It saved me from suicide.

You have to understand first that things in India work differently. Academics are not personal, but a social business. Academic competition in India is very high and not in a good way, or for the good reasons.

As a teenager was sent off from my home to the other side of the country. I didn't like it. My studies suffered, and I failed my exams. Came back home and faced months of emotional abuse (guilt trips, scornful comments, plain insults) from my parents, neighbours and relatives. Indian society is just built that way. They didn't know they were damaging my psyche, or they were too angry to care. Lots of other shit (lost friends, lost love) happened at roughly the same time period and everything started to fall like dominos.

I fell into severe depression. Lost appetite, lost sleep. Nothing mattered anymore. There were mornings when I would wake up and not get up from my bed for hours, and not even move a finger. Self-hate became the motto of the day. I became violent and anti-social. I would either be angry or trying not to break down and give up all the time. Many a night, I considered suicide. I would end up googling for easy ways out to take.

But what gave me a way out of the pains of my reality was programming. It helped my keep my head, figuratively and literally. It kept my mind distracted and gave me a sense of purpose. I would shut myself in, plug in my headphones, shut the world out and just experiment.

I am not saying that I am the best at what I do, but those sleepless and troubled nights, and many other similar nights over the years have given me a definite edge over my colleagues.

Even today, when everything is falling to pieces, I know I have something to fall back on. I still get episodes of depression every now and then, but I know I can always pick up a new project and distract myself. It probably isn't healthy, but eh...

I am alive. I code. I kick ass. My colleagues respect and value my opinion. I love my job.

Computer does what I tell it to do (mostly :p) and I feel good. Because for that small moment, I am in control of everything. For that infinitesimally small moment of my average, boring, and somewhat painful life, I am God.

Real HR policy ...

HR Manager in Heaven!!!

One day while walking down the street a highly successful HR Manager was hit by a bus and she died. Her soul arrived up in heaven where she was greeted by God himself.

"Welcome to Heaven," said God. "

"Well, What we're going to do is let you have a day in Hell and a day in Heaven and then you can choose whichever one you want to spend an eternity in."

"Actually, I think I've made up my mind, I prefer to stay in Heaven", said the woman.

"Sorry, we have rules."

And with that God put the HR Manager in an elevator and it went down-down-down to hell.

The doors opened and she found herself stepping out onto the hell wt beautiful golf course. And a country club and standing in front of her were all her friends - fellow executives that she had worked with and they were well dressed in evening gowns and cheering for her. they talked about old times.
She met the Devil who was really a nice guy and She was having such a good time that before she knew it, it was time to leave.

Everybody waved goodbye as she got on the elevator.

The elevator went up-up-up and opened back up at the Pearly Gates and found God waiting for her.

"Now it's time to spend a day in heaven," he said. So she spent the next 24 hours around on clouds and playing the harp and singing. She had great time and before she knew it her 24 hours were up and God came and got her.

"So, you've spent a day in hell and in heaven. Now u must choose ur eternity,"

The woman paused for a second and then replied, "Well, I never thought I'd say this, I mean, Heaven has been really great and all, but I think I had a better time in Hell."

So God escorted her to the elevator and again she went down-down-down back to Hell.

When the doors of the elevator opened she found herself standing in a desolate wasteland covered in garbage and filth. She saw her friends were dressed in rags and were picking up the garbage and putting it in sacks.

The Devil came up to her and put his arm around her.

"I don't understand," stammered the woman, "yesterday I was here and there was a golf course and a country club and we ate lobster and we danced and had a great time. Now all there is a wasteland of garbage and all my friends look miserable."

The Devil looked at her smiled and said:
...
...
...
....
....

"Yesterday we were recruiting you, today you're an Employee".😁😁😁
☝dedicated to all companies

My sister is 16yo and she is not interested in the C.S field. I gave her last year my laptop and it has Debian on it, since i bought a new one. She never told me that she has to deal with any problem, she was just using it.
Today she got a new laptop from our grandma and she texts me "hey, is there any way i can install Linux on that? I don't want to use windows".
Well i told her that she has to wait me to come back home next month and i will take care of it.

I had never thought that i will listen something like that. Good day.

There's this guy where I work who's one of the senior linux engineers. To me, he's like a linux god. He knows how to solve the most difficult problems and somehow copes with all the stress/workload. Next to that, he's only one year older than me!

Whenever I'm at work, I consider myself a junior, which I actually am. I also, as said earlier, see this senior guy as a fucking linux god and consider myself to be an absolute newbie around him but he is the most kind/friendly guy ever.

But then, today, something happened which made me feel like a god in front of him, a very, very weird feeling.

For him, doing his stuff is the most normal thing in the world while for me, it's still a learning process.

For me, programming is the most normal thing in the wold, while for him, it's still something he just knows the very basics of.

He asked me if I knew something about javascript/jquery. Said yes as I often program/script in javascript.

Explained me what he wanted to get done, it was a very simple thing for me but after hours of online searching, his lack of javascript knowledge still got him nowhere.

Told him I'd give him a working script in 30 minutes. Emailed it to him in 10.

He seemed/reacted the way I always do when he solves something I have no clue how to solve.

It was really weird to witness *him* being amazed of something that *I* made/did.

Today was a good day where I saw that one person's limitations can be anothers' most easy thing, even if that another person sees that one person as a god.

Worst dev I've interviewed?

"Archie" ran his own consulting business for almost 20 years. Prior to his interview, Archie sent HR (to send to us) his company's website, where he had samples of code for us to review (which was not bad, this guy did know his stuff).
What I found odd was Archie was the lone wolf at his company, but everything I found about him (the about page, his bio, etc), Archie was referred to as 'Mr. Archie Brown'.
Ex. 'Mr. Archie Brown began his humble career and 'Mr. Archie Brown is active in his church and volunteers his time in many charities ...'
Odd to refer to yourself in the third person on your own site, but OK, I like putting hot sauce on my mac & cheese (no judgement here).

Then the interview..standard stuff, then..
Me: "Given your experience, this is an entry level developer position. Do you feel the work would be challenging enough for you?"
Archie: "Yes, Mr. Archie Brown would have no problem starting at bottom. You see ..."

Almost any time he would reference himself, instead of 'me' or 'I', he would say 'Mr. Archie Brown'. As the interview continued, the ego and self-importance grew and grew.
My interview partner wanted to be done by using the escape clause, "PaperTrail, I'm good, do you have any questions?"

Yes, yes I do. I was having too much fun listening to this guy ramble on about himself. I made the interview go the full hour with the majority of time 'Archie' telling us how great he is.

The icing on the cake was my partner caught his gold cuff-links and tie-pin where his initials and how he kept raising his hands and playing with his tie to show us (which I totally missed, then was like "oh yea, that was weird")

After the interview, talking with HR:
HR-Jake: "How did it go?"
John: "Terrible. One of the worst. We would have been done in 10 minutes if PaperTrail didn't keep asking questions."
Me: "Are you kidding!? I had the best time ever. I wish I could have stayed longer."
HR-Jake: "Really? This guy was so full of himself I wasn't sure to even schedule with you guys. With his experience, I thought it deserved at least a round with you two. You think we should give him a chance?"
Me: "Hell no. Never in a million years, no. I never in my whole life met anyone with such a big ego. I mean, he kept referring to himself in the third person. Who does that?"
HR-Jake: "Whew!...yea, he did that in the phone interview too. It was a red flag for us as well."

Couple of weeks later I ran into HR-Jake in the break room.
HR-Jake: "Remember Mr. Archie Brown?"
Me: "To my dying day, I will never forget Mr. Archie Brown."
HR-Jake: "I called him later that day to tell him the good news and he accused me of being a racist. If we didn't give him the job, he was getting a lawyer and sue us for discrimination."
Me: "What the frack!"
HR-Jake: "Yep, and guess what? Got a letter from his lawyer today. I don't think a case will come in front of a judge, but if you have any notes from the interview, I'll need them."
Me: "What are we going to do?"
HR-Jake: "Play the waiting game between lawyers. We're pretty sure he'll run out of money before we do."

After about 6 months, and a theft conviction (that story made the local paper), Mr. Archie Brooks dropped his case (or his lawyers did).

This is more just a note for younger and less experienced devs out there...

I've been doing this for around 25 years professionally, and about 15 years more generally beyond that. I've seen a lot and done a lot, many things most developers never will: built my own OS (nothing especially amazing, but still), created my own language and compiler for it, created multiple web frameworks and UI toolkits from scratch before those things were common like they are today. I've had eleven technical books published, along with some articles. I've done interviews and speaking engagements at various user groups, meetups and conferences. I've taught classes on programming. On the job, I'm the guy that others often come to when they have a difficult problem they are having trouble solving because I seem to them to usually have the answer, or at least a gut feel that gets them on the right track. To be blunt, I've probably forgotten more about CS than a lot of devs will ever know and it's all just a natural consequence of doing this for so long.

I don't say any of this to try and impress anyone, I really don't... I say it only so that there's some weight behind what I say next:

Almost every day I feel like I'm not good enough. Sometimes, I face a challenge that feels like it might be the one that finally breaks me. I often feel like I don't have a clue what to do next. My head bangs against the wall as much as anyone and I do my fair share of yelling and screaming out of frustration. I beat myself up for every little mistake, and I make plenty.

Imposter syndrome is very real and it never truly goes away no matter what successes you've had and you have to fight the urge to feel shame when things aren't going well because you're not alone in those feelings and they can destroy even the best of us. I suppose the Torvald's and Carmack's of the world possibly don't experience it, but us mere mortals do and we probably always will - at least, I'm still waiting for it to go away!

Remember that what we do is intrinsically hard. What we do is something not everyone can do, contrary to all the "anyone can code" things people do. In some ways, it's unnatural even! Therefore, we shouldn't expect to not face tough days, and being human, the stress of those days gets to us all and causes us to doubt ourselves in a very insidious way.

But, it's okay. You're not alone. Hang in there and go easy on yourself! You'll only ever truly fail if you give up.

Today,
First day of new dev class...
Teacher, "As you know Tablets, Smartphones, Smartwatches etc... Are not allowed in class, except Laptops."
Me,
"Is a Surface allowed?"
Teacher,
"Is it a Laptop?"
Me,
"Yes, but also a Tablet.."
Teacher,
*Furious*
"NO TABLETS"
Me,
"Bu.."
Teacher
*Still furious*
"YOU ARE HERE TO LEARN HOW TO BE A GOOD RELIABLE DEV, SO LISTEN"
Me,
*Proceeds to Lift up surface from Keyboard*
Teacher,
*Rips surface out of hand and goes to secretary*
"You can have it after school"
Me,
*Sitting there speechless with nothing to develop with*
10 Minutes later
*rector comes in and gives me surface back*
Me,
Thank you
*Proceeds to use surface*
...

The Teacher hates me...

Father bought a PC in 1997. Back then very few had it. I learned doing things like accessing the internet and sending emails, among others. I remember having added age on websites to be allowed to sign up at times :P My sisters used to play games on it sometimes. The first few ones we had were Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, Tomb Raider Chronicles, American McGee's Alice(Which caused us to upgrade the PC xD)... And some others.

I have a memory of this pseudo-3D-looking game where you move in a maze and try answering questions. I want to remember its name, but I cannot :(

We literally have video evidence of me liking the computer as a child, yet my parents either say I'm addicted or deny I've ever liked it before. Not only that, but continuously limiting my time with the PC hasn't been a literal obstacle in my way of trying to do things in their opinion. Funny how my parents think the last few years I've been my worst when they've hurt me in those years so much that our relationship is guaranteed not working out. There were doubts in my head before, but now it's cemented and there is no way of going back. Father, for example, tells me it's too late to do anything with a PC now(As well as how I've been unable to use the PC. He looks at these pro players' footage in some TV show and he's like, „You've been unable to use your hobbies“, as if they have never ever screamed at me for perceived gaming and not actually cared to check), and I need to look for a „real“ job.

Sorry. I went to bed at 2:00 in the morning. Feel like a zombie because of ongoing weirdly insufficient sleep, even though I sleep kinda more than normal. Even when I took Melatonine for that it didn't help at all.

Childhood was where beating began. I was about 6/7. Right when I entered school. The first school that I attended was a private one and supposedly for „Wunderkinds“, while in reality I haven't seen a SINGLE teacher or psychologist approve of it, their argument being that children were basically drowned in work that wasn't age-appropriate(I don't mean anything bad. Just that teaching about Galaxies and all in first grade isn't the brightest idea). There was always a mountain of homework to do and as opposed to some other countries, we had to do it on a day to day basis. We didn't have a week-long deadline. I was predictably not keeping up with it as I could have, had it been a normal amount, so my parents decided I didn't want to study and began their methods of getting me to „study“. I have yet to see a person able to keep up with that school's tempo, no matter the age.

This place was also where I got bullied. I felt I had nowhere to be: At home, the parents' situation, at school, the bully. I never really went outside to play with other children, so I missed that part of childhood.

After the second year of school I was transferred to an advanced German school, called like that because they taught German and not English there. I also got to learn a bit of Russian before they removed it from school. In that period I used to attend ballet. But for less than a year. And piano, which I remember having attended for quite a long while, some years, if my memory isn't fried. I quit it because of it having been forced on me. Last piece I ever played fully was Beethoven's Marmotte.

In this school I was once again the outcast of the class. I had some people to interact with. All of those interactions lasted a few years at most. Then, because of a part of my class choosing me as a laughing-stock N2 and another girl as the N1, I found my best friend, who I still have today. She's the only friend I have nearby.

Most of the time I hated myself. Even today I struggle with that sometimes.

After that came university. This us where I got something like a friend circle at last. But it still didn't last. I got in a relationship with one of the guys, but I was just attracted. There was another I couldn't dare getting close to. Turns out he also had something for me. Then he disappeared from our lives and a year after, I still cannot forget the person. If I want to, I have to deprive myself of my own personality. Not a thing I'm willing to give up. Then I broke up with the guy I was in a relationship with and completely disappeared from the friendship circle. To be honest, I had reasons to. They refused to even try to look for the guy and they called him a friend for years. Sometimes parents hitting me can occur even today, but if I REALLY piss them off.

Now I'm here and oh, my God, I'm officially am aunt now! My sister gave birth to a daughter this morning... She's in Berlin with mother and both she and the child are doing great. I just hope she manages to be a good mother.

Today was a good day. User asked for a tricky feature. Right after telling him it is done he left this :)

Summary of the summary: Boss is an asshole. Root gets angry; boss leaves instead of picking a fight for once. This makes Root sad (and really angry).

Summary: Root has another interaction with her boss. The boss is an asshole. Root is a bitch. Root would have been so so so much more of a bitch if the boss actually fucking responded. Root is sad this didn't happen. Root might have gotten fired. That would have made Root happy. :<

-------------

Le wild blackout appears!

-- Conference call (the short-short version) --
Boss: *freaks out* Fix it! Why aren't you fixing it? You have to fix it.
Me: I'm already fixing it. 😕
Boss: You have to fix it! This is important!
Me: Then let's get off this call so I can focus on fixing it!
Boss: Okay but fix it! *begrudgingly hangs up*

-- Slack --
Me: (posting a running log of what I'm doing) This is what i discovered. this is the cause. these are the possible fixes. I picked this one because it's quick and has few consequences, though it may break ____ so it'll need followup fixes. I'll do those tomorrow. Blackout resolved!

Boss: (apparently doesn't even noticed I fixed his shitty service)

-- Next day --
Boss: I want you to work on [stupid shit] instead.
Me: But what about the followup fixes?
Boss: Top priority! because customer service!
Me: ... fine.

-- Next week (verbatim because wtf) --
Boss: Did we test that [resolution] on ______? No one thought to test this. It didnt cross anyones mind at all? Either you guys can make good decisions and document concerns or I have to be part of every decision [...]. But this is basic. SHould have been a team heads up and said if we are switching this what can it break and can we test it. [sic]

Me: Did you want me to resolve the blackout quickly and allow people to actually use our service, or spend two days checking everything that might possibly have gone wrong? I weighed the possibilities and picked the solution with the quickest implementation with the fewest consequences. You're welcome.

Me: (Quotes boss's "SHould have been a team heads up" and links my "this is what could go wrong" heads-up in Slack)
Boss: (pretends not to even notice)
Boss: (talks about customer service related crap)

What a fucking loser.
I'm so angry he didn't respond and start in on me over it. I wanted to tear him to shreds in front of everyone.

Related:
He tried adding another huge project to my plate earlier today, and I started flipping out on him for all these shitty sales features he keeps dumping on me in place of real work that i still get blamed for not finishing. The contractor stepped in before it got too heated, though, which is probably best because my reaction was pretty unprovoked. The above rant, though? Asshole doesn't read, just blames and yells when he's angry.

I really hate him.

Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

/*
It's a pretty long rant. Hope you didn't get bored :P
*/
So I have this friend of mine who has learnt Python at good level (that's what he says) and is with me in all classes in college. I have worked with C, C++, C# and Java only and hated Python when it was taught (wk44).
So the following happened in the last 2 weeks:
Once he wrote a Python function in terminal just returning a hard coded string (lame right) and will show me how cool is it and that it is sooo much easier.
Whenever we do a mini project together he will force that we use Python. Even in Image processing when everyone is ready to work on Matlab, he insists that Python would be a better option.
We asked that this XYZ is very easy to implement on Matlab.
We then had to listen about the large and great community of Python and that it has Libraries for everything and that it is the greatest programming language ever.
One day he saw my C# project for DFA and NFA simulation which was the greatest project I have "completed" myself, and went like "Hmph, if I was you, I would use python and make a more "professional" code" (then went on arguing as always)
This happened today in Networking lab-
(Sockets was taught and we are expected to learn its programming aspects)
All students: Open linuxhowtos.org and start reading on socket programming
He : Opens some websites and downloads books on Networking with Python or someting
Now while I am reading the documentation of sockets and bind, he opens spider IDE, copy-paste the code in the book and start bugging ME that he is getting all these errors like literally showing me those errors and whining about all those problems.
Me: We are supposed to learn this in C. Here take a look at this link.
HE: No I'll use Python cuz it is better than your C. It has libraries for everything and is much easier.
Me: Alright whatever I am fed up, do whatever you want

Manager: Good news everyone, I made a big giant announcement this morning that the app upgrades will be released today!

Dev: They definitely won’t be, we need another 2 weeks minimum. I told you yesterday

Manager: Ok well I already made the announcement that today was the day so too bad for you.

Dev: Doesn’t change the state of things

Manager: 😡 This announcement is supposed to motivate you to work faster! You guys are making me look bad when you don’t support me like this!

Dev: Working as fast as we can, it’s a 2 person dev team for 4 separate applications so it’s quite a bit to get pushed through

Manager: Ok well then stay extra then, we have to get this out asap. Tell your spouses they are not going to be seeing much of you until this work is done. People are starting to ask questions!!!!!

Dev: Not my problem, it’s done when its done. I’m not staying extra.

Manager: !!

// *************

Might be blowing my cover a little but what are they going to do? Fire me? Good luck getting this out without me. They’ve tried to replace me in the past but the cheapest person they could find was 60k more expensive than me and still couldn’t keep up. Probably they’ll ship the work overseas and the code will die in a dumpster fire and cost them even more. Ah well, just another company that doesn’t deserve code.

Today was my last day of work, tomorrow i have officially left that place. It's a weird feeling because i'm not certain about the future.
The job was certainly not bad, and after all i read on devrant i'm beginning to believe it was one of the better ones. A nice boss, always something to eat/drink nearby, a relaxed atmosphere, a tolerance for my occasionally odd behaviour and the chance to suggest frameworks. Why i would leave that place, you ask? Because of the thing not on the list, the code, that is the thing i work with all the time.

Most of the time i only had to make things work, testing/refactoring/etc. was cut because we had other things to do. You could argue that we had more time if we did refactor, and i suggested that, but the decision to do so was delayed because we didn't have enough time.

The first project i had to work on had around 100 files with nearly the same code, everything copy-pasted and changed slightly. Half of the files used format a and the other half used the newer format b. B used a function that concatenated strings to produce html. I made some suggestions on how to change this, but they got denied because they would take up too much time. Aat that point i started to understand the position my boss was in and how i had to word things in order to get my point across. This project never got changed and holds hundreds of sql- and xss-injection-vulnerabilities and misses access control up to today. But at least the new project is better, it's tomcat and hibernate on the backend and react in the frontend, communicating via rest. It took a few years to get there, but we made it.
To get back to code quality, it's not there. Some projects had 1000 LOC files that were only touched to add features, we wrote horrible hacks to work with the reactabular-module and duplicate code everywhere. I already ranted about my boss' use of ctrl-c&v and i think it is the biggest threat to code quality. That and the juniors who worked on a real project for the first time. And the fact that i was the only one who really knew git. At some point i had enough of working on those projects and quit.

I don't have much experience, but i'm certain my next job has a better workflow and i hope i don't have to fix that much bugs anymore.
In the end my experience was mostly positive though. I had nice coworkers, was often free to do things my way, got really into linux, all in all a good workplace if there wasn't work.

Now they dont have their js-expert anymore, with that i'm excited to see how the new project evolves. It's still a weird thing to know you won't go back to a place you've been for several years. But i still have my backdoor, but maybe not. :P

Manager: You know you did good this week, take the entire day off tomorrow

Dev: Really?

Manager: Yeah my treat.

Dev: Can you send that to me in an email?

Manager: ….I mean yeah, but I don’t see why that is necessary

*** About halfway through The next day

Manager: WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?! YOU HAVEN’T COMPLETED A SINGLE TICKET TODAY OR REVIEWED A SINGLE PR OR EVEN SO MUCH AS ATTENDED THE STANDUP. EXPLAIN YOURSELF!

Dev: You said I could take the day off today?

Manager: YEAH BUT YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO ACTUALLY TAKE IT OFF!! I WAS GIVING YOU THE OPPORTUNITY TO SHOW DEDICATION TO THE COMPANY BY COMING IN ANYWAY BUT NO YOU THOUGHT YOU’D JUST TAKE ADVANTAGE OF OUR GENEROSITY AND HAVE AN ENTIRE DAY TO YOURSELF?! GET YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS, THERE ARE URGENT TICKETS ON THE BOARD!

Dev: …

"devRant has changed" "I'm so fed up with this site" "Its a bunch of hate and memes, it was so much better before"

A rebuttal.

devRant is approximately the same as it was when it was just a newborn. Remember the days of semicolon jokes being unironically funny?

Look at the top rants of all time, for fucks sake. #2 ever is:

"A different error message! Finally some progress!"

Posted three years ago. That's the second most upvoted rant in history (Remember, this was a "rant" because the joke/meme category didn't exist back then), it made it's way into the app store screenshots, and was a welcome post.

Now imagine that posted today. It would probably go over okay, in fairness, but it's certainly at risk of any number of pretentious pricks complaining about how this is "devRANT not 4chan" or how they had seen the joke before and it's a shitty repost.

And sure, the repost bullshit is fair. I'm not saying that all the reposts are good content. What I'm saying is devRant has always been full of reposts - they just weren't reposts in the early days. The quality of content is the same.

There's also the common misconception that your posts need to be directly related to tech to post on devRant. This is a myth propagated by 0 IQ heathens that don't read any further than the name of the application. Your posts can be anything that isn't prohibited, like porn, spam, and, importantly, politics (commonly overlooked rule)

"All the memes are just too much". Oh you poor fucking baby, let me pour you a healthy serving of pity juice. First of all, you can turn off the memes category, and while they will still find their way to your feed, the concentration will be much lower and it will once again be bearable for your pitiful, weak little soul. Do you seriously get annoyed that severely by shitty posts that you need to leave the app altogether, or do you just want the attention of being a "cool hipster that hates on xyz"?

"This place is just filled with hate! Why can't you just respect xyz technology, it isn't actually that bad!"

This is probably the most stupid fucking thing you could possibly ejaculate from your fingers into whatever device you are using to type. Welcome to devRant, we hate on shit. That's at our core. No, xyz technology ISN'T actually that bad, you're correct. But we're here to tear it apart because it probably has frustrated us in the past. I fucking hate JS because it was my first language and it confused the shit out of me. JS is a great language. But I still talk shit about it, and that's what we're here to do.

Like seriously, I know a lot of people post stuff they're proud of here, and then they're met with "Would be great if you didn't use xyz tech", and that hurts, but holy shit, this is devRant. If you're sensitive to criticism, or even just straight up being made fun of, don't post shit that you're proud of. You won't have a good time. It's just not what we do here.

Quick interlude before the conclusion, "My girlfriend dumped me after I named a class after her. She felt I treated her like an object." is also on the first page of all-time most popular posts.

In conclusion, devRant has not changed. Reposts have been a nuisance since day 0, and just because reposts look different these days doesn't mean the quality of content has decreased in any manner. The two main sources of your frustration are the volume of low-quality posts (Mind you, not the concentration of them, but the volume of them) and your own prejudices about the platform. You're looking back with rose-tinted glasses.

Here are some tips for a more enjoyable experience:

-Make sure you have the "Hide reposts" setting ENABLED in settings. Any posts marked as repost will be hidden in your feed, pulling down the concentration of low-quality posts.
-Keep to the algo sorting method. Obviously, algo is a bot, and there's still gonna be some shit content in there anyways, but if you're in recent, you are absolutely guaranteed to see low-quality posts. It's unfiltered.
-Keep in mind that what you consider a "quality" post is not what others consider a "quality" post. Just because you don't like memes doesn't mean memes are poor content. There are people here who have never seen the bobby tables comic. And they deserve the same experience we got when discovering dev humor.
-Don't be a prick. And if you cannot help yourself, leave. Ironically, you're making the site worse by complaining about how bad the site is. You can always come back if you aren't a prick anymore. And you can leave permanently if you choose as well.
-Downvote and move on. You're not doing anything but making yourself more aggravated by leaving a shitty comment about how shitty the shitty post is.
-Think critically. Obviously optional, and I know not many people like to use their brain when a phone is suspended between their hands, but if you want a better experience, remember to use your head and not to lose it.

Revived my grandmas computer with Linux and she is happily using it without problems.

Today it was a good day.

I just had the most intense nerdgasm of my life.

So I'm learning NodeJS (11/10, super fun, totally recommend) and I already had a chat script written up but it was only available to my LAN. Im hosting it using my Raspberry Pi Zero, which is surprisingly fast, and obviously sips power. Anyways, I FINALLY figure out port forwarding (Comcast made things harder, as per usual) and for the first time in my young life, I chatted with someone half way across the country... Using the hardware I set up, running the script I wote, on the network I configured.

I could have sworn I was drooling.

Today was a good fuckin day.

Why are job postings so bad?
Like, really. Why?

Here's four I found today, plus an interview with a trainwreck from last week.
(And these aren't even the worst I've found lately!)

------

Ridiculous job posting #1:
* 5 years React and React Native experience -- the initial release of React Native was in May 2013, apparently. ~5.7 years ago.
* Masters degree in computer science.
* Write clean, maintainable code with tests.
* Be social and outgoing.

So: you must have either worked at Facebook or adopted and committed to both React and React Native basically immediately after release. You must also be in academia (with a masters!), and write clean and maintainable code, which... basically doesn't happen in academia. And on top of (and really: despite) all of this, you must also be a social butterfly! Good luck ~

------

Ridiculous job posting #2:
* "We use Ruby on Rails"
* A few sentences later... "we love functional programming and write only functional code!"

Cue Inigo Montoya.

------

Ridiculous job posting #3:
* 100% remote! Work from anywhere, any time zone!
* and following that: You must have at least 4 work hours overlap with your coworkers per day.
* two company-wide meetups per quarter! In fancy places like Peru and Tibet! ... TWO PER QUARTER!?

Let me paraphrase: "We like the entire team being remote, together."

------

Ridiculous job posting #4:
* Actual title: "Developer (noun): Superhero poised to change the world (apply within)"
* Actual excerpt: "We know that headhunters are already beating down your door. All we want is the opportunity to earn our right to keep you every single day."
* Actual excerpt: "But alas. A dark and evil power is upon us. And this… ...is where you enter the story. You will be the Superman who is called upon to hammer the villains back into the abyss from whence they came."

I already applied to this company some time before (...surprisingly...) and found that the founder/boss is both an ex cowboy dev and... more than a bit of a loon. If that last part isn't obvious already? Sheesh. He should go write bad fantasy metal lyrics instead.

------

Ridiculous interview:
* Service offered for free to customers
* PHP fanboy angrily asking only PHP questions despite the stack (Node+Vue) not even freaking including PHP! To be fair, he didn't know anything but PHP... so why (and how) is he working there?
* Actual admission: No testing suite, CI, or QA in place
* Actual admission: Testing sometimes happens in production due to tight deadlines
* Actual admission: Company serves ads and sells personally-identifiable customer information (with affiliate royalties!) to cover expenses
* Actual admission: Not looking for other monetization strategies; simply trying to scale their current break-even approach.

------

I find more of these every time I look. It's insane.
Why can't people be sane and at least semi-intelligent?

Currently on an internship, PHP mostly, little bit of Python and the usual web stuff, and I just had the BEST FUCKING DAY EVER.

Wake up and find out I'm out of coffee, oh boy here we go.

Bus leaves 10 minutes late, great gonna miss my train.

Trains just don't wanna ride today, back in a bus I go, what's normally a 10 minute train travel is now a 90 minute bus ride.

Arrive at internship, coffee machine is broke, non problem, I'll just lose it slowly.

NOW HERE COMES THE FUCKING GOOD PART!!

Alright, so I'm working on a CMS that can be used just about on any device you want, mobile or desktop, it's huge, billion's of rows of scientific data. Very specific requirements and low error margins. Now, yesterday I was really enjoying myself here until today, Project manager walks in, comes to my desk and hands me a Samsung Gear S3, an Apple watch and some cheap knockoff. He tells me that before the Friday deploy, THE ENTIRE CMS SHOULD WORK ON THOSE WATCHES!

I mean, don't get me wrong, I like a challenge but it's just not right, I mean, I'm still not sure what the right way to handle tables on phones is, but smart watches, just no. Besides that, I've never worked with any Apple devices, let alone WatchOs, nor have I worked with Android Wear.

Also, Project Manager is a total dickhead, he's the kinda guy that prefers a light theme, doesn't clean up his code, writes 0 documentation for an API, 1 space = tab, pure horror.

So after almost flipping my desk, I just called my school coach to announce I'm leaving this internship. After a brief explanation he decides to come over, and guess what, according to the Project Manager I wasn't supposed to do that, I was supposed to test if it would be possible.

FUCKING ASSFUCKFACE

I really hate this company.

The code is a disaster. Every single other employee is a salesperson. Nobody has any bloody clue what I do or how difficult it is. They don't care about stability (unless things are crashing), maintenance (until crashing), code quality (until it delays features), or anything apart from shiny new features they can sell. The boss (the king salesman, if ever there was one) doesn't know how to manage, but tries to by acting like his "nice asshole" self -- he's an asshole that gives you passes, makes sure it's bloody obvious that he's doing it begrudgingly, yet everything is still absolutely your fault. If he arbitrarily decides it's too much your fault, he stops being "nice" and flips out on you in front of everyone. That's a "nice asshole": an asshole who can barely even pretend to be nice.

Fuck him.

And you know what? I really hate having to work next to these fucking birds, too.

Today was our weekly conference call, and I was both late and unprepared. I was too focused on my work, and got a ping 4 minutes into the meeting, so I obv didn't have time to prepare. Boss was also pissy today, and I didn't have much to show for my week, thanks to lots of little "OMG NEED ASAP" shit projects that all took too long, pushing back what I was actually supposed to work on. Which didn't get finished, of course, and today that project was "the most important" -- I suspect simply because it wasn't finished. AGADJFSKL. Cue the birds fucking screaming and never fucking shutting up no matter what I did. Blanket? No effect. Spray bottle? SCREAM MORE! Boss was yelling at me, the birds were screaming, and I couldn't think. Goddamn fucking disaster.

and yes, we have a macaw. A macaw and over 20 cockatiels. Said macaw decided today was a lovely day to just fucking SCREAM non-stop, and the tiels were doing their best to keep up. Thinking clearly during this cacophony? Not gonna happen.

Wait, "go elsewhere," you say? Somewhere quieter? Where is this "elsewhere?" We live in a fucking tiny house, and during the call it was (and still is) filled with sleeping people, and surrounded by a fucking desert. Who the fuck thought living in the desert was a good idea, anyway? Like, seriously. What brainless moron thought "You know what? This is a great place! Let's settle down right here," while trudging through the scorching sand and dust, looking at the basically lifeless horizon filled with large, hot, dry, dusty, barren rocks (aka "mountains"), and fucking dying from thirst? Probably someone so delirious from heatstroke they never actually recovered, and continued raving that it's a goddamn paradise to their heat-addled imbecile followers. I really hope they hallucinated a la-z-boy in place of a hedge of teddybear cholla and died an excruciating and prickly death. Fuck that guy/girl, too.

But I digress.

I seriously need an office that isn't a 30 min drive into gang-central. I'd work outside, but I live in the middle of the bloody fucking desert, and get heat exhaustion within about half an hour. Everywhere else in the house people bother me almost incessantly.

just. FUCKING FJASKLDFJGAG.
I HATE THIS PLACE SO SO SO MUCH.

'I've had such Zen lately,' Alex said. Maybe then, but lately? I've just been too exhausted and burned out from putting up with all this shit to get angry. Days like today? I could pour kerosene over everything and laugh as it all just burned to ash.

You know what? Fuck this shit. We spend most of our life locked down in a school, we are being told facts, tested and stressed for many years with the only hope to get out as soon as possible.
Failing is something that keeps you there indefinitely.
Parents keep pushing on kids to achieve the best and get good grades to have a job.
Then something happens.
You get out of school and what happens?
You start working.
A.k.a modern slavery...
Employers thinks that since you are young they are doing YOU a favor if they decided to hire you.
So you find yourself having to do the same tasks everyone is doing, perhaps you are even fully capable of managing them and get the shit done but guess what!!
You are paid the minimum.
You barely make enough to pay off your rent which keeps you locked away from Holidays abroad, from that huge cake you desperately want.
And guess what! Try to raise your voice and you'll get fired in a Matter of seconds, replaced with someone else which accepts any condition.
You dream of a house, a family and a car but you can't even eat healthy with that salary.
So you are forced to buy cheap and low quality food from the same store again and again till you had enough and spend some days with that horrible feeling...
Calling you to get a job interview feels like they are doing you a favor, they always try to give the minimum possible and expect you to work in a serious manner and respect their deadlines.
Colleagues earn a lot more even though they aren't doing anything different from you.
For the first year you won't have any holiday, let alone traveling or anything different from just staying home for 3 days straight.

Banks won't give you a loan because your job doesn't pay off
The day that your car is broken you struggle to eat the whole month.

On top of that, taxes. Because they aren't taking away enough.

I don't want to live this life, I don't want to become a modern slave and work 8-17 everyday for the rest of my life and retire with a shitty retirement pension that won't probably grant me anything again.

I had enough of this shit.
I don't want to go back to work and pretend to do what I am supposed to do with a smile on my face knowing that I am just a number and that no matter how skilled I am I can always get replaced with N number of people for a lower salary of mine.

I am tired
I dream of a life that I won't ever reach this way.

Today I looked up houses prices and felt like shit.
I will never in my entire life be able to afford something so expensive, let alone buying furnitures and what is needed or what I like.

I dream of having my place, my dog and my family but apparently I am asking too much.

How is this even fair in 2018/2019?

I... I am... Speechless.
I wonder how many people out there are in the same situation or even worse and I can't even wrap my mind around that.

This is just modern slavery.

My boss makes a shit load of money from young people that can't complain because they are threatened and will eventually be replaced...

This is my rant.

Woke up early. Feel great. Even office coffee tastes great. Today is going to be a good day.

Lead QA: - Hey I'm fixing some stuff in production, and now I can't reach it. Do you have the same problem?

TODAY IS A GOOD DAY, GO FIX YOUR OWN PROBLEM CUNT.

COFFEE TASTES FUCKING GREAT.

Today is a sad day.
A sad day indeed.
I used to live with my parents for pretty much my whole life until the beginning of this year, when I decided to move and starter living with a friend, in his apartment.
By far, one of the things that I've missed most from my parents' house was the dogs. Boy, I love those four pretty little creatures.
Being a fulltime developer in an area that I honestly don't like that much, I really appreciate my after-work hours. Specially because of the time I could spend with the dogs.
So, the first months away were quite hard. Even though I was living with a friend, I couldn't help but feel alone and really depressed at times.
But then, my friend and my girlfriend decided that it was a nice idea to give me something to grow with again. And Jolyne, my beautiful, smart and messy little dog came to the apartment.
Boy oh boy, my bright days were back.
Getting home and seeing those four small legs and a shaking tail running on my direction was everything I could ask for. I was happy again.

Fast-forward to today.
I finally finished the code for a project I was working on. Everything was working fine. A good day indeed, good sir. Have one on me. - then my friend called me, which is weird considering we almost only talk through Telegram during the day.
All he had to say, with a sad voice and painful tone, was "man... I don't know how to tell you this... But Jolyne is dead".

And that was it. Every good feeling I had was now dead. And a part of me as well.
I stood there, speechless. I mean, I just couldn't believe what I've just heard. She was happy by the morning. We were playing before I left for work. Everything was fine.
Then, four hours later, it wasn't. She was gone.
I came home to a friend that didn't have any more tears to shed. And no dog came running to me like usual.
My fluffy little friend was laying on her bed, like she was sleeping normally. Like nothing had happened at all. She was just sleeping and have not noticed me... At least that was what I wanted to believe.
Three hours had passed then... And I just can't fathom the fact that my dog won't be here anymore. That I won't be able to play with her again like I do every night. That I won't listen to her running around with her toys. That I won't be able to hug her anymore.

I still don't know what to do. I mean, she will be buried. I've already arranged everything.
But I don't know what to do about myself. I don't know how to deal with this pain I'm feeling.
But I will try to move on... I just don't know how.

I'm deeply sorry for bringing you this story. For just writing it down here, like you guys need to share my pain...
But I needed to write this down somewhere. And this place is pretty much the only one where I feel comfortable and welcome enough to do this.
Thank you for your time, my friends.
Thank you.

Look what I achieved today in Windows 7. Felt good. Today is a good day....

What is the most ridiculous over-the-top "startup" thing you've been the victim of as a developer?

Alternatively, what kind of weird startup luxury would you absolutely love to have at your company?

For me, at various companies I've worked at/visited:

1. Hammocks & fatboy beanbags. Current employer has a "Netflix & Chill" corner with nice couches, and a small gym. I have encountered isolation/flotation tanks at the office of one of our partners... which is cool, but over the top in my opinion.

2. A fully automated aquaponics garden in the lunchroom. Was awesome, until some fish died and started to rot.

3. One hoverboard per employee, at previous employer. I splashed hot chocolate milk in an arc over three desks. A coworker broke his ankle while watching me spill chocolate milk.

4. Daily scrum standup meetings, on socks, in a big bouncy castle. Not kidding. Fucking ridiculous... (but secretly fun). That employer also had spiral slides between all floors, a tiny half-pipe with tiny skateboards, and someone who rode a unicycle way too much. It was a fucking circus. Stuck in the office of a Fintech company.

5. Soldering bench (at my current company), with drawers full of breadboards, servos and electronics components. Completely unrelated to my work, but it was my idea. It's just great to build a simple kits together with another random coworker while brainstorming platform features & refining specs... much better than meetings with bullshit slides.

6. Unlimited energy drink. Developed a serious caffeine habit (15-20 cans a day), and almost got a stomach ulcer. Not beneficial to employee health.

7. I really do love working from home + unlimited holidays. Just being able to honestly say "fuck you guys, I'm gonna get drunk and play games today", and at other times working until 4am and sleeping in the next day, or taking a week to work in a park in Rome... It makes work truly feel like my favorite hobby. Combined with a good sprints and curious/ambitious people, you can easily track productivity anyway.

My words to live by...

Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers. "Teenager
Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"...
Damn kids. They're all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain,
ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what
made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
I am a hacker, enter my world...
Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of
the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They're all alike.

I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain
for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms.
Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is
cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I
screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.

And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through
the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is
sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is
found.
"This is it... this is where I belong..."
I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to
them, may never hear from them again... I know you all...
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...

You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at
school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip
through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or
ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us will-
ing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying
for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and
you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek
after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me
for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual,
but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.

+++The Mentor+++

My code review nightmare part 3

Performed a review on/against a workplace 'nemesis'. I didn't follow the department standards document (cause I could care less about spacing, sorted usings, etc) and identified over 80 bugs, logic errors, n+1 patterns, memory leaks (yes, even in .net devs can cause em'), and general bad behavior (ex.'eating' exceptions that should be handled or at least logged)

Because 'Jeff' was considered a golden child (that's another long TL;DR), his boss and others took a major offense and demanded I justify my review, item by item.

About 2 hours into the meeting, our department mgr realized embarrassing Jeff any further wasn't doing anyone any good and decided to take matters into his own hands. Thinking 'well, its about time he did his job', I go back to my desk. About an hour later..
Mgr: "I need you in the conference room, RIGHT NOW!"
<oh crap>
Mgr: "I spoke to Jeff and I think I know what the problem is. Did you ever train him on any of the problems you identified in the review?"
Me: "Um, no. Why would I?"
Mgr: "Ha!..I was right. So lets agree the problems are partially your fault, OK?"
Me: "Finding the bugs in his code is somehow my fault?"
Mgr: "Yes! For example, the n+1 problem in using the WCF service, you never trained him on how to use the service. You wrote the service, correct?"
Me: "Yes, but it's not my job to teach him how to write C#. I documented the process and have examples in the document to avoid n+1. All he had to do was copy/paste."
Mgr: "But you never sat with Jeff and talked to him like a human being? You sit over there in your silo and are oblivious to the problems you cause. This ends today!"
Me: "What the...I have no idea what you are talking about. What in the world did Jeff tell you?"
Mgr: "He told me enough and I'm putting an end to it. I want a compressive training class developed on how to use your service. I'll give you a month to get your act together and properly train these developers."

3 days later, I submit the power-point presentation and accompanying docs. It was only one WCF with a handful of methods. Mgr approved the training, etc..etc. execute the 'training', and Jeff submits a code review a couple of weeks later. From over 80 issues to around 50. The poop hits the fan again.

Mgr: "What's your problem? When are you going to take your responsibility seriously?"
Me: "Its pretty clear I don't have the problem. All the review items were also verified by other devs. Its not me trying to be an asshole."
Mgr: "Enough with the excuses. If you think you can do a better job *you* make the code changes and submit them for Jeff for review. No More Excuses!"

Couple of days later, I make the changes, submit them for review, and Jeff really couldn't say too much other than "I don't see this as an improvement"

TL;DR, I had been tracking the errors generated by the site due to the bugs prior to my changes. After deployment, # of errors went from thousands per hour to maybe hundreds per day (that's another story) and the site saw significant performance increases, fewer customer complaints, etc..etc.

At a company event, the department VP hands out special recognition awards:

VP: "This award is especially well earned. Not only does this individual exemplify the company's focus on teamwork, he also went above and beyond the call of duty to serve our customers. Jeff, come on up and get this well deserved award."

> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

!rant

Quite the opposite of a Rant actually. Very good day today! Had pancakes to start the day, finally got a second monitor for only 5 bucks - it is so much easier to program with live change monitoring!

And, I finally got my very own server rack :) just wanted to share!

Today the collection is expanding with more ducks and new stickers!

Setup a pi to be functioning as vpn server and pihole tonight.

Now working on a Jasper voice assistant on another pi, because I can choose for offline speech processing and don't have to use a mass surveillance network for this (google).

Today is a good day.

I managed to get a group of people to use an open source and privacy respecting service instead of its proprietary (surveillance) competitors today.

The experience was good for everyone and I wouldn't be surprised if at least some people who participated will remember this good working FLOSS solution.

My work is done here for the day :)

So;dfjkhijasdfkjq;sdfhjkl;asdf

I copy a line from one spec (to create a user) and paste it in another spec. It works just dandy in the first, and throws MySQL missing column errors in the other.

Fucking what.

This codebase is full of shit like this. Things work in one place but not another, and it’s never obvious why. Tens of thousands of gotchas and quirks. The only way I can get an answer to things like these is to either beg my boss for an explanation, which I’m sure he’s long since tired of, or spend a full day (or more) wading through several rabbit holes filled with raw sewage.

I wasted two hours today trying to get a simple fucking factory to work. And you know what? I just gave up and used the existing admin user. Yeah it’s a bad idea, but it’s fucking good enough.

They can yell if they want.
I have no cares left.

The story of my webshop with this fuckin' asshole continues! I decided to stop with the webshop as my partner didn't do anything, so I handed over my shares to my business partner. This was done formally at the notary. Immediately after, we agreed that I would hand over everything that same week. 1 day later I cannot access any accounts. He said that a hand over was not necessary and that he took appropriate measures. Now, 4 months later, I got a letter from a collection agency telling me to hand over the tradename. Uhm what? Tradename? I don't own it so I replied that there's nothing to hand over. A day later again a letter that he will sue me if I don't hand over the tradename. Mr. Prick Lawyer, I understand that you mean the DOMAINname, but why the fuck do you keep referring to the tradename?! You too stupid to understand the difference? So, to get rid of this crap I made an offer to sell him the domainname, which he accepted. But mr. Asshole moved the shop to a different hostingprovider thinking that the dns would be magocally updated. Of course not asshole. So I offered (to be cooperative) to update dns so his site will work again. I did. A day later again a letter that site still not reachable and he'd sue me for all damages etc.

What a muppet show! You think ypu can sue me because YOU made a config mistake? He's a funny guy! I told the lawyer to not send me any 'issues' caused by mr. Asshole's unprofessional acting and if he does, I'll charge him for every second spent.

Today mr. Asshole's webshop says 'Apache is functioning normally' and that's it. Well done, asshole! See how eaay my job is and how little knowledge it requires? You proved ypu can do it yourself Big boy! Good luck selling shit on your website. Good luck with your seo rankings. And good luck fucking yourself in the ass!

Now I'm going to sue you because of copyrights violations. You use my software and you don't have a license. Either pay or remove it or I'll make you pay!

Fuck that fucking company three way while dozens of homeless HIV crack junkies puke and shit their diarrhea on the three bosses!

I can't put it in words how stupid they are!

Let me try to tell you the latest story while I try not to get multiple strokes.

Backstory: We are three devs, all with a TCCI certification. One has been working for us for almost a year, the other one has been working for us since one and a half year. Both are good friends of mine, btw. I have been working there for almost three years.

Fortunately, I am allowed to work on a reasonable computer. The other devs work on PC's with Windows 7 and 8!

One has just 400 MB space left on his drive and has to delete every month some shit because he does not want to be able to call up websites anymore... How awful?!

The PC of the other great Dev Crashes three to six times a day and needs about 30 minutes to start up!

We can be so productive, but...

We told that in February one of our bosses and asked him to buy new hardware. His answer: yes, of course, I understand that, it's my turn (he always says that "ich bin da dran")

We got a new colleague in the middle of this fucking month. She is responsible for conception.

She works on an old notebook, but today she gets a fucking new PC to work on while the devs are trying to weld with a sparkler! Better hardware than every other Dev PC!!!

Guess what? She is the daughter of a friend of one of our bosses!

We are the only devs at this company.

Fuck that fucking company! Fuck that fucking bosses!

I think we don't go to work for that fucking company anymore!

I am DONE with this woman CONTINUED!

I didn't think I'd have to put another rant about this stupidity at least not this soon but she just keeps on giving!

I have my noise canceling headphones on most of the time and when I want to hear the people around, I just put the right earcup of it to the side of my ear so the music pauses. Today we had a huge disrupt on our services because of a network switch error on the hub. I was also trying to focus on my coding as I didn't wanna do a stupid mistake on the last working day and be sorry about it in the next week.

So this woman sneaks up on me from behind calling my name - meaning she has a question, surprise! -, I say 'yes' moving my head to her side ever so slightly without getting my eyes off of my screen stating subtly that I'm also listening to her while trying to focus on my shit. She starts yelling at me 'look at me!' out of nowhere! I turn my head and ask what the problem is and she asks why I'm not looking at her face! Stupid moron, I might not be too good in understanding your way of communication but you are the one asking so you WILL wait if you'd like to hear answers.

I say I'm working on something and her answer is again 'Why aren't you looking at my face it's going to be quick bla bla did we do this like that?' and I answered I didn't remember because there's no way I'd ever remember without looking further and it was no lie.

This woman clearly has stability issues and everyone else seem to be tolerating it. It's now obvious as I'm not tolerating the nonsense I'll be the one that 'she only has ever had a problem with'.

I was quick to de escalate the situation but now I'm thinking maybe I should've responded in a way that she could understand. I wouldn't ever give a shit about it but this is getting ridiculous.

Manager: Messages not visible! bug ticket!!!!

Dev: oh fuck, there's an issue with our chat system, not good! _inspects ticket_ oh, it's just a display issue that actually is according to the previous spec, yawn...

Dev: please describe the bug better next time, I though we had a major outage, this is simply a small design issue...

Manager: ...

Dev: ...

I think I'm quitting soon guys. I literally do not get paid enough to deal with these incompetent idiots each day.

Meanwhile:

Management: forget your shitty salary, take one for the team, you get 3% of the shares in the company!!!!

Dev: what fucking shares, you haven't even converted to a corporation yet, THERE ARE NO SHARES

Management: ...

Dev: ...

Oh yeah and they called me at 6:30 PM today: "so i guess you are winding down for the day"

fuck outta here i haven't been working since 5 you fucks

jesus i swear some people need to screw their fucking head on straight, so far gone into the hUsTlE CuLtUrE they don't even know what reality is anymore

made a password sniffer in python it was really easy how many of you took #100DaysOfCode i took the challenge 8 days today every day i am doing one project what do you think of the sniffer? it currently doesn't support SSL response but working on that right now this is good

Allright, I'm pissed.

Warning: more than 4k characters written by a non native english speaker ahead.

Legend:
Storytelling
> Short summary of the current situation
> "Something being said"
> (Something being thought)
* Actions *

-- Background --
In an attempt to reorganize my desktop I accidentally deleted a folder I called "development". In there I stored links to all my IDEs (Not sure how you call these in english), but also some workspaces like unity (Not much stuff there, processing (just some hobby stuff) AND Eclipse (FUCKING EVERYTHING RELATED TO SCHOOL WEB DEVELOPMENT). Now 3 days have passed and I realized this important folder was missing. Cleared that windows trash the instant I deleted the trash on my desktop.

> Shit, Regret

Install a file restore programm. Do every possible search. Nothing found.

> Big shit

Deadline was in like 3 days. Week was fucking rough so:
> "Screw this, the teacher nevet corrects the assignments and also fuck JSP"

Fast forward 2 months to last week. Teacher starts checking assignments.

> Fuck

* Sees pattern: Only students with missing or bad marks are checked. *

* Feels save *

Teacher approaching me while working on current projects.
* Doesn't feel save anymore *
> "Well, I'ld like to see your THAT programm"
> Well fuck
* Tells the truth *
> "Well that's unfortunate, but I must write a mark. Do you really have nothing to show?"
* Remember that I worked on the school pcs when I started *
> (Better than nothing. Gotta try it)
* Teacher checks programm, not pleased *

> (Fuck me, but at least it's over...)

> Nope

* Teacher calls me over *
> "With the mark I had to write today you can't reach that good mark even with a good examination, what are we gonna do about this?"

> "Well, there were other assignments that were never checked. Could we replace that mark with one of those?"

* Teacher agrees *
> (Srly bless this guy for that support)

My best choice was an Android app we had to develop during December in pairs. I did the front end (90% of the whole work) and my partner the backend (10 %). I also did 30 % of these 10 %, because I had to review the shit he wasn't able to debug himself.

> brainlogic.exe provided by windows vista

This distribution was partly my fault since I overestimated the work needed for the backend, but also the fault of that fucker. I mean, he didn't tell me the professor already provided 90 % of the backend...

Rest of the week was really busy (always 1 or 2 things to study for each day, workout and family stuff).

Yesterday (It's past 12 already) I arrived at ~9 pm in the dorm I could finally start reviewing my code.
Internet gets shut down at 10 pm.
Gotta hurry.

* Opens project *
* Sees half a year old code *
* Fights urge to puke *
> (Alright I gotta do this. For the mark!)
* waits for gradle to index files *
* Remembers the fact that I haven't opened Android Studio in the last 2 months *

For those who don't develop with android studio: This is an equivalent to ~10k windows updates waiting to be installed

> (Well, gotta work with this kinda old version)

"gradle sync failed"
> ( Ok, just restart it. You're fine )
* Android Studio doesn't react anymore and/or renders *
* Waits 5 min *
* Restarts laptop *
* Android Studio is reacting again*
"gradle is synching"
9:45 pm: gradle is done and I can finally compile my app

> FML

* Sees App launched on phone *
* Almost pukes again *

> (This was the assigment for the UX chapter, so design doesn't matter)

UX is decent. Proceeds with testing stuff. Save paths work, but some bugs can be caused by going of it

* fixes as much as possible *

* Takes quick look at backend *

Date date = new Date (GregorianCalender.getInstance().getTimeInMillis());

C'mon, I asked you to be the backend. You got 90% of the methods already written by the teacher and had 2 months to write the interfaces to my Front end AND you come up with shits like that.

Note: this example is a minor example of brainlogic.exe

I did what I could to make improve my situation. Hopefully he doesn't discover the bugs. And If it's a backend bug then I could't care less, since that was not my job!

Wish me luck for today!

Today I get off at 1pm. Because of weather conditions. I swear i love this job.

Gonna pick my baby girl from the daycare at a good time. Head home, get us some hot chocolate and learn more about Smalltalk while mom gets home.

Today is gon b a good day.

Awwww yii

Today is a good day... for AMD

try {
// code that will someday
// throw an exception. Today is
// not that day.
}
catch(Exception ex) {
// The big day has arrived! BUT...
// I'm a heartless bastard who
// does not log errors.
// Good luck finding me!
}

I fucking hate HTML forms! Especially representing bloody nested objects within them!

Fighting with html forms has taken at least 80% of my time over the past three features. Why can't I just do this via API? It would be soo much freaking simpler! ugh.

But today.
Today is not going to be a good day.
I not only get to expand a complicated vanilla form with with one nested object today, I get to expand it to include three nested objects. Normally this wouldn't be a problem because it's just moving elements around, but two of those nested objects need to be broken up and combined into three+ segments each. I have no idea how to even approach this.

ugh.

New job today, here is my start so far:
coworker: Hi, first you have to set up your lamp project..
me: Good, let's do it.. Please give me the repo git URL
coworker: here is everything, but.... the database is on MySQL.
me: ok, did you have any TeamSQL or something to track this?
coworker: nop.
me: check the database and see the whole file size is 4GB.... Checking the file on plain .txt i see the problem WORDPRESS.

So far to import this file on my LAMP i use Bigdump script and works like a charm.

coworker: Take it easy dude, it's your first day. You can do this task in a few days, don't rush it.

me: :/

OK.
1. So i tindered.
2. I got a really nice girl.
3. We chatted really long and good.
4. We tried to meetup it did not work because of our schedule. New
job on my end, she is a student.
5. I thought its over. Fine whatever.
6. She gives me her number.
7. We continue chat on whatsapp
8. Blablabla 3 days long, she gets bored and tries to friendzone me
9. I revert the shit and state i wanna be serious and there wont be a
friendzone/nice guy comin from me.
10. She happy and continues to chat.
11. I get emtionally invested in her.
12. We exchange thoughts dreams and music.
13 We want to meetup at weekend. I cant. Got a family wedding all
weekend.
14. We want to meetup the second week.
I cant. Im off on a company trip. Again new job here.
15. So we say in the week after I get back.
15a. Before the weekend we need to deliver an rc and go all out to hold
the deadline.
15b. We deliver, but shit happens on the customer side. His fault but we
get the blame.
15c I go onto the company trip.
16. We chat and i send her pictures of the trip over the weekend so she
sees I care.
17. She seems fine. And happy.
18. I come back from the trip late night and need to work the next day
jetlag style.
19. I work jetlag style. And try to fix the shit from last week.
20. I come home really tired and looking forward to date day tomorrow.
21. I cant do anything. My home looks like shit and the bag still
unpacked. I just eat and fall asleep.
I feel bad bcs my home will turn her down instantly if we make it to my
place.
Need to hope that it does not come to this.
22. Date day comes. Today.
23. I wake up at 6 early to plan ahead to make sure my clothes are fine
and i arrive on time in the office to exit early.
24. I expect to check what goes on today in the city and give her the
location to meet and time.
25. I enter office and immeadetly get caught up in meeting planning, dev
questions and the meeting itself because the project is on edge.
26. We have a 5hours long meeting where people go on and on and on.
27. 3h later in the meeting:
my brain was fried and around 12 i go to lunch with some people.
28. Meanwhile the city is turning into a rainy mess of a shitty day. No
way I can have a nice walk with her like that. Bars and coffeshops are
just to boring.
29. So i eat to regain some sense and we go back to the office.
Meanwhile I am thinking all kinds of locations and stuff in my head.
30. Havent given her any update since a good morning in the morning.
31. We reenter the meeting. Things continue like before. The project is
on impossible demands and impossible timelines. Still we try to do our
best.
32 3h later on 3pm I tell her i am in a long meeting and working on a
meetingspot.
33. shes not happy.
34. I get a call from a relative
35. i need to go out and take the call. not good for the collegues.
again new job here.
36. family trouble,  money trouble, goverment demands. I promise to
handle that tomorrow. Before work.
37. i get back into the meeting.
38. still super slow and no results.
39. need to focus but start to check for locations on my phone.
40. she asks me where i am
41. I send her my location.
42. she thinks i am saying she should pick me up!
43 i joke and say no definitly not.
44. shes pissed.
45.  I decide for a coffeeshop. after work. and send her the location
46. She says to call it off.
47. I go all in and go romance style. I say ill wait there even if she
does not come to show her how much i care.
U know to avoid the lets do it some other time fuckery and then it never
happens.
47. She goes quiet.
48. 2h later we finish the meeting. Meanwhile QA foudn a bug we need to
fix because why not.
49. I got 30 minutes to find the bug and fix it before I need to go to
uphold my word.
50. I find out what to do, but it might break a lot of other things
without careful test and implementation. Collegues says he takes it.
51 I feel bad but I need to go. I even leave earlier because otherwise I
would not be on time.
52. I arrive 15 minutes early. I grab two coffee2go and wait outside,
53. Shitty weather, sometimes rain, sometimes sunny, cant decide what it
wants.
54. The weather is just like how I feel.
55. I wait 1 1/2h
56. I think I should feel stupid, For gods sake its tinder. People dont
give a crap, Enough people around why should I Invest so much into this?
But I dont feel stupid. Because this is how I want it. I dont want
appointments, I dont want safety. I decided for her and I went all in.
57. I send her pics from the sceneray as proof that I waited,
58. I think I blew it. She is still quiet.
59. Friends are asking me for plans for the weekend. I wish I could say
I already have some with her.
60. I feel lost right now. But my head says I put too much stress on
her, And i fucked up with the planning. I should have been more precise.
My head also says that i am putting myself into the victim role, which
is wrong always. Should I continue to reach out to her? Is there
something I could do still?

I've seen several rants about dumb/useless teachers, college and the CS degree studies; today is a good day to vent out some "old" memories.

Around two semesters ago I enrolled in a Database seminar with this guy, a tall geek from the 80's with a squeaky voice, so squeaky mice could had an aneurysm if they listened to him.

Either way this guy was a mess, he said he was an awesome coder, that we were still "peasants" when it came to coding, that relational databases had nothing on him since he was an awesome freelancer and did databases every day, that we had to redo the programming course with him and with his shitty, pulled out of the ass own C++ style guide with over 64 different redacted rules.

He gave us sample code of "how it should be done" in Java...it ain't my favorite language but fuck me a fucking donkey could have written better code with his ass!! He even rewrote Java's standard input function and made it highly inefficient. He still wrote in a structural paradigm in OOP languages! And he dared to make this code reviews were he would proyect someone's code and mock it in front of the class as he took off points, sometimes going to the negative realm (3,2,1,0,-1...)

But you know what's shittier? That he actually didn't even attend, 90% of the time, it was literally this:
> Good morning class
> Checks attendance. . .
> I'll be back, I'm going to check in...
> 1 hour 45 minutes later (class was 2 hrs long) - comes back
> do you have any doubts?
> O.o no...? I'm ok.
> We're done

Not only that, he scheduled from 4 to 17 homeworks throughout the week, I did the math, that was around 354 files from everyone; of course he didn't check them, other students from higher semesters did and they gained each point taken from students making students from lower semesters get the short end of the stick.

How did I pass? He didn't understood my code or database schema and he knew he couldn't fail me as he had no ground to stand on.

Thanks for listening, if you got to the end of this long ass post and had a similar experience I'd love to read it.

PM: Ok Android, i've reviewed the latest build, you are good to release. Waiting on iOS's build to test.

Me: ... are we not holding all builds until we hear back from backend about that bug?, as we likely have to change something on our side?

PM: Which bug?

Me: ... the only one we discussed yesterday in the team meeting.

PM: How many customers is it affecting?

Me: that we know of, one ... the CEO of our company

PM: oh that one, yeah were not doing that anymore.

Me: WHAT? i've been waiting all day / night to hear back. Why are we not doing this?

PM: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ... Everything is too messy at the minute anyway, the release plan is changing every day. Need to keep it back in line.

Me: ... the plan has changed exactly once. We had a plan at the start of last week for the last release, we changed it YESTERDAY to include 2 critical bug fixes. The only issue with the plan changing is nobody telling us these aren't bugs anymore

PM: We can discuss tomorrow in the team meeting.

CEO: oh hey guys, yeah we pulled that bug fix. Its not really a bug, more like a missing feature. No way it will get done before xmas. Going to live with the way it works for now and fix it properly next year.

Me: Ok, fair enough, but we really need to be told these decisions.

CEO: sure, sorry, didn't think anyone was blocked by this. What was the blocker?

Me: ..... you asked me yesterday to get this bug fix in the build ... you asked for the final build to be made today so we can go through the app store review. As we all discussed yesterday, today is kind of the last day we can really do this.

CEO: ok, its late, we can discuss this tomorrow in the team meeting.

Me: ..... ..... ..... ..... sure

Today is sprint demo day. As usual I'm only half paying attention since being a Platform Engineer, my work is always technically being "demoed" (shit's running ain't it? There you go, enjoy the EC2 instances.)

One team presents a new thing they built. I'm still half paying attention, half playing Rocket League on another monitor.

Then someone says

"We're storing in prod-db-3"

They have my curiosity.

"Storing x amount of data at y rate"

They now have my attention. I speak up "Do you have a plan to drop data after a certain period of time?"

They don't. I reply "Okay, then your new feature only has about 2 months to live before you exhaust the disk on prod-db-3 and we need to add more storage"

I am asked if we can add more storage preemptively.

"Sure, I say." I then direct my attention to the VP "{VP} I'll make the change request to approve the spend for additional volume on prod-db-3"

VP immediately balks and asks why this wasn't considered before. I calmly reply "I'm not sure. This is the first time I'm learning of this new feature even coming to life. Had anyone consulted with the Platform team we'd have made sure the storage availability was there."

VP asks product guy what happened.

"We didn't think we'd need platform resources for this so we never reached out for anything".

I calmly mute myself, turn my camera back off and go back to Rocket League as the VP goes off about planning and collaboration.

"CT we'll reach out to you next week about getting this all done"

*unmute, camera stays off* "Sounds good" *clears ball*

I'm not sure whether to cry or to burn everything to the ground.
I'm stuck in a rotten, over aged corporate that will one day choke on all the documents and formalism they require. Which is something I'm generally fine with. Each to their own.
But ever since I handed in my resignation they have been fucking me like I have never been gang raped before.
(A little context: I work for a midsize financial institute. Which at least in Germany are full of legacy projects and are regulated as all hell.)
So some fuckwits decided that since the regulator slapped us hard 2 years ago that we need to make up a new standard of documentation that has to be used for all IT-documentation there ever was and ever will be.
So the upper management (the before mention dumb-dumbs) choose some consultant company and locked them up together with the brightest stars (read biggest slime balls) of the IT department in an ivory tower and told them to pull some out the ass.
And one year later (early November last year) they got the shit they ordered. Gilden shit, only the most sparkly and non-sensical bullcrap you could imagine.
But they only looked at it and deemed it good. Now the guys actually in charge of the the applications got served the dish. And guess what they found out when started to dig into? Nothing but contradictions, non-final thoughts and all of that held together by web of retarded, unusable guidelines. But they ate it, they cursed but they swallowed forced by disciplinary punishments waiting should they misbehave.
The only one emerging fact was: All previous documentation was completely invalidated.
But now the mighty lords in the ivory tower guided by the never failing hand of the higher management had the greatest idea of them all. They needed someone to check all the documentation till the end of this year but since they blew all of their budget on useless wankers ( oh, ofc I meant "highly qualified external help") they now preyed on the lowest in the food chain. Which is where this story goes full circle and comes back to me.
I was the lowest rank on the food chain, a student that just handed in his resignation.
I was the first to be locked up in the basement, my co-student followed shortly after.
And now I'm going to spend my last 2 months looking at checklists that we had to pull out of the slime's ass and validating hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation. We get grinded up in the endless hate coming from the guys that we need to tease and are held in position by a wall of sheer idiocy on the side of the rule makers.
Today I cried when I had to tell someone that his magnificent documentation was not standard conform and had thus no longer any meaning or right to exist.
Thanks you for those that made it this far down. I hope you never have to feel my pain.

Round up kids.
I have a story to tell. The story of a war I've lost. Many battles were fought and many hours were wasted.
This is the story of wasp in a computer lab.

Today, the weather was good. So your old pal, Nomi, decided to open the windows. And as usual, that's where it all started.
So Nomi sat down and worked for a few hours. Tweaking two different neural nets, adding to its dimensions and concatenating the living shit out of the data they were supposed to process. After, she tried testing and testing and testing. It was early afternoon at this point and she was hungry. She went to close the windows and go for lunch.... When she realized, that she's not alone in the room. A big ass wasp was sitting on one of the curtains.

Now, Nomi doesn't have a good relationship with bugs and flying shit. Wait, no, she doesn't have a good relationship with moving things in general. So she panicked. She begged the wasp to leave. The wasp sat on the curtain and smirked at her. So after a while, she left the windows wide open, turned off the lights, put her hoodie on and went for lunch.

(btw, at this point my hoodie smells of sweat, fried onion, steak, cigarette and shisha. Don't ask. It was a long two weeks)

When she came back, the wasp was nowhere to be seen. So she assumed that the wasp got tired and left. But oh, how wrong she was.

After few hours, she heard something. She assumed it was just a fly. Actually, she hoped it was a fly and not the return of the wasp. But all her hopes were in vein.

She heard a buzz. And all of a sudden, an angry wasp flew in her direction. She dodged the attack and got under the table. But the wasp was not letting this go. Nomi jumped out of the room and left the door open. The wasp hid itself. She waited and waited but no sign of wasp. So she ran back in the room, and opened the window and ran back outside. She waited. The wasp occasionally would fly from one hideout to another. The wasp was making herself comfortable. At one point Nomi got angry and threw a shoe at the wasp, but the wasp caught the shoe and threw it back at her while maniacally laughing at her.

So she gave in. This was enough for the day. She ran back in, closed the window, turned off the computer, took her bag, turned off the light, and closed the door. All in less than 15 seconds. She came outside panicked and distressed, and now she's on her way home hoping that by tomorrow the wasp is gonna be dead.

The wasp and the robots are sitting alone in the lab tonight. I hope when the robots uprising happens, the robots can forgive me for abandoning them powerlessly with a wasp. 😟

Tl;dr

Longest Rant I've written so far.

How to manage a school (by out school director):

Did this student do something spezial to emphasize the school?
-No: Ignore him
-Yes: Did the student achieve this with the help of this schools staff?
-No: Take all the credit
-Yes: Hahaha, just a joke, nobody receives help from the school. Goto -No

Q: Should this class get the 5 day trip, they've been waiting for the whole year?
Director: No.
Q: But they don't even participate in other trips just to go there.
D: No
(Good thing she did not have the last word there)

Does the school director need this one week trip to india, just to talk once about stuff, you can talk about via email, to a sponsor?
D: "Of course I deserve it"

D: "We need faster internet in this school"
Network admins: "But it won't be of any use, if the network can't handle it. We'll need better pcs (and network conponents) on top of that"
D: "No, bot enough money available for that one." *browses email with IPad paid by school money*

Teacher: "I want to realize project xy with the students. We'll need around 1200€ (for 20 people)."
D: "Can place xy at our school to as advertise?"
T: "No, but it's be a valuable le-"
D: "600 at most."
(Again denied by people who aren't fcking assholes. We got 1500€, so 300€ per group)

D: So what makes you think you can teach informatics in this school"
Applicant: "Well, I'm friends with one of your teacher here. We went to university together, where I learn't nothing about informatics and I don't even understand the principles of this subject"
D: "Close enough. Hired, you can teach them all the theory stuffy. You don't have to prepare that yourself another teacher has done so. Just read it from his documents."

*In class with the mentioned teacher talking about Threads*
*Le wild code appears*
while (doStuff())
System.out.println ("Thread working...");
System.out.println ("Thread terminated");
T: "... and most importantly, when you have done all the work be sure to terminate the thread with 'System.out.println ("Thread terminated");'"

Should this teacher be allowed to participate in this seminar about burnouts?
D: "No, I can't afford paying the supplenze."

Staff: "We need to talk with the director about this."
S: "Not in her office. The cafeteria maybe"
*Not in the cafeteria either*
S: "Seems like she didn't come to achool today. Let's try tomorrow"
(^ Stuff that happens almost daily. Screw semicolons. I see her only once a month at most)

*Student send 5000 emails by accident* (Shit happens 😂😅😂😅)
D: "You gonna work here for a full afternoon"
*Student arrives for his punishment*
Staff: "Good that you're here. Do this real quick."
*10 min. Later*
Student: "Done"
Staff: "Well, we have no more work to give you, so you might as well leave"

DONE!!! Good job coming so far.

Our school is supposed to be the best, but internally it's one big meme.

Building a business can hamper one's development urges!

I have been building stuff since 2008. Took my first job in 2012, won a hackathon at Yahoo right after that. Got an amazing team to work with! Our team converted the hacked product into a proper product using Django and AngularJS. Those were the fun days. At that time AngularJS had just come out and I was under the dilemma to use Angular, Ember or backbone. But with all this came the responsibility to build a business out of our product. It didn't happen eventually though.

So I moved on to cure my entrepreneural itch and went on to start up an e-commerce startup along with my day job. It started getting good traction and I finally left my day job to focus completely on it. It's a sticker marketplace and I had to focus a lot on the actual physical product, improve the quality, tackle business development and stuff etc. In all this, my habit of creating stuff with code kind of got the back seat. Everyday, I see such exciting technologies come up and I want to try them out. I have been itching to create a native app using react native. Try to build a skill for Amazon Alexa.

On one side I am happy that I have been able to build a brand and become the largest sticker marketplace in India providing super awesome reusable stickers, but on the other hand, managing the business on a daily basis is killing the developer in me :(

Does anyone else building a business which involves a physical product also face a similar problem? I think I should just take up weekend hackathon type problems and try to solve them using the technologies I want to learn. Example, I have been meaning to build an app for our company. I think I will start with that!

I have been following devRant for quite sometime now and it has been awesome. Finally, signed up and ranted today! 😊😊

My apprentice quit!

Posted the other day about him quitting ...

He did ( he could of read the old post )

Just took him two days to do it

Worst fucking thing he fell asleep this morning on his way to work , so he's late anyway 9 start time actually arrives 9:40 .... ! Normally today it was 10:50 till he arrived... On a day he quits

Now he expects me to pay him extra money .... Holiday days etc ...

I want an apprentice who wants to be good at software 😐

Thing is he said it's not what he wants , I think development is something you learn to love.. because of the challenges. You always when starting out facing huge brick walls you have to get through.

Some people just don't have the capacity to get through them. I think. Developer has to love the difficulty .. you fail multiple times before the finished product ... All the errors. Little fixes no one sees.

It takes dedication.... Hard work to be the best. He didn't get that.

I now have more respect for other devs ( I had a lot already ) knowing that we all went through all of that and now. We are people with true talents.

Enjoying the college life to the fullest was the mindset of the confident boy, who now burns the midnight oil to cope up with world and give himself a proud future.

Is this a story of some successful person, who has achieved a lot in his life?

No, it is the story of the guy who lost all his hopes of future after spending the very first month in his college.

The first month was enough to perceive the reality of the domain I got myself let into. It was enough for someone, who didn’t even knew what programming languages are, to realize how left behind is he from the people around him.

Being from a private college which hardly anyone recognizes, expecting them to prepare me to stand out lone would be foolishness. I took my first step and started learning my very first programming language , Python.

I met some people with similar interest .We discussed, we exchanged resources, we used to talk to seniors to guide us. And yes, we were guided.

There were many bad days. Days which made me regret about starting late. Many a times I myself confirmed me as useless and some other time people did. The good thing is I never stopped , and improved myself with each day.

And now, after spending more than a year in the same college, I look at the things I have learnt. Today I can develop decent websites, can train neural networks, can make me stand in good position in coding platforms.

All you need is to take a step.I may not be the best, but I am definitely better than what I was yesterday.

If you have started something, then concentrate on finishing it.

Bit of an essay. TLDR: come Monday I'm either getting fired or promoted. And the CTO is a dickhead. If you think you work with me or know who I am, no you don't, shut the hell up.

Was having a discussion with my team, went on for a bit, at one point my manager mentioned that the CTO wanted me to go into the office occasionally, same thing I've had since I joined when they literally wanted me to move hundreds of miles to be close to the office mid covid when the office was closed. I give a nondescript answer. He's a bit more persistent, I snap a little but the conversation moves on. Discussion of company and team dynamics, at one point he makes a comment about people at another company being told if they don't go into the office they won't be eligible for promotion.

I ask everyone else on the call to leave.

I point out that 2 years ago me and him were interviewing candidates. He on a few occasions introduces me to candidates as a _senior_ engineer. My job title does not contain the word senior. I let it slide the first time, not worth it for a slip of the toung. Happens a couple more times, I take him aside and privately point out my job title does not contain the word senior. He says he didn't realise and thought I was.

My take away then: I'm expected to do the work of a senior without being paid for it and without being given the acknowledgement of the appropriate job title. I remind him of this. My job title hasn't changed. Fuck, I took a low ball offer when I joined and have had a minimal pay rise in like, 3 years. My tone is "not happy".

His response? He discussed promoting me with CTO however budged constraints. I somewhat understand, however.

We have promoted several people in the last few years. We have grown by hiring new people in the last few years (5 in a company of 30). There are ways to compensate someone in ways that do not impact day to day budget (shares, TC, total compensation, is normal terminology in the tech field for this). I ask why the hell should I travel a few hundred miles to the office to get get to know people, put effort in to a company that demonstrably doesn't value me? Particularly as all levels of management have completely failed at developing a social atmosphere during covid? My first month, I had 3 5 minute meetings with my manager a week. That was all of the communication I had with people. I literally complained and laid out what they should do instead, they adopted most of it.

I also ask him if he genuinely thinks being here is in my professional interest? My tone has well passed pissed off.

I will say, I actually quite like my manager, we have a good working relationship and I've learned a lot from him.

He makes some mediocre points, tries to give advice about value of shares. To me, the value of shares is zero until they are money. The value to the company, however, is that it's a sizeable chunk on their balance sheet and shares sheet that they have to be willing to justify. If I wanted money, I'd go work at a high frequency trading bank and make 5x what I'm on now. No joke, that's what they pay, I could get a job, came close in the past but went to amazon. He understands.

He says will discuss with CTO. They were on a call for like an hour. His tone has changed to "you will be promoted ASAP, comp may be structured as discussed". Point made.

I'm in this job because it's convenient, is easy for me. Was originally lower challenge than previous, has a range of chances to learn and _that's_ the value to me. He's suitably nervous.

Point made I think.

So given I swore a few times, at least once about the CTO. Interesting to see how it goes.

Message from him to the effect that he spoke to CTO, has been told to write a proposal for promotion (kinda standard), will discuss with HR on Monday as they're on holiday.

So, maybe not getting fired today?

Blood pressure still very high.

"What we can do to get all on time? ", manager asks
"Can we have 4 more developers on the project?", dev asks
"No, that's not gonna happen. Let's be realistic", manager says
"Is it realistic to ask 3 devs to ship 20 features in a week, reviewed and tested?" dev asks
"Actually 2 of you, because our contractor goes into a vacation. But you can do overtimes, can't you?"
"I prefer not to but even in that case I can't guarantee that as it's not realistic. But at least can I leave earlier and work more from home more because there are severe delays on the train lines and if I have to commute 4 hours a day it won't help", dev says
"Well, I'm not sure if that's a good idea. You have to communicate with people, you know. We have to ship things. But we can discuss this tomorrow as I have to leave early today. I have to take my kids from school"

Really? Wtf?

moving from desktop support to Development! Today is a good day 😎

*Goes for an interview*

Interviewer reads my resume and goes on to say : "You are the first person today, whose resume doesn't include 'machine learning' ".
Me : *Points towards Machine Learning written in my resume* Sir here it is.

We both have a good laugh about it.

That day i realised that EVERYONE is 'learning' machine learning. EVERYONE.

[long]
When searching for internship via school I found this small startup with this cute project of building a teaching tool for programming. There were back then 2 programmers: the founder and the co-founder.

Then like 1 week before the internship started, the co-founder had a burnout and had to get off the project, while the company was so low on budget the founder, aka my new b0ss, had to work separate jobs to keep the company alive. (quite metal tbh)

It's funny because I'm a junior developer, 100%. I've been coding as a hobby for around 8 years now but I've never worked in a big company before. (No exception to this workplace either)

First project I get: rewrite the compiler. The Python compiler.
"But wait, why not just embed a real compiler from the first case?"
-nanananana it's never simple, as you probably know from your own projects.

The new compiler, as compared to existing embedded compiler solutions out there, needed these prime features:
- Walk through the code (debugger style), but programmatically.
- Show custom exceptions (ex: "A colon is needed at the end of an if-statement" instead of "Syntax error line 3")
- Have a "Did-you-mean this variable?" error for usage of unassigned variables.
- Be able to be embedded in Unity's WebGL build target

All for the use case of being a friendly compiler.
The last dash in the list is actually the biggest bottleneck which excluded all existing open-source projects (i could find). Compliant with WebAssembly I can't use threads among other things, IL2CPP has lots of restrictions, Unity has some as well...

Oh and it should of course be built using test-driven development.

"Good luck!" - said the founder, first day of work as she then traveled to USA for **3 weeks**, leaving me solo with the to-be-made codebase and humongous list of requirements.

---

I just finished the 6th week of internship, boss has been at "HQ" for 3 weeks now, and I just hit the biggest milestone yet for this project.

Yes I've been succeeding! This project has gone so well, and I'm surprising myself how much code I've been pumping out during these weeks.

I'm up now at almost 40'000 lines of source and 30'000 lines of code. ‼
( Biggest project I've ever worked on previously was at 8'000 lines of code )

The milestone (that I finished today) was for loops! As been trying to showcase in the GIF.

---

It's such a giant project and I can honestly say I've done some good work here. Self-five. Over-performing is a thing.

The things that makes me shiver though is that most that use this application will never know the intricates of it's insides, and the brain work put into it.

The project is probably over-engineered. A lot. Having a home-made compiler gives us a lot of flexibility for our product as we're trying to make more of a "pedagogic IDE". But no matter that I reinvented the wheel for the 105Gth time, it's still the most fun I've had with a project to date.

---

Also btw if anyone wants to see source code, please give me good reasons as I'm actively trying to convince my boss to make the compiler open-source.

Cheers!

Today is a good day for past memories.
Yoshi’s island here we go!!

Step 1: Run to the store to buy a USB card reader because all of a sudden you have a need to use a 16Mb CF card that was tossed in a junk drawer for 20 years (hoping it still works, of course), but that was the easy part...

Step 2: Realize that the apps - your own - you want to run on your new (old) Casio E-125 PocketPC (to re-live "glory" days) are compiled in ARM format, not MIPS, which is the CPU this device uses, and the installer packages you have FOR YOUR OWN APPS don't include MIPS, only ARM (WHY DID I DO THAT?!), so, the saga REALLY begins...

Step 3: Get a 20-year old OS to install in a Hyper-V VM... find out that basic things like networking don't work by default because the OS is so damn old, so spend hours solving that and other issues to get it to basically run well enough to...

Step 4: Get that OS updated so that it's at least kind/sorta/maybe (but between you and me, not really!) safe online, all without a browser that will work on ANY modern site (oh, and good luck finding a version of Firefox that runs on it - that all took a few hours)...

Step 5: Okay, OS is ready to go, now get 20-year old dev tools that you haven't even seen in that many years working. Oh, do this with a missing CD key and ISO's that weren't archived in a format that's usable today, plus a bunch of missing dependencies because the OS is, again, SO old (a few MORE hours)...

Step 6: Get 20-year old code written in a language you haven't used in probably almost that long to compile, dealing with pathing issues, missing libs, and several other issues, all the while trying to dust off long-dormant knowledge somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of your brain... surprisingly, it all came back to me, more or less, in under an hour, which lead to...

Step 7: FINALLY get it all to work, FINALLY get the code to compile, FINALLY get it transferred to the device (which has no network capabilities, by the way, which is where the card reader and CF card came into play) and re-live the glory of your old, crappy PocketPC apps and games running on the real thing! WOO-HOO!

Step 8: Realize it's 3:30am by the time that's all done and be VERY thankful that you're on vacation this week or work tomorrow would SSUUCCKK!!!!

Step 9. Get called into work the next day for a production issue despite being tired from the night before and an afternoon of errands, lose basically a whole day of vacation (7 hours spent on it) and not actually resolve it by after midnight when you finally say that's enough :(

Talk about your highs and your lows.

!dev

TLDR; younger brother is an unreliable fuck. Learning to be a pathetic trickster. Penny teller cheap ass jester.

Hello folks. Time for a little family story.

This started around mid June.
I was a little tight on money the past few months. I had a broken laptop, that my brother wanted to buy. So I told him that he can have it for 100 bucks. It was a 1k gaming laptop 2 years ago, (i7, gtx 960m, 16gb ddr4). But I didn't know how much it would cost to repair. So I was happy with the price and so was him.

He told me he would pay by the end of June.

Hi didn't pay. He repaired the laptop for free by asking his boss, that used to be my friend (I'll probably tell you guys about that in another rant, best friend, got in a fight, stopped talking, next day my brother asked him for a job).

A month later, mid July, I told him I needed the money.

He literally said:

"I don't care for what you need. I'll pay you when I think it is a relevant expense, now I have money only for buying tools and investing in my career".

He was buying 15 usd pens (not only 1), because he wants to have expensive crap.

That was a bit disgusting, but not shocking. (I'm used to his little brat attitude, he's 26 btw).

I thought to myself. Ok, you want to be a bitch?. Then pay more.

I told him that he appreciated a good that wasn't his and that he should either pay now or agree to a new price. He didn't like that idea, but eventually we agreed to make it 300usd.

And one of the clauses was.

"I shouldn't ask him to pay." 🙄

He would pay when he could. (entitled brat attitude again). Ok. Fine.

It's been a month from that. He teased that he would pay 3 weeks ago. And he didn't. I asked him how was the "not asking for payment clause", because he did the teasing and I wanted to know if that kind of shitty mind games was part of the deal.

So that's the background story for the laptop.

Now time for a dinner story.

We share dinner once or twice a week. And when any one is short in money we keep a tally on who's been paying.

When I have money I just let the tally go in my favor, an buy him dinner whenever he says his short on money.

Note: Here, fries and soda are not part of the price, so the one that is short on money pays the fries and soda.

Today it was not one of those days. (Dinner here is about 15 USD for 2, with fries, and soda, nothing fancy, nor healthy, but an exuse to hang out with my only brother that would not eat a salad even if it was free).

I owed him 10 bucks, and he owed me 1 dinner. I asked him if he's buying dinner today. He said that the tally is even because last meal I didn't pay the chips. 🧐. (That was settled because I didn't pay once, but made up for it later)

Again with his entitled ass shitty attitude.

I just said. I don't want to hear your excuses. Here's your money. I want my laptop tomorrow, I'll sell first thing Monday. And tell me how much did you spend on repairs and parts and I'll pay you.

And now I'm sad. 🙃

Mainly, because is just so fucking boring to deal with a person that counts every penny. I fed him for 10 year while he was having problems, (alcohol and depression), And now he comes with this shitty ass counting pennies attitude, wtf?

I literally felt poorer just by counting the cents that made part of this story. (Really, who the fucks keeps track of chips and soda??? What are we 15yo??)))

It's one thing to be trapped in a 3rd world country where everyone is trying to fuck you. You learn to deal with that shit. And it's ok.

But seeing that your little brother is learning the same cheap trickery is just sad. The same cheap approach to life. The same easy and pathetic mind games is just fucking sad.

I don't even mind the money anymore. I was short on cash 2 months ago, I'm gladly better now. But finding out that he's becoming a little scammer is a bummer.

I just needed to vent. I think I should stop enabling him. And maybe keep some distance, it is fucking depressing to be counting cents to settle an argument. By dealing with that fucktard I end up counting cents just to figure out who's right.

Oh hey, no extra screws. Today is a good day

Highlights from my week:

Prod access: Needed it for my last four tickets; just got it approved this week. No longer need it (urgently, anyway). During setup, sysops didn’t sync accounts, and didn’t know how. Left me to figure out the urls on my own. MFA not working.

Work phone: Discovered its MFA is tied to another coworker’s prod credentials. Security just made it work for both instead of fixing it.

My merchant communication ticket: I discovered sysops typo’d my cronjob so my feature hasn’t run since its release, and therefore never alerted merchants. They didn’t want to fix it outside of a standard release. Some yelling convinced them to do it anyway.

AWS ticket: wow I seriously don’t give a crap. Most boring ticket I have ever worked on. Also, the AWS guy said the project might not even be possible, so. Weee, great use of my time.

“Tiny, easy-peasy ticket”: Sounds easy (change a link based on record type). Impossible to test locally, or even view; requires environments I can’t access or deploy to. Specs don’t cover the record type, nor support creating them. Found and patched it anyway.

Completed work: Four of my tickets (two high-priority) have been sitting in code review for over a month now.

Prod release: Release team #2 didn’t release and didn’t bother telling anyone; Release team #1 tried releasing tickets that relied upon it. Good times were had.

QA: Begs for service status page; VP of engineering scoffs at it and says its practically impossible to build. I volunteered. QA cheered; VP ignored me.

Retro: Oops! Scrum master didn’t show up.

Coworker demo: dogshit code that works 1 out of 15 times; didn’t consider UX or user preferences. Today is code-freeze too, so it’s getting released like this. (Feature is using an AI service to rearrange menu options by usage and time of day…)

Micromanager response: “The UX doesn’t matter; our consumers want AI-driven models, and we can say we have delivered on that. It works, and that’s what matters. Good job on delivering!”

Yep.
So, how’s your week going?

So today I realized that Im not happy.

When I was a kid I wanted to do many things because I had time and energy but I had no money. Now that Im an adult and I have the money, I have no energy and no will power to try and have personal life in these few hours left of my day. I spend 9 hours at work everyday and totally 1hr 30min is wasted on commuting.

I spent 4 years in uni between lectures and working on my side projects, and I really believed that after uni I will get a job and my life work balance will improve.

After uni I spent 2 years working abroad in 3 jobs at 3 countries. I work as android dev and now Im making a really decent salary.

However Im not happy at all. I realized that life is not about the money. Im changing countries like socks and dont even feel the need to socialize or enjoy my life anymore. Im european and these other eu countries are not that different at all. It came to a point where relationships are meaningless to me. I became an office drone who cares only about work and outside of work I care only about my projects and more work.

At this point im only 25 years old with around 2 years of experience and money is really good, but fuck it Im so tired of being an emigrant and having no stability in life. Im so drained. I spent past 6 years (4 in uni combined with side projects and 2 years working in 3 jobs in different countriee) working my ass off and lying to myself that after the next big thing Im gonna take a break and enjoy life. But its never enough. I dont want to hit 30s or 40s and realize that I wasted my life on pursuing money and didnt get to enjoy life..

Im really considering taking a 6-12 months vacation. I need to find myself. Probably going back to my own country. Just learn how to enjoy life, attend workshops, get to know new city area, meet new people, do some interesting hobbies. Maybe do a little freelance (max 10hrs a week).

Im tired of feeling like I need to make as much money as I can and learn as much about my work as I can. Its not rewarding because its never enough.

Whats the point in that money if I cant enjoy it?

Good morning, good day and good weekend.
Sometimes babysitting is worth it Hehehehe.
No projects today, resting day, me, the pool, my nephews and a arduino basic manual.

Today is a good day for programming... Still raining

Dear diary, today was a good day.

1: i got the confirmation of promotion.
2: i solved a task using newly introduced tech and it works. Which has lots of implications on future work, a lot faster too. Also everyone is happy and supportive.
3: i felt good at the progress made with my kinesitherapy, my spine is starting to cooperate again.

Overall a good day.

Oh, and also i got payed :D

Heyyy Fellow devRant users, wanted to know has anyone else been in this situation before? it happens to me quite a bit now and usually always makes me laugh :-D, i'll set the scenario for you here.

*Me talking to stranger on the bus*
Me - "How are you doing today mate"
Stranger - "very well thank you, off to work, how about yourself?"
Me - "Very good thanks mate, I'm off to Uni for the day :D"
Stranger - "Thats great, what do you study mate?"
Me - "Well I'm doing a course in Software Development!, i very much enjoy what I'm studying!"
Stranger - "Wow, you must be very good at fixing printers and stuff hey"

well... it sorta ends there but hopefully you get the picture :D, this is usually how my conversations with strangers ends up. As you may notice i tend to 'talk too much' :D,
hope you're having a great night or day where ever you may be :D. - Milo

I just signed up to get this off my chest.
Dear Windows, you god damn moronic, ugly, unuseable abomination of an excuse for an OS. I wonder how we could end up here in this situation. You suck, in every way imaginable. I didnt choose Linux or Mac, you made me do it.
I know no other OS that can screw you up this bad when setting up. My friend is an experienced windows user and the last install took him 2 days. I just spend the last day trying to get this uncompatible sucker installed. I manage to set up an hackintosh quicker than I was able to install Windows the last three times I checked, you scumbag.
Your error messages suck ass, there is nothing I cant figure out given enough time, except your useless hints and pathetic attemps to get anything done on your own.
And you are fucking slow. Just why, do you keep installing stuff I didnt ask you to. Now I got this ugly ass Bing-Toolbar because I missed a damn checkbox in an .exe, which could have also been an exploit, you never know.
You are cluttered with useless stuff. I dont care about you lame ass app store, idc about your cortana annoying spy assistant and I certainly dont care about your forced updates.
Just sit back and feel your PC getting slower every day by background processes. Watch your productivity decline while dealing with their brain dead privilege and file system.
You ugly malformed mutation of software. When I look at your UI I feel disgust while wondering how you can fail with the most basic principles of UX.
How pathetic, badly supported, bug ridden and dangerously unsecure can an OS be you ask while trying to navigate through the settings, a pile of legacy software debt this garbage pile was build on. And your shell... what a sick joke.
I hate you Windows. For screwing other OS with your asshole boot manager, hardware driver requirements and making people send me .zip and .docx. You should be embarrassed to charge money for this unfunctional junk, but you do, a lot.
I really try to see the positive here. You got all the software, but thats not on you, thats because all those poor suckers are trapped with you and the effort to change is too big.
This OS is the most disappointing thing technology could come up with today. I would rather set myself on fire than work with this pain in the ass software professionally. I mean if you are a serious developer at some point you have to admit that you just cant develop on windows. You will get fucked 5 times as often as any Mac or Linux user. Fuck you, Windows.
Hey Microsoft, thanks for Typescript and VSCode and all the other good things you have done. But burn in hell for what you have done to all of us with this piece of shit OS.

Rant PART 2 [FINAL-inspirational]

In my previous rant I posted what was happening in my life. And now I want to share how it all unfolded.

To remember some things, I was doing a mobile project for school and it was a group assignment. My group was so disperse that I ended up doing all by myself. And in the middle of this my gf and I were fighting.

I spent the last two days coding all day during work (I do coding internship for the college I go to, so my boss was cool about me doing the project during work) and I ended up forgetting what day it was today (today is a holyday, I thought I had to go to work because I forgot). It was such an intense two days that while coding I was forgetting variable names, table row names (I literally spent half an hour on my API trying to find a solution, when the solution was that I was using `seller_fk` on the API, but in the database was `seller_id`) and my mind was imploding. I asked my boss for help on the database (he's really good at it) and my teachers to help me. But everything paid off.

Yesterday I started coding at 8am and ended up finishing the project at 9:28 pm (the day before yesterday was the same thing), 2 minutes before the class of the project to start! I was able to finish the project, finally! But what really remarked me was that from all the groups that were in like 4-5 people, I was the only one who delivered the project that day. All other groups are going to have to deliver the project next week with reduced project grade, while I got 100% of the grade because I delivered on the date.

God is good!

Also my gf and I are good now. We are kinda still recovering emotionally, but are now more respectfull to each other, so I guess something good can comeout of bad things.

Happy coding everyone and never give up!
If I made it out of this whole mess so can you! :)

I just had my cell phone cloned yesterday. End of the day, my phone lost signal suddenly. I thought it was a problem with my chip, so I decided to check that on a store and buy a new one next day.

Today, after I recover my chip and number, I started to see the mess. Someone used my number to send message to all my contacts on whatsapp, asking for money. Also, I had some contact info changed on the bank broker, which is really serious. I do not know what else is compromised, and I'm truly worried about it.

Someone has some good tips for improving security while using cellphones?

I haven't ranted for today, but I figured that I'd post a summary.
A public diary of sorts.. devRant is amazing, it even allows me to post the stuff that I'd otherwise put on a piece of paper and probably discard over time. And with keyboard support at that <3

Today has been a productive day for me. Laptop got restored with a "pacman -Syu" over a Bluetooth mobile data tethering from my phone, said phone got upgraded to an unofficial Android 9 (Pie) thanks to a comment from @undef, etc.

I've also made myself a reliable USB extension cord to be able to extend the 20-30cm USB-A male to USB-C male cord that Huawei delivered with my Nexus 6P. The USB-C to USB-C cord that allows for fast charging is unreliable.. ordered some USB-C plugs for that, in order to make some high power wire with that when they arrive.

So that plug I've made.. USB-A male to USB-A female, in which my short USB-C to USB-A wire can plug in. It's a 1M wire, with 18AWG wire for its power lines and 28AWG wires for its data lines. The 18AWG power lines can carry up to 10A of current, while the 28AWG lines can carry up to 1A. All wires were made into 1M pieces. These resulted in a very low impedance path for all of them, my multimeter measured no more than 200 milliohms across them, though I'll have to verify and finetune that on my oscilloscope with 4-wire measurement.

So the wire was good. Easy too, I just had to look up the pinout and replicate that on the male part.

That's where the rant part comes in.. in fact I've got quite uncomfortable with sentences that don't include at least one swear word at this point. All hail to devRant for allowing me to put them out there without guilt.. it changed my very mind <3

Microshaft WanBLowS.

I've tried to plug my DIY extension cord into it, and plugged my phone and some USB stick into it of which I've completely forgot the filesystem. Windows certainly doesn't support it.. turns out that it was LUKS. More about that later.

Windows returned that it didn't support either of them, due to "malfunctioning at the USB device". So I went ahead and plugged in my phone directly.. works without a problem. Then I went ahead and troubleshooted the wire I've just made with a multimeter, to check for shorts.. none at all.

At that point I suspected that WanBLowS was the issue, so I booted up my (at the time) problematic Arch laptop and did the exact same thing there, testing that USB stick and my phone there by plugging it through the extension wire. Shit just worked like that. The USB stick was a LUKS medium and apparently a clone of my SanDisk rootfs that I'm storing my Arch Linux on my laptop at at the time.. an unfinished migration project (SanDisk is unstable, my other DM sticks are quite stable). The USB stick consumed about 20mA so no big deal for any USB controller. The phone consumed about 500mA (which is standard USB 2.0 so no surprise) and worked fine as well.. although the HP laptop dropped the voltage to ~4.8V like that, unlike 5.1V which is nominal for USB. Still worked without a problem.

So clearly Windows is the problem here, and this provides me one more reason to hate that piece of shit OS. Windows lovers may say that it's an issue with my particular hardware, which maybe it is. I've done the Windows plugging solely through a USB 3.0 hub, which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the host. Now USB 3.0 is supposed to be able to carry up to 1A rather than 500mA, so I expect all the components in there to be beefier. I've also tested the hub as part of a review, and it can carry about 1A no problem, although it seems like its supply lines aren't shorted to VCC on the host, like a sensible hub would. Instead I suspect that it's going through the hub's controller.

Regardless, this is clearly a bad design. One of the USB data lines is biased to ~3.3V if memory serves me right, while the other is biased to 300mV. The latter could impose a problem.. but again, the current path was of a very low impedance of 200milliohms at most. Meanwhile the direct connection that omits the ~200ohm extension wire worked just fine. Even 300mV wouldn't degrade significantly over such a resistance. So this is most likely a Windows problem.

That aside, the extension cord works fine in Linux. So I've used that as a charging connection while upgrading my Arch laptop (which as you may know has internet issues at the time) over Bluetooth, through a shared BNEP connection (Bluetooth tethering) from my phone. Mobile data since I didn't set up my WiFi in this new Pie ROM yet. Worked fine, fixed my WiFi. Currently it's back in my network as my fully-fledged development host. So that way I'll be able to work again on @Floydian's LinkHub repository. My laptop's the only one who currently holds the private key for signing commits for git$(rm -rf ~/*)@nixmagic.com, hence why my development has been impeded. My tablet doesn't have them. Guess I'll commit somewhere tomorrow.

(looks like my rant is too long, continue in comments)

Voting feels like shit.

Seriously. Why? Because I have to vote for parties and representatives that might have one interest in common with me but go against my points of view almost all of the time. "We'll introduce a freedom of information act and legalize weed for better drug policy and youth protection!" -- WOW Great I'll vote for yo .. " ...and we'll also come to your home kill your dog, rape your family and shit in your back yard." -- oh f*** WHY? why do I have to live in a system were I am constantly forced to trade shit for even worse shit? Why can't I vote for policies or at least some kind of 'single' - issue representative?

I know that solving this problem is not easy and I do not claim to have the magical solution. "Not voting is even worse" sure but I am getting so fucking tired of it. It doesn't feel like progression and it sure as hell does not feel like it matters because in the end of the day you are just voting for the party that's at least going to use lube when raping you. I hate these ad hominem politics where we don't discuss the ideas but the people who represent them. I honestly don't give a fuck about who you are, if you're gay, married, or are left-wing, right-wing, conservative or liberal, in the end its about finding a good solution for everyone and not about the people implementing it. I don't care about politicians private lifes or worldviews (in terms of ideals, morals, religion etc.) , I care about finding the solutions to problems and having a wide array of opinions in order to discuss ideas and to find a valid and good way to go forward. "you can't agree with that person at all, because he's evil", yeah you know what? I don't care. It's about the ideas, arguments, discussions and solutions, not about the people who discuss them.

"I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I
screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me...
Or feels threatened by me...
Or thinks I'm a smart ass...
Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike."

Today was a day at work that I felt like I made a significant contribution. It was not a lot of code. Actually it was a difference of 3 characters.

I am developing an industrial server so that my employer can provide access to their machines to enterprise industrial systems. You know, the big boys toys. Probably in fucking java...

Anyway, I am putting this server on an embedded system. So naturally you want to see how much serving a server can serve. In this case the device in more processor starved than memory starved. So I bumped up the speed of the serving from 1000mS to 100mS per sample. This caused the processor to jump from 8% of one core (as read from top) to 70%. Okay, 10x more sampling then 10x approx cpu usage. That is good. I know some basic metrics for a certain amount of data for a couple of different sampling rates.

Now, I realized this really was not that much activity for this processor. I mean, it didn't seem to me that it "took much" to see a large increase of processor usage. So I started wondering about another process on the system that was eating 60 to 70 % all the time. I know it updated a screen that showed some not often needed data from its display among controlling things. Most of the time it will be in a cabinet hidden from the world. I started looking at this code and figured out where the display code was being called.

This is where it gets interesting. I didn't write this code. Another really good programmer I work with wrote this. It also seemed to be pretty standard approach. It had a timer that fired an event every 50mS. This is 20 times per second. So 20 fps if you will. I thought, What would happen if I changed this to 250mS? So I did. It dropped the processor usage to 15%! WTF?! I showed another programmer: WTF?! I showed the guy who wrote it: WTF?! I asked what does it do? He said all it does it update the display. He said: Lets take to 1000mS! I was hesitant, but okay. It dropped to 5%!

What is funny is several people all said: This is running kinda hot. It really shouldn't be this hot.

Don't assume, if you have a hunch, play with it if its safe to do so. You might just shave off 55 to 60 % cpu usage on your system.

So the code I ended up changing: "50" to "1000".

I'm starting to think we might need a global union for developers. I have been reading the comments today and it looks like a lot us getting way underpaid.

New features should be a moment of joy if they are released. So far so good. People really liked the idea of working together on opensource project. The app is updated. But then we encountered a major problem. It looks like some of us are getting so underpaid that they can't pay for the 14 dollar it cost to start the opensource project they want. We must rebel against this.

14 dollar, how much is 14 dollar. How many hobbies cost 14 dollar to start up. From running to collecting stamps. Its going to cost you more And how many hobbies are you as passionate about as your own open source project.

The next great thing is that it is show in the place where developers are eagerly looking to join a opensource project. And will probably join you're product because I'm sure between all of us there are tons of wonderfull ideas just waiting to be build.

And for me personal I do not mind supporting an app that I use almost every day. And just keeps growing without annoying ads.

So you should be more then willing to pay 14 dollars. And are ready to start recruiting your team.

And if you really can't pay. Your house burned down, you needed it for food. Your only pc is beyond saving. You can be a positive force in this community and do pay with upvotes.

But if you are to much a cheapskate to pay 14 dollars well, I think I was clear enough.

Today is a sad day for me.
I lost all of my data today. My phone was in my pocket and the Iris scanner was looking for a face. I guess it did it multiple times because I found that it had completely reset my phone.

I'm pissed mostly because I knew I had some control over when I could have backed up my phone... I could have at least been pushed back a month but now I'm pushed back by a whole year!
That is a fuck ton of time for things to have happened.

I'm just sad right now guys. There was some good stuff that could have been saved.

Today was not a good day for me at all ,being considered a junior developer is not a good thing.
Yes I know due to my lack of the understanding of your 3 years old code base I could not meet up with the deadlines.
So as a punishment one of our senior devs asked me to bring my chair to his desk and told me to commit and push my progress every ten minutes .
He'll then review reading each code line by line ., Reverting too.
The worst part was that for the ten minutes I'll need to wait another 5 , because he was watching some Fifa19 gameplays on YouTube.
This went on for 3 hours .

It worked because I feel like a title noob today .

Another incident which made a Security Researcher cry
[ NOTE : Check profile to read older incidents ]
-----------------------------------------------------------
So this all started when I was at my home (bunked the office that day xD) and I got a call from a..... Let's call him Fella as I always do . So here we go . And yeah , our Fella is a SysAdmin .
-----------------------------------------------------------
Fella - Hey man sup!
Me - Good going mate , bunked the office , weather's nice , gonna spend time with my girl today . So what's goinon?
Fella - Bruh my network sharing folders ain't working no more .
Me - Did you changed or modified anything?
Fella - Nope
Me - Okay , gimme your login creds lemme check .
Fella - Check your inbox *texts me the credentials*

*I logged in and what I'm seeing is that server runs on Windows2008R2 , checked the event logs , everything's fine and all of a sudden what I found is fucking embarrassing , this wise man closed SMB service*
Me - Did you closed SMB service?
Fella - Yeah
Me - You know what it does?
Fella - Yeah it's a protocol , I turned it off to protect the server from Wannacry .
Me - Fuckerrrr!!!!! Asshole dumbass you fuckin piece of Dodo's shit!! SMB is the service responsible for files and network sharing!!!
Fella - But....I just wanted protection
Me - 😭😭😭

*A long conversation continues with a lot of specially made words to decrease the rate of frustration which I used already*

Fella - Okay I'm turning it on .
Me - Go on....... Asshole
Fella - It worked! Thanks a lot bro
Me - Just leave me and my soul away from evil and hang up .

*Now the question is , who the hell gives them the post of SysAdmin? While thinking this question , I almost thought of committing suicide​ but then my girl came with coffee and my rubber duck*

I miss old times rants...So i guess, here it goes mine:

Tomorrow is the day of the first demo to our client of a "forward-looking project" which is totally fucked up, because our "Technical Quality Assurance" - basically a developer from the '90-s, who gained the position by "he is a good guy from my last company where we worked together on sum old legacy project...".
He fucked up our marvellous, loose coupling, publish/subscribe microservice architecture, which was meant to replace an old, un-maintainable enormous monolitch app. Basically we have to replace some old-ass db stored functions.
Everyone was on our side, even the sysadmins were on our side, and he just walked in the conversation, and said: No, i don't like it, 'cause it's not clear how it would even work... Make it an RPC without loose coupling with the good-old common lib pattern, which made it now (it's the 4th 2 week/sprint, and it is a dependency hell). I could go on day and night about his "awesome ideas", and all the lovely e-mails and pull request comments... But back to business

So tomorrow is the demo. The client side project manager accidentally invited EVERYONE to this, even fucking CIO, legal department, all the designers... so yeah... pretty nice couple of swallowed company...

Today was a day, when my lead colleague just simply stayed home, to be more productive, our companys project manager had to work on other prjects, and can't help, and all the 3 other prject members were thinking it is important to interrupt me frequently...

I have to install our projects which is not even had a heart beat... not even on developer machines. Ok it is not a reeeeaaally big thing, but it is 6 MS from which 2 not even building because of tight coupling fucktard bitch..., But ok, i mean, i do my best, and make it work for the first time ever... I worked like 10 ours, just on the first fucking app to build, and deploy, run on the server, connect to db and rabbit mq... 10 FUCKING HOURS!!! (sorry, i mean) and it all was about 1, i mean ONE FUCKING LINE!

Let me explain: spring boot amqp with SSL was never tested before this time. I searched everything i could tought about, what could cause "Connection reset"... Yeah... not so helpful error message... I even have to "hack" into the demo server to test the keystore-truststore at localhost... and all the fucking configs, user names, urls, everything was correct... But one fucking line was missing...
EXCEPT ONE FUCKING LINE:
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=false # Whether to enable SSL support.

This little bitch took me 6 hours to figure out...so please guys, learn from my fault and check the spring boot appendix for default application properties, if everything is correct, but it is not working...

And of course, if you want SSL then ENABLE it...
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=true

BTW i really miss those old rants from angry devs, and i hope someone will smile on my fucking torture

Budge works on Arch again and I made a devRant client in Minecraft.

Today is a good day :)

Android Studio opened in 6 minutes. Today is going to be a good day.
*Takes 24 minutes to load project*
Well not like I was going to do anything productive anyway.

Had my first car accident today. I was taking a friend to school, we were down the street from our school. Person in front of me slammed on their brakes for no reason (light was green, nobody was crossing), so I did the same. Almost fucking hit them, but whatever. As me and my friend started to recover from that, we get hit from behind.

I remember just looking over at her when it happened and going "DID WE JUST FUCKING GET HIT?", she looks at me and says "I don't know what else it could have been"

The guy that hit us was a really nice guy. When me and the person in front of me slammed our brakes, the guy behind us followed, but it was raining this morning and he slid into my car.

So the guy called the cops, had an officer come, we exchanged information and everything (wasn't a bad enough accident for an actual police report). I called my insurance company, they said to call his insurance company, so I did. Filed a claim, told them everything that happened, then they called the guy, he confirmed everything and said the accident was his fault. But since my car is fairly old (it's a 2001 model), they said it might not even be worth fixing and they'll probably just end up seeing how much the car is worth and sending me a check.

The fun thing is, my cousin is my mechanic and he can also do body work, and the damage isn't that much, so he said he probably wouldn't charge much. So I'll probably get to pocket a good amount of the money (maybe like $700 max but still)

So, fun day.

So met a guy today in college and it was his first day in class. He told me that he is working as software engineer and having 4 years of experience and primarily works with Java lang.
We do programs in Java for practicals and I'm not good with Java (I fuckin hate). I thought maybe I can ask for help from this guy if I'm stuck. And so the practicals started.
And guess what the guy did not know how to compile Java program on 'cmd' and was seeking help from other guy. I'm like what the actual fuck. How the fuck he has 4 years of experience and can't compile a program. Can't even able to set path. Total idiot. Fuck this shit.

Just asked something on stackoverflow.
Has been 15min already. And still no downvote and no comment saying “fuck off”

Today is a good day.
🙃

Sorry for wrong tag. This ain’t a rant. I was just thinking “so? -> rant”

Fuck this day!
Like really fuck it!
I have one of the most terrible crunch-time i ever experienced.
I’v been working 12+ hours every day with an ever-changing project timeline.
It started simple, we made a timeline, it was risky even then but it was realistic, we started working immideatly, everything looked good then a few days in BOOM! Actually our project management completely forgot client B’s projects soo we need to do that too with the same fucking deadline!!! (About 10x more work in waay less time)
Then this morning i got an email from the graphics team that we need to document our design process RIGHT FUCKING NOW! Because management wants documentations, in the middle of a fucking crunch-time.
Today it almost got physical with my project manager, i told him that he is not a programmer, i dont fucking care about his shit, just fuck off and let me work because we won’t be ready based on his unrealistic bs.
I feel like completely fucked over, like we were told 2 days before deadline that the whole company and people’s jobs depends on us now because if we wont finish this clients won’t pay.
WE ARE TWO PROGRAMMERS for studio of 10-12 people!!!
Soo i’w been thinking about getting the fuck out of here ASAP, i got an offer from a pretty big international gamedev company just what i needed, i already did their test before all of this, i passed A+.
We scheduled a skype interview for today. I had completely no time to prepare or chill off, just got out of the office, got into a starbucks and i’m interviewing. No time to even check my mic or internet, the call was so shit i could not hear anything, they neither because the plaza was loud af. Meanwhile im nervous about work, about the interview, about can they hear me at all because of the noise. I fucked it up. BIG time! I was so done i could not reverse a fucking string in c++ or explain what is a signed int!!!
Needless to say they said no.
Need time to think about it or realize what happened? Nice dreams. Back to the office and continue working.
I can’t do this anymore. My girlfriend came for me and took me home at 10pm but all i could do was stare at the floor on the subway. I don’t want people to lose their jobs but i just phisically can’t do this anymore.
Meanwhile any time i talk to my project manager about being tired he says like “hshshsbsb i have 60 hours in the last 4 days i got the worst part, i would be grateful in your place..” like fuck off dude, i dont give fuck about how you feel about this. This is not okay for me, you did this to the project, your fucking job is to manage it! I have one day off before going back to this, i have completely no idea what to do now...

[ps: this is not Nemesys. They did not let me work on my own stuff because i would be a competitor, so i left.]

The story of how I got my dream job.

I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.

--A few weeks pass--

It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!

I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)

The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.

--D-day--

I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!

Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.

We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.

I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.

--Two days later--

I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.

--A few months later--

I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.

I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).

Just another big rant story full of WTFs and completely true.

The company I work for atm is like the landlord for a big german city. We build houses and flats and rent them to normal people, just that we want to be very cheap and most nearly all our tenants are jobless.
So the company hired a lot of software-dev-companies to manage everything.

The company I want to talk about is "ABI...", a 40-man big software company. ABI sold us different software, e.g. a datawarehouse for our ERP System they "invented" for 300K or the software we talk about today: a document management system. It has workflows, a 100 year-save archive system, a history feature etc.
The software itself, called ELO (you can google it if you want) is a component based software in which every company that is a "partner" can develop things into, like ABI did for our company.

Since 2013 we pay ABI 150€ / hour (most of the time it feels like 300€ / hour, because if you want something done from a dev from ABI you first have to talk to the project manager of him and of course pay him too). They did thousand of hours in all that years for my company.

In 2017 they started to talk about a module in ELO called Invoice-Module. With that you can manage all your paper invoices digital, like scan that piece of paper, then OCR it, then fill formular data, add data and at the end you can send it to the ERP system automatically and we can pay the invoice automatically. "Digitization" is the key word.

After 1.5 years of project planning and a 3 month test phase, we talked to them and decided to go live at 01.01.2019. We are talking about already ~ 200 hours planning and work just from ABI for this (do the math. No. Please dont...).

I joined my actual company in October 2018 and I should "just overview" the project a bit, I mean, hey, they planned it since 1.5 years - how bad can it be, right?

In the first week of 2019 we found 25 bugs and users reporting around 50 feature requests, around 30 of them of such high need that they can't do their daily work with the invoices like they did before without ELO.
In the first three weeks of 2019 we where around 70 bugs deep, 20 of them fixed, with nearly 70 feature requests, 5 done. Around 10 bugs where so high, that the complete system would not work any more if they dont get fixed.

Want examples?
- Delete a Invoice (right click -> delete, no super deep hiding menu), and the server crashed until someone restarts it.
- missing dropdown of tax rate, everything was 19% (in germany 99,9% of all invoices are 19%, 7% or 0%).

But the biggest thing was, that the complete webservice send to ERP wasn't even finished in the code.
So that means we had around 600 invoices to pay with nearly 300.000€ of cash in the first 3 weeks and we couldn't even pay 1 cent - as a urban company!

Shortly after receiving and starting to discussing this high prio request with ABI the project manager of my assigned dev told me he will be gone the next day. He is getting married. And honeymoon. 1 Week. So: Wish him luck, when will his replacement here?

Deep breath.
Deep breath.

There was no replacement. They just had 1 developer. As a 40-people-software-house they had exactly one developer which knows ELO, which they sold to A LOT of companies.

He came back, 1 week gone, we asked for a meeting, they told us "oh, he is now in other ELO projects planned, we can offer you time from him in 4 weeks earliest".

To cut a long story short (it's to late for that, right?) we fought around 3 month with ABI to even rescue this project in any thinkable way. The solution mid February was, that I (software dev) would visit crash courses in ELO to be the second developer ABI didnt had, even without working for ABI....

Now its may and we decided to cut strings with ABI in ELO and switch to a new company who knows ELO. There where around 10 meetings on CEO-level to make this a "good" cut and not a bad cut, because we can't afford to scare them (think about the 300K tool they sold us...).

01.06.2019 we should start with the new company. 2 days before I found out, by accident, that there was a password on the project file on the server for one of the ELO services. I called my boss and my CEO. No one knows anything about it. I found out, that ABI sneaked into this folder, while working on another thing a week ago, and set this password to lock us out. OF OUR OWN FCKING FILE.
Without this password we are not able to fix any bug, develop any feature or even change an image within ELO, regardless, that we paid thausend of hours for that.

When we asked ABI about this, his CEO told us, it is "their property" and they will not remove it.
When I asked my CEO about it, they told me to do nothing, we can't scare them, we need them for the 300K tool.

No punt.
No finish.

Just the project file with a password still there today

Help. I'm drowning in spaghetti code

I've been working at a working student (15 hours/ week) at a local software company for about a month now... and with everything I learned at college I'm kind of getting eye cancer here.
We still use SVN
We don't have any coding guidelines. No checkstyle, no overview over the program. When I started there I was just giving a ticket and they said good luck.
We just have some basic RCPTT Tests inside Eclipse and most of Themen don't work in the trunk because the gui got changed...
At least we have a ticket system but it doesn't get used by most of the working students.
I found 10 other bugs while reproducing and trying to fix 1 bug.
And I've never seen Java raped so badly. Today I saw a line that started with 6 brackets because whoever wrote it wanted to cast like there was no tomorrow. I see more instanceof in one day than in my whole devlife before.
The only thing we have is two normal employees that review our code before we are allowed to commit it into the trunk.
So yeah... I'm drowning in spaghetti-code.

When you finally see a series of ✓'s across all tests - today is a good day!

Now to write a whole bunch more that......, that dickhead past @C0D4 didn't do.

Today was a manic-depressive kind of day. Spent the morning helping some developers with getting their code to run a stored procedure to drop old partitions, but it wasn't working on their end. It was a fairly simple proc. But working with partitions is a little like working with an array. I figured out that they were passing the wrong timestamp, and needed to add +1 to delete the right partition. Got that sorted out, and things were good. Lunch time.

After lunch I did some busy work, and then the PO comes up at about 2PM and says he's assigned some requests to me. The first was just attaching some scripts. Easy. The second, the user wants a couple of schemas exported ... at 6PM. I've been in the office since 6:45AM.

While I'm setting up some commands to run for the data export, a BA walks up and asks if I'm filling in for another DBA who is out for a few weeks. Yep. There's a change request that hasn't been assigned, and he normally does the work. I ask when it's due. Well, the pre-implementation was supposed to be done in the morning, but it wasn't, and we're in the implementation window ... half way through. I bring up the change task, and look at. Create new schema and users. That's all it says. The BA laughs. I tell I need more to go on. 10 minutes later he sends an email with the information. There's only two hours left in the window, and I can only use half of it, because the production guys have to their stuff, and we're in their window. Now I'm irritated, because I'm new to Oracle, and it's an unforgiving mistress. Fortunately, another DBA says he'll do it, so that we can get it done in time. But can't work it either, because Dev DBAs don't have access to QA, and the process required access for this task. Gets shelved until the access issue is resolved. It's now after 4:15PM. I'm going to in traffic with that 6PM deadline.

I manage to get home and to the computer by 5:45PM. Log in. Start VPN. Box pops on screen. Java needs to update. I chose skip update. Box pops up again. It won't let me log in until Java is current. Passed.

I finally get logged in, and it's 6:10PM. I'm late getting the job started. I pull up Putty and log into the first box, and paste my pre-prepared command in the command line and hit error. Command not found. I'm tired, so it's a moment to sink in. I don't have time for this.

I log into DBArtisan and pull up the first data base, use the wizard to set the job, and off it goes. Yay. Bring up the second database, and have enter the connect info. Host not found. Wut? Examine host name. Yep, it's correct. Try a different method. Host not found. Go back to Putty. Log in. Past string. Launch. Command not found. Now my brain is quitting on me. Why now? It's after 6:30PM. Fiddle with some settings, reset $Oracle home. Try again. Yay. It works. I'm done. It's after 7PM.

There is nothing like technology to snatch the euphoria of a success away from you. It's a love-hate thing, but I wouldn't trade it for anything else. I'm done. Good night.

Hey guys,

I think the topic of this week is very important.

Older, experienced devs are giving their skills and advices to the younger one.

Some of you maybe know it, I'm a young developer, who started his apprenticeship at september.

I'm feeling good there, the others are friendly. I learn a Lot there. I had experience before I started there. It's my Hobby to code so I started coding when I was 14.

You can't know anything, everyone makes mistakes, this is what I've learned and this is important to remember.
There are these days like today, when your Boss isn't there and you have to work alone. You have to do many things, and you are desperated because nothing Works, you can't ask anyone, you are completly alone. There are these days, when nothing seems to work. But there are also these days when everything Just Works fine and you are happy with yourself.
This is important to remember.
For me its very hard. Days like today are driving me crazy and I'm very sad, even when I know, that this is Kind of normal not to know everything and have Problems, especially when you are young as me and started your first apprenticeship 3 months ago.

Tomorrow I'm also alone, I'm a Little Bit feared of tomorrow (you say that in that Way? :P) When I think of tomorrow and that I don't know How to proceed and sitting there, I'm getting frustrated and Kind of sad. But I know that this will Make you even better some day, because you learn and gets better - day for day.

At least there was something good today. My stickers finally arrived! To Germany! That was fast! Thanks everyone, Thanks! And Thank you @dfox for building this great community!

What are you advices? And how you handle these situations? I hope tomorrow everything Works fine :/

*flashback to days of windows xp*
Just finished formatting and installing xp on friend's trash pc cuz the os was compromised due to a shitload of viruses. Notice that other partitions might still be infected and i don't have an antivirus on me.
"Big boi Ill be back in an hour, just whatever you do, don't open ANY drives no matter how urgent it is. Just Don't do it or i won't be able to help you"

Come back and VIOLA this worthless trash avocado opened a drive to play a game and d pc was infected. Again. Back to square one. It almost broke my heart. Almost.

I remember that day well. I was 15yo and hopeful. That day marks d start of my hatred toward tech incompetent people.
SO FKIN
A N G E R Y

So today
College
My classmates stink of incompetence. I'm not that smart in fact i consider myself to be a noob among devs but seeing ppl that are several order of magnitudes trashier than me breaks my heart and makes me soo Fkin

A N G E R Y

Hey you cunt of a skunk, WHY can't you even compile a fkin cpp file without an IDE what the fuck is wrong with you? What do u mean ur program isn't compiling? Well it literally says there syntax error on line 15 congrats u moron u fkin spelled else as esle. Why shud I waste my time on stupid Shitty ppl like u huh?

And waddup mr shithead.No. Not gonna help you partition ur drives and install a fkin linux just cuz ur too lazy to google it urself.
And if i refuse to help cuz im working on my shit then I AM D BAD GUY? Stop bitching about me u lazy bastards get ur lazy arse off and read the fkin book. Watch a tutorial or sm shit why the fuck can't u understand YOU LITERALLY PAY TO COME HERE AND YOU AREN'T EVEN TRYING TO LEARN THE BASICS GOOD LUCK GETTING A JOB YOU WORTHLESS CUNTS.

Now now all the poison is out i can finally focus on improving myself and stop giving a fuck about them. Its hard to be calm and cool when ur surrounded by ppl like this all day. Even harder when there is almost noone that you can look upto. All this time, there's only one thing I've learnt- in a place like dis, being an asshole is better dan being polite.

At 20 I thought my life would be an adventure. At 30 it seems like it's a rerun.

The reality is that life is full of grey areas, "good guys and bad guys" on all sides of most issues, and the story and excitement eventually end.

sometimes getting old feels like becoming comfortable with being numb and mediocre.

you are not the star at the center of your own story.

there is no story. there is only today, and then tomorrow, and then the day after that for as long as they happen to go on.

I can see no greater meaning or purpose behind this circus.

people think in months, seasons, years. maybe some of you even have five year plans.

but for me, rome was yesterday. and every rome to come. thats how near it is. It is so close, it and so many times before and after it, I cannot explain the sensation.

and in the vast gulfs of time, I see the wars, the conflicts, the narratives, and they unfold like dust or scum swirling on a pond, mechanistic, telling stories about nothing, algae struggling over territory on a rock.

as clearly as day, I see it all.

I saw your birth, and I saw your death. Your pain, and your greatest joy. How is it possible to love a total stranger and know them intimately because of their shared humanity? And still.

And from afar, in the stillness, I can't help being detached from the world and its problems.
And when we die, it is as if the world dies with us. Because it is not the end of the world, but the death of our own.

Softly go mortals, gently to their gods, like flowers in the fading summer. Never grasping that the permanence of the true identity and the temporality of the spirit are as fundementally distinct as the permanence of say "the G note", against the brief sound it makes when touched.

Eh. forget it. Sentimentality is a curse sometimes.

That moment when you decide to look why Vim's regex rules are a bit inconsistent and find out this program has a setting called "very magic".

Today is a good day.

So one of my clients had a different company do a penetrationtest on one of my older projects.

So before hand I checked the old project and upgraded a few things on the server. And I thought to myself lets leave something open and see if they will find it.

So I left jquery 1.11.3 in it with a known xss vulnerability in it. Even chrome gives a warning about this issue if you open the audit tab.

Well first round they found that the site was not using a csrf token. And yeah when I build it 8 years ago to my knowledge that was not really a thing yet.

And who is going to make a fake version of this questionair with 200 questions about their farm and then send it to our server again. That's not going to help any hacker because everything that is entered gets checked on the farm again by an inspector. But well csrf is indeed considered the norm so I took an hour out of my day to build one. Because all the ones I found where to complicated for my taste. And added a little extra love by banning any ip that fails the csrf check.

Submitted the new version and asked if I could get a report on what they checked on. Now today few weeks later after hearing nothing yet. I send my client an email asking for the status.

I get a reaction. Everything is perfect now, good job!

In Dutch they said "goed gedaan" but that's like what I say to my puppy when he pisses outside and not in the house. But that might just be me. Not knowing what to do with remarks like that. I'm doing what I'm getting paid for. Saying, good job, your so great, keep up the good work. Are not things I need to hear. It's my job to do it right. I think it feels a bit like somebody clapping for you because you can walk. I'm getting off topic xD

But the xss vulnerability is still there unnoticed, and I still have no report on what they checked. So I have like zero trust in this penetration test.

And after the first round I already mentioned to the security guy in my clients company and my daily contact that they missed things. But they do not seem to care.

Another thing to check of their to do list and reducing their workload. Who cares if it's done well it's no longer their responsibility.

2018 disclaimer: if you can't walk not trying to offend you and I would applaud for you if you could suddenly walk again.

I'm feeling like writing this down...

So today I got told off by my boss. Why? Because my job bores me.

My current title, "webmaster", is quite similar to "plumber" where I work. I fix holes on our websites, and I tell "qualified" people (external providers) how a project should be made. Nothing exciting, nothing creative, boring.

So I got told off today for being "laid-back" in a newsletter project (GDPR, looking at you) and not being thorough in my procedures of testing and configuration. Fair enough, I didn't care and I admitted it. It's a boring drag-and-drop done in literally 5 minutes, there's no added brain-value here. Plus I got told off by my IT Manager because our Exchange server would not let me receive test emails. Still doesn't work after a day. Yay.

Then she said "we're doing exciting things here, it's not always the case anywhere else you'd work". And I'm like: "really? I love writing code, seeing things coming alive, investigating why things don't run smoothly, writing efficient code (both in performance and in readability)". I hear many friend devs telling me they're doing that and what they do during their "dev-day"... All I'm doing here is "maintenance" (a.k.a boring) stuff that apparently is "exciting". Adding a <script> to handle google tag manager is hell fun, going through compiled CSS and change color values is also thrilling, finding out if a PDF handler application can handle PDF files, re-plugging a computer monitor to make it work...

I think she meant that I'm not at my place here.

Didn't want to tell her that I have no motivation in doing things I don't enjoy making, i.e, my job.

Good thing I have an interview in two weeks

Elon musk has shown himself to be a terrible person, a worse manager and someone who hasn't a clue of what a code review is. A summarily fires so many people that he can't find someone to open the doors for his big in person meeting or the vet the badges. He offers 3 months termination pay or you can work 12 hours a day 7 days a week hardcore. But none of the payroll people are around anymore either. Critical subsystems have not a single engineer left to work on them. He's paranoid that employees will sabotage the software. But I think he's doing such a good job it would be impossible to tell that anyone else was helping him.
An engineer wrote a prescient seven page report listing problems ahead including user verification. So Elon twit-fired him.
Also entirely predictable is the stress that the world cup will put on the system beginning today, I believe. He doesn't "like" microservices.
I work for the psychiatrist once who barely needed to sleep. Maybe Elon can function with 12-hour days week in week out. But it's cool to think you're going to squeeze substantially more work out of people by doubling their hours. More likely you will more than double their errors and what will that do to you budget? 50 years ago IBM determined that the best way to improve programmer productivity was to give each one their own office.
I can't believe he's whining over spending 13 million dollars a year on food. That is so far from being a strategic item. Soapbox out.

So today is my last day at my current job. I've been here for 4 years and started working here even before I'd even graduated high school. It's really bittersweet. On the one hand I'm so excited for my new job (and vacation), but on the other hand I'll miss this place so damn much. Some say you shouldn't get too attached to your employer, and while that might be true for many cases, I feel that I've gained nothing but positive things from these last 4 years.

Having gone from just having colleagues to having actual friends has been an awesome journey, and I think a good indication of our good relationship is the fact that one of them even wrote me a goodbye song for our little goodbye breakfast this morning.

Idk, just thoughts...

Anyways, away I go. Let's hope my new job will be somewhat good as well.

So lets start here, as i have been preparing myself for a while for that rant. I have been putting it off for a while, but today I had enough.
Fuck react-native and fuck facebook react-native team. Bunch of lazy incompetent twats.
The all amazing framework that suppose to be speed up your development process, since you don't have to compile your code after each change. SO FUCKING WHAT if the god damned framework is so fucking buggy and so fucking shit that you constantly have to fix build, dependancies etc issues. Every day since I work on this project that is using react-native I have to deal with some of the react fucked up behaviour. You got an issue ? don't worry google it just to find out that 100 other people had the same issue. Scroll through down the bottom of the page just to find out that facebook devs have closed the issue as resolved (without fucking fixing it) because there wasnt recent replies to the post. Are you fucking kidding me? It's ok thou, create a new issue just to get an automatic reply from the bot that locks the thread and keeps it locked till you update your React-native version to the newest one. You do that and guess fucking what? Their newest version fucks up remote debugging on iOS(fucking android been broke for over a year) so say good bye to debugging your js code. Documentation is fucking trash. You found a nice function like autoCaptialise on your text input? Great! Ah wait, its not fucking working, what is wrong? You google this just to fucking found out it, function never worked on android, so why the fuck you still have it exposed and still have it in your docs? You want to add package? So fucking ez, just type npm install <name of the package>. Ha! fuck you, you still have to go and add them fucking manually in gradle in android and in pod in xcode, because obviously react-native is a one big fucking bullshit. Oh and a scroll view is a fucking glorious highlight of that framework, try add some styling to it, you gonna have loads of fun. Fuck react-native. And fuck the fucking idiot who convinced my boss that framework is so fucking great and now I have to work on this shit. Sincerely Xamarin Developer.

I think I might change my middle name to "I told you so"

Couple of weeks ago I proposed integrating a daily process job into an existing WPF application (details of what+why would be too long to explain) and the manager suggested I make the changes

Me: "I can do it, but Jay has the most experience with that application. I don't have his WPF skills"
Mgr: "How hard can WPF be? If it uses the MVVM pattern, it should be a snap."
Me: "Its nearly an 8 year old WPF project with several chefs in that kitchen. I pretty sure I could figure it out, but that is a difference between 2 weeks and 2 days. Integration is pretty straight forward, Jay could probably do it in a day."
DevA: "WPF is easy. MVVM makes it even easier. I worked on the shipping app."
Me: "That's was a brand new, single page app, but yea, it should be easy."
DevB: "WPF has been around a long time and the tools have really matured. I don't understand what is so difficult."
Me: "I didn't say anything would be difficult, I know with that application, there is going to be complexity we need to figure out."
DevB: "It uses the MVVM, so all we need is the user control, a view model, controller, and its done."
DevA: "Sounds easy to me."
Mgr: "If you need more time to work on the vendor project, I'll have DevB work on the integration."

<yesterday>
Me: "How is the integration going?"
DevB: "This app is a mess. I have no idea how they got the control collections to work. If I hard-code everything, I can get it to work. This dynamic stuff is so confusing. Then there is the styling. Its uses dark mode, but no matter what I do, my controls show up in light mode."
Me: "The app uses Prism, so the control configuration is in, or around, the startup code."
DevB: "That makes sense. Will it fix the styling too?"
Me: "I have no idea. When I looked at it, some controls loaded the styles from the main resource, other's have it hard-coded. Different chefs in the kitchen, I guess. How far have you got?"
DevB: "I've created invoice button. That is as far as I got"
Me: "I'm finished with the vendor project and I'll be wrapping up the documentation today. I can try to help next week."
DevB: "Thanks. I think we might have to get Jay to help if we can't figure this out."
Me: "Good idea"

Two weeks and only a button. A button? I miss Delphi.

Today, I was so certain that all the functionalities were implemented to handle some webhook calls from a third-party service. It's a script I wrote that has been running for 2+ years uninterrupted or without any issues.

We got some "complaints/notices" today that some "special" actions weren't registered, so I thought that the third-party service just didn't send those actions via their webhook. After some research I found a part where they explained that those actions trigger the webhook like any other action etc. So..

First thought: "okay, maybe they implemented that at a later stage" (was not the case)
Second thought: "maybe this is not what the client meant" (it was)
Third thought: "Then it should have been implemented" (it wasn't)

Okay, time to look at the code to see where this could get handled but apparently isn't. All the actions look good, nice, clean handeling etc, nicely documented code (gave the 'past-me' mentally a high-five)..

I scroll further down to that specific action and it was quiet obvious why it didn't work.. I just see an empty function with the comment:

"//TODO: maybe handle this action one day. don't know what this does atm, probably unused.. Will take a look at it next week.."

.. :D

I took my 'high-five' back..I just needed to copy-paste some other code and change 1-2 parameters..

! rant
Today has been a good day.
Woke up telling myself I should make a build for my game to see how it perform (didn't do a single one in several months). Was expecting some issues like always. But everything built on first try, on Windows and Linux (which is a fist attempt for the later).
So yea, today has been a good day 😎

!devRelated

I personally think that one of the worst things a person can be is a bad driver.

I really hate the driving culture in my city.

This ain't some third world country with no roads and no traffic signs or regulations. We have very very nice roads. Good traffic systems in place. Decent driving speeds and people STILL manage to fuck shit up.

Not one fucking day do I get in my truck without wanting to murdee someone.

I flipped off about 3 people today. One of them started to scream at me. I told the bitch ass motherfucker to do something about it. I was really hoping a motherfucker would.

I really hate these fucking people.

My fucking city is the reason why Trump supporters get off on hating mexicans. How the fuck can I blame them if when driving through such fucking city damn near every fucker on a vehicle drives with 0 regard for others.

Fuck this bullshit man. This is fucking Texas. I have yet to see nicer fucking roads, no fucking excuse really.

I am going to kill someone one of these days. And I will aim poorly...see if that shit hurts more.

Sorry to keep whining about my stupid fucking job, but y'all, I think I'm nearing my limit.

There's some good...I am pretty much free to resolve issues any way I want to, as the only other person in the company who "codes" only knows one old ass language that doesn't apply to 90% of the rest of the tech stack at all, and some SQL - all of that to say, we may disagree, but ultimately, these matters are always deferred to me at the end of the day, insofar as the actual implementation goes (which is to say I am not micromanaged). At least as far as non-visuals are concerned, because those of course, are the most important things. Button colors and shit, woo hoo**. That's what we should focus on as we're bringing in potentially millions of dollars per month - the god damn button color and collapsible accordions based on data type over the shit ass DB performance bottleneck, the lack of redundancy or backups (aside from the one I made soon after I started -- literally saved everyone today because of that. My thanks? None, and more bullshit tasks) or the 300GB+ spaghetti code nightmare that is the literal circulatory system of the FUCKING COMPANY. Hundreds of people depend on it for their livelihoods, and those of their families, but fuck me in the face, right? I'm just a god damn nerd who has worked for the federal government, a handful of fortune 500's, a couple of fortune 100's, some startups, etc. But the fuck do I know about the lifecycle of companies?

I could continue ranting, but what's the point? I've got a nice little adage that I've started to live by, and y'all might appreciate it: "If everything is a priority/is important, nothing is". These folks just don't fucking get it. I'm torn because, on the one hand, they waste my time and kinda underpay me, in addition to forcing me to be onsite for 50 hours a week. They don't listen to me, couldn't give a flying shit about my experientially based opinions. I'm just a fucking chimp with a typewriter, there to take commands like a fucking waiter. But there's a lot of job security, assuming I don't fucking snap one day, and the job market for devs (I'm sure I don't need to tell you) is hostile atm. I'm also drinking far more than usual, and I really need to do something about that. It's only wednesday - I think...not 100% on that truth be told, and I logged my fourth trip to the liquor store this week already.

**Dear backenders - don't ever learn front end, or if you do, just lie about it to avoid being designated full stack. It's not worth it.

Today was very good day for me:
one of my friend said he is going to buy new phone as his older phone is unrepairable (Android failed to boot). I took the phone installed twrp - unlocked bootloader and then flashed cynogen os and boom! android booted up.
Now they think me as a genius and says i wrote that Android OS, i tried saying its just a hack due to open source but they still think me as a HACKER! :)

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.

I think I like teaching.

Today I was helping out a friend with an algorithm for an assignment because he had no idea how to do it (we're on the second semester). You could see that we was completely lost, without a clue on what to do. So I showed him how to think about programming, how to figure out the problem and the solution before going to the code. I was so goddam happy when I saw he understood it. At the start I was guiding him heavily, but towards the end I'd just loosely describe what he had to do (and, of course, explain why) and he'd know how to do it. It just made me so fucking happy and so fucking proud of him, I was dancing on my chair, you guys have no idea. He went from 0 to 60 in 2 hours, I could teach him what the teacher couldn't.

I college I'm kinda explaining a lot of stuff (mostly programming and calculus) to my friends, even to classmates I don't know (I made a few friends this way) and I fucking love it. Seeing people completely lost, shining a light on them and seeing them fly, it's fucking awesome. Idk it's just very fulfilling.

Not sure I'd like all other responsibilities that come with being a teacher, but teaching in of itself is **g r e a t**, definitely a career path I'm considering.

Today was a good day :)

Today is the first day of the last year of my bachelor's degree.
It's also the first day of work for one of my closest friends.
I wish him the best for this new adventure.

Good luck my friend and have a nice day !

This week I got a promotion after being a junior for a year. Boss said Im a medior now and my monthly salary raised with 400 euro per month

Feels good but what feels bad is that a coworker of mine which has been contracted recently without any development experience is still making 400 more a month..

The thing is that this "developer" wanted to become a Java developer, he has been given time during work to study Java and in the meanwhile join the team thats working on a saas product (my team, where im lead dev)

During the 3 months ive counted a maximum of 10 commits and i was done with him which conflicted in a very bad vibe at the office.

During a refinement I asked if everybody understood what needs to be done, no questions asked. Next day when i was working at a clients office on another project 9 am i git a Skype message "Can you tell me What to do? I have no idea" where I replied "you should have asked me yesterday, i am not going to help you unless u come up with a question that makes sense.. what have u tried urself?".. Well then he got mad and stopped doing what he was trying to do.

The next morning i talked with him and we agreed to have a 1hour session to talk him through the user story. When we were done, he said that he understood and was going to work on it.

Next day I check, no commits, so during stand up i confronted hmj with this and he admitted hes been lacking and wanted to talk with the boss and me after stand up.

Well he admitted things were going to fast to keep up for him because he is doing some sysadmin stuff aswell.. the plan of becoming a Java dev was now history and he left the team..

Now he is just doing some sysadmin stuff but its been 3 days that hes been saying today ill setup a tomcat on the servers and give you SSH acces to deploy your .war files, today I finally gained access but he couldnt figure out how to move the war to the webapps folder.. And i wasnt allowed to transfer it to there..

When you spend half an hour long at your code wondering why your do while loop only works once.
Then you realise there is a return just before the end of the loop.

Today was not a good day

We had a Christmas party at work. We did a traditional white elephant gift game. I stole some larping swords from one guy, somebody else stole them from me, and another guy named Bilbo stole them and ended up with them.

After the party I am at my desk. Bilbo comes over with the swords and gives them to me. He said, "You looked like you really wanted these." I said thank you. I was really touched by that gesture.

Bilbo had tried to get golf balls during the game and lost them. So I went to the store at lunch today and got him a 12 pack of Titleists for $25. I don't golf, but people I work with say they are good. I left these on his desk. He comes to me later and says, "I cannot accept these. It is just too much money." I said its not too much and explained I was touched by his gesture. He tells me to take them back and get something nice for myself. Which is another nice gesture. Bilbo said when we get back from Christmas break we can do lunch.

So I am a bit baffled. Did I cross a line I shouldn't cross? Is Bilbo just too nice? I was really hoping he would enjoy this. I get it. We are coworkers and not family. I truly respect and like the guy.

Anyway, I am unsure what to do with them. I didn't really want to take them back. I tried to give them to another guy I work with and he wouldn't take them either. One talked about paying for them then decided he didn't want them. I have more shopping to do so I can take them back then. It kind of weirds me out to say $25 is too much money. I can hardly go a day without spending that much on a couple of random small things.

I'm buried in projects that I never get time to work on. My boss took the week off, and I'm getting emails from users asking about adding more projects to the board. I'm a single dev at my company. Normally, I have enough patience to get through the day, but today my CIO decided it would be a good time tell my coworker to let me know that the company dumped a third party we used for tons of report automation, and that I need to get these reports hand rolled in house asap. When I sent him a message asking for any kind of details on what this would involve, I found out he left early for the day.

I'm already stressed and putting in extra hours (salaried, so no extra pay) and am having trouble meeting deadlines for projects as it is because I'm constantly pulled away from my dev work to do non-dev work.

I just landed this dev position six months ago and haven't had a chance to build my resume. I'm getting "OK" money considering this is my first full-time dev job. Should I be looking to get out? Suck it up and get the experience? I know we all have crazy expectations on us and frustrating PMs, but after chats with other devs, I get the feeling that my situation is beyond fucked.

Just go to GPT and get me the code today!!!

Like wtf why does every non-tech guy thinks GPT is the solution for each problem.
So, a workmate wanted a fullstack system ready in 2 days and argues that its too easy with GPT. I mean yeah GPT helps, sometimes, on frequent rare occasions. But, that can't be the solution to everything, like ask it to setup the whole backend frontend integration, will it? ask it to manage assets will it? ask it to write complex code, it fails, miserably, okay like me but that's the point. Just because random transformers pop up each week containing some random shitty weights (not always agreed) that can't replace a full stack developer. These 'attention' seeking models are as good as another tool, a bit efficient, but at the end of the day its just a tool, all it does is lessen the typing time but gives more errors too. The average time remains the same. And my non-tech manager can't understand he can't do it himself earlier using GPT. Succkkkkkkssss!

Today I was debugging some shitty code left by unknown developer whos linkedin account is dead and phone number left in contact card calls local pizza house.

I knew it qould be hard so i've made myself comfortable, gathered 5 redbulls and other items that diabetes people would kill for eating again.

After around 10 minutes i was already frustrated but i kept the pace. "Who is the best, little devie, you!" - I fooled my ego to keep up and shut up.

After around 10 next minutes my attention span has ended. Limbic system started injecting some hormones into my brain, but I remained silent.

First two energy shots were applied. I felt like hero again. Two minutes after I was debugging through some library that was written fo java and found out that it ahots some natives to a c lang lib called "mypreciouslib".

Oh flock, how can i debug it if ita compiled , I cannot do such things, Me be only junior dev. I started swearing, but silently.

Started ollydbg to see what is inside livrary, i searched through but i couldnt match anything it was like mess stirred with fecals of an elephant.

So I opened aida pro " with vitamins" cause obviously, our pm says "but you write in java right " so we dont need those tools right ? Fuck no.

Aida was better at least i could find some funcions calls, but hey, the progress. I was swearing out loud, with earplugs in. And by the time I've sweared all the things in company i got a reminder.

"Hey -insane- stop swearing, the children are here."-sayys pm, it is some kind of " family and work " shitfuck day.

So i asked them: " why wouldnt you buy this fucking tools for programmming for us , you wouldnt have to hear me fucking swearing" . then i realized that , colleagues in room heard all of it, and one of them, total fuckface buttlicker(dev without bit of knowledge) started something like "you are wrong, see how good our software is sellling". Pm was like smiling like he thanked him for buttlicking again. Not to mention he is officially retarded and i know his password to all our services cause he is so smart to put it into text file and then have sharing files in windows turned on.

The other one told aloud, that we would be much better with some debugging tools that are better than fucking eclipse if we have to work without code.

PM told us that he will arrange a meeting. At that point I didnt care any longer. I just fired myself, fuck them.

Please saint Stallman give me hope and joy of programming from my teenage years. Uhhh..

Trigger warning:
Emotional !dev love life rant

I think this is not the right place to pour my heart out, but despite its more recent infights I still consider devRant to be a special community to me. And I guess if devRant is my goto place for support that's an issue. But maybe I just need to shout into a void because this is not about you solving this for me.

I have been in this relationship for ~6 years. My first great love. In the beginning, everything was perfect - a love story like from a cheesy movie. We've been through a lot to be together: Long distance, moving countries, a ton of bureaucracy (as she's from another country). So many memories.

It came as a surprise to me when she ended things. It really shouldn't have been. We've talked a lot about the reasons and I now see how much I've taken her for granted and neglected our relationship. I see now how I've been avoiding my problems and how I didn't work on my (mental and physical) health issues as good as I need to - not just for any relationship, but for myself. The regret/shame/guilt of not giving it 100% and of neglecting her weights heavily on me (besides the loss) and I am not sure what is worse.

Besides our relationship withering because of neglecting emotional needs, she also questioned our compability. We certainly have differences and different interests and we're both somewhat uncertain whether we really fit, if we ignore our history/emotions. It is actually a question that popped up in my head before sometimes, but I was too afraid to look into it for fear the answer is no. But here we are and ignoring that didn't help.

For now, we both need time to think about what we really want and whether this includes the other. We agreed that we need some distance to process the feelings. We still live in the same flat but for now she's staying with a friend most of the time and I'll also have a friend's place available soon. If in some time we both feel like we want to be together, we can date again - however she was also clear that she doesn't want to give any false hope and her current vision doesn't include me. If not, well have to hire a divorce lawyer. (Why you need a lawyer for that if both agree is beyond me.)

I am shattered. When it became clear to me that the relationship is over (and I ruined it), I got nauseous to the point that I threw up constantly for 6 hours. For the following 2 days I only cried and haven't eaten. Third day I started cleaning up the flat (long overdue!) - mostly for her tbh but I know it's good for myself, so better do the right thing with wrong motivation than sob all day -
talked to my psychiatrist and she brought some lunch which I could eat. Today (fourth day) she came over and we cooked lunch. I am still feeling terrible but the first days have been the worst I've ever felt and I've been trough quite a bit of (physical & chronic) pain - emotional pain hits different.

Let's see how this works out. In any case I now know very clear that I can't continue like before and need to work on my issues (for my own sake). I want be my best self, even if right now I don't have a lot of energy and am very depressed. I got an appointment with a therapist tomorrow - something I should have done years ago but I was overwhelmed with anxiety and analysis paralysis. I hope the future will be brighter and while I still wish to wake up from this nightmare and realize my faults without this breakup, I also know that I have to face reality.

PS: I do feel better now after writing this out. Thanks for listening, I guess.

I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get a ride to the airport on Friday and I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get a ride to the airport on Friday and I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get my car out the time to do it again and I look forward to hearing from you in awhile I have a few questions about the other I have a few questions about the same as the other day I will have a talk at you and I hope to see everyone again and again I apologise I didn't get a response to your advertisement for a while but it is a little chilly here is a copy to the store to buy the car is in a good way to start a little more time with the family for a while but it is a little chilly here is a copy to the time of the year for the first time in a long time and I don't want it for a couple days so I'm just trying for you guys I just want a ride with us to get a few things done and I will be there at the end if this works out well for you and your family a very happy and excited about this weekend so I'm just going to go to the store and get back with me and my family is going to be a little late today but I'm still in my car and I will be there at like midnight so much and have to be at work at the moment but I'll try again later in life I have been trying to get a hold of the guy that I have a meeting with you to discuss the details of the job and I have been working in my room so I can get a ride to the airport on Sunday so we are all on my own and I will be there at noon so I'll just be me my money back and I will get it done this weekend but I will be there at the same time and where would we have been in the hospital for a week or two to see you soon and have a great day today love it and it will not work for me to come in and get a new phone or in person and I am not sure how long it would have taken it off and on again and again I apologise I didn't know you were going to be a little late to the game and it will not work on it this morning I was wondering if you had a choice but I don't know if you have any questions please feel free to contact me at any rate is higher up for it and the other is a good time to come in for an appointment with the surgeon on my phone and I don't want to be a good friend to come in at all and the other is a good time to call and talk about what we can do to help you feel better I can come by to pick up the kids from school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next few days and I have a few more days before we get into my car to go out for lunch at home and I will be there at the same time as you can imagine how hard is it to late to get a new car is a lot more done with the interview and the kids will have a good day at school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next two days so we are all on my way home from the gym and then I will be able to make it today because I'm a very nice person who can do it for you if you want to come by and see you soon and have to go back in the office tomorrow morning at work today but I'm going back and I will be there at the same time and where would we have been trying all of us and the rest are you still interested I can send you a picture of the front and back of the house and the kids are going well with the family for a while but it is a little chilly here is a picture of the front and back of the house is in my prayers as a friend but it will have a great weekend and I will be there at the end if this works out well and that your mom and dad are going to be a bit of an emergency at least you have a good day at school today so I'm going to be in the office tomorrow and will be back to the hotel now I'm in bed with a friend and then I will be able to make it to the meeting tonight but I will be there at the same time I was in a hurry and come to the office and I will send the other side and a little about me and you will see that you sent it out and get a good deal and you have the address of where I can get a ride to work on it this week but will have a good day at school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next two days so we are going to be in the office tomorrow and I have been working in the morning and I will get it done this weekend but will be back in the office on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday are going well for you and your wife is not the case then you have the address of your day goes on and I have been working in the morning and I will be there at the same time I am in need and I'll see what the status is on the way to the airport and then we will have a great day at school today so I'm trying to get a hold of the guy who was the guy who was the guy who is going well and I am going to be out by then but if I can find a way to get the car out the door to go to the store and I have to be in a relationship with a friend and then I will be able to make it to the meeting and will get the info for the guy who was the guys are doing the meeting at the church

1. Nothing lasts forever and you always need to be prepared for change.

That might be technology acquired by other company and dropped completely by all of people or new technology take over the market for a year and is gone after that and no one remember about it.

2. If you go opposite way then all of people around you that might be actually the best way.

That learned me to always look around for new stuff cause this small stuff that people make today can be big company next day just cause they got annoyed by things and start something new.

3. Trust nothing that you see.

Bugs are everywhere

4. Quality and speed doesn’t matter when you start doing something but consistency matters a lot.

When you start doing something you suck and you need to be ok with fact that you’re going to make lots of stupid mistakes and learn from them.
When you start new prototype you don’t need dozen tools to finish it, you don’t need performance or perfection, you need consistency to finish it.

Good luck

I have decided that today is going to be a good day.

git merge master && deploy

Once a guru of mine told me,
"A developer is one who can convert his/her ideas to code and doesn't need to depend on external libraries to help him/her"

His words actually have made me a different person. I mean since that day, I actually started developing things on my own. Until then I was hardly good at coding. Wasn't even clear with the basics. But those words of his had a deep impact on me.

Today I suddenly started thinking about that and honestly, I'm so glad to have met him. I'm so glad that he actually said the above thing to me.
Today, I'm at a position where I can legit build anything I want.
From websites to bots, I make my ideas come to life. All thanks to my guru.

Just thought this might be a good thing to share to motivate others. If it motivated me, I'm sure it might motivate atleast one other person in this community.

Fun fact : Typing on a keyboard that's not plugged into your laptop will not work. Honestly, I should have taken today off. My toddler woke up at 1am screaming bloody murder and didn't get back to bed until 2:30. There's a construction crew hammering up my 14 year old floors to replace it with new ones. My dog is anxious as fuck with all the noise, and truthfully, I'm just staring into my screen hoping the code will write itself. This code will become production deployment logic, so it damn well better be excellent and bug-free. Not a good day to pick up this task.

A little update after yesterday's catastrophe:

No catastrophe today (so far). Managed to clear some space on the servers, and the backup ran correctly overnight.

Also...and I'm still checking this... but I think I've just received a pay rise.

wait....is today...a good day?

Small company, sole engineer. Non-tech management. Increasingly fancy job titles despite working alone most of the time, with the promise of hiring someone (again) I can actually manage soon.

Backlog of projects/tasks is truly a mindfuck, with new things being added each week. This backlog will never ever get done, and nothing matters anyway because the next idea is "the future", all the time.

While I have influence on some aspects of decision making, it usually ends up being what the boss wants. Actively opposed a project because it's just too big of an undertaking, it was forced through anyway. I'm trying to keep the scope manageable as I'm building it now, and it's hard.

"It's the future, we absolutely have to do this. It will be the biggest thing we've ever done."

Boss's excitement then quickly faded since it's actually in development, now nobody really seems to want to know where it's at, or how it will all work. I need to scope it out, with the knowledge that many decisions boss signed off will be questioned when he actually looks at it. We now have even more "exciting" ideas of utter grandeur. Stuff that I can't even begin to comprehend the complexity of, while struggling to keep a self imposed deadline on the current one.

Every single morning we sit on Zoom for a "valuable" "catch-up". This is absolutely perfect for one thing: Completely destroying whatever drive and focus I have going into the day. Unrelated topics, marketing conversations, even more ideas, ideas for ideas sake, small problems blown out of proportion, the list goes on. I recently argued in detail why it should be scrapped or at least be optional to attend. No luck, it's "valuable".

Today a new idea was announced, and we absolutely have to do it ASAP because it can only be better than the current solution. I raise my concerns, saying it's not as easy as you make it out to be, we should properly think about it. Nope! We'll botch something to prove that it works... So you'll base your decision whether it's good on some half ass botch job that nobody really has the mental capacity to actually pay attention to. What a reliable way to measure!

"Our analytics data isn't useful enough to tell us the impact of things we do. We (you) have to fix this." Over the last 2 or so years, I've been pushing for an overhaul and expansion of our data analysis capabilities for exactly this reason. Integrating different data sources into a unified solution so we can easily see what we're doing, etc. Nope, never happened.

The new project idea which is based on wild assumptions is ALWAYS more important than the groundwork.

Now when I mentioned that this is what I wanted to do all along, it got brushed aside. "We don't need to do anything complicated, just fix this, add that, and it's done. It should be an easy thing to do. This is very important for our decision making." Fine, have it your way.

I'm officially burned out. It's so fucking hard to get myself to focus on my work for more than an hour or two. I started a side project, and even that effort is falling victim to my day-job-induced apathy.

I'm tempted to hand in my resignation without another offer on the table. I just need time to rediscover my passion, and go job hunting from that position, instead of the utter desperation of right now.

If you've read through all this rambling, kudos to you!

Last Week Friday:
PM: We'll be taking you off the one project on to another, we'll send the details later.
Me: Cool

*Hours Later*

PM: Ok cool, so you'll be looking at a script that one of our Pillar heads has scripted. You need to make sure it works and that it can run on the server.
Me: *I always thought this guy was useless now i get to see what he can do* Cool, just send the documentation and i'll take a look at it over the weekend. Just tell me when you've sent it.
PM: Cool.
Project Head: I'll inform you when i send the files and how to run them.
Me: *I know how to set up a database locally, i'm not an idiot* Cool.

Whole Weekend I don't get a single message.

Monday Morning:
Project Head(PH): Have you taken a look at it yet?
Me: Taken a look at what?
PH: The Database and the Script
Me: i didn't get any message over the weekend.
PH: I sent it yesterday, it should be in your inbox.
Me: There's Nothing. Sending anything on a Sunday is expecting me not to see it, especially at 10pm. Besides i can't retrieve any of the files in the attachment(Outlook tripping), rather send it in a zip file or upload it to onedrive.

PH sends the link. I get the files, set up the DB, glance at the script.

Me: This is actually interesting.
PH: You know what it does?
Me: My SQL knowledge is below average but i can read and understand it pretty well. So your dynamically copying the database from the server to the warehouse, cool.
It's not going to work though.
PH: Check first.

I check it

Me: Doesn't work, but it sort of works.
PH: What do you mean?
Me: Some tables are populated but some aren't,, how and there's a shit tone of errors.
PH: So i does copy the data over.
Me: Some of the data.
PH: test it on the Server
Me: Not a good idea.
PH: Just try it.
PM: In the mean time i'll send you some documentation i need you to review and edit.
Me: *Idiots* Cool.

Tuesday:
Me: Have you checked it on the server yet?
PH: Not yet, busy.
Me: Where's the documentation again?
PM: I'll send it it a moment.
Me: In the mean time i'll write some script to fix that script that's definitely not going to work.

Wednesday:
Boss: I heard you done with the script
Me: It's not done, but we'll be testing it on the server later.
Boss: Then why are you running it on the server?
Me: Ask the PH and PM.
Boss: What are you doing now?
Me: Well i'm supposed to do documentation *looks at PM* but i haven't recieved any yet, so I've been writing a script to fix the copy script.
PH: Ok we'll test when the boss leaves, after all the meetings.
PM: here's the documentation.
Me: Thanks

I start on documentation.

PH: It didn't work.
Me: I know.
PH: Fix it.

Thursday:
Meeting.
PM: What you doing?
Me: Fixing the script,
PM: Do the documentation first
Me: Cool.

End of the day:
PH: Why you doing the documentation? The script has highest priority.
Me: Ask the PM.

Friday(Today):
Boss: can we talk.
Me: Sure.
Boss: I though you said the script was done?
Me: i said it sort of works, just doesn't do the job 100%.
Boss: Monday i was told it's done.
Me: i only looked through it Monday to understand it, i done nothing before Tuesday. though i have been trying to create a script to fix it.
Boss: Your working really slow hey.
Me: *It's been a week, and stupid people are in charge* I was doing what i was told.
Boss: Cool.(His Upset)

Stupid FUCKEN people, make stupid FUCKEN decisions. But Hey, the boss only see's the final result. I am a human being, even i make mistakes. But there's a huge gap between stupidity and a mistake.