the wrong way of database design from the beginning. I'd prefer getting them to start writing SQL commands from day 1 and play em at some DB VM. Keep em as real as it gets.

Now I have my own students asking for help in their assignment and also asked for tutoring lessons in web development. So I gave them the crash course in HTML, CSS and Javascript. I've asked them if they've used anything of what I taught them in school. They go and tell me that they've been taught web development through Wordpress. Oh WTF!? I havn't talked to their lecturer yet but it better be a really good explanation to teach these youngsters in a flawed and bloated PHP CMS framework for "web development".

Do you know one major thing (among others of course) that has made devrant feel like home for me after swearing off social media for a long time?

Common ground with users dealing with absolute, insane incompetency at work (I have it real bad at my job).

This doesn't so much make me angry or frustrate me as it makes me sad.

Everyone has varying levels of intelligence in infinite disciplines. Someone could make you cry because they play violin so beautifully but they can't tell you 4 + 4 because they are completely dense, but boy are they genius with that instrument.

Everyone is GREAT at something, that's capitalism's strength! Everyone can excel! I'm lucky enough to truly in my heart believe that programming, data and game development is my true calling...and I personally think I'm amazing at it.

It breaks my heart when people fall into or pursue something that clearly they just don't have enough passion for or regardless just don't have the skill for.

They become toxic to themselves, their employees/coworkers, their industry.

Sadly, power is given to people who simply aren't capable and power is bad on so many levels (aka fucking psychopaths gaining too much power) but it's also bad when people who don't know what they're doing or care get power.

People, I implore you...the secret to happiness and fulfillment in life is finding what makes you happy and what you're passionate about and good at and gripping it until you die.

Most people don't find it....but DON'T stop looking! It took me until my 30's to figure it out. My best friend in her 20's took her life because she couldn't find purpose...don't just be an asshat, incompetent manager in an industry you don't know a fuck about. Love what you do and help others excel.

This is how I get when I'm drunk, sorry. You guys will learn, lol.

Avoid ACPICA if at all possible. It's one garbage tier cluster fuck of bad design, horrible documentation and downright misleading and wrong code

It's meant to consist of an ASL compiler, disassembler, debugger, dumper, various user space utitilies and a kernel resident OSPM implementation *if* you can figure out what belongs to what. Even just compiling this pile of trash is a mystery in itself. Think you need the source files in source/common? EEEEH, wrong. Well, at least partially since most of them seem to be for the user space stuff..? Other ones *are* needed on the other hand. At least the disassembler and/or debugger and/or dumper components seem to reference them. Not that I could figure out how to compile those anyways. The real path to your goal seems to be to ignore a seemingly arbitrary subset of source and header files until your linker stops complaining

There's also a bunch of configuration defines, some of which *you* define, some defined *for* you, based on again others. Of course most of them do stupid shit. Enabling the debugger automatically enables debug logging. Enabling the disassembler force enables debug allocation tracking... What?

The code itself isn't of much help either. Looking in "os_specific/service_layers" you find what looks to be reference implementations of acpica functions in certain os' like windows and unix. Of course I had a look because AcpiOsReadMemory is supposed to read physical memory and I don't know how I would even implement that. But hey, osunixxf.c (xf for interface... of course) should tell me. I'll let you see for yourself in the attached image. Apparently it does fuck all and just returns AE_OK. No error, no logging, no nothing. Just ok. As you can imagine, AcpiOsWriteMemory doesn't do much more either.
...okay so maybe physical memory accesses aren't actually used and these functions are some sort of relic from past times? Nope! They are absolutely necessary for doing low level device interaction. WTF. So finally I went to the linux source and checked how *they* implemented them, and just as I thought, these functions are anything but no-ops...
...So for what fucking reason do these stupid interface implementations even exist but to purposefully mislead you?? They aren't used for fucking anything! As far as I know Windows doesn't even *use* ACPICA and Linux have their own fork with working implementations... They just sit there, just to tell you how to NOT do it

So that's some of my thoughts about ACPICA. Note that I haven't even used it as a library yet, I just got it to compile and link and it already fucked with me this much.
There's also so much more I didn't mention like that you *have* to modify the acpica source in order to get your own platform header working (else #error) eventhough the docs explicitely instruct you not too but you get the point

Don't use ACPICA if you don't have to. Save your sanity for something that's worth it

Wow. That's a new level of ratings.
Just read ratings like these below an ascii cam app(which works like it should):
"This is just a camera witu a mosaic filter, that's why you can't save the pictures as ascii"
"This is not real ascii because you can't save it as .txt or .html"

I don't think i need to say anything.

What is it with devs who try to bloody "cost optimise" everything to within an inch of its life when there's no reason to do so?! This ain't your personal pocket money project here. This is a real commercial app with real consequences.

Seriously, saving £100 a month might seem like a lot to you, but this is a multi million pound project we're talking about. That's bloody nothing, and no-one will care. If a Fargate spot instance restarts at the wrong time and causes downtime though, or if we need logs going back a week, and don't have them because the log retention period is a few days, then everyone will be royally pissed. All because you thought "it should be ok", or it "seemed like the right thing to do". Sod off.

You know what's the worst in doing software?
being assigned that dreadful project, that's doomed and cursed just from the start. Nobody dared to try or touch it for 7 years, because it's destined to fail. You will never get the resources to do it properly, all the constrains are just against you. Even as the requirements bars are lowered and lowered you barely make it. You keep testing that shit with QA for like 8 months past schedule. Then before release some core changes need to be done. It passes QA, but you somehow now it's just a ticking time bomb. It will just crumble and fall somewhere out there, if somebody dares to use that shit for real.

And so it goes.

Bug reports coming in.

At home: a glass of nice single malt whiskey, headphones on with some chill background music and that's all I need.

At work: First half an hour up to one hours goes into deciding what to do / waking up and having the first 2-4 cups of coffee.

Headphones on with some chill background music and I get into the zone for a quick moment before it's lunch time and it takes up to 1h after the lunch break to get back to the zone and multiple coffee cups.

In the afternoon I usually get into the zone and real speed with my work and quite often almost forget to go home :/

Hitting a really deep, deep low in the manic-depressive roller-coaster of the development cycle:

There comes the crunch time. No meeting goes by hearing the odious: "We don't have time for that." - One critical component needs to be finished for Big Sur and instead of addressing the real issues we keep changing design and goal. One main dev already gave up fighting the PO and team lead(!) - and now I'm next. So that dev build this really clean and minimal library as the core part. But now it's just like, yeah, take that nice Porsche engine put it on the old rusty bicycle from the shed,.. but maybe because that's so shitty we need that specially formed exhaust pipe to tune it. Yeah, very 'agile' - Only thinking about it makes me shudder in disbelief and anger. I shouldn't take that shit so serious, be emotional about shit code, I know, but I can't. Let them drive some rounds around the block, if it runs at all,.. because until now we still didn't make it run on the fuckin' street. It's all so insane. Will make some nice fireball, when it goes up in flames.

Well, I have been part of quite some shitty projects. Real suicide commandos set out to fail, and somehow stood them through or made it even "work" though it should never have. But what enrages me here is, that it needn't to be that way. We had plenty of time. Our team was often rowing along in good rhythm. And now I just feel drowned in resignation and sarcasm.

I took a job with a software company to manage their product, which was a SaaS property maintenance system for real estate, social housing, etc.

There was no charge to real estate agents to use it but maintenance contractors had to use credits to take a job, which they pre-purchased. They recharged their credit costs back to the real estate agent on their invoice).

Whether this pricing model is good or not, that's what it was. So, in I came, and one of the first things management wanted me to deal with was a long-standing problem where nobody in the company ever considered a contractor's credits could go into the negative. That is, they bought some credits once, then kept taking jobs (and getting the real estate agent to pay for the credits), and went into negative credits, never paying another cent to this software company.

So, I worked with product and sales and finance and the developers to create a series of stories to help get contractors' back into positive credits with some incentives, and most certainly preventing anyone getting negative again.

The code was all tested, all was good, and this was the whole sprint. We released it ...

... and then suddenly real estate agents were complaining reminders to inspect properties were being missed and all sorts of other date-related events were screwed up.

I couldn't understand how this happened. I spoke with the software manager and he said he added a couple of other pieces of code into the release.

In particular, the year prior someone complained a date on a report was too squished and suggested a two-digit year be used. Some atrocious software developer worked on it who, quite seriously, didn't simply change the formatting of that one report. No, he modified the code everywhere to literally store two-digit years in the database. This code sat unreleased for a year and then .... for no perceivable reason, the moron software manager decided he'd throw it into this sprint without telling me or anybody else, or without it being tested.

I told him to rollback but he said he'd already had developers fixing the problems as they came up. He seemed to be confident they'd sort it out soon.

Yet, as the day went on more and more issues arose. I spoke to him with the rest of the management team and said we need to revert the code but he said they couldn't because they hadn't been making pull requests that were exclusive to specific tickets but instead contained lots of work all in one. He didn't think they could detangle it and said the only way to fix was "play whack-a-mole" when issues came up.

I only stayed in that company for three months; there was simply way too much shit to fix and to this day I still have no idea the reasoning that went on in the head of anyone involved with that piece of code.

Debating on whether to quit my job.

Part of the reason it's hard for me to make a decision is there are a lot of good things about my job:

- almost all the projects we work on are blue sky; no technical debt anywhere
- great teammates; people help each other out and generally there's a good vibe
- reasonable boss; he's totally fine with me managing my own schedule, and since I get my work done, he basically never questions when and where I work
- about 1 hour of corporate meetings each week
- best healthcare I've ever had; basically everything is paid for
- 3 weeks PTO & all major US holidays
- free food; generally healthy office snacks and such

So why would I want to quit this environment?

- I hardly get to code anymore. About 2 years ago, I got asked if I would mind helping spec out projects. Since then, I've moved from writing code related to projects to helping my teammates understand the business situation so they can build the right thing.
- I'm in lots of meetings. So we have very few meetings for the company itself. We have a bunch of customer meetings, though. And progressively, I've getting pulled into meetings where there's really no reason for me to be there, aside from "we should have a technical person present."
- The sales people are getting tired of turning down clients that our product isn't targeted for. So they're progressively pushing to make products in those areas. Unfortunately, I'm the only one on the engineering team has any experience in that other tech stack. Also, the team really, really don't want to learn it because it's old tech that's on its way out.
- The PM group is continuously in shambles. Turnover there has averaged 100% annually for about 5 years. Honestly, IMO, it's because they're understaffed. However, there has been 0 real motion to fix this other than talk. This constant turnover has made it so that the engineering team has had to become the knowledge base for all clients.
- My manager has put me on the management track, but has been very slow to hand off anything. I'm the team supervisor, and I have been since the beginning of the year formally. When the supervisor quit last year, it basically became obvious to me that I was considered the informal supervisor after that. However, I can't hire or fire; I can't give a review; I don't have any budget; I can't authorize time off. So what do I do now? Oh, I'm the person that my boss comes to ask about my co-workers performance for the purpose of informing promotion/termination/pay increases. That's it. I'm a spy.