What kind of music from video games has stuck in your head?

For me it was nearly all music from American McGee's Alice(because that OST is absolutely unique), Bumby's Office from Alice: Madness Returns, along with some other music, Crysis 2 Theme(it stuck in my head for at least a month after having beaten it), some songs from Still Life, the theme for Ori and the Blind Forest, Halo Theme(of course), and others I just cannot remember...

Planning a camping trip with my friends.

Friend1: I’ll bring the snacks.

Friend2: I’ll bring the equipment to build the tents.

Friend3: I’ll bring the first aid kit.

Everybody: who’s bringing the equipment to make the fire?

Me: I’ll do that. I’ll just run Android Studio on my laptop.

Everybody: woah woah man! Take it easy! We just want a simple fire, not burn the whole forest down!

Trying to design a company logo and all I keep ending up with is the pringles guy after he loses his job and has a mental break down in a forest...

Story time! Promised this, so making good on the promise. Eh-hem.

Misunderstandings [A slice of life short play that actually happened]

Dramatis Personae (anonymized, bc of course):
Moi ........ me, myself and possibly some lint
Robert ..... co-architect
Daisy ...... line dev
Lisa ....... also line dev

Prologue: the beginninning
[A project is starting up, new devs are coming on, including the two individuals who drive this story.
Daisy, of Indian origin, an exceptional dev and lovely person. Mother, wife, very conservative by upbringing in her early 40s.
Lisa, also exceptional dev, lovely person. Mother, also wife, self-made immigrant with liberal views derived from personal pride and self-bootstrapping]

Enter the office, We introduce everyone, off to a nice start, everyone is happy and excited to be working on [large bank project].

Lisa and Daisy form a friendship of commonality, they have similar backgrounds by all appearances and similar concerns due to children the same age and shared employment. They seem to become fast friends and things proceed normally for some months. Smooth sailing, all is well.

The fuse is lit.

Scene: Lunchtime gossip
[Robert, middle 40s architect adjacent Moi, also architect, age is my own damn business [old, so very old].]
Robert: "So, it seems like Daisy and Lisa are getting along great."
Moi: *snerfs a little, almost chokes on enchilada* Yes, yes they are, It's nice to see...
Robert: *eyebrow, having learned to read my expressions* "Aaaaaaand..."
Moi: "I adore both of them, but they are primarily friends because they don't actually understand most of what the other says"
[Lisa has a thick Taiwanese accent, Daisy has a standard northern indian accent. Never the two shall meet]
Robert: "Are you sure, they seem to have a lot of conversations?"
Moi: "Positive, you weren't at lunch with the three of us. They're polar opposite in terms of values, it'll be fine so long as that never comes up"
Robert: "I'm not even digging into that"
Moi: *flan*

Sizzle.

Scene: This is bat country
[More months pass, everything is fine, project is humming along nicely, save a few blips of personality conflicts. Moi takes a vacation. A gas station, somewhere in the middle of Wyoming, a snowstorm, a sports car full of luggage]
*phone rings*
Moi: *looks down, sees it's Robert, eyebrow raises, answer* What's on fire?
Robert: "We had to let Lisa go"
Moi: "Ah, they finally understood each other."
Robert: "Yes..." *deep sigh*
[Fade to flashback]

Bang.

Scene: The office, Lisa's desk
[Daisy and Lisa are discussing non-descript conversation. Daisy broaches the subject of Lisa's past divorce and being a single mother]
Daisy: "It must have been hard, how did you manage?"
Lisa: "I had my daughter, she was my motivation. We made it here, I met my current partner"
Daisy: "That's good! It is so hard, coming to something new. I could never imagine leaving my husband."
Lisa: "He left us, we weren't important, I don't want to marry every again"
Daisy: "Surely you do though? Marriage is great for a woman, my parents found a great husband for me."
Lisa: "Haha, lucky you. Most indian marriage is like prostitution."
[At this moment, Daisy's demeanor takes a nose dive. Whatever was actually said, what she heard was, "Indian marriage is prostitution"]
Daisy: *tears begin pouring down her face, she flings herself back in her chair, head shaking violently she screams* "I AM AN HONORABLE WOMAN!"
[Daisy runs out of the room, straight to HR. Lisa sits there, stunned, not really understanding what just happened or the consequences]

Scene: Back in bat country
[Robert finishes the story, the emotions are a mixture of hilarity at the absurdity of the situation and frustration in the work void it has created]
Moi: "Satan, well. Fuck me. Fuck us. Fuck. Is Daisy alright, is she at least staying? We can't lose two devs at the same time."
Robert: "She got a few days off, she seems fine now, but she's... yeah, I never laughed so hard"
Moi: *double facepalm* "Yeah, the word choice was a bit outrageous. It's not like we didn't know it was coming. I'm going to get back on the road."
Robert: "Alright, enjoy yourself, I'll try and prevent any other forest fires."

A young man was walking along in the forest, when he heard a muffled voice crying for help from behind a log. He leaned over to see a frog sitting in the mud.

The frog looked up at him and said, "I'm actually a beautiful princess, and if you kiss me, I'll transform back into my true self, and be yours for eternity."

Silently, the man scooped up the frog and continued on his walk.

A minute or two later, the frog piped up again, "Hey, buddy, maybe you didn't hear me -- I said, if you kiss me, I'll turn into a princess. What are you waiting for?"

Annoyed, the man stuffed the frog into his coat pocket.

Shocked, the frog yelled from inside the man's pocket, "What the hell? I'm a princess! All you have to do is kiss me!"

Opening his pocket and peering in, the man said, "Listen -- I'm a software engineer. I don't have time for a girlfriend. But a talking frog is kind of cool."

Running an Alpaca farm in rural Finland, next to some mountain creek with an oldschool water mill so I can grind flour and coffee beans.

I hated people so I tried to find solace as a nerd in technology, but tech is also fucking awful so I feel like retiring in a tranquil forest with some equally grumpy wooly animals.

If I get eaten by a bear because I'm a skimpy city boy that's OK, more epic than being found decomposing slumped over on a keyboard in the boring grey suburbs.

All of this is probably pandemic-me talking though. So sick of this concrete city with the farting cars and fat obnoxious shoppers.

I need some trees around me, and some mammals with a higher IQ than my current neighbors.

I think I should go and live in some forest or mountains.
The world is full of shitty people😑😶

guys my linux is not booting !
reply:
Find a forest, where no human has ever set foot.
Wait until the full moon rises, and then sacrifice x virgins, where x is the month of the year.
Spill their blood on your device, and wrap in parma ham (if your religion forbids you to make contact with ham, replace it with high quality carpaccio. If you're vegan get youreslf a rope).
Then, build an altar to the gnu God, with feet spelling GPL, and a head that like of a gnu.
When this is done, you shall bow down three times to the altar (thirty if you use tabs), place your wrapped bloody system on the altar, and proceed with dancing on Staying Alive, except you will have adapted the lyrics to your system.
When you are done dancing and chanting, you shall lie down in front of the altar, and you shall not gaze upon your system till daybreak.
Then when the sun rises (sorry if you're in the uk, or one of the poles) you will marvel at your system, thanking the ever potent gnu god forever.

The funniest shit I have ever read 🤣 ... had to share

WASM was a mistake. I just wanted to learn C++ and have fast code on the web. Everyone praised it. No one mentioned that it would double or quadruple my development time. That it would cause me to curse repeatedly at the screen until I wanted to harm myself.

The problem was never C++, which was a respectable if long-winded language. No no no. The problem was the lack of support for 'objects' or 'arrays' as parameters or return types. Anything of any complexity lives on one giant Float32Array which must surely bring a look of disgust from every programmer on this muddy rock. That is, one single array variable that you re-use for EVERYTHING.

Have a color? Throw it on the array. 10 floats in an object? Push it on the array - and split off the two bools via dependency injection (why do I have 3-4 line function parameter lists?!). Have an image with 1,000,000 floats? Drop it in the array. Want to return an array? Provide a malloc ptr into the code and write to it, then read from that location in JS after running the function, modifying the array as a side effect.

My- hahaha, my web worker has two images it's working with, calculations for all the planets, sun and moon in the solar system, and bunch of other calculations I wanted offloaded from the main thread... they all live in ONE GIANT ARRAY. LMFAO.If I want to find an element? I have to know exactly where to look or else, good luck finding it among the millions of numbers on that thing.

And of course, if you work with these, you put them in loops. Then you can have the joys of off-by-one errors that not only result in bad results in the returned array, but inexplicable errors in which code you haven't even touched suddenly has bad values. I've had entire functions suddenly explode with random errors because I accidentally overwrote the wrong section of that float array. Not like, the variable the function was using was wrong. No. WASM acted like the function didn't even exist and it didn't know why. Because, somehow, the function ALSO lived on that Float32Array.

And because you're using WASM to be fast, you're typically trying to overwrite things that do O(N) operations or more. NO ONE is going to use this return a + b. One off functions just aren't worth programming in WASM. Worst of all, debugging this is often a matter of writing print and console.log statements everywhere, to try and 'eat' the whole array at once to find out what portion got corrupted or is broke. Or comment out your code line by line to see what in forsaken 9 circles of coding hell caused your problem. It's like debugging blind in a strange and overgrown forest of code that you don't even recognize because most of it is there to satisfy the needs of WASM.

And because it takes so long to debug, it takes a massively long time to create things, and by the time you're done, the dependent package you're building for has 'moved on' and find you suddenly need to update a bunch of crap when you're not even finished. All of this, purely because of a horribly designed technology.

And do they have sympathy for you for forcing you to update all this stuff? No. They don't owe you sympathy, and god forbid they give you any. You are a developer and so it is your duty to suffer - for some kind of karma.

I wanted to love WASM, but screw that thing, it's horrible errors and most of all, the WASM heap32.

[OC] Don't let the nature get to you only as a pixels on your screen!

Free your mind and don't forget the real world is out there, waiting for you to help you think, calm yourself and please you in the silence of a forest ~

No fans spinning

"And how are you?" I said.

Eeyore shook his head from side to side.

"Not very how," he said. "I don't seem to have felt at all how for a long time."

"Dear, dear," said Pooh, "I'm sorry about that. Let's have a look at your code..."

And then Eeyore looked at Pooh with terror in his face, before he vanish into the forest.

He never let me review his code again...

Am I the only one who silently shouts "Run Forest ruuuuun!" when clicking a run-button?

!dev

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Explaining to my boss why we can't use the WordPress theme he saw on Theme Forest in an Android app

Moving away from technology and becoming self-sufficient. A cottage with a stream on the edge of a forest, a large garden, some chickens and other animals, and no smart devices, managers, tickets, KPAs, performance reviews, legendary devs shitting out an endless stream of bugs, etc.

Peace and quiet.
And freedom at last.
That’s success.

That’s the ultimate success: escape.

I'm fixing a bug. In a car. In the middle of the fucking forest. My download speed is 13 KiB/s, roughly 75120 times slower than at the office. Fucking hell.

That's it. I've had enough.

I lost my job yesterday (again) and the Irish cumstain who lives in the room next to me got pissed last night and kicked my door in because he thought I had his phone(?) and was ignoring him, when I was at work.

Long story short, he ripped my friends back door apart, tried to fight me (which ended with me chasing him down the street with a plank).

Police came and did a wonderful job as always by making us shake hands and 'promise' to leave each other alone.

THIS ISN'T FUCKING PRIMARY SCHOOL. DRAG HIM AWAY BEFORE I DO, YOU IGNORANT FUCKING PIGS.

Oh, and my 'friend' then had a schizophrenic episode and blamed it all on me(?!?). I then went to buy 2 bottles of vodka and decided to get pissed before trying to kill myself.

Ah, I love humans. Dirty, ignorant, blood sucking bags of sweaty meat and delicate bone. I really want to turn this Irish cunt into a skinsack of blood and guts, but I'm waiting patiently. He's going to wake up one night tied up and gagged, with me dragging him to a forest somewhere far far away...

Is it weird that I want to make him scream, cry, and shit himself at the same time?

* Yesterday:*
PM: Yes, so, could you please do those changes on this page tomorrow by 3 pm and push to prod?
Me: Yeah sure! Noted :) (task is to "untick" a checkbox in a page's settings on our CMS)

* the next day -- 11 am *
PM: erm yes so please can you do the changes I told you about, it's getting urgent and you didn't start it already and it stresses the hell out of me because today is friday and it needs to be up and running fine for Monday 12pm and you don't work on weekend so I'd like yo-
Me:

Spec'ing out a data analysis tool for several billion transactions and I got this when sending the final spec to the client.

Client: "I don't see why it takes so long, I downloaded this template from theme forest and edited it in dreamweaver, it only took 3 hours"

Do you give your PC or Smartphone (or printer etc) a name?

Like: I called my Laptop "Momo" (Reference: Michael Ende, I never read nor watched it but I liked the drawing style)

And my Phone "Ori" (Reference: Ori & the blind Forest, I never played it, only saw a some gameplay)

Ok I completely lost it... Been in a prod issue all week and basically just said the root cause is bc this team is blind....

Use the forest and trees analogy first but they still didn't seem to see it so I sent them this.

And then the chat went silent....

No one will understand me but you Devs.
I am a self taught developer who works in a digital marketing agency, when I was learning to code I wanted that the code I will produce will help people and make me happy, the only job i got is in digital marketing agency, because no one in my country will recrute a self taught bald ugly mid thirty fucker, then want them young and fresh, anyway, I proved that I can handle the job, so that I became the only dev in the agency.
the problem is that I reached a that checkpoint where I have to choose a path:
- I learned Node and React but I can't use them in my agency
- I work with wordpress and prestashop but I don't code, I use fucking theme forest templates

the only way to work with MERN is through remote, but I am not a senior yet, I only have to keep learning PHP but I can't advance in my current job since the projects don't require coding, and I feel that my agency will close the dev department because they put me in the designers office.

I don't want to reach 40 with nothing in my portfolio but shitty theme forest template rape, the stress from my current situation is killing me, I can't even start working on my portfolio website and blog because I can't think straight, my mind jump from "today I will build an api" to "no I need to build a custom wordpress theme" each 3 minutes, I don't sleep, the futur is dark, I am afraid that if I focus on wordpress and shit I will miss working in interesting projects, and if I focus on MERN I will never gain experience localy to become a full remote later.

many will agree with me that PHP is shitty but gets the work done, and I hate PHP because of prestashop, and we only live once, the only other job I found require wordpress and fucking prestashop, imagine living a live doing something you don't like, then die regretting every decision you make.

I might sound crazy for you, but I don't have many friends and I am an introvert working with designers and community managers ... so this is the only place I can write what I want.

if you reached here, I thank you for your time

kinda long but please read (skip to the bullets if you're lazy):

hey dR. I stumpled across a search engine that aims to help the environment. it's called "Ecosia" and it will plant a tree for every ~45 searches you make. just think, one stubborn bug could make you the reason for a new forest! I'm not sure if it's legitimate or not, but apparently it uses 80% of its profits to plant trees, and makes that profit from ads. is it safe to use? I'm not sure.

here is what you should know (some are based on claims by ecosia and aren't proved, but probably true):
- they plant a tree for about every 45 searches you make
- they are able to plant trees by using money from ads
- they "respect privacy"
- they're "fully transparent"
- they're a "social buisness"
- [I hope this isn't a turnoff] the search results are powered by bing
- since 1.9, vivaldi has included ecosia as one of the preset search engines (I'm not sure if it's the default)
- it has opera, firefox, and chrome extensions

thanks!

Cannot understand those who are frustrated with it.
Sure, one can feel frustration when some project is not going as they were supposed to go, but that is life for ya, boi.

Without wanting to offend anyone it feels like devs who complain so much either do not actively search for a solution and learn shit properly and cry their soul out afterwards or they do search, but cannot find anything.
Patience is the solution. Do not let yourself fall down and stay strong.
Even if it takes a lot of willpower, retries, inner pain, patience and non-sleepy nights, you will and can do it. I believe in you.

My whole life was basically a psychological disaster.
I have had and still have depression and a lot of short frustrations from time to time, too, but I do not cry it out loud.
My high school is fucked up. In every single aspect. I am doing all-nighters almost every day. With maybe half an hour of sleep to get school projects done on time.
I cannot just say "fuck you. I am not gonna do this shit" to school, because that would affect my grades in a negative way. Same thing applies to you, as an employee, too. But at least you do not need to be afraid of getting bad grades.
Bad grades->not getting the desired degree->bad chance of finding a job
In your case:
Bad communication with boss->bad connection->bad chance of finding a job

But is that really so?
I do not think so. Nonetheless, you still can have a good chance of finding a job, if you have proven yourself to others in a great way. Everyone has bad times. Even with their bosses. That's normal. Being bad with someone does not make yourself bad in general.

The job world will still accept you, but school won't accept you again. Whenever I feel like the burnout is about to catch me, I take an immediate break and go outside. Take a walk in the sunset. Go to the forest. Run with music playing loudly. Swim. And other things like watching the stars in the silence of the night.

To finally come to an end here...
Do not make yourself feel bad that quickly and try to endure the pain. This is going to make you a better and stronger person.
If you cannot do it anymore (hitting the borders of burnout), take your time and do whatever makes you happy and treat yourself.
Life is not all about work. Were you born to be a worker? No. Were you born to be a slave of others? No.
What is holding you then? Let go of all the stress (for a minute). You are free.

You are a great person.
Do not forget that.

So i got fired from a company with has a name similar to a burning forest.
I guess this is going to burn down someday as well.

I got fired for a shitty ass reason that doesn’t even make sense.
Just clarifying, i didn’t do drugs, no smoking or drinking or harassing anyone or cause fraud (frankly i wasnt senior enough to do one)

And the worst part, atleast 500 other people (these are all the ones that i shared an office floor with), also did it, and weren’t even investigated.

Join google, facebook, join any company you want, dont join this shithole.

Being frugal my ass, its just another term they have for being cheap.

Also people who are working there and are happy, wait till it happens with you!

Working with Microsoft is like trying to make a fucking bridge out of jello. It’s like trying to tell where you are in a forest by licking the soil. It’s like trying to run on a track covered in oil. It’s like trying to speak to aliens. Its like trying to write something with your own blood. It’s like spending 10 fucking hours to find out how to setup the IDE so the scrolling works. It’s like shoving your tv remote up your own ass to feel something.

A client once thought I was making "the trees come out of the screen" because I used parallax scrolling with a forest photo..

I'd say a program in production is a puzzle without the sky and forest

My newest BASH project: reactive BASH
:)
Yes, I do like shell THAT much!

Since today my bhttp lib supports STOMP [still need to work on 1.2 compliance], i.e. I can carry out live communication with MQ. Meaning I can script the whole thing, be it 5 calls 5 reads, be it 20 subscriptions and reacting to unlimited number of messages in either of them with separate actions. WITHOUT A FOREST OF IF-ELSEs OR CASE-ESACs!!!

Boi do I love shell scripting... :D

Next project: AI in BASH

Ah transports

Minding my own business in a crowded train, listening to full blast music. As the song changes I sort of heard an announcement but didn't get the subject.

Guy in front of me does a 180° and starts talking to me. I thought he wanted some guidance, so I removed my headset and never did I regret more doing that, that guy just went on and on about his life and stuff that I don't care about, until he got off his stop. Ironically, before he left off he said "you know my mama always told me that you should ignore people you're not interested in" (Forest Gump Swiss edition? He didn't have a box of chocolates though)

I was like "yes, fuck off, not interested in your bullshit", but well, noticed he might be sensitive.

After he left some teens just came and pretended I didn't exist as they invaded my corporal space. Pushed one gently as he was leaning on to me a bit too much.

People must see me as a help point, you know those terminals where you can browse stuff... That's me. The Father of them all.

Working in the forest 🌳

I learned the first things in php by the Sololearn app. If that count's as an teacher, it was quite a good one, cause it triggered my interest and guided me into this forest where only google and probably stackoverflow will lead out.

I just found out my parents have less than $30 in the bank by the end of each month after all expenses...

We are not living. We are barely surviving....

Every day in my house it is dark and the lights are off. They turn all lights off in order to avoid getting a high electricity bill. I have to use my phone's flashlight as the main source of light in my own house, as if i live in abandoned cottage in the middle of a forest.....

Both my parents are jobless (have been their entire lives). They just borrow money from their family members and grandparents to pay these bills every month. They depended on luck their whole lives. A luck in context of "maybe if i dont work anything at all then a huge pile of money will fall down from the sky!".

So now I, as their son, have to grow up in extreme poverty and fight my way up, because of DUMB, STUPID people. They are good people, but what does being a good person bring if you are fucking stupid and valueless?

I knew i was poor but today i found out i was THIS poor. I had no idea we were THIS much poor. Because today my 4g internet got cut off due to not paying bills. The bill is $30. My dad cant pay it cause he doesnt have $30 in the bank. I was in shock. So i had to pay it

My $8.125 usd an hour backend software engineer + DevOps engineer (2 jobs in 1), is considered as LUXURIOUS SALARY, in the most corrupted country of Europe -- SERBIA 🇷🇸

When i tell the world i make $8 an hour with a computer science degree working as a software engineer, they laugh at me. People mock me "bro even a mcdonalds worker earns $17/hour what are you doing" im doing what i was born into -- born into poverty of a third world shithole country.

With my $8 an hour salary, i am in TOP 3% of the HIGHEST earners in serbia. Can you fucking imagine how miserable lives do people live if this is not even an average salary, but among the ELITE salary? Because the average salary in Serbia, is $3.75 usd an hour, sometimes even less than that.

When people say "its not about luck its about hard work", please, GO. FUCK. YOURSELF.

Go and be born in a shithole third world country. Now on top of that be born in poverty due to poor decisions of your parents. Go ahead and try it. Lets see how hard you fucking have to work to get to the same level compared to someone who was born into for example America, where you get paid 6 figures immediately after graduating computer science. Or on top of that, you're born in a wealthy family in america. Did you work hard to be born in the 1st class freak show or were you LUCKY to be gifted such life?

My whole life i have been fighting to get money and escape this misery due to poor decisions of my parents.

Very ironically, my parents have lived extremely luxurious lives in the 90s. They had 5 cars. 1 huge house with a backyard garage private office private jacuzzi private gym. This house was worth at least 500k in the 90s. Today this house would cost at least 1.5 or 2 million. They went to luxurious travels. Hotels of $5000 per night per person. Literally wasted 45k in 3 days just for hotel. They even GAVE AWAY FOR FREE money to our relatives and cousins, taking them on luxurious vacations for free etc. None of those people appreciated them, none of them came to help them in tough times, everyone forgot about them and abandoned us.

Like i said, my parents are good people, but what does it profit being a good person if you are FUCKING STUPID.

They were extremely LUCKY but their STUPIDNESS has made them broke. I couldn't be THIS much fucking stupid even if i tried hard.

Nobody is coming to save us. No one cares. Its all up to me now. All the pressure and stress and poverty is passed and inherited onto my life now. its up to me to either get rich or end my STUPID bloodline

I am living a very difficult life and no one seems to understand this...

We code hard in these cubicles

My style’s nerd-chic, I’m a programmin’ freak

We code hard in these cubicles

Only two hours to your deadline?

Don’t sweat my technique.

Sippin’ morning coffee with that JAVA swirl.

Born to code; my first words were “Hello World”

Since 95, been JAVA codin’ stayin’ proud

Started on floppy disks, now we take it to the cloud.

On my desktop, JAVA’s what’s bobbin’ and weavin’

We got another winning app before I get to OddEven.

Blazin’ code like a forest fire, climbin’ a tree

Setting standards like I Triple E….
Boot it on up, I use the force like Luke,

Got so much love for my homeboy Duke.

GNU Public Licensed, it’s open source,

Stop by my desk when you need a crash course

Written once and my script runs anywhere,

Straight thuggin’, mean muggin’ in my Aeron chair.

All the best lines of code, you know I wrote ‘em

I’ll run you out of town on your dial-up modem.

Cause…
We code hard in these cubicles

Me and my crew code hyphy hardcore

We code hard in these cubicles

It’s been more than 10 years since I’ve seen the 404.

Inheriting a project can make me go beeee-serk

Ain’t got four hours to transfer their Framework.

The cleaners killed the lights, Man, that ain’t nice,

Gonna knock this program out, just like Kimbo Slice

I program all night, just like a champ,

Look alive under this IKEA lamp.

I code HARDER in the midnight hour,

E7 on the vending machine fuels my power.

Ps3 to Smartphones, our code use never ends,

JAVA’s there when I beat you in “Words with Friends”.

My developing skills are so fresh please discuss,

You better step your game up on that C++.

We know better than to use Dot N-E-T,

Even Dan Brown can’t code as hard as me.

You know JAVA’s gettin’ bigger, that’s a promise not a threat,

Let me code it on your brain

We code hard in these cubicles,

it’s the core component…of what we implement.

We code hard in these cubicles,
Straight to your JAVA Runtime Environment.

We code hard in these cubicles,
Keep the syntax light and the algorithm tight.

We code hard in these cubicles,

Gotta use JAVA if it’s gonna run right.

We code hard in these cubicles

JAVA keeps adapting, you know it’s built to last.

We code hard in these cubicles,

Robust and secure, so our swag’s on blast

CODE HARD

I just got a job as a "Web designer", but I've quickly learned that my job duties involve installing theme forest themes for clients and sticking to the template. I'm not allowed to write my own code. ever. uuuuuuuuggggghhhhhh

Oh, gather 'round fellow wizards of the code realm! 🧙✨ Let me regale you with the epic tale of software sorcery and the comical misadventures that come with it! 🤪🎉

So there we are, facing the dreaded Internet Explorer dragon 🐉 - an ancient, stubborn beast from the era of dial-up connections and clipart-laden websites. It breathes fire on our carefully crafted layouts, turning them into a pixelated disaster! 🔥😱

And then, the grand quest of cross-browser testing begins! 🚀🌍 One moment, your website is a shining knight in Chrome's armor, and the next, it's a jester in Safari's court. A circus of compatibility struggles! 🎪🤹

CSS, the arcane art of cascading style sheets, is our magic wand. But oh, the incantations can be treacherous! A slight misstep and your buttons start disco dancing, and your text transforms into a microscopic mystery! 🕺👀

But fear not, brave developers! We wield the enchanted sword of Stack Overflow and the shield of Git version control. We shall slay bugs and refactor with valor! ⚔️🐞

In this enchanted land, documentation is the mystical parchment, often written in the cryptic dialect of ancient monks. "This function doeth stuff, thou knoweth what I meaneth." 📜😅

And meetings, oh the meetings! 🗣️🤯 It's like a conference of babbling brooks in the forest of Jargon. "Let us discuss the velocity of the backlog!" 🌿🐇

But amidst the chaos, we code on! Armed with our emojis and a bubbling cauldron of coffee, we persist. For we are the wizards and witches of the digital age, conjuring spells in Python and brewing potions in Java. 🐍☕

Onward, magical beings of code! 🚀 May your bugs be few, and your merges conflict-free! 🙌🎩

Most web developers don't seem to care at all about ecological footprint and UX/UI impact on people and society, like they never cared about accessibility either, desperately dreaming to work for the Californian oligopoly companies that shaped our current digital infrastructure.

Meanwhile, rivers run dry, forest are burning, people starving and soldiers killing people.

But politics is taboo, even on devrant. Let's post a funny thank-God(?!)-it's-Friday GIF animation instead!?

What kind of people do we want to be?

There are days where I just want to develop a plot of land in some forest/mountain rich area into a little farm, maybe with some silly animals like emus and alpacas.

Development is not always as stress free as I'd like it to be.

If I'd had to pick a way to spend my days and money was no issue, I'd probably only contribute to open source, and invest more time into a few projects of my own.

No boss, no sales department, no deadlines, zero pressure. Just solving the puzzles my brain wants to lock on to that day.

I know I’ll get mixed views for this one...

So I’ll state my claim. I agree with the philosophy of uncle bob, I also feel like he is the high level language - older version of myself personality wise.. (when I learned about uncle bob I was like this guy is just like me but not low level haha).

Anyway.. I don’t agree with everything because I think he thinks or atleast I get the vibe he thinks everything can be solved by OOP, and high level languages. This is probably where Bob and I disagree. Personally I don’t touch ruby, python and java and “those” with a 10 foot pole.

Does he make valid arguments, yes, is agile the solve all solution no.. but agile ideas do come natural and respond faster the feedback loop of product development is much smaller and the managers and clients and customers can “see things” sooner than purly waterfall.. I mean agile is the natural approach of disciplined engineers....waterfall is and was developed because the market was flooded with undisciplined engineers and continues to flood, agile is great for them but only if they are skilled in what they are doing and see the bigger picture of the forest thru the trees.. which is the entire point of waterfall, to see the forest.. the end goal... now I’m not saying agile you only see a branch of a single tree of the forest.. but too often young engineers, and beginners jump on agile because it’s “trendy” or “everyone’s doing it” or whatever the fuck reason. The point is they do it but only focus on the immediate use case, needs and deliverables due next week.

What’s wrong with that?? Well an undisciplined engineer doing agile (no I’m not talking damn scrum shit and all that marketing bullshit).. pure true agile.
They will write code for the need due next week, but they won’t realize that hmm I will have the need 3 months from now for some feature that needs to connect to this, so I better design this code with that future feature in mind...

The disciplined engineer would do that. That is why waterfall exists so ideally the big picture is painted before hand.

The undisciplined engineer will then be frustrated in the future when he has to act like the cool aid man thru the hard pre mature architectural boundaries he created and now needs links or connections that are now needed.

Does moving to agile fix that hell no.. because the undisciplined engineer is still undisciplined.

One could argue the project manager or scrum secretary... (yes scrum secretary I said that right).. is suppose to organize and create and order the features with the future in mind etc...

Bullshit ..soo basically your saying the scrum kid is suppose to be the disciplined engineer to have foresight into realizing future features and making requirements and task now that cover those things? No!
1 scrum bitch focuses too much on pleasing “stake holders” especially taken literally in start ups where the non technical idiots are too involved with the engineering team and the scrum bastard tries to ass kiss and get everything organized and tasks working so the non technical person can see pretty things work.

Scrum master is a gate keeper and is not needed and actually hinders the whole process of making a undisciplined engineer into a disciplined engineer, makes the undisciplined engineer into a “forever” code grunt... filling weekly orders of story points unable to see the forest until it’s over because the forest isn’t show to the grunt only the scrum keeper knows the big picture..... this is bad this is why waterfall is needed.

Waterfall has its own problems, But that’s another story for another day..

ANYWAY... soooo where were we ....

Ahh yess....

Clean code..

Is it a good book, yes.. does uncle bobs personality show thru the book .. yes lol.
If you know uncle bob you will understand what I just did with this post lol. I had to tangent ( at least mine was related to the topic) ...

I agree with the principles of the book, I don’t agree with the extreme view point. It’s like religion there’s the modest folks and then there are the extremists. Well he’s the preacher of the cult and he’s on the extreme side.. but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.. many things he nails... he just hits the nail thru the wall just a bit.

OOP languages are not the solution... high level languages do not solve everything.. pininciples and concepts can be used across the board and prove valuable.. just don’t hold everything up like the 10 commandments of which you cannot deviate from.. that’s the difference here I think..

Good book, just don’t take it as the Bible as a beginner, actually infact DONT read this book as a beginner. Wait a bit learn then reflect by reading this.

Our approach is to get a loose feel for what the client wants, lift some visuals from Theme Forest then spend the next few weeks persuading the client to use our crappy server rather than their preferred AWS solution. Then once the project is behind schedule we break the work down into disparate tasks each of which gets a single line brief from the PM (such as 'create admin' or 'do css'). These then get assigned to different devs with no consideration of their skillset. The PM is available for 10 mins every day to answer queries, the rest of the time our devs are expected to work autonomously. Meanwhile we'll tell the client that we're back on schedule and arrange a demo for an impossibly short deadline. We have the mantra ”dont worry about it” which the PM uses to quash any dev's concerns up until the day before the deadline at which point we'll swap some devs on to unrelated work whilst others concentrate on getting "just the pages the client wants to see looking right" (we have a policy of making it look like it works before it actually does.) Following the demo we will announce all the missing features we had forgotten about from the initial undocumented agreement and set the project aside whilst we service another client.

Repeat/repost:

Unfortunately I do not own a drop of what is conventionally known as confidence or ego. It applies to everything; work, skills, relationships, friendships, you name it. I can estimate my chances of succeeding, and sometimes be pretend-delulu for a purpose (you gotta admit, sometimes showmanship is the biggest asset) but I don't understand confidence. In my opinion, it's just a gross overestimation of one's chances.

So this project/paper thing, I feel like I'm blind and running in the forest. I am not counting on my boss, nor am I counting on anyone in the dept to give me clarity or decent feedback. ("Cutting edge" research issues. Not anybody's fault.)

And I guess, in the worst case scenario the paper will be rejected, which would be a setback but not a full failure.

... Actually, that's not the worst case. The worst case would be someone running a peer review and finding that I made a tiny mistake and all my results are bullshit. 🤦

... Anxiety is eating me alive rn. 🤢

- hanging my brain on a nail and drying it watching Netflix

- stroll/hike in nature (park, forest, by the river, etc.). At least 1 hour long

- warm seasons: riding around the city on my e-scooter at max speeds (works amazingly well!)

- warm seasons: gardening

I would become one with the forest

The datepicker saga

Part one

So I begin work on a page where user add their details, project is late, taking ages on this page

Nearly done, just need a component to allow users to put in some date of births. Look for react components.

Avoiding that one because fuck Bootstrap.

Ah-ha, that looks good, let's give it a go.

CSS doesn't exist, oh need copy it over from npm dist. Great it applied but...

... WTF it's tiny. Thought it was a problem with my zoom. Nope found the issue in github.com and it's something to do with using REM rather than EM or something, okay someone provided a solution, rather I saw a couple of solutions, after some hacking around I got it working and pasted it in the right location and yes, it's a reasonable size now.

Only it's a bit crap because it only allows scrolling 1 month at a time. No good. Hunting through the docs reveals several options to add year and month drop downs and allow them to be scrolled. Still a bit shit as it only shows certain years, figure I'd set the start date position somewhere at the average.

Wait. The up button on the scroll doesn't even show, it's just a blank 5px button. Mouse scroll doesn't work

Fucking...

... Bailing on that.

Part 2

Okay sod it I'll just make my own three drop down select boxes, day, month and year. Easy.

At this point I take full responsibility and cannot blame any third party. And kids, take this as a lesson to plan out your code fully and make no assumptions on the simplicity of the problem.

For some reason (of which I regretted much) I decided to abstract things so much I made an array of three objects for each drop down. Containing the information to pretty much abstract away the field it was dealing with. This sort of meta programming really screwed with my head, I have lines like the following:

[...].map(optionGroup =>
optionGroup.options[
parseInt(
newState[optionGroup.momentId]
, 10)
]
)...

But I was in too deep and had to weave my way through this kind of abstract process like an intrepid explorer chopping through a rain forest with a butter knife.

So I am using React and Redux, decided it was overkill to use Redux to control each field. Only trouble is of course when the user clicks one of the fields, it doesn't make sense in redux to have one of the three fields selected. And I wanted to show the field title as the first option. So I went against good practice and used state to keep track of the fields before they are handed off to the parent/redux. What a nightmare that was.

Possibly the most challenging part was matching my indices with moment.js to get the UI working right, it was such a meta mess when it just shouldn't have taken so stupidly long.

But, I begin to see the light at the end of this tunnel, it's slowly coming together. And when it all clicks into place I sit back and actually quite enjoy my abysmal attempt at clean and easy to read code.

Part 3

Ran the generated timestamp through a converter and I get the day before, oh yeah that's great

Seems like it's dependant on the timezone??!

Nope. Deploying. Bye. I no longer care if daylight savings makes you a day younger.

Woke up in the middle of the night thinking about work and how the team seems to be always a few steps away from the next production issue and well always busy with urgent work too so that the crap that produces more and more tech debt never get cleaned or fixed...

And now it's grown so big... The bad habits are just sparking more bad habits and well the only person (boss) able to correct course still hasn't realized for the last 4 years... Constantly thinking things will get better after the next sprint. Hell we don't even use proper sprint planning... even I can't keep up anymore and can never get any long term high value/low immediate return work done...

So I guess I'm having a work overload, nervous breakdown before even going back to work...

I have an urge to tell all this to his boss and have him give him a wake-up slap or maybe bring in a more experienced/veteran manager to set the ship right but my boss personally is a very nice guy so don't want to rat him out...

So not really sure now what to do other than maybe just stay in my lane and put up the blinders? And let the whole forest around be burn down... Though I still gotta bear the heat till it all dies down by itself...

Can't say when that is though...

Ah I love that movie.. Hero, from 2002. I've seen it in the cinema three times. It's a real marvel, especially the scene where the forest turns red right after Snow killed Moon.

I also like how the quotes are adaptable:

Martial arts and programming are quite different, but they are based on the same principle: striving for highest perfection.

The essence of programming reveals itself through study and meditation.

(The latter one is also one of my favourite lines at work when being asked how come I know some esoteric stuff: it revealed itself through study and meditation.)

After examining my model and code closer, albeit as rudimentary as it is, I'm now pretty certain I didnt fuck up the encoder, which means the system is in fact learning the training sequence pairs, which means it SHOULD be able to actually factor semiprimes.

And looking at this, it means I fucked up the decoder and I have a good idea how. So the next step is to fix that.

I'm also fairly certain, using a random forest approach, namely multiple models trained on other variables derived from the semiprimes, I can extend the method, and lower loss to the point where I can factor 400 digit numbers instead of 20 digit numbers.

Even though I like Javascript I get so frustrated over all the libs and frameworks that is so good. And then some forks. And then all deps because everyone wants to have a cool npm package. So, took a deep breath, went for a run in the forest and started looking at Go for the small service(s) that from the start was thought to be a NodeJS thing. Might be fun.

I start with the broad concept first.

"In the end, the application needs to do <this>. Okay. In order to get to <this> the application first has to know <that>".

Then, I just keep breaking this down until I get to the bits and pieces. I see the forest and then zoom in on the trees.

My boss don't give me any information about the project in 2 months ... Then the application need to run in 1 week ... Im the only developers in this faculty .. suprise ! I said to him the project cannot be delivered in such small time ...

Boss : but you having so mutch time to do it !

me: but you tell me to fix some PC screen and printer and is not my job to do that im a programmer.

Boss: but you have certification in programmation and tech support

Me: yes but you hire me to code your project not to fix your forest !

Boss: if you don't want to work just say it

Me: never mind ...

Results: i change faculty in the university

You ever just get constantly shit on by life, work, and everything for weeks and then, one day, it finally just turns around for the better. After that, you finally feel normal again. Probably all the Christmas cookies I’ve been eating… In the words of forest gump, “I’m so happy I could bust!”

The purpose of AWS free tier is to trick people into attempting to stay within its completely unmarked limits. It's like trying to hunt for mushrrooms in a forest split with a hostile country based on a verbal definition of where the border lies with border control waiting to ambush tourists for ransom money.

Why can't they get power saving right? Every keyboard I have to pull out the sleep button. Once you press it that's it. PC is dead. Put to sleep.

Do I have to venture into the ancient forest and find a prince to wake it up?

Same thing with monitors these days acting all weird.

Can we put a wake up button on these things? They're backwards. At least have a screen explaining its waking up. The slightest indication.

If power saving is going to be such a hassle I'm going to turn it off.

Internship Memories (cause currently jobless!)
My GM (who is the same as PM) used to bring website projects with only details given from the client is the website name!

So what about the content?

GM: Google it.

So any particular design pattern?

GM: Just find a suitable theme from theme forest.

Now as a developer, how I'm supposed to get content and design? Suppose I got it, but how can I get related materials?

Thank god I left as soon as my internship was over.

- I love blowing my mind. Even if it is the most confusing thing. Things like security mechanisms, neurons' behaviors, mathematics (even tho I hate it when I fail lol), electronics, medical terminology and chemistry.
- I love collecting rare coins, personally never-seen stones and put them into my collection. I love to be a designer. Not only on my laptop. I have a book shelf and within that book shelf I put stones that create the yin yang sign while pushing the books to two sides. That makes them look like they are levitating. I have stones (including obsidian) that create a triangle and a knife hanging down the wall of my room.
- I love visiting touristic, historic, naturally-beautiful but also non-touristic (non-touristic? yes. by that I mean visiting e.g. the areas of touristic cities which are dangerous, because you can easily fall down off of a slippery ground and take serious injuries) places around the globe, talk to complete strangers in public (I am trying to be an extrovert), take pictures with my camera and collecting antiquities.
- I love taking risks (no. I don't play any poker games etc on the internet) without trying to put other people in risk. Driving insanely with whatever I have. Car, bike, you name it.
- I love reading books. Books that are about human psychology, fantasy novels and books about programming languages.
- I love to cook (I am at the beginning).
- I love to use the konMari method of tidying up my room.
- I love plants.
- I love having everything in my room tidied up (even if I am too busy with other stuff and skip this cleaning process for a week upto a month sometimes. Sorry, room.).
- I love doing sports. But mostly sport that I have never tried before. This can be, because of my greedy wish for an adrenaline kick. That led me into taking a balloon flight at 4 am (sunrise) and to paragliding at sunset above Mediterranean sea btw. (I am normally afraid of flying, but paragliding was awesome).
- I love swimming. Like, you cannot pull me out of the sea for a minimum of 2 hours, if it is not important.
- I love laying above the sea water and let the sea carry me to somewhere else.
- I love being alone. I love the silence. I love to be free in my thoughts.
- I love watching the sunset, the light that shines through the forest, the moonlight and the stars at night.
- I love dreaming. No, like, lucid dreaming for example.
- I love being open to any opinions.
- I love to learn about other people's views about the world and their religion.
- I love pets and would do anything to keep them alive when they are ill. It hurts my heart seeing them like this.
- I love watching demonic "A: Holy shit! Did you see this thing, too?! B: Yes!" YouTube videos just for the fun of it, but I hate horror movies and games.
- I love trying out new things. The creation of music and video for example.
- I love to give my hair and beard a shape, if I am too lazy to go to the barbershop lol. By that I don't mean just going to the barbershop, but taking an electric razor and cutting my hair myself even if I get bad results from time to time that can be corrected by letting any family member tell me in which area of of my head the hair problem is.
- I don't like disco clubs.
- I don't like toxic people even though I can be a quite toxic person myself without realizing it. If I appear toxic to you, inform me about it. Having so much testosterone in that moment, can make me do things that I don't want to do.
- I don't like drugs even tho I have to admit that I am trying a few from time to time (maybe 6 months in-between) to have a dopamine kick. I am not an addict.
- I hate myself for things that I did in the past.
- I used to watch MMA videos etc.
- I used to use a telescope, but I can't find it anymore.
- I used to have a microscope, but I can't find it anywhere and besides of that the seller did literally piss in it before selling it to me many years ago. Don't want to touch it tbh.
- I used to play games, but I don't enjoy games anymore. That makes me feel sad.
- I miss the old moments of my life.

In conclusion:
I like how things went and go so far. It changed me so much. It made me a good and a bad person. I became more open and confident, but it also particularly made me a leader who can say "fuck off" in a bad way to his family. I would like to undo this particular part of me.

In a sprint planning meeting. Getting frustrated. I guess it's my fault. I guess I assumed that attending the same schedule meeting each week meant that we all knew when everything was due. My bad.

Seriously, I fucking hate systems people sometimes. We have 4 major tasks coming down the pipe, but they are scheduled in such a way in which they are staggered. But they want to punt the 1 of the 4 that is fucking done because it is going to cause a lot of testing, but the other three aren't coming til end of next month AT LEAST. So they want to stick their thumbs up their ass holes and wait to test the other three before testing the one that, again, IS FUCKING DONE!!! Are they worried that a super massive black hole will spontaneously form in earth's orbit and cause time to run backwards and somehow cause December to happen in October!?!?

No wonder systems is so fucking far behind. They can't see the forest for the trees. They're so big picture that months and years are at the same level of granularity. Fucking hell how is scrum better than our current agile process again? Besides the fact that it makes me attend more useless meetings and get more angry.

They are punishing the left hand for the actions of the right. Systems wasn't doing their job so now software has to slow down and miss schedule.

#get unique images ids
images_ids = np.unique(images_df.index)

Dear developer who wrote the code I'm looking at,
thanks, I really need comments like this one. I was wandering lost in 1500 lines of code, looking for an explaination of what the actual fuck the code is doing, and there I see you, comment. It's not like I want to know what the hundreds of lines functions do, who cares about that. What I needed to know, what shed light on this dark forest, is what the numpy functions do, because as you certainly know dear developer, such functions are really hard to comprehend, lacking of documentation.
Thanks.

Many of the time I mistakenly say DARK FOREST instead of Random Forest algorithm. But it's nt every one's bowl of ice cream. :D

How I try to stay productive:

I seem to be slightly less distracted if there are other people around me. Probably because I have to make an effort to focus, which stops a part of me secretly searching for distractions when there are parts of work that I would rather avoid (like googling error messages). So I used to spend some time of the day in a café or in our family kitchen.

Taking breaks an going for a walk, preferably in the forest (when I work from home).

Prioritization of tasks also helps to focus and do one thing after the other. That said, sometimes it inspires me to do more than one task at a time.

Writing down what I did and want to do (in an actual note book on paper) helps me start a new work day, especially after a weekend off.

!dev

I just woke up from a fun adrenaline packed film dream.
It started like an movie, leaning a bit into the funny side, but also a bit serious.

We were 3 guys going top speed on the highway, dodging traffic, trying to prevent a bomb from detonating on the other side of the city.

We were all famous actors, but the only one I remember was Jackie Chan. I remember thinking why would they cast Jackie Chan and give him so few lines.

I wished I remember more about this part. The only thing I remember is that when we get to the end of the island, we’re in the wrong place: we’re at a huge OBGYN center.

My sidekicks are bothering the desk women, eating all of the “waiting candy”. I feel bad and offer to pay those, which they pretend to not care about but then end up charging me down to the penny. Cunts.

The sidekicks leave and (without explanation because dreams) disappear of the story.

Defeated, I go outside and start walking.
And I don’t remember exactly what the fuck happened in between, but somehow I’m now in the house of a cartel druglord and he’s pissed and I need to run now.

So I do. I remembered that there was a very thick forest east to the house. So I go there.

And what follows is a very intense montage of me escaping.

At some point that forest ended, so I continue through some high weed, and then another forest, and so on. While I had to pass through parts with no vegetation, I had to avoid these as much as possible.

I saw dozens of types of trees and shrubs.

Then I started seeing families, kids, playing, relaxing on what seemed a Sunday afternoon.

The adventure was so fun, the landscape was so beautiful I felt happy and thought “this is how it feels to be alive”. And I actually felt happy in real life as well.

At some point the vegetation I encounter decreased, and I have to go through more urbanized areas, with more people.

“Uh oh” I think, “I hope no one snitches me”. But miraculously, no one does.

Throughout all the journey I had glimpses of the drug lord nearby presence.

His face on the distance, the sound of his car engine.

But now he was closer than ever. And I’m closer to this house which is the escape point (can’t really remember why).

So I reach for the handle and fade to white, and fade back again, it’s me, older, and I’m not in an escaping mood.

My wife is waiting, our car is outside (on the non drug lord side).

And guess what, we were waiting for our daughter, who comes with a smile and a child on her hands.

So apparently, my daughter married someone from the drug lord villa that almost murders me.

Reading this sounds like a bad script, but that’s what I dreamed today.

“Hey, I just spent a year building this amazing thing - but I can’t tell you about it because that’s for scummy spam assholes who only care about money - and you’re all just happy forest creatures who only like to hug and tell each other how special they are. I’ll pay more than you earn in a year - to have Facebook tell you instead.”

Soon... we’ll all be living in tents by the river.

#never-tell

If a job (swiss knife developer) is preventing you from reaching your goal (freelancing) and take all your time so you can't learn new things, you can't go to the gym, all the projects are boring (theme forest wordpress integration, prestashop hack into cpanel ...), make you sleepless at nights, and grumpier than grumpy cat ... will you quit ?

It's been over 7 months of being deployed to help finish a project that's crossed the deadline umpteenth times. There's only this guy who had started on this project and me as developers. He's a nice guy, but I'm finding him to be a snowflake that's extremely difficult to work with. Every time I mention a critical problem with his original design, or the approaches he takes on this project, he takes it personally. He would pour out a long spiel of why this and why that, and waste most of the meeting time. Or he would run to his outdated diagrams or documents that he had created himself somewhere deep in the wiki forest, and use that as a defense. He creates his own user stories and tasks on a whim with no PM supervision. I've noted to the managers that this is a project to fail, and all they've done is assign a busy PM to this project, and the new PM is perfectly fine w/ the way the project has been handled so far.
I point out a small flaw with his assumptions just the other day, and he even managed to hyperventilate and again fall back to his outdated document... WTF? I'd rather start from scratch and get this project finished faster.. and even though I've expressed my objection to continue on this path, the managers foolishly believe that this project will be completed somehow. I don't hate my development partner, or PM, or people in the management, but I hate the fact that I don't have control over so many aspects of this project, including the half-assed, unnecessarily complex design, and the dev workflow itself. I feel like I'm tied to a car that's being thrown over the cliff, and assigned to fix the junky car w/ its engine broken before the car hits the ground. Something like this would never be allowed to go in a commercial sector. I just wish that the management could just give me control over project as THE lead & PM over this project, and get this project tied up for good, and with better reusability and quality.