During a random school project.

Me: *Explains why team members idea is bad*

Team member: *Im going to do it like this anyways.*

Me: *add explaination of why idea is bad to git commit log.*

1 week later: some parts of the project dont work like they are suppost to.

Team member: *dude can you help me bla bla....(encounters issue i mentioned regarding his idea)*

Me: *no, i've already got too much on my plate. please, sort it out yourself....*

At the presentation

Teacher: *ask question about problem*

Team member: *tries to blame the problem on me....*

Me: *shows git commit log to teacher*

Me: *passing grade*

Team member: *failing grade*

Justice served.

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.

I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.

So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?

This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:

1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!

2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...

3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.

But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.

There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.

After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.

So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".

So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".

So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.

So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.

If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>

In a user-interface design meeting over a regulatory compliance implementation:
User: “We’ll need to input a city.”
Dev: “Should we validate that city against the state, zip code, and country?”
User: “You are going to make me enter all that data? Ugh…then make it a drop-down. I select the city and the state, zip code auto-fill. I don’t want to make a mistake typing any of that data in.”
Me: “I don’t think a drop-down of every city in the US is feasible.”
Manage: “Why? There cannot be that many. Drop-down is fine. What about the button? We have a few icons to choose from…”
Me: “Uh..yea…there are thousands of cities in the US. Way too much data to for anyone to realistically scroll through”
Dev: “They won’t have to scroll, I’ll filter the list when they start typing.”
Me: “That’s not really the issue and if they are typing the city anyway, just let them type it in.”
User: “What if I mistype Ch1cago? We could inadvertently be out of compliance. The system should never open the company up for federal lawsuits”
Me: “If we’re hiring individuals responsible for legal compliance who can’t spell Chicago, we should be sued by the federal government. We should validate the data the best we can, but it is ultimately your department’s responsibility for data accuracy.”
Manager: “Now now…it’s all our responsibility. What is wrong with a few thousand item drop-down?”
Me: “Um, memory, network bandwidth, database storage, who maintains this list of cities? A lot of time and resources could be saved by simply paying attention.”
Manager: “Memory? Well, memory is cheap. If the workstation needs more memory, we’ll add more”
Dev: “Creating a drop-down is easy and selecting thousands of rows from the database should be fast enough. If the selection is slow, I’ll put it in a thread.”
DBA: “Table won’t be that big and won’t take up much disk space. We’ll need to setup stored procedures, and data import jobs from somewhere to maintain the data. New cities, name changes, ect. ”
Manager: “And if the network starts becoming too slow, we’ll have the Networking dept. open up the valves.”
Me: “Am I the only one seeing all the moving parts we’re introducing just to keep someone from misspelling ‘Chicago’? I’ll admit I’m wrong or maybe I’m not looking at the problem correctly. The point of redesigning the compliance system is to make it simpler, not more complex.”
Manager: “I’m missing the point to why we’re still talking about this. Decision has been made. Drop-down of all cities in the US. Moving on to the button’s icon ..”
Me: “Where is the list of cities going to come from?”
<few seconds of silence>
Dev: “Post office I guess.”
Me: “You guess?…OK…Who is going to manage this list of cities? The manager responsible for regulations?”
User: “Thousands of cities? Oh no …no one is our area has time for that. The system should do it”
Me: “OK, the system. That falls on the DBA. Are you going to be responsible for keeping the data accurate? What is going to audit the cities to make sure the names are properly named and associated with the correct state?”
DBA: “Uh..I don’t know…um…I can set up a job to run every night”
Me: “A job to do what? Validate the data against what?”
Manager: “Do you have a point? No one said it would be easy and all of those details can be answered later.”
Me: “Almost done, and this should be easy. How many cities do we currently have to maintain compliance?”
User: “Maybe 4 or 5. Not many. Regulations are mostly on a state level.”
Me: “When was the last time we created a new city compliance?”
User: “Maybe, 8 years ago. It was before I started.”
Me: “So we’re creating all this complexity for data that, realistically, probably won’t ever change?”
User: “Oh crap, you’re right. What the hell was I thinking…Scratch the drop-down idea. I doubt we’re have a new city regulation anytime soon and how hard is it to type in a city?”
Manager: “OK, are we done wasting everyone’s time on this? No drop-down of cities...next …Let’s get back to the button’s icon …”

Simplicity 1, complexity 0.

Root interviews for a job

So I've been interviewing for fun lately (and for practice), and it's been going mostly well. This one company in particular looks interesting, and they seem to really like me. This morning was interview #4 with them; tomorrow morning is #5.

The previous interviews were pretty enjoyable, especially the last one where I interviewed with one of the senior devs who gave me his "grumpy old man rails quiz." He actually asked some questions I wasn't able to answer! (Mostly dealing with Rails' internals.) Also when showing me the codebase, there were a few things I hadn't seen before, so it's exciting that I'll actually be able to learn something if I sign on. We ended up talking for almost an hour past our allotted time, and we got along famously. He said he was very surprised I did so well on his quiz because most people don't. Everyone else I interviewed with so far has liked me and gave positive reviews, too.

I don't know if I want the job, but that's beyond the scope of this rant anyway. The real reason for this comes next.

My interview today was with the VP of engineering. It was more of a monologue, as he wanted to give me perspective to see if I actually wanted to work there, but it was still very much a monologue. He's an old white guy who seems to loves to drone, and he never seemed very happy when I responded, so I let him drone and drone. Good information though.

But he's very set in his ways in some regards, and two of them were pretty insulting. We never really talked about technicals, and he just assumed that since I wasn't old and graying that I was a junior dev. He said, and I'll quote: "We run a lean but senior team, so we typically only hire senior devs here. But the dev team is all old white men. There's no diversity in talent, age, sex, race, religion, etc, and I'm looking to change that." He made several more allusions to my more junior level, too. He made a lot of assumptions (like how I'm not comfortable with structure because I've been the only dev so often) and got annoyed when I countered them.

I realize he has no idea of my skill level -- even though he should if he was listening to his team -- but to just assume that I'm not talented because I'm young, and bloody hire me just because I'm female? I don't want to be your diversity hire, old man. 🤬

So I'm feeling angry.
I might still take the job because the it offers considerable benefits over where I'm working (despite being quite happy here), but it will absolutely be despite him.

We're using a ticket system at work that a local company wrote specifically for IT-support companies. It's missing so many (to us) essential features that they flat out ignored the feature requests for. I started dissecting their front-end code to find ways to get the site to do what we want and find a lot of ugly code.
Stuff like if(!confirm("blablabla") == false) and whole JavaScript libraries just to perform one task in one page that are loaded on every page you visit, complaining in the js console that they are loaded in the wrong order. It also uses a websocket on a completely arbitrary port making it impossible to work with it if you are on a restricted wifi. They flat out lie about their customers not wanting an offline app even though their communications platform on which they got asked this question once again got swarmed with big customers disagreeing as the mobile perofrmance and design of the mobile webpage is just atrocious.

So i dig farther and farthee adding all the features we want into a userscript with a beat little 'custom namespace' i make pretty good progress until i find a site that does asynchronous loading of its subpages all of a sudden. They never do that anywhere else. Injecting code into the overcomolicated jQuery mess that they call code is impossible to me, so i track changes via a mutationObserver (awesome stuff for userscripts, never heard of it before) and get that running too.

The userscript got such a volume of functions in such a short time that my boss even used it to demonstrate to them what we want and asked them why they couldn't do it in a reasonable timeframe.

All in all I'm pretty proud if the script, but i hate that software companies that write such a mess of code in different coding styles all over the place even get a foot into the door.

And that's just the code part: They very veeeery often just break stuff in updates that then require multiple hotfixes throughout the day after we complain about it. These errors even go so far to break functionality completely or just throw 500s in our face. It really gives you the impression that they are not testing that thing at all.

And the worst: They actively encourage their trainees to write as much code as possible to get paid more than their contract says, so of course they just break stuff all the time to write as much as possible.
Where did i get that information you ask? They state it on ther fucking career page!

We also have reverse proxy in front of that page that manages the HTTPS encryption and Let's Encrypt renewal. Guess what: They internally check if the certificate on the machine is valid and the system refuses to work if it isn't. How do you upload a certificate to the system you asked? You don't! You have to mail it to them for them to SSH into the system and install it manually. When will that be possible you ask? SOON™.
At least after a while i got them to just disable the 'feature'.

While we are at 'features' (sorry for the bad structure): They have this genius 'smart redirect' feature that is supposed to throw you right back where you were once you're done editing something. Brilliant idea, how do they do it? Using a callback libk like everyone else? Noooo. A serverside database entry that only gets correctly updated half of the time. So while multitasking in multiple tabs because the performance of that thing almost forces you to makes it a whole lot worse you are not protected from it if you don't. Example: you did work on ticket A and save that. You get redirected to ticket B you worked on this morning even though its fucking 5 o' clock in the evening. So of course you get confused over wherever you selected the right ticket to begin with. So you have to check that almost everytime.

Alright, rant over.
Let's see if i beed to make another one after their big 'all feature requests on hold, UI redesign, everything will be fixed and much better'-update.

Navy story time again. Grab that coffee and fire up Kali, the theme is security.
So, when I got promoted to Lieutenant Jr. I had to attend a 1-year school inside my nostalgic Naval Academy... BUT! I was wiser, I was older... and I was bored. Like, really bored. What could go wrong? Well, all my fellow officers were bored too, so they started downloading/streaming/torrenting like crazy, and I had to wait for hours for the Kali updates to download, so...
mdk3 wlan0mon -d
I had this external wifi atheros card with two antennae and kicked all of them off the wifi. Some slightly smarter ones plugged cables on the net, and kept going, enjoying much faster speeds. I had to go to the bathroom, and once I returned they had unplugged the card. That kind of pissed me off, since they also thought it would be funny to hide it, along with the mouse.
But, oh boy, they had no idea what supreme asshole I can be when I am irked.
So, arpspoof it is. Turns out, there were no subnetworks, and the broadcast domain was ALL of the academy. That means I shut EVERYONE off, except me. Hardware was returned in 1 minute with the requested apologies, but fuck it, I kept the whole academy off the net for 6 hours. The sysadmin ran around like crazy, because nothing was working. Not even the servers.
I finally took pity on the guy (he had gotten the duties of sysadmin when the previous sysad died, so think about that) and he almost assaulted me when I told him. As it turned out, the guy never had any training or knowledge on security, so I had to show him a few things, and point him to where he could study about the rest. But still, some selective arp poison on select douchebags was in order...
Needless to say, people were VERY polite to me after that. And the net speed was up again, so I got bored. Again. So I started scanning the net.
To be continued...

So I had my exams recently and I thought I'd post some of the most hacky shit I've done there over here. One thing to keep in mind, I'm a backender so I always have to hack my way around frontend!

- Had a user level authentication library which fucked up for some reason so I literally made an array with all pages and user levels allowed so I pretty much had a hardcoded user level authentication feature/function. Hey, it worked!

- CSS. Gave every page a hight of 110 percent because that made sure that you couldn't see part of the white background under the 'background' picture. Used !important about everywhere but it worked :P.

- Completey forgot (stress, time pressure etc) to make the user ID's auto incremented. 'Fixed' that by randomly generating a user id and really hoping during every registration that that user ID did not exist in the database already. Was dirty as fuck but hey it worked!

- My 'client' insisted on using Windows server.Although I wouldn't even mind using it for once, I'd never worked with it before so that would have been fucked for me. Next to that fact, you could hear swearing from about everyone who had to use Windows server in that room, even the die hard windows users rather had linux servers. So, I just told a lot of stuff about security, stability etc and actually making half of all that shit up and my client was like 'good idea, let's go for linux server then!'. Saved myself there big time.

- CHMOD'd everything 777. It just worked that way and I was in too much time pressure to spend time on that!

- Had to use VMWare instead of VirtulBox which always fucks up for me and this time it did again. Windows 10 enjoyed corrupting the virtual network adapters after every reboot of my host so I had to re-create the whole adapter about 20 times again (and removing it again) in order to get it to work. Even the administrator had no fucking clue why that was happening.

- Used project_1.0.zip etc for version control :P.

Yup, fun times!

I am bloody sick of being on my own.

I was the sole dev at the last few jobs I've held, with the exception of API Guy -- who didn't really help much, and who got fired / quit six months after I started. Every other job I've either been the only dev, or the only web dev. (Exception:My boss at my previous job was a Rails dev, but he has zero time to code, and was significantly less experiened so he could only rarely help anyway.)

But now I'm in a company with a bunch of other devs, and they're all ostensibly senior devs, so you'd think I should be able to ask questions, right? And get answers? that actually help? like "Hey, you built this; how does it work?" No bloody way.

So far every time I've asked someone for help, they've been incompetent. I asked about what a few flags did, and got an answer that basically said "you just gotta know. oh, and the labels aren't up to date, so don't trust what they say." I asked the head of the "product team" about a ticket that he wrote, and he changed what it meant four times within two days. I asked about another, and he said "oh, that isn't reproduceable." Thanks. I asked about mailers, and got two very different, very incompete walkthroughs from the more senior devs (9+ years on this codebase) that didn't help. I asked two people about how users and roles work, and still have no idea what kind of user (there are like twelve?) is what, what roles even exist, or how to check for permissions. `@current_user` is a thing, but idfk what it holds since that can change considerably, and there's an impersonation feature that changes how it works, too. I ask the product guy again about where to link something, and he has no idea. I ask said product guy about what this feature needs to do, and he doesn't know. I ask what the legal team needs, and i get nothing. I ask the designer where the goddamn CSS lives, and he doesn't know; he apparently just puts it wherever he feels like, even if it's a completely unrelated stylesheet. As long as it works, right?

I ask very simple and straighforward questions, and it takes them forever to get back to me saying what amounts to "idk, ask someone else."

This feels like the same crap all over again, except now there are a bunch of devs I can ask that give me basically the same answers as the sales people always did. Always "idk" or a confusing mess of an 'answer' that skips most/all of the important bits. At least these people don't [usually] contradict themselves.

So, @Root is all alone, again.
And currounded by incompetence.
Again.

For fuck's sake.
Can't I catch a break?

• Good night’s sleep (8-9 hours)
• Clearly defined requirements.
• A fun challenge to solve.
• An idea of how to begin.
• Music! Something fast paced and/or harsh. I find soft tunes, good lyrics, etc. are usually very distracting.
• Deadlines help, too, even if they make me stressed out and work too much.
• No political BS / hateful and intolerant political comments from my coworkers within the past day or two, as being called a horrible, racist nazi by association absolutely kills my desire to do any work for them. Going two days without something like this happening is exceedingly rare.
• Being left alone, *especially* in the morning before work! The more distractions, the harder it is focus, even if i have peace and quiet later on.

After our Head Of Software has terminated.

I started to take control over our development crew. And in this year I did more then the old head in the last 6 years.
- Swapped from plain old SVN to Gitlab.
- Build a complete autonomous deployment with Gitlab.
- Introduced code reviews.
- Started to refactor the legacy product with 500.000 lines of code...
- learned how to use confluent apache kafka and kubernetes to split the legacy project in many small and maintainable one.(not done yet)
- Last 3 weeks I learned how to use elasticstack with kibana and co. That we aren't blind anymore. Big dashboards are now shown in the middle of the room :) and maybe convinced my coworker that we use unity3d for our business application cause of support for all devices and same design on them. And offline capabilities. (Don't know if this was my best idea)
When I look back, I'm proud to did that much in one year alone. And my coworkers are happy too that they have less work with deployments and everything.
But I can't decide what's the title for this. System or Software Architect cause I litterallity did both :/

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.

TLDR: I wrote one of my firsts codes to help my father. Was really excited after it worked, nobody cared. F*ck them (not really).

So my father comes and says he needs me to help making a simple presentation. Just a title and slides with images. It seemed to be an easy task so I'm like "sure, why not?". So I told him to email the images and I would have the presentation made in no time. The next day I recieve like 30 mails containing from 4 to 10 photos of boats (yes, boats). I stay chill and have the brilliant idea of automating the process with python, just to learn a bit more.

I took some to read the documentation of the modules I was going to use, then write a simple code and bam! In 3 hours I have a presentation with images in it. I open it, every image was 4 times the actual slide and all of the images were randomly rotated, it still was the most rewarding moment I've had in months :') I wanted to show it off to my brothers, so they came to my desktop, saw it and all I recieve was a "cool". Not a good "cool", a "meh" kind of "cool". So I thought it was because of the size bug.

Fastfoward some hours, now every image gets scaled into the slides prefectly, in the correct angle, etc. I tell my dad what I made and he says "yeah sure, the problem is that I need you to give them to have subtitles". He wasn't even impressed. My heart hurt a bit.

I could totally automate the subtitles too (and did it), but what hurt the most is that nobody cared for what I was so pationate about. I'm so fascinated with coding that it replaced all my gaming habits, and now all I do is learn. I want to dedicate a good portion of my life to this but at that moment it seemed nobody in my family cared about it. So this rant is for all those f*ckers that I love but don't know how much my code means to me.

Interviewed a dev for a junior role earlier this week...my first question:

const numbers = [0.1, 0.2, 0.3];
let sum = 0;

for (i = 0; i < numbers.length; ++i) {
setTimeout(() => {
sum += numbers[i];
}, 0);
}

// Refactor the preceding code so that the following returns true.
console.log(sum === 0.6);

---
He had no idea where to even start, so I asked him to walk through the code with me line by line, he couldn't get past line 1 - literally didn't know what an array was... I walked through the code with him and he just started to look more and more lost.

I didn't even bother with the rest of my questions on OOP, FP, etc...

Am I really expecting too much of somebody that claims to have 2 years practical experience in JavaScript, jQuery, Angular, and PHP?

Do you think this is a problem a junior dev should be able to solve...even if it takes some hand-holding?

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.

( rant || !rant ) && idiots
console.info( this.isLongRant );
console.warn( "contains strong language and wordpress" );

A friend of mine sent two of his "friends" to me because they wanted me to build a website for their new business (~idea).

So I had a meeting with them.

First of all they wanted me to have a look on the current (work in progress) site.
First impression of the frontend:
OH BOY!?

Well, imagine this:

- a 90s/2k background (dotted/pixelated cloud in baby-blueish as backgroud with repeat)

- the logo was made by the sister of one of the guys, it wasn't too bad, but badly aligned, asymmetrical

- some obvious $offTheShelfShopPlugin with $randomStockContent

- the fucking slider had a small loading bar to indicate changes, it appears like an hyperanxious child on ADHS

- below the logo TWO FUCKING GIF SPINNERS to indicate nothing else but how fucking brain amputated these two dudes are, including the dev who is responsible for adding this. (to this point, they only told me, that a webagency did the setup and some basic work on the site, more on that later)

- no styling concept at all, random fonts and stuff everywhere including default styles of the shop plugin.

- FUUUUUCK WTF wil come furtherin this meeting?

After seeing a pile of binary puke fisted out of a 60yo nonstop-intern who changed his jobtitle from dildo-traveling-salesman to fullstack-frontend-dev by wrinting it on a post-it-note, I imagined, there has to be something wrong with the backend as well.

Boy was I right!
Yes, you guessed it! A random Wordpress adminpanel login appeared! OH NO....
I really wanted to levae this meeting immediately.
I was not able to hold my disgust back and I told them right in their face, what a shit pile of nutty squirrel turds this current page is. And that Wordpress is not the right choice at all for a shop.

Then came the best part: They basically told me, that they terminated the previous contract with the webagency because they were too expensive (they are cheap, compared to others, I know people who know their prices) and that they wanted to create A BIG MARKETPKACE with multiple ressellers who can have their shop in their website. Something similar to FUCKING AMAZON. ON FUCKING WORDPRESS!?!?!?
They even asked me if I wanted to be their partner & developer and that they can't pay much at the moment until the marketplace starts to grow.

I more or less told them to go fuck themselves with a rusty pitchfork.

So, there is this company (let's call it A) with an average idea, who got the android app and webservices from a company(B) . The service was awful but cheap. The owner of the A was a friend and gave my company the handover to manage the project. I actually ranted about that on wk11(The worst project). Now, The project was terrible. It took me months to give it any real structure, fix the services, make it compatible with iOS. Now, that majority of the work was done, suddenly we were too expensive and the work was being given to another company while much of our payment wasn't going to come(Friggin company politics). But, guess which company did the project now go to, it was 'B'.
After a couple of weeks I see, inline styles and js errors start emerging on the website.
Tell you what, if there's any justice in this world, he will one day come back to me and then I will respectfully tell him to fuck off!
Thank goodness there's devRant to just whine about this shit!

My teacher told me not to do a project. He said it was much too hard.

I did it.

2 months pass

And then i come to him with anothec project idea.

Same thing goes, nobody believes in me, but i still succeed.

in the aftermath, i was able to create an interpreter AND a compiler in about 1 year... 😁

Senior manager calls me at 3pm today. I’ve known about this issue since last Friday, one of her pions told me to hold off until Thursday when he’s back in the office and that I could prioritise other tasks.

I have another task with a deadline of the 21st with the potential for fines if it’s not done.

Snr manager: “I’m calling to see how this is going”
Me: “cool, it’s not, bigger problems in the world”
Snr manager: “waah, this has to be done Monday or we face the potential of a court case, fines, this is the biggest problem in the world”
Me: “I’ve known about this issue for a week, have been told not to worry too much and nobody has mentioned the impact or timeline you’ve just given me.”
Snr manager: “so can it be done for monday”
Me: “no chance”
Snr manager: “why not?”
Me: “because it’s 3pm Friday and I have 1 hour of Work left, good luck”

My manager was in the room, he got an arsey call soon after. I don’t really care how that one went but he’s a good guy so I’m sure it was fine.

I also had the joy of asking: so give me an idea of the potential fine... to which they wouldn’t give me an answer.

I need this to weigh up which of the potentially finable tasks takes priority.

The other team that had trouble told me all the dates, gave me over a months notice and the scale of the problem.

If you want someone to help: be polite, give them as much warning as you have and be absolutely honest.

The job’s done cause I’m a fucking legend. But they’re not gonna find out until 5pm Monday. That’s the dickhead tax, they get the dickhead tax for being dickheads.

I’m gonna spend Monday working from home, incommunicado. Fuck incompetent arseholes.

Enjoy your weekend everyone, I know I will mine.

I have this little hobby project going on for a while now, and I thought it's worth sharing. Now at first blush this might seem like just another screenshot with neofetch.. but this thing has quite the story to tell. This laptop is no less than 17 years old.

So, a Compaq nx7010, a business laptop from 2004. It has had plenty of software and hardware mods alike. Let's start with the software.

It's running run-off-the-mill Debian 9, with a custom kernel. The reason why it's running that version of Debian is because of bugs in the network driver (ipw2200) in Debian 10, causing it to disconnect after a day or so. Less of an issue in Debian 9, and seemingly fixed by upgrading the kernel to a custom one. And the kernel is actually one of the things where you can save heaps of space when you do it yourself. The kernel package itself is 8.4MB for this one. The headers are 7.4MB. The stock kernels on the other hand (4.19 at downstream revisions 9, 10 and 13) took up a whole GB of space combined. That is how much I've been able to remove, even from headless systems. The stock kernels are incredibly bloated for what they are.

Other than that, most of the data storage is done through NFS over WiFi, which is actually faster than what is inside this laptop (a CF card which I will get to later).

Now let's talk hardware. And at age 17, you can imagine that it has seen quite a bit of maintenance there. The easiest mod is probably the flash mod. These old laptops use IDE for storage rather than SATA. Now the nice thing about IDE is that it actually lives on to this very day, in CF cards. The pinout is exactly the same. So you can use passive IDE-CF adapters and plug in a CF card. Easy!

The next thing I want to talk about is the battery. And um.. why that one is a bad idea to mod. Finding replacements for such old hardware.. good luck with that. So your other option is something called recelling, where you disassemble the battery and, well, replace the cells. The problem is that those battery packs are built like tanks and the disassembly will likely result in a broken battery housing (which you'll still need). Also the controllers inside those battery packs are either too smart or too stupid to play nicely with new cells. On that laptop at least, the new cells still had a perceived capacity of the old ones, while obviously the voltage on the cells themselves didn't change at all. The laptop thought the batteries were done for, despite still being chock full of juice. Then I tried to recalibrate them in the BIOS and fried the battery controller. Do not try to recell the battery, unless you have a spare already. The controllers and battery housings are complete and utter dogshit.

Next up is the display backlight. Originally this laptop used to use a CCFL backlight, which is a tiny tube that is driven at around 2000 volts. To its controller go either 7, 6, 4 or 3 wires, which are all related and I will get to. Signs of it dying are redshift, and eventually it going out until you close the lid and open it up again. The reason for it is that the voltage required to keep that CCFL "excited" rises over time, beyond what the controller can do.

So, 7-pin configuration is 2x VCC (12V), 2x enable (on or off), 1x adjust (analog brightness), and 2x ground. 6-pin gets rid of 1 enable line. Those are the configurations you'll find in CCFL. Then came LED lighting which required much less power to run. So the 4-pin configuration gets rid of a VCC and a ground line. And finally you have the 3-pin configuration which gets rid of the adjust line, and you can just short it to the enable line.

There are some other mods but I'm running out of characters. Why am I telling you all this? The reason is that this laptop doesn't feel any different to use than the ThinkPad x220 and IdeaPad Y700 I have on my desk (with 6c12t, 32G of RAM, ~1TB of SSDs and 2TB HDDs). A hefty setup compared to a very dated one, yet they feel the same. It can do web browsing, I can chat on Telegram with it, and I can do programming on it. So, if you're looking for a hobby project, maybe some kind of restrictions on your hardware to spark that creativity that makes code better, I can highly recommend it. I think I'm almost done with this project, and it was heaps of fun :D

I fucking hate Internet of Things, I think that it's a ridiculous idea to connect things, that work perfectly fine, to the internet.
The 'convenience' you get is minimalistic and most of the time non existent.
It is also often insanely insecure and expensive. The burdans it brings with it most of the time just outweigh the positive sides of it.

Now today happened something that made me hate it even more. Today was the First Lego Lego (Lego competition with ev3 robots, etc.) and one part of the tournament is to find a solution for a given problem. This year the general topic was hydro-dynamics and so the problem was how you can reduce water usage and 'save' water.

Our idea was to make reusable coffee cups and give them to the local coffee shops. One time use paper cups use take around 400ml water when produced) Basically you buy a cup once for 5 bucks and you get your coffee served in it. After drinking the coffee you return the cup to a local cafe and get a chip as pawn. When you buy your next coffee, you give them your chip and get it served in another reusable cup. The are at the moment already around 1000 cups going around the city.

Now this was our idea and we got ranked third. I am not too mad about our rank but what really drives me fucking mad is the team who ranked first.

Their idea was to make a pump (using an arduino) and a humidity sensor which you stick into a plant and the pump pumps water when the plant is too dry.
However (you probably guessed it already) they went a step further and connected it to the internet. They also made a web 'interface' for it so you can control the pump with your smartphone / computer / smartwatch / tv / whatever the fuck is connected to the internet nowadays 'thanks' to the iot 'revolution'.

So it is a pump that waters your plant when it is too dry BUT it is also connected to the internet.

WHY THE FUCK DOES THIS HAVE TO BE CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET.

"Oh look it is connected to the internet, wow awesome, oh it is also 'smart'. oh cooool. Nice I don't have to water my plants anymore"

A funny thing is that one of my friends built basically the same thing without connecting it to the internet. He built a small box with a pump and a humidity sensor that measures if the dirt is too dry and then waters the plant. It checks every few hours and the also is a small 16x2 LCD and a knob that you can turn to control how much water it should give the plant each time it waters it. He built it and I programmed it for him. Works perfectly fine and I don't see any reason why there should be any need to connect something like this to the internet.

Anyway we got ranked third, they first. I guess we should connect our coffee cups to the internet in some way ...

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."

Fuck code.org. Fuck code. Not code code, but "code" (the word "code"). I hate it. At least for teaching. Devs can use it as much as they want, they know what it means and know you can't hack facebook with 10 seconds of furiously typing "code" into a terminal. What the fuck are you thinking when you want me to hack facebook? No, when I program, it's not opening terminal, changing to green text and typing "hack <insert website name here, if none is given, this will result to facebook.com>" Can you just shut the fuck up about how you think that because you can change the font in google fucking docs you have the right to tell me what code can and can't do? No, fuck you. Now to my main point, fuck "code" (the string). It's an overused word, and it's nothing but a buzzword (to non devs, you guys know what you're talking about. how many times have you seen someone think they are a genius when they here the word "code"?) People who don't know shit don't call themselves programmers or devs, they call themselves coders. Why? It fucking sounds cool, and I won't deny that, but the way it's talked about in movies, by people, (fucking) code.org, etc, just makes people too much of a bitch for me to handle. I want everyone reading this rant who has friends who respect the fact that YOU know code (I truly believe everyone on devRant does), how it works, and it's/your limitations, AND that it takes hard work and effort, to thank god right now. If you're stuck with some people like me, I feel you. Never say "code" near them again. Say "program." I really hate people who think they know what an HTML tag is and go around calling themselves coders. Now onto my main point, code.org. FUCK IT. CAN YOU STOP RUINING MY FUCKING AP CS CLASS. NO CODE.ORG, I DON'T NEED TO WATCH YOUR TEN GODDAMN VIDEOS ON HOW TECHNOLOGY IS IMPORTANT, <sarcasm>I'VE BEEN LIVING UNDER A ROCK FOR THIRTY YEARS</sarcasm>. DO I REALLY NEED ANOTHER COPY OF SCRATCH? WAIT, NO, SCRATCH WAS BETTER. YOU HAD FUCKING MICROSOFT, GOOGLE, AND OTHER TECHNOLOGICAL GIANTS AND YOU FUCKED UP SO BAD YOU MADE IT WORSE THAT SCRATCH. JUST LETMECODE (yes I said that) AND STOP TALKING ABOUT HOW SOME IRRELEVANT ROBOT ARM DEVELOPED BY MIT IS USING AI AND MACHINE LEARNING TO MAKE SOME ROBOT EVOLVE?! IF YOU SPEND ONE MORE SECOND SAYING "INNOVATION" I'LL SHOVE THAT PRINT STATEMENT YOU HAVE A SYNTAX ERROR UP YOUR ASS. DON'T GET ME FUCKING STARTED ON HOW ITS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO ANYTHING FOR YOURSELF WHEN YOUR GETTING ALL THE ANSWERS WITHOUT DOING ANY WORK AND THE FACT THAT JAVASCRIPT IS YOUR FUCKING LANGUAGE. <sarcasm>GREAT IDEA, LETS GET THESE NEW PROGRAMMERS INTO A PROFESSIONAL ENVOIRMENT BY ADDING A DRAG AND DROP CODE (obviously we can say it) EDITOR</sarcasm> MAYBE IF YOU GOT THIS SHIT UP YOUR ASS AND TO YOUR BRAIN YOU'D ACTUALLY GET TO PRPGRAMMING IN YOUR ADVANCED AP COURSE. ITS CALLED FUCKING CODE.ORG FOR A REASON

The Absolutely True Story of a Real Programmer Who Never Learned C.

I have a young friend named Sam who is quite a programming prodigy. Sam does know C! I need to make this clear: he’s not the titular programmer.
But a couple years ago Sam told me a story about a different programmer who never learned C, and I liked it so much that right on the spot I asked his permission to repeat it. (I could never just steal such a tale.)
Sam wasn’t always a programmer—actually he started in his later teens, in part because he was more of a jock, and in part because he was related to programmers and wanted to do his own thing. But, like all great programmers, once he was bitten by the bug he immersed himself completely in it.
One day Sam happened to be talking programming with his uncle, who was also a programmer but from way, way back.
“Hey,” said Sam, “I’m learning this language called C. You must know a lot of languages, did you ever study C?”
“No,” said the uncle, to Sam’s surprise. “I am one of the very few programmers who never had to learn C.”
“Because I wrote it.”
Oh, Sam’s last name is Ritchie.
What I love about this story is the idea of Dennis waiting Sam’s entire life to deliver this zinger. Just imagine sitting on a line that good, watching your nephew grow up and waiting, waiting until the one day he finally starts learning to code. Did he work on the line in his head at night? Like, “Hmm, how should I word it so I can deliver the punch line perfectly? Should I say ‘I never took a class on C?’ Nah, too awkward…”
The great thing about geniuses is how much effort they put into everything.

Courtesy : Wil Shiply.

Friend = F
Me = M

F: We should combine everything that's awesome with stackoverflow and slack together.
M: that sounds like a really bad idea.
F: We can call it SLACKOVERFLOW ~laughs maniacally~
M: I think you've drank too much tonight dude...

Starting to wish I never got involved in this industry.

I am working for the most ridiculous, god awful place I have ever had the misfortune of working and I am having a HELL of a time getting out of it because everything wants 5 years fucking exp in some fucking specific framework that is basically the same as every other fucking framework.

Our previous cto was a closeminded totalitarian bully and when she finally left she was replaced by a lecherous fucking dinosaur who has no idea how to code in our code base. He also has barely been showing up to work for the last few months.

For some reason our fucking ceo allows this all to continue and only interjects whenever he can make himself the biggest nuisance (ie design handoffs etc where he has little to no knowledge)

I was already woefully underpaid but was recently 'promoted' to team lead and when I brought up my ridiculous salary (yes I was essentially just funneled into this role) they gave me a neglible raise and ceo told the fucking dinosaur to tell me he 'doesn't like when people ask for raises'

The only reason I am in this position is because we have such ridiculously poor employee retention and I am one of the people after only 2.5 years there that has the ability to provide any kind of knowledge transfer. Most of our dev team consists of people fresh out of school and our code base is just an absolute mess of junior dev spaghetti debauchery.

I have expressed concerns over this and was told that I'm negative and go looking for problems and that 'everywhere is like this'

The ceo has a few people he keeps close because in his words 'they're the only ones who don't disagree with me'

He also refused to hire anyone with experience because they cost too much and he doesn't like people who have opinions.

To make matters worse all the fucking dinosaur does is wander around and talk to the junior devs about video games.

His previous favorite past time was staring at my tits, ranting about his wife and telling me 'he'd offer to give me a back rub but you can't do that now a days'

I caught his fucking wife creeping me on LinkedIn a few months ago for some fucking reason.

Oh and as icing on the cake I had a fucking interview today for an intermediate angular position and a few minutes after I received an email saying that ACCTUALLY they had been informed they were now looking for a senior react dev.

Like seriously what the fuck.

It's enough. I have to quit my job.

December last year I've started working for a company doing finance. Since it was a serious-sounding field, I tought I'd be better off than with my previous employer. Which was kinda the family-agency where you can do pretty much anything you want without any real concequences, nor structures. I liked it, but the professionalism was missing.

Turns out, they do operate more professionally, but the intern mood and commitment is awful. They all pretty much bash on eachother. And the root cause of this and why it will stay like this is simply the Project Lead.

The plan was that I was positioned as glue between Design/UX and Backend to then make the best Frontend for the situation. Since that is somewhat new and has the most potential to get better. Beside, this is what the customer sees everyday.

After just two months, an retrospective and a hell lot of communication with co-workers, I've decided that there is no other way other than to leave.

I had a weekly productivity of 60h+ (work and private, sometimes up to 80h). I had no problems with that, I was happy to work, but since working in this company, my weekly productivity dropped to 25~30h. Not only can I not work for a whole proper work-week, this time still includes private projects. So in hindsight, I efficiently work less than 20h for my actual job.

The Product lead just wants feature on top of feature, our customers don't want to pay concepts, but also won't give us exact specifications on what they want.
Refactoring is forbidden since we get to many issues/bugs on a daily basis so we won't get time.
An re-design is forbidden because that would mean that all Screens have to be re-designed.
The product should be responsive, but none of the components feel finished on Desktop - don't talk about mobile, it doesn't exist.
The Designer next to me has to make 200+ Screens for Desktop and Mobile JUST so we can change the primary colors for an potential new customer, nothing more. Remember that we don't have responsiveness? Guess what, that should be purposely included on the Designs (and it looks awful).
I may hate PHP, but I can still work with it. But not here, this is worse then any ecommerce. I have to fix legacy backend code that has no test coverage. But I haven't touched php for 4 years, letalone wrote sql (I hate it). There should be no reason whatsoever to let me do this kind of work, as FRONTEND ARCHITECT.

After an (short) analysis of the Frontend, I conclude that it is required to be rewritten to 90%. There have been no performance checks for the Client/UI, therefor not only the components behave badly, but the whole system is slow as FUCK! Back in my days I wrote jQuery, but even that shit was faster than the architecuture of this React Multi-instance app. Nothing is shared, most of the AppState correlate to other instances.

The Backend. Oh boy. Not only do we use an shitty outated open-source project with tons of XSS possibillities as base, no we clone that shit and COPY OUR SOURCES ON TOP. But since these people also don't want to write SQL, they tought using Symfony as base on top of the base would be an good idea.
Generally speaking (and done right), this is true. but not then there will be no time and not properly checked. As I said I'm working on Legacy code. And the more I look into it, the more Bugs I find. Nothing too bad, but it's still a bad sign why the webservices are buggy in general. And therefor, the buggyness has to travel into the frontend.

And now the last goodies:
- Composer itself is commited to the repo (the fucking .phar!)
- Deployments never work and every release is done manually
- We commit an "_TRASH" folder
- There is an secret ongoing refactoring in the root of the Project called "_REFACTORING" (right, no branches)
- I cannot test locally, nor have just the Frontend locally connected to the Staging webservices
- I am required to upload my sources I write to an in-house server that get's shared with the other coworkers
- This is the only Linux server here and all of the permissions are fucked up
- We don't have versions, nor builds, we use the current Date as build number, but nothing simple to read, nonono. It's has to be an german Date, with only numbers and has always to end with "00"
- They take security "super serious" but disable the abillity to unlock your device with your fingerprint sensor ON PURPOSE

My brain hurts, maybe I'll post more on this shit fucking cuntfuck company. Sorry to be rude, but this triggers me sooo much!

ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.

I'll summarize the few I remember.

First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.

Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'

and gems like:

def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end

^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.

Next up are a few of my personal favorites:

Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am

LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?

And for design decisions...

The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'

I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.

Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.

But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.

Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.

Yep, it's garbage all the way down.

Stack Overflow. Everyone uses it but everyone seems to hate the community. I very often read about someone getting down voted and they all say the same thing - "I have no idea why".

I have spent a lot of time moderating SO posts, which gave me a lot of reputation and medals. I find it fun to help people and it feels good to give back to the community.

I have asked a bunch of questions and I've never gotten a single down vote, which leads me to believe everyone of you that is constantly getting down voted are doing something wrong. Because the posts I see getting down voted are fucking stupid questions that either lack information or contain too much information.

Example 1:
Server java error

Why is my server not working? I am using Tomcat, port 8080 and I'm getting IOException.

Example 2:
Webpack configuration not working

My webpack is not a working, why?
[entire webpack config]

End examples.

What the fuck are you expecting asking questions like these?? No one gets paid for answering your questions, so the least you can do is write a CLEAR AND UNDERSTANDABLE question. I'm not gonna tell you how to do it because there's A LOT of information on how to do it.

People devote hours and hours to helping others on SO, and of course they get fed up with the stupid and lazy questions. That community is not about being nice, it's not about making people feel welcomed, it's about QUALITY OF CONTENT. No one is crying when they find a superb question + answer, right? That's the result of a community not accepting low quality content.

So please, the next time you get a down vote on SO - do not come here whining about it but instead take a look at what you have posted there and ask yourself if it could have held a higher quality.

Thanks!

Found this on mastodon:

I sometimes imagine that somewhere there must be a Ministry for Messing Up the Internet. It would be like a Monty Python sketch.

Each day a new idea would arrive in the intray of an official who looks like a young John Cleese. They would form a large pile of papers.

[reads] "Make a protocol so complicated that nobody can understand it. No the Sematic Web has already been tried".

[reads] "Ban all the cat photos for spurious copyright reasons. No, we already have an upload filter in progress to do that".

[reads] "Fill Tim Berners-Lee's socks with elephants. No - much too silly."

"Ah yes, [reads] make a giant man in the middle that everything on the internet has to go through like a sausage machine and get squirted out on the other side, hopefully in the correct order. Bernard, get Cloudflare on the phone immediately."

@bob@soc.freedombone.net

Bad dev practices:

1. Forgetting to version control some fun project i am doing for a long time and then commit everything at once. And forget about it again..

2. I probably have too much love for abstraction. So i abstract stuff just for the fuck of it to the point my friends dont even understand what the program is for.

3. I have no patience and due to that i lose motivation when i think of some idea that is big.

4. I cant keep my ideas small enough, and i dream too big until problem3 kicks in, and then i drop the entire idea.

Why does the idea of having to develop social skills somehow seem to scare the fuck out of a large portion of you?

Is being a likeable human being such a weird concept? What do you expect? To people just validate your entire existence based on how good you can sit in front of a set of monitors and push code out? Thousands of monkeys can do that shit. Thousands of systems will eventually do such things.

for whatever reason the "I am a fucking asshole that can code" trope seems to be a "real thing" amongst developers. A mfker can know waaaaaaay less than you, have the same credentials (degrees etc) and will get the job because you were too busy building an online persona governing how better you are than everyone else. How "quirky" and Sheldon Cooper like you are. You think that makes you likeable? "i don't need to be likeable" <---- yes the fuck you are, because this shit is something in which people can be trained upon.

A team, regardless of how much you agree with this, can choose a person solely based on how well he/she/whatever clicks with them. You might be the end all be all of development, but if they don't like you or feel you will not be someone worthwile to be around, will not chose you. They will go with the charismatic newbie that can learn the same shit you so dear hold on to, because they are likeable.

Sticking to a merit based "I am the best there is" asshole mentality is a thing of the fucking past, boomer mentality. For which newer generations are parting ways with, with still profitable results. workable results. Production ready results.

Yet you chose to stick to a "I might be a quirky annoying fuck, but I am the best" mentality?

This is why you were bullied. This is why you can't get any dick, this is why you can't get any pussy, this is why you sit your ass in your little dark room trying to convince yourself that being lonely is a choice, not a situation in which you put your ass in. This is why I also dislike developers online.

Most of you might be the nicest mfkers on the planet when dealing with on a face to face basis, but if you put this shit on a screen for the world to see you will be viewed upon as some dickhead.

Fuck this "code is my life" mentality, shit is but a paycheck, a craft is not a glimpse into what you are as a person, but a way in which you make a paycheck. Molding your personality, based on what you do for a living, really?

Damn man, shit is just so fucking sad. So cringeworthy even.

#First

I joined a start up and worked after college hours as an intern over there. I would usually bunk my college and go to my internship. I had limited knowledge at that moment. I worked very hard over there because I wanted (still want) to gain practical knowledge.

Almost a month into it and I had to take a break from it because I had college work. Rejoined the same start up during my vacations. Worked quite a lot and learnt quite some stuff. I continued the internship after my one month vacation for another month once my college started. All this while I was not being paid, not even a little bit of allowance. But that didn't matter because I wanted to learn

Fast forward six months to November 2016. I have been placed in an MNC through my college placements. One day I get a call from this start up owner(we had become good acquaintances by then) if I was willing to work as a paid intern while I was working on the projects that the company landed (so I guess as a free-lancer) and as an unpaid intern while I was working on the company projects. I agreed. Jump to December. I have joined and started working on an Android project of this very big company.

At time point, I should inform you'll that I'm not very good at Android and that the company size is very small. Company owner plus the tech lead in one city (where I'm from) and another two full time employees in another city. Out of which one quit to start his own company apparently. The start up would primarily employ interns and provide exposure to them while getting their work done.

Back to the story. The tech lead vaguely assigns everyone their work. Everyone over here includes new interns and previous interns like me who will get paid some amount. 3-4 days into the project, the tech lead quits. The tech lead and the company owner call three of us and says that one of you will have to be a project manager for this project. And then both of them and 2 of my colleagues look at me. And I don't know what to say. I hesitate initially because it's too much responsibility but agree to it finally.

The next day I come to office and read about the project thoroughly and catch up with my colleagues about the progress. The entire day I'm panicking about what I'm going to do. In the evening, my boss tells me that we have to go for a meeting with the client for whom we are doing this project. At this moment, the shit out of me has been scared. Mostly because I don't know what the fuck am I going to do over there apart from being stupid and asking dumb questions. So we reach the client's office and wait for him. The entire time I'm thinking to myself that I'm going to drown this company by opening my mouth. Surprisingly, all the questions that I asked seemed legitimate and I asked a lot of questions. And so I didn't drown the company after all...phew!

It's been more than a week. And holy fuck! What a pain it is to manage people. Half of my time is spent on updating excel sheet about their progress, where are they stuck and what is needed. And the other half about thinking what the fuck am I doing or how am I gonna do it.

So to sum up, intern-turned-freelancer-turned-project manager who has no idea what the fuck is going on. Seems pretty crazy, don't you think.

!(short rant) && (long story)

So these last 2 months of my life have been quite topsy turvy. Everything was pretty much unexpected and now I am on my way to Banglore, which is referred to as the Silicon Valley of India.

All this started in mid Feb when one day my ceo dropped a mail to all of us saying he wants to covey something important. A little background story about my company before I go on. We were a bunch of 6-7 tech guys working on a location based analytics product and had a decent client base. I had joined them in November 2017 and I was very hopeful that I would get to learn a lot owing to the good seniors from reputed universities and their experience. Coming back to the day, the ceo called us and dropped a bomb on us that the funding is depleted and we only have enough money to pay you salaries for this month. "We didn't anticipate that this day will come but currently we are in talks with some companies that are looking to acquire us. I am very much hopeful that we will figure something out by the end of this month(Feb). Until then, I can't stop you from applying to other companies but don't reveal that we are in this situation." So, keeping my fingers crossed I was waiting for the acquisition and wasn't looking for any other opportunities.

The company work was under hold and during this time one of my friends approached me with his idea. Since I had nothing else to do, I agreed to work with him. I was living in Mumbai, the city with one of the highest living standards in India, and I was paying exorbitant rent without any income. There was no news until mid March when the ceo called and dropped bomb#2 that an Indonesian company is looking to acquire us and he had scheduled an interview for the entire team. This isn't what I had signed up for. Indonesia wasn't a country I had even considered, let alone leave the country. Still I appeared for the interview and it went very well.

No news from the company or the ceo after that. One of my friends advised me to start applying to other companies and not rely on this acquisition. Now the problem was I couldn't reveal about the acquisition in my interview, so I used to give some bullshit about me not liking the work here. The company didn't buy it because how can someone judge a company in just 4 months. So obviously I didn't clear the interviews, also partially because I didn't meet their technical requirements.

March end, I moved to my hometown in Gujarat because obviously I had started to get broke in this expensive-ass city. The friend with whom I was working with also didn't have any issue since it was just tech and coding and I could do it remotely. Comes mid-April when the ceo called and said the acquisition is done and gave me some details about it. For confidentiality sake I can't reveal the details but I figured enough red flags for me to go with it.

*Eye of the tiger playing in the background*
Now started my quest of finding a decent job. The edge I had now was that I could reveal about the acquisition to the other company. I started applying left right and center to any company I could find. Amazon, saavn and some good-ass Indian companies. The thing that now came in my way was my experience. I am 23 year old(soon to be 24) with around 20 months of experience. Everyone wanted a 3-5 year experience guy/girl. Soon, my entire optimism was draining and I even considered going back to my first company.

During this time, I got a call from this company in Banglore who were looking for a candidate which best suited my profile. I went all guns blazing and appeared for the interview. I had 6 rounds of technical interview plus 1 logical reasoning. And since I was giving the interview remotely, I had one round on each alternate working day. Everyday was a challenge and I spent the nights in anxiousness and anticipation. Meanwhile I was appearing for other interviews too, since I wasn't too hopeful about my chances in this one.

Cut to April 27, I got an offer from this company and without negotiating they offered me the package I was hoping for.

After this entire ordeal, I realised one thing. Whatever happens, happens for good. Looking forward to this new city, new company, new people and new environment.

Was on edge..
Had no job, no money, got kicked out by my family(what left of it) depression kicking in, desperately trying to do anything to hold on
Had studies, in automation and robotics and other software skills, but no time to find a company to work..
Decided to try working at burger King, I mean, was that or selling myself, so I got called passed the interview, ( quick info - 60% of young people in my country can't get a job, have to lie on their cv because they have too much skills (there's still that wrong idea that studies get you a job))
Have too much studies for the job, I have to sign a contract saying that I accept being underpaid (by the law I have to be paid under the minimal wage for my skills)
This triggers an alert on social employment center and I started to work for another company two days after as a front end developer and it dude.
Refused the bk, yup they weren't happy about it, but I mean who really wants to do a 1 year trainee flipping burgers...

I hate, HATE MYSELF!! I am an awful developer. I am an awful person.
I am trying so hard. To be a better person. To be a better developer. But, as a person I am again finding it difficult to empathize. At work, I really want to explore MERN stack but that I have to do it out of working hours. And damn! work is too much, I don't get time.
I need to work on a new project, for 2 months the discussions with MILLION TEAMS ARE GOING ON!!! NOTHING!! NOBODY HAS ANY IDEA!! THEY MIGHT FIRE ME!! I AM STRESSED!!
IT'S 1AM HERE AND I AM WRITING UNIT TESTS!! I want to cry. I want a partner maybe who can support me or maybe it's my mood swings.

A few years ago I had a startup. I invited 2 friends to join and we split the ownership equally. I did most the work but didn't mind. I had fun. Anyway, the story is not about me. I was in a startup incubator.
There was this stereotypical rich kid in the incubator too.
For the first few months he refused to even share what his idea was.
Finally he was forced to do it. It was an app for storing gift cards. Literally, there were startups for some high tech phd genious types. But the guy with the idea of a gift card app didn't want to share in fear that we would steal his mediocre idea.
His idea was to digitalize physical gift cards without the consent of the companies and make a market for selling, buying and trading (and taking a fee). When asked what if the companies refuse to accept the unofficial digital gift card, he said he had talked to a lawyer that they should accept it or he would sue them. Wow.
There was a guy who had attempted at doing an app like that 2 years before too apparently.
So here comes the part about the work culture.
He convinced 3 or 4 computer science students to develop the app for him. He offered them 1%, no pay. Talking about how rich they would get and how big it would be.
Luckily, one of the developers came to his senses after a few weeks and convinced the others that they were worth much more.
The guy was furious and even threatened to sue them.
He even got like 2-3k USD from some of his parents rich friends to develop the app. He could afford to pay them.
Anyway, the app was never completed.

I have many stories like that from other startups. A lot of students getting ripped off to work for free. I know people who have startups going for years thanks to free labor.

writing library code is hard.

there are sooo many details that go into writing good libraries:

designing intuitive and powerful apis
deciding good api option defaults, disallowing or warning for illegal operations

knowing when to throw, knowing when to warn/log
handling edge cases
having good code coverage with tests that doesn't suck shit, while ensuring thry don't take a hundred years to run

making the code easy to read, to maintain, robust
and also not vulnerable, which is probably the most overlooked quality.

"too many classes, too little classes"

the functions do too much it's hard to follow them
or the functions are so well abstracted, that every function has 1 line of code, resulting in code that is even harder to understand or debug (have fun drowning in those immense stack traces)

don't forget to be disciplined about the documentation.

most of these things are
deeply affected by the ecosystem, the tools of the language you're writing this in:

like 5 years ago I hated coding in nodejs, because I didn't know about linters, and now we have tools like eslint or babel, so it's more passable now

but now dealing with webpack/babel configs and plugins can literally obliterate your asshole.

some languages don't even have a stable line by line debugger (hard pass for me)

then there's also the several phases of the project:

you first conceive the idea, the api, and try to implement it, write some md's of usage examples.

as you do that, you iterate on the api, you notice that it could better, so you redesign it. once, twice, thrice.

so at that point you're spending days, weeks on this side project, and your boss is like "what the fuck are you doing right now?"

then, you reach fuckinnnnng 0.1.0, with a "frozen" api, put it on github with a shitton of badges like the badge whore you are.

then you drop it on forums, and slack communities and irc, and what do you get?

half of the community wants to ban you for doing self promotion

the other half thinks either
a) your library api is shitty
b) has no real need for it
c) "why reinvent the wheel bruh"

that's one scenario,

the other scenario is the project starts to get traction.

people start to star it and shit.
but now you have one peoblem you didn't have before: humans.

all sorts of shit:

people treating you like shit as if they were premium users.

people posting majestically written issues with titles like "people help, me no work, here" with bodies like "HAAAAAAAAAALP".

and if you have the blessing to work in the current js ecosystem, issues like "this doesn't work with esm, unpkg, cdnjs, babel, webpack, parcel, buble, A BROWSER".
with some occasional lunatic complaining about IE 4 having a very weird, obscure bug.

not the best prospect either.

Well now, I wouldn't want to mention anyone specific since talking about someone behind their back and calling them 'weird' isn't very nice. 🙄 But absolutely HYPOTHETICALLY speaking, if I HAD a weird coworker, they would probably...
- ... strut about the office, telling all how great yet underpaid their work is
- ... write lots of 'concepts' because coding is for lowly programmers
- ... insist that the code they have to do when boss is looking is simply too complicated for unit testing, and 'that's great!'
- ... brag about their/wear to work a ridiculous array of ties in every colour imaginable, when everyone else shows up casual

- ... trap people into listening to them talk for hours about...
-- ... ties
-- ... their misspent youth
-- ... how awesome they are/were/will be
-- ... why it's a good idea to eat cheese

- ... never let me forget I'm female, coz *insert BS reasons why all devs must by nature be male here*
- ... send me little unsolicited notes and mails with funny (sexist) jokes *har har*

- ... be let go, at which point everyone else discovers why they had so much time that they could spend chatting away at the watering hole
- ... earn the eternal hatred of anyone picking up the pieces of their 'work'
- ... try to steal our customers away who will laugh in their bloody face

Just my theory, of course..

Well, it wasn't fun, but I switched jobs this month. And sadly, it was mostly because my old company started building custom applications for our larger customers. Now, normally that wouldn't be too bad (other than the fact that it distracts us form working on our main product...) but... it was decided that we would use the back end of our user-generated forms module as the data storage layer. Someone outside of my department thought it would be a great idea, and my boss kinda just rolled over without a fight because he always just figures he can "make it work" if he works hard enough...

You shoulda seen the database and SQL code...

Because of that decision, everything took at least 3x as long to write and there was always the looming possibility that the user could change the schema on a whim and break the app.

I think the reasoning behind it was to try and keep the customers tied to the aging flagship product (with a pricy subscription model), but IMO, it was not with it. Our efforts could've had much greater impact somewhere else. Nobody seemed to care what I thought about it though...

I had to start over as a front-end dev, but I'm trying to look on the bright side and seeing it as an opportunity to sharpen my skills in that area. I'm already learning a lot. And although it's a little scary at times, it's also so refreshing to work at a place where I know I'm not the smartest guy in the room.

To the future!

Inspired by the comment I posted on another rant.

My uni decided to be one of those progressive tech schools that start people with Python. Mind you, I had prepared myself with studying as much as I could with math and programming by automating things and similar stuff in our computer when I was at my previous job, so I had a better idea as to what i could expect.

Introduction to computer science and programming with Python or some shit like that was the name of the class, and the instructor was a fat short ugly woman with a horrible attitude AND a phd in math, not comp sci and barely any industrial knowledge of the field.

She gave us the "a lot of you will fail" speech, which to me is code for "I suck and have no clue what I am doing"

One assignment involved, as per the requirements the use of switch cases. Now, unless someo knew came about, Python does not have swio cases. Me and a couple of less newbie like students tried to point out that switch cases were non existent and that her switch case example was in Javascript, not python, curly braces and everything. She told us to make it work.

We thought that she meant using a function with a dictionary and we pass the key and shit, a simple way of emulating the switch case.

NOPE she took points and insisted that she meant the example. We continuously pointed out that her example was in JS and that at the time Python did not have switch cases. The nasty woman laughed out and said that she didn't expect anyone to finish the assignment with full points.

Out of 100 points everyone got a 70. No problem. Wrote a detailed letter to the dean. Dean replied and talked to her (copied her in the email because fuck you bitch) and my grade was pulled up to full mark.

Every other class I had with her she did not question me. Which was only another class on some other shit I can't remember.

Teachers are what make or break a degree program. What make or break the experience, going to college is putting too much faith on people. If you ask me, trade certification, rigorous training is the future of computer science, or any field really. Rather than spending 4+ years studying a whoooole lotta shit for someone to focus on one field and never leave it.

!dev

It’s sooo weird.
I’m generally not feeling happy or good or “okay”, I’m almost always rather shitty but just keep going through my day without complaining too much because that’s what most of us do..

Today, for the first time in at least one (very lonely, cold and boring) year, I went outside for a smoke and felt good. No idea why.
Everything was orangy/yellowish outside because of the clouds after the first sunny day in weeks.
Its raining slightly but not so much that you actually get wet.

I just had this feeling of “yea, that’s good enough” which I haven’t had in probably 4-5 years or so.

Maybe it’s because I got a little bit of sun for once and saw other people walking 2m around me, I don’t know..
But it felt good.

Does that feeling sound familiar to anyone or am I just finally going crazy?

I also apologise for my last 50 rants not being about dev or rant but I’m lucky to not have much to rant about in my current job 😅

I try as hard as possible not to be judgemental towards incompetent colleagues, motivating myself with the knowledge that we were all incompetent at some point, and that people need a chance to learn, and that sometimes too much pressure will lead you to believe that they're bad. Or sometimes, people just aren't good at the stuff you want them to be good, and you just need to discover that niche where they will be very useful.

Mostly that goes well.
I've had the incompetent late bloomer who was a family man who started too late to dev, and wasn't really serious. A bit of harsh talk, some soul searching over a few beers, made him into a really valuable asset. Not the brightest rock, but reliable, steady-paced developer who earned his stay.
Then there was the girl who wasn't really good at coding, but saved our team from disaster many times by keeping things into account, and realizing what must be developed or tested at every step.

However, there are exceptions. I've worked with people who have been nothing but a menace, through their incompetence AND attitudes.

The most noteworthy example was an intern that we sought out, by talking to professors to point us to their best students. So we got that intern on board. He seemed strange at first. Kind of perfectionist. Talked serious, with an air of royalty, and always dressed sharply. He really gave the impression that one must be worthy to receive his blessing. The weirdest part was his handshake. It was as if he was touching an iron hand heated to 3000 degrees. It was over before you even knew it. Leaves you kinda offended. Especially when he always took a wet wipe after that and wiped his hands. Am I really that gross?
But that's fiiiine. I mean we're all different and weird in our own ways, right? So he's a germophobe, so fucking what? We just gotta find a way to work together, right?
WRONG.
As soon as he started (and remember, he's a paid intern, who barely knows how to code, and has zero industrial experience), he started questioning my architecture solutions, code implementations, etc. I don't mind discussion and criticism, which is why I welcomed his input. But it seemed like he wasn't willing to accept any arguments, so I started looking for excuses not to talk to him.
Meanwhile, the most productive team member we had, to whom you could just give and describe an idea, with architecture and stuff, well, and you'd see it implemented the next week, with only the most well placed questions asked, started going into fights with this intern for the same reasons I was avoiding him.
.....
And here's the kicker.
Get this:
This intern comes to me (I was the team lead), while that guy is not in the office, and with a straight face, dead serious, starts telling me that that guy was making stupid decisions and being a bad team member because he doesn't ... I quote him almost verbatim... "follow my indications". He said that I had to do something because he refused to work with him together.
I was stunned.
This good for nothing imagined superhuman, who was completely useless and an amazing annoyance to pretty much everyone in the team, came to me, telling me that the most capable and productive developer in the team is bad, because he doesn't follow his orders, and that I had to pick between the 2.

I couldn't believe what I had heard.
I had so much emotion in me right then. I was angry, but at the same time I could barely abstain from laughing.
I just told him calmly that he was wrong, and that I wouldn't mind if he never came back. I didn't see him for 5 years after that.

Anyway, later that week our team went for a dinner + beer, and the stories from all the team members started pouring in. They didn't want to talk him down either, but now that he was gone, it was a weight off, and everybody could tell their story.

What a fucking asshole.

So 5 years after I stumbled on him as he was entering a church. Still an arrogant bitch. Barely exchanged 10 polite words and I continued on my way as he was disinfecting his hands from my filthy handshake.

People/companies talking about ooh we want gender diversity we want more female software developers, IT professionals etc

You talk the talk, do you know how to walk the walk?? Do you know how to deal with female engineers?

I am a hardcore engineer worked and studied majorly with men for years. I lead, managed teams had my own company worked as a consultant for years.

Then I got into the IT industry as developer later. I was completely against the idea of being female would make any difference or you would be treated differently.

Finally I had my own enlightenment and stopped resisting that idea.

Some treatments made me think what are these guys doing? Don’t treat me like your sister. I am not your sister. Don’t see the femininity or looks. I am not a Merrilyn Monroe to say oooh you are great you know soo much. I am not paid for that act, I do my job! It’s same as yours mate.

Don’t underestimate me or try to preach me as if I am a cute little girl. Don’t show off and boost your ego next to other guys.

Now I regretfully I agree the ladies ranting about male dominance and getting different treatment in IT.

I am literally trying to avoid red nail polishes or red lipstick god forbid. Maybe I should put some fake beard and a belly, loose jeans with an energy drink in hand. Here comes the expert IT professional, already ticking a box.

Honestly you are not taken seriously most of the time. If you are a guy then they are all ears..And those guys talk about they want gender diversity blah blah

You feel like a ghost when you express your opinion. You are not taken into account even when you have a comment or suggestion.

Even humiliated by a guy giving me a speech about how to be a good developer next to a manager. Look buddy I am not a yesterday’s child. I am at your age. I haven’t come to this position by jumping around picking flowers in a field. If I was a man, would you dare saying those to me? There could be a street fight coming.

LinkedIn selfie takers with body show offs putting ooh I am an IT recruiter as a female I got into IT. You can do it too. (don’t get me wrong I respect that achievement that’s good) but those girls get thousands of likes and applauses, you are working in IT for years people say they are seeking for. Your technical post doesn’t even get 20 likes. Your encouraging comment on a guy’s post isn’t even acknowledged. You are not even taken into account. Am I a ghost or something?

Honestly I don’t understand.

What do you mean by gender diversity? What do you want here?

Leave this gender bullshit. Look at the knowledge you don’t even know what equality means. It’s not having even numbers of genders. It is respecting knowledge and hard work regardless. Listening and acknowledging without judgement. Looking beyond male, female or others

Companies that say we want to have more females, you don’t come and knock on my door either. You are already stating a difference there. Attract with indifference don’t come and tell me you are a female we want more females here.

I’m telling you this sector is not getting proper gender equality for 25 years. Talk is there but mentality is not yet there.

I am super pissed off and discouraged today. I don’t even get discouraged that easily. Now I understand some women in IT talking about insecurities. I am on the edge of having one, such a shame.

Don’t come at me now I would bite!

This is my generalisation yes. Exceptions apply and how good it would have been if those exceptions were dominant.

A few hours ago I decided it was a good idea to to clean up my keyboard. I did so and took a walk leaving the keys to dry.

After I came back I hoovered the -board and decided to put back the keys. I started with the special keys since they were the easiest to find (and some required a metal thing).

Now, I was quickly made aware of something that I had never known nor noticed before. Bear with me here as I'm not a person that cares too much about hardware unless I need to. (Hardware here meaning stuff like mice, keyboards, headsets, and stuff like that). But I learned that

Not all keys are the same size. They look really similar to someone like me. But I manned up and put the keys back.

A little under 1.5 hours later and I now posses a keyboard that is in uncanny valley. It doesn't feel like it though, and it shouldn't be that big of a problem since I never look at my keyboard anyway.

Messaged one of my m8's about and this was his reply

"nope
one kind per row
usually says the row on the underside"

Now fantasize about the elasmobranch fish which is characterized by a cartilaginous skeleton of which I am the proprietor at what he said. I pulled a key out and, sure enough, "C28 R1".

Now I am not sure about the 28th column, but it did fit in the first row.

Fuck me

Code review time:

Hey Rudy, can you approve my PR? ??? Shouldn't it be can you review my PR?(thought to myself)
Anyway, as a new practice, we(royal we) do not approve PRs with js files. If we touch one, we convert it to typescript as part of a ramp up to a migration that never seems to get here. But I digress.
I look at the laziest conversion in history.

Looked like
Import 'something';
Import 'somethingElse';
Import 'anotherSomething';

export class SomeClass {
public prop1: any;
public prop2: any;
public prop3: any;

public doWork(param: any){
let someValue = param;
// you get the idea
return someValue;
}
}

Anyway, I question if all the properties need to be visible outside of the class since everything was public.
Then if the dev could go and use type safety.
Then asked why not define the return type for the method since it would make it easier for others to consume.
Since parts of the app are still in js, I asked that they check that that the value passed in was valid(no compilation error, obviously).
Also to use = () => {} to make sure "this" is really this.
I also pointed out the import problem, but anyway.

I then see the his team leader approve the PR and then tell me that I'm being too hard on his devs. ????

Do we need to finish every PR comment with "pretty please" now?
These are grown men and women, and yet, it feels oddly like kindergarten.

I've written code in the past that wasn't pretty and I received "WTF?" as a PR comment. I then realized I ate sh*t on that line of code, corrected it and pushed the code. Then we went to Starbucks.
I'm not that old(35), but these young devs need to learn that COMPILERS DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS!!!!!
Ahhhhhh
Much better.
Thanks for the platform.

**noob alert**
Hi all, I'm new to this community. I found it out couple of days back while downloading some apps on play store. And I don't know how much time have I spent here since then... Damm, I've an interview after 2 days.

My query is, I am stuck/confused. I have so many ToDos. ToDos to learn new things, from UI to other langs to machine learning to database to etc etc. And I keep on postponing it because I can't decide which way to go first. There is so much fuzz about BigData/AI which sounds cool. Sometimes I want to build UI for my imaginary idea, then somebody says a man must learn linux and DB. Top of that I'm preparing for interviews, so I think I should get a job first and then start learning. But when I get a job, I get *busy* with job. It feels like Captain America, all he does is official work. I sometimes feel like trying open source coding, but quit the idea because I get scared or overwhelmed by imagining the big community behind it and I won't be able to make a difference or I might get bashed by others as I get bashed in StackOverFlow :-(
I'm unable to get help from friends/family/colleagues, not because they are bad. It's just they don't get it. People think just because you have a job which pays the bills and save money, everything is fine because there are lots of people who dream to get a job, so be thankful for what you have. I'm thankful... But it's not helping. I really want to do things more than what my job asks me to. The kid inside me is awake since I became adult.

Have you been in this condition or is it just me? Or is it too confusing? Could you please help me out. Thanks a lot. Sorry for serious post. I'm a java programmer by the way.

Am I the last one here late to the party? Just try out and impressed by VSCode and this is my thoughts about the editors:

- I have been loyal to Sublime Text for like 5+ years, cannot complain much.
- Notepad++ was my first love, but absent on Linux so got to say goodbye.
- VSCode is the latest I try out and very rare one I could spend a couple of hours to dive into its settings to make it easier to use. The extensions are impressive!
- Atom, Bracket, and those blabla of their kind are bullshit.
- Jetbrains products are heavy ass, I can't even take a note!
- Vim is great too, but it's not the thing that I can just "open up and start typing".
- Have no idea about Emacs, but supposedly it's nowhere near its UI-friendly brothers, so I give no patience.

I used to work in a small agency that did websites and Phonegap apps, and the senior developer was awful.

He had over a decade of experience, but it was the same year of experience over and over again. His PHP was full of bad practices:

- He'd never used an MVC framework at all, and was resistant to the idea, claiming he was too busy. Instead he did everything as PHP pages
- He didn't know how to use includes, and would instead duplicate the database connection settings. In EVERY SINGLE FILE.
- He routinely stored passwords in plain text until I pretty much forced him to use the new PHP password hashing API
- He sent login details as query strings in a GET request
- He couldn't use version control, and he couldn't deploy applications using anything other than FTP

Idea was to make a little helper utility to be used once (only for myself, not client). But, I've kept adding layers of functionality over layers of functionality ... Long story short - this monstrosity (UI is bad, code not that much) was used for 10+ years (again, only by myself).

Finally, personal embarrassment was too big, so I took wooden stake and monster passed away. All related files deleted (but not before one final screenshot).

During the last couple of days, I got to hear quite a horrible story...

So we start at the beginning, where I have a dev-related chat with some other strangers on the internet. One of them was working on a custom protocol implementation with an API to go with it, written in Python. There were plans to migrate the codebase to another language like Rust in the long term. So the project seemed to be going well.

Another guy and the main subject of this chimed in on various of our messages, and long story short - he uses Express.js for everything he does, and he doesn't know jack shit on what he's talking about. Yet he still does.

Later we got the delight to hear that he had beaten up his mother, and that she's now in the hospital because of it, with broken arms, hands, fingers and severe bleeding. Yet he has the audacity to complain about his sore throat, caused by all his shouting. He refuses to seek any help, or to take medicines he's been given. This has been going on for several days now.

As much as I hate to even think about it, these too are "developers". I too have skeletons in my closet, but goddamn.. that these people even exist. The very idea that you may be talking to them every day. It disgusts me.

If you're planning to be a new entrepreneur (like me) here's a few things to keep in mind:

1) it'll keep getting harder but it's all worth it. Do not quit mid way no matter how hard it gets.

2) stop asking everyone for advice, they'll either be assholes or you'll end up getting confused by too much contradicting advice.

3) regardless of point 2, people will still advise you on everything (ikr). Listen to them, and if you don't agree with it... Do not bother to correct them, never helps... Just ignore it

4) if some one is an asshole to you or someone shoots your idea down, don't get discouraged. Reflect on it and if it's irrelevant, forget it all. Do not try to be an asshole back, always take the higher road.

P.S I'm also still learning... Hope you all very best for your endeavours :)

Since fucking when did "bare metal" mean just running on an OS?? At a conference and literally everyone is like "we got kubernetes running on bare metal", got super excited for a bit because just the idea of that sounds amazing but they're using it as slang for "basically not in a container or vm."

Nothing exciting at all. Now we're patting ourselves on the back for getting software working without it being preconfigured as a container or a VM image. No one knows how to do anything any more. MUCH too much abstraction going on.

I guess it keeps me more employable, but the state of the world from a developer standpoint is just sad.

(For reference, this is what the first sentence of "Bare Metal" looks like on wikipedia "In computer science, bare machine (or bare metal) refers to a computer executing instructions directly on logic hardware without an intervening operating system.")

Today,

My "big boss" call me because I take too much time to develop a website. She thinks all I need to do is drag n drop. Why the f*ck do you need to hire me if it's only drag n drop you "super smart ass licker"? Man, this old people need some update about technology.

Btw, the "drag n drop" idea came from Dreamweaver YouTube tutorial.

From 3 decades of operating system development, yesterday Windows shat itself (for the so many'th time) with the ACPI power button (how one can possibly fuck up interacting with a goddamn fucking pushbutton, I have no idea) and this morning I got back to my PC, only to notice that the USB driver (again one of the easiest and most ubiquitous protocols out there) shat itself as well. So wiggling the mouse to activate the screen? Of course, no says Windows. I can't possibly do that much, even though I'm developed by a team that could easily outnumber most distributions' development teams, and am part of a company that turns over fucking billions of dollars each year.

I feel that Microsoft offends the words "operating system" to the point that it should be changed (call me SJW 🙃), just for Windows. Shouldn't be too much of an effort considering that Microsoft never follows common standards anyway. I'd like to introduce you to the term "operating shitstain" 😜

My manager is instructing my team to add a feature that can only be enabled for users by running an update script in the database.

When I argued that it's not really "complete" if it can't be turned on without someone going into the production database, I was told that not only is it complete, but they plan to have our non-technical customer service enable it for customers if the customer requests it...

Apparently giving everyone and their brother write access to prod is a good idea, but implementing a checkbox is a "waste of time and would cost too much money".

Probably going to float my resume... :-p

~2 years ago:

Me: Managed to figure out how to port that library. Just need designs and then we can build feature X. I've tested it in ugly developer-y screens. It works fully

Boss: Thats awesome, saw the video, looks great. This is a really important feature, thanks for looking into this

~1.5 years ago:

Me: Ok i've started working on the designs, just FYI we don't have designs for feature X

Boss: Ok, must have slipped, noted

~1 year ago:

Me: I've seen more posts about users wanting apps with features X in it. Still don't have designs, we working on that?

Boss: I'll check with design

~3 Months ago:

Boss: Ok were going to have to get serious about pulling features out and reducing MVP so we can get this out there. I think feature A, D, Y and X have to be dropped for v1. Theres too much left to do on them

Me: sure

~1 week ago:

Boss: We need to start getting ready for xxxxx. Can you do me a favour and start writing up some developer docs etc, kind of like this one we did for this other project

This morning opening my emails from last night:

Boss: I've reviewed the doc, looks good, only minor things need tweaking. Let me ask you something though, you said feature X was pulled out and its "pending design work". Its not only pending design work is it? Is it that far along?

==========
What I actually replied:

Yes ... i've sent you videos of it functional in the past, and discussed this ... more than once. Just design ... and some testing of the new designs obviously

==========
What that meant:

Yes. May god have mercy on your soul if you reply anything even remotely close to "oh I had no idea, lets revisit adding this to v1". I will not be held accountable for my actions

When your home's infrastructure runs better and is more stable than some of the shit that's actually running enterprises because you actually do care about industry best practices and product quality.. it's a weird feeling. A very disappointing one, if anything.

Post-meritocracy, it very much seems to be a thing. And when you call people out for it because yes I do want to *be* the change that I want to see, they get all defensive and shun you. Yeah, let's make the world burn in inefficient, dysfunctional bullshit. That's a much better idea.

Are we humans really that far apart from the chimps that we descended from?

Worst part of it all, those incompetent bastards that can't possibly admit and work to improve their mistakes are the ones that are behind the companies' steering wheel. That too is such an excellent idea. I bet that half of them got employed only because they took the lowest wage and could (barely) turn on a computer. Fucking morons...

Two years ago I started a small online business. It was not a long term investment and it literally ended up being a one man business. The idea was to provide a service to a small group of people who will benefit from my idea and to offer it to them at a very cheap price. (It being the cheapest helped its popularity a lot).

However, never once did it actually make any profit. (and i never wanted it to make a profit) I wanted it to be self sustaining business and it was.

This was a project for my University by the way, I started off in my first year because of my extensive knowledge in the particular matter, and I only sold to people on campus.

Now that its been 4 years, my batch is graduating, and so there aren't many people to spread the word about this project. It's finally the time to actually say goodbye to this project.

I leased a dedicated server two years ago, and I am finally saying goodbye to that too (can't afford to keep it live anymore). And seriously, it feels sad to shut this machine down haha, I've had so much fun playing around with the configurations (even though it was a production server).

It's clear that this downsizing will continue and I will be closing the service in the near future.

FUCK OFF with all this Code of Conduct/ Contributors Covenant BULLSHIT..... Coraline Ada Ehmke The stupid cunt ass tranny bitch started this bullshit.
Heres a crazy idea.... Focus on the god damn code and quit worrying about the other shit.
If you cant stand the heat get the fuck out of the kitchen....
I am sooooo fucken tired of this pansy ass cry baby SJW generation. All of them just need to be forced onto a judas chair... im afraid they would like it too much tho.
At this point there is'nt a law to prevent me from discriminating against Political Ideologies in employment. Its the only way to prevent your company from being infected by the virus.

Today on forgotten movies – Chronicle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wrote a node + vue web app that consumes bing api and lets you block specific hosts with a click, and I have some thoughts I need to post somewhere.

My main motivation for this it is that the search results I've been getting with the big search engines are lacking a lot of quality. The SEO situation right now is very complex but the bottom line is that there is a lot of white hat SEO abuse.

Commercial companies are fucking up the internet very hard. Search results have become way too profit oriented thus unneutral. Personal blogs are becoming very rare. Information is losing quality and sites are losing identity. The internet is consollidating.

So, I decided to write something to help me give this situation the middle finger.

I wrote this because I consider the ability to block specific sites a basic universal right. If you were ripped off by a website or you just don't like it, then you should be able to block said site from your search results. It's not rocket science.

Google used to have this feature integrated but they removed it in 2013. They also had an extension that did this client side, but they removed it in 2018 too. We're years past the time where Google forgot their "Don't be evil" motto.

AFAIK, the only search engine on earth that lets you block sites is millionshort.com, but if you block too many sites, the performance degrades. And the company that runs it is a for profit too.

There is a third party extension that blocks sites called uBlacklist. The problem is that it only works on google. I wrote my app so as to escape google's tracking clutches, ads and their annoying products showing up in between my results.

But aside uBlacklist does the same thing as my app, including the limitation that this isn't an actual search engine, it's just filtering search results after they are generated.

This is far from ideal because filter results before the results are generated would be much more preferred.

But developing a search engine is prohibitively expensive to both index and rank pages for a single person. Which is sad, but can't do much about it.

I'm also thinking of implementing the ability promote certain sites, the opposite to blocking, so these promoted sites would get more priority within the results.

I guess I would have to move the promoted sites between all pages I fetched to the first page/s, but client side.

But this is suboptimal compared to having actual access to the rank algorithm, where you could promote sites in a smarter way, but again, I can't build a search engine by myself.

I'm using mongo to cache the results, so with a click of a button I can retrieve the results of a previous query without hitting bing. So far a couple of queries don't seem to bring much performance or space issues.

On using bing: bing is basically the only realiable API option I could find that was hobby cost worthy. Most microsoft products are usually my last choice.

Bing is giving me a 7 day free trial of their search API until I register a CC. They offer a free tier, but I'm not sure if that's only for these 7 days. Otherwise, I'm gonna need to pay like 5$.

Paying or not, having to use a CC to use this software I wrote sucks balls.

So far the usage of this app has resulted in me becoming more critical of sites and finding sites of better quality. I think overall it helps me to become a better programmer, all the while having better protection of my privacy.

One not upside is that I'm the only one curating myself, whereas I could benefit from other people that I trust own block/promote lists.

I will git push it somewhere at some point, but it does require some more work:
I would want to add a docker-compose script to make it easy to start, and I didn't write any tests unfortunately (I did use eslint for both apps, though).
The performance is not excellent (the app has not experienced blocks so far, but it does make the coolers spin after a bit) because the algorithms I wrote were very POC.
But it took me some time to write it, and I need to catch some breath.

There are other more open efforts that seem to be more ethical, but they are usually hard to use or just incomplete.

commoncrawl.org is a free index of the web. one problem I found is that it doesn't seem to index everything (for example, it doesn't seem to index the blog of a friend I know that has been writing for years and is indexed by google).

it also requires knowledge on reading warc files, which will surely require some time investment to learn.

it also seems kinda slow for responses,

it is also generated only once a month, and I would still have little idea on how to implement a pagerank algorithm, let alone code it.

I wish to create a guild for software developers. Like in the old age, where certain masterwork developers work together in order to provide non-hacky solutions. The beauty of a guild is that it would allow proper apprenticeship, Blacklisting of toxic companies and directly help with wage negotiations. Too often I see proper professionals working overtime just because they are harassed and having "impostor syndrome" (I know the term is hated, but passes the idea much better). Also maybe that would eliminate technical debt...
But hey, this is just a vision... :')

I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.

I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.

We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.

I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?

I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.

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

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

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

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

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

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

love-hate relationship with Python semi-rant
The year is 2020.

I have already grown accustomed to the idea that in order to do ML without worrying too much about having to completely jump through hoops with the tech stack I have chosen that I would have to settle with Python, which I like.....for small scripts that don't do much other than piping data around or doing simple admin tasks, that is generally our use of Python at work.
For anything bigger I would prefer something else. Not because I find anything inherently horrible in Python, I find it to be a nice language overall, that has made it possible for many to find a passion inside of the world of development and possibly an interesting in overall engineering and computer science principles. Much respect Python, good game Guido VR, what you did changed the world.

But it is that damn whitespace that gets me, the need to use it as a way to properly write blocks, I just can't make myself like syntactical whitespace no matter what I do. I can do without static typing, shit I did it for the longest time with JS way tf before Node and Typescript were a thing, and I have done it before PHP's attempt at having type hints, which still leave much to be desired. Ruby(imho) the most elegant language around doesn't have it and that is fine really, it does not bother me as much, if mypy gets powerful and widely adopted enough it will then be a non-issue.

But another thing that the 4 languages i mentioned before have is non-existent syntactical whitespace......I just can't stand it.

So, why am I saying all of this nonsense? Today I wanted to recreate a conda environment and landed on the use of YAML............which has syntactic whitespace and I lost my shit.

I seldom bitch about languages and technologies, shit, I used VBScript before, not only did I get paid handsomely for it, but I fucking enjoyed it(probably cuz I am a masochist).

But two things I cannot abide: VBA and syntactic whitespace.

Once I get enough knowledge for it I will push for the same level of tooling in Python to be ported to Scala.

Thank you for coming to my whiny post about something as small as bitching about syntactic whitespace.

Primarily IntelliJ IDEs.

I'm using IDEA for Rust & Kotlin, PHPStorm, Datagrip (DB), and sometimes PyCharm CE.

IDEs can feel a bit dirty with how heavy they are, and the lack of customization/control. But at the end of the day there's just nothing that can measure up against IntelliJ's inspections, integrations and project indexing.

My ideal product would be one universal IntelliJ IDE, but combined with the openness of VSCode/Atom, having everything transparently configurable through stylesheets and scripts.

As an editor though.... I use Vim for LaTeX, Markdown, plain text and Haskell code... but not so much for other programming languages.

Vim was my first editor when I moved from C64 to PC development 25 years ago, and while you get used to balancing keybind vimgolfing with being actually productive, i've always found maintaining plugins and profiles too cumbersome -- the reality is that Vim is an awesome TEXT editor, but it's really awful as a CODE editor out of the box.

When you want to try out a new programming language, you don't want to have to mess around with your Vimrc and Vundle and YCM for half a day just so you can comfortably write "Hello World" in Rust or Elixir... you just want to click one install button, press F10 to compile and see if it flies.

Oh, and I use Xed a lot for quickly editing files... because it's the default GUI editor on Mint desktops, and it's quite good at being a basic notepad.

#forexposure, for experience, flexible hours (especially when coupled with work from home, it makes your workplace too accessible and management can guilt trip you into working at ungodly hours way too easily), and such I'd really avoid.. not that I have much experience with these things though. Oh and also, startups. They're small so very intimate in a way but too unstable.

Honestly though, I have difficulty in working for any employer, especially when that employer isn't a very technical one. Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to go self-employed... 🤔

(Sorry for repost, forgot wk144 tag)

Ever dealt with people who don’t understand a damn thing they’re coding and just copy and paste stuff around and say that it works? It’s amazing how long people can skate by with only knowing 50% of how what they’re working on works.

We had some dumb know it all on our team who would regularly ship half-done stuff to production and then scramble to fix it after the users bitched about how it didn’t meet the requirements.

This stupid person changed an else to an if having no idea what any of the logic did in this section of code, didn’t adequately test it, and it somehow made it through code review because the better devs were out of office.

This bullshit goes to production, fucks up 200,000 records, and users start complaining about it. Shitty developer refuses to revert the offending code until multiple people on the team overrule them. They spend the next week unfucking the data and decides to just take a day off on Wednesday because it’s been “too much mental energy to fix.” The shit wasn’t even fully resolved yet.

Some people seriously do not belong in this industry. This person’s thought process was:
“Changing an else to an if can’t possibly have significant consequences. Let’s just change this so my code change executes to see what happens.”

Still not sure how they weren’t fired when this happened. They unfortunately got to quit on their own two months later.

"Let the developers consider a conceptual design,” the King said, for about the twentieth time that day._

“No, no!” said the Queen. “Tests first—design afterwards.”

“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of writing the tests first!”

“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple. “How much code have you written recently, anyway?” she sneered.

“I won’t,” said the plucky little Alice. “Tests shouldn’t drive design, design should drive testing. Tests should verify that your code works as it was designed, and that it meets the customer’s requirements, too,” she added, surprised by her own insight. “And when you drive your tests from a conceptual design, you can test smarter instead of harder.”

!dev

I have a couple of thoughts about social justice controversies from these last years.

I think it's hard to have a good opinion about these events for several reasons.

One reason is that finding good information in 2019 is very hard.

Revenue based sites (thus unneutral) dominate the search results. You search about something and you find thousands of sites basically saying the same thing (because they copy each other).

That's why the existence of a free and open search engine is so important, so it's easier to find neutral hence good information on which to base your opinions, but they are prohibitively big for small groups to build.

Another reason is that controversies generate shock and shock curtails rational thinking. Maybe that's how the primitive brain works?

I'm not much of a scholar to feel confident to say that, but it's so recurrent that it's not too much of a wild guess.

When a controversy happens, a natural reaction is to pick a side. This means that:
a) we assume that there are only 2 sides, and
b) we must pick one of them

So, maybe the human is a bad politician by nature?

Also, because of the shock controversies generate, peaceful dialogue is very rare.

I have yet to see peaceful dialogue online about what patriarchy means to feminists and a lot of other terms they use.

I don't care much about feminists that vandalize or interrupt talks (yelling over someone else is abuse in my opinion).

But for the rest of them, I think discussing their ideas would be good.

I say this because most feminist discourse I see online is not open. Or maybe there are such instances but the web is so big that it's hard to find such instances.

I think some part of the modern feminist doctrine is bullshit, and some part is true.

I for one hate when some men I know in life expect their wives to be their cooks+cleaners (unless they want to do that, willingly). Personally, I'd encourage my wife to get a job (rightfully so, not just to meet some minority quota in some company).

I don't mind either calling a trans person the pronoun she wants.

But other ideas are awful, like the idea that meritocracy is patriarchy, so you need to force minorities to meet a proportionate quota. That's terrible reasoning.

Or the excessive self appreciation culture, like saying to yourself "you are pretty, you are beautiful, you are perfect". I think that grows arrogance and black-or-white thinking.

And some other ideas as well.

I guess the same you can say about any doctrine with different degrees. Some part is bullshit, some part isn't.

Some right wing people hate everyone who isn't white by default, but some want to have more immigration control.

I sure don't like the experiment of separating children from families like the current us govt did, but I wouldn't be happy either to know that by '99 50% of gangs members in the us were hispanic.

With this, I'm not going to say "embrace everyone's ideas" like an idiot. I hate when people do that. It's a stupid and weak reaction to radicalism.

In fact I think the way you fight radicalism and bad doctrines is that you listen to them and maintain good dialogue and counterargue in a respectful but insightful manner.

Making snide remarks, insulting or trolling won't change anyone's mind. That is just throwing fire to the fire.

In fact, when someone gets harassed because of something they believe in, usually it results in even more adherence to their beliefs, because of the usual assumption that success or goodness is full of strife.

So by telling a "sjw" or kkk member that they are idiots over twitter, you are in fact making them stronger believers in their doctrine.

Think of Daryl Davis, a black guy that made 200 members leave the kkk. How? He didn't tell them they were assholes, he somehow made friends with them.

I feel bad now because I've been trolling new devrant users a lot because of how they worsen the quality of the site, but maybe I should tell them that they are ruining the site somehow in a nice way and maybe they'll listen? I dunno...

did you know, that in PHP, you can do:
if ( ! function_exists('function_name'))
{
function function_name()
{
//code of the function
}
}

which apparently means you can do
if($var == 'something'){
function functionName(){
//some code
}
} else if($var == 'something else'){
function functionName(){
//some completely different code
}
}

so now, apparently:
1. before this code executes, the function doesn't exist at all (okay, i can live with that)

2. after this code executes, any call to that function can result in any of those two completely different bodies of the same-name function executing, depending on what the $var was set at that time?

...so... now not only the same call to the same(name) function can do two completely different things, *but if you change the value of $var afterwards, you can't even properly find out which version of that function is in effect for the remainder of the run of the script*...?????

WHAT.
THE.
...i mean... I can't help but think that the idea of conditional function declaration like this is... kind of cool (have I been warped by JavaScript too much?), but at the same time... WHAT THE FUCK.

Person:"you're a dev, you must reeeaaaly get frustrated with semi colons 😏"
Me: "at times but it's not such a big problem with the compilers being better now.😊"
Person: "so innovative!😁"
Me: "nothing is innovative!! All new idea app ideas suck and there are not too many clicks!!! The icons are perfect!! Purple and orange buttons are not a good idea!!! What do you mean you want 3 buttons on the one screen that do the same damn thing!! Do you even think!! Oh of course the users are stupid, takes one to know one!!! Doesn't look like much?!!! Sure the backend is a mother fucking kraken the size of Michigan that runs smoother than a babies bottom but hey, let's bitch cause it's too plain on the eye!!! EVERYTHING IS A LIE LIKE THE EXISTANCE OF YOUR BRAAAAIIIN!! - pants neoriticly-😳
Person: "new client? Or friend with an idea? 😒"

Any idea how to make a fan in an HP laptop spin at lower temperatures? The fan in my Pavilion dm-1 only starts spinning when CPU reaches 75°C and enters full speed when the GPU also becomes 75°C. Which is strange because this CPU and GPU are one and the same thing.. an APU. And overheating freezes often happen at around 75-80°C.. which isn't too much of a headroom really. I'd rather have it kick in at 50-60°C already, but would like to avoid using the power of the soldering iron for it.. I've already lost a fan to that previously (current one is a spare part from AliExpress). Granted, my soldering experience was much less back then.. nowadays I can probably even solder 1206 SMD packages comfortably. But I don't want to risk it, and I've got experience with custom kernels anyway.. are there any fan speed governors in the kernel that you know of?

FWIW, fancontrol doesn't seem to be supported on this laptop, and neither is pwmconfig. Perhaps I'll have to stick to the electronics method after all? Given that it's just a 5V fan, I guess that I could feed it power by tapping some power from a USB rail and controlling its speed from an ATtiny85.. but inside the laptop there isn't enough space for that and I don't feel like freeing this hardware out of its laptop chassis yet (though that is on the list). Either way running at 60°C under no load is terrible.. some HP certified enganeering "feature" I guess...

What were some of your "OH MY GOD I'M AN AWESOME CODE WIZARD!" moments?

For example, I can remember two or three:
One was when I, with only cursory knowledge of C, never having worked with it but having been exposed to it (and having lots of experience with C# therefore familiar with the c-family syntax), took 5 minute look at a source code and pointed out a bug that the student working on it was trying to solve for the past 2 hours. Sadly, I don't remember what the bug was anymore.

Second one was on reddit, someone posted to gamedev group a 2minute video from his voxel+ai framework he was working on, I watched it, and without any idea what it's written in, or how, I was like "you seem to be dropping frames in a pretty regular manner unrelated to anything I see happening on the screen. You're creating too much garbage on frame-by-frame basis (probably while your AI is exploring what to do), look into object pooling, it'll help".

And the guy responded in a few hours like "by gosh, you're right! thank you! and what do you think about the source code?" (he linked git repo below the video.

And I was like OMG I'M A MAGE, I DIDN'T EVEN CLICK THE REPO LINK, ONLY NOW AFTERWARDS, AND yeah, it's c++ so sadly nothing for me, but OMG I JUST WROTE THE FIRST THING THAT CAME TO MY MIND, DIDN'T EXPECT IT TO BE CORRECT, I'M AWESOME.

=D and the feeling stayed with me for about two days.

(If it's not clear yet, it's perfectly okay, in fact, required, to brag about yourself in answering this question ;) )

How do you guys/girls explain to potential new customers that you can perfectly work in a structured business environment and follow the rules, but also that you're assertive enough to oppose desicions being made based on bias, misunderstanding, fanboyism, or grave stupidity.

I just got informed from a freelance position that they would have hired me if it were not for my 'rebellious nature towards customers'

I don't oppose customers, i oppose stupidity unfounded.
Example from experience
> me working in a helodesk support position, all windows computer.
> new mgr comes into office, is a douche and complete mac fanboy
> wants all computers that are FINALLY working decent for some time in the entire department replaced with mac's... Back at 2010.
> whole team, even disliking microsoft themselves, are telling mgr that's a bad, dangerously dumb idea, expensive too, different OS, different software mgmt making, back then integration microsoft and apple was beyond diarhea... Several other issues the senior devs and admins pointed out

>mgr: 'but aple is soh much better, like a billion times better, hurrduurrrrr'
His decision passed somehow to the board..
> All stations from our customers get changed...we don't get a single machine to try out problems because overspending
> we are most of the time unable to help out customers because we still have pc's...
> mgr asks team why performance drops after 1 month
> we compared performance graph with his starting date of mgr, see clear drop after mgr's plan implemented...
> board stilll stands by mgr, gets praise for 'bold changes in the company', but appears to be some associate's son
> two main seniors leave after 15 years of employment, in three months, 80% of staff leaves.
> we canr fix the problems, we are not dev's , we get shit from all sides, i was still a junior in the industry so i worked as a slave inside that job.
> eventually get fired due to 'bad performance'
> mgr loses entire team... 'Hey why don't we outsource this dept to south africa, it's a lot cheaper! '

now that company is an it hellhouse where everyone get clinically depressed from sitting atbtheir station...
This is what i wish to oppose!

How to make that clear!

I prefer functional style programming because it is easier to me to think in modules and functional hierarchies than it is object style shierarchies.

All in all, languages like F# and Clojure have always been fascinating to me. I wish I could find a use case for Haskell, but I can't. If anything F# is awesome to me because I already know .NET and really dig the entire framework, the strides made by Core are outstanding.

I had tried Scala before and just couldn't get into it. Far easier to just stick to Java even if I hate the idea of extending classes all over the place.

Ocaml is interesting too, but I know little to nothing about it, and Elixir looks far too much like Ruby for my taste even if I do like Ruby.

Choice is good, but sometimes overwhelming

== Internship Interview Rant ==

This is the weirdest interview I've been to to be honest because it wasn't really ABOUT ME. It's like the boss is not really interesting in knowing what I can do, what I am capable of doing. He asked me about my educational background for 5 minutes and started explaining about the startup for 45 minutes. He explained how he came up with the idea like it was a children's bedtime story. He explain what the job is, BUT he didn't mention what programming languages they use. All he said was it required knowledge about different programming languages. I tried asking but he seemed to dodge the question for some reason by saying everyone needs to know a little bit of everything. (Srsly i don't even know what to start learning for this) After listening to him talk and talk and talk and talk, he finally said "hey, think about it and send me an email if you are willing to take it up!"

He works with STUDENTS. The team is composed of him and 5 students. o.O They all seem so..... quiet in the office. Is that normal ???? Or like shouldn't everyone be kinda "interactive" sometimes?

So there is a girl working there too for 3 weeks now but SHE IS IN ROMANIA like wtf, gr8 then i guess ill be the only girl there but hey perks of being a girl, u get to be spoiled sometimes XD it happens a lot !

Internship ad ----> Main language: English
Me: *rages internally during the interview and thinks: BRUHH WHY ARENT U SPEAKING IN ENGLISH i prepared what I was gonna say in english for an hour*
I wonder if the code is in english or maybe its not :(( But I wish it were because it would be soooo much easier in english.

And there you go, I guess I have one week to find a better internship or decide to deal with this talkative boss. This isn't exactly a story of my last job cause my last job is totally non-dev related. This is a story of (maybe) my future job unless I actually find a better internship.

Absolutely not dev-related.

Blah, blah, weird conversation and shit. I'm too tired and lazy to write this crap again, but let's do it.

The guy is a dev I randomly found on some chatting service, he was interesting to talk with until this conversation. I'll write this out of memory, so yeah.

Him: So by the way I wrote an app that you give your penis size to to get measurements and stuff about it.
Me, thinking it was dev humor: That's hilarious. Tell me more, I'm interested.
Him: So the idea behind all of this was to gather some big data style info about people's penis size and habits and all that stuff.
Me: Man that's awesome. Can I see the source?
Him: No, it's proprietary. You can buy a license though.
Me: You went that far for a joke?
Him: What joke?
Me: The whole software you just told me about.
Him: That's not a joke, I'm being very serious about it.
Me: Oh well. What did you get from the stats?
Him: I got some tips from people's habits! I never thought that shaving it could make it look bigger, but that's awesome!
Me: Do you really care about it that much?
Him: Studies have proven that size correlated with confidence. Since I started doing it, I've been more confident than ever!
Me: Great.
Him: I'm a bit disappointed to see that I'm in the lower percentiles though.
Me: Well of course you are.
Him: Why would you say that?
Me: Well since people with a big dick tend to go more willingly into the subject and might even buy a fucking app for it, of course you'd have the higher average in your stats.
Him: You're only saying that because you have a small cock.
Me: Why the fuck would you say that? You're the one that's concerned about it, not me.
Him: Go on, what's your size?
Me, because I don't care about discussing that stuff: *Tells him*
Him: [stats, comparisons and stuff]
Me: Well I never gave a fuck and your stats won't make me change my mind.
[ ... Some other shit about my size compared to his ... ]
Him: Would you want to work with me for the database maintenance?
Me: You must be joking?
Him: I'm serious.
Me: *Deletes account*

Seriously, fuck that guy. I rewrote that quickly so you only had the best, but it was a whole fucking conversation.

When I was in college OOP was emerging. A lot of the professors were against teaching it as the core. Some younger professors were adamant about it, and also Java fanatics. So after the bell rang, they'd sometimes teach people that wanted to learn it. I stayed after and the professor said that object oriented programming treated things like reality.

My first thought to this was hold up, modeling reality is hard and complicated, why would you want to add that to your programming that's utter madness.

Then he started with a ball example and how some balls in reality are blue, and they can have a bounce action we can express with a method.

My first thought was that this seems a very niche example. It has very little to do with any problems I have yet solved and I felt thinking about it this way would complicate my programs rather than make them simpler.

I looked around the at remnants of my classmates and saw several sitting forward, their eyes lit up and I felt like I was in a cult meeting where the head is trying to make everyone enamored of their personality. Except he wasn't selling himself, he was selling an idea.

I patiently waited it out, wanting there to be something of value in the after the bell lesson. Something I could use to better my own programming ability. It never came.

This same professor would tell us all to read and buy gang of four it would change our lives. It was an expensive hard cover book with a ribbon attached for a bookmark. It was made to look important. I didn't have much money in college but I gave it a shot I bought the book. I remember wrinkling my nose often, reading at it. Feeling like I was still being sold something. But where was the proof. It was all an argument from authority and I didn't think the argument was very good.

I left college thinking the whole thing was silly and would surely go away with time. And then it grew, and grew. It started to be impossible to avoid it. So I'd just use it when I had to and that became more and more often.

I began to doubt myself. Perhaps I was wrong, surely all these people using and loving this paradigm could not be wrong. I took on a 3 year project to dive deep into OOP later in my career. I was already intimately aware of OOP having to have done so much of it. But I caught up on all the latest ideas and practiced them for a the first year. I thought if OOP is so good I should be able to be more productive in years 2 and 3.

It was the most miserable I had ever been as a programmer. Everything took forever to do. There was boilerplate code everywhere. You didn't so much solve problems as stuff abstract ideas that had nothing to do with the problem everywhere and THEN code the actual part of the code that does a task. Even though I was working with an interpreted language they had added a need to compile, for dependency injection. What's next taking the benefit of dynamic typing and forcing typing into it? Oh I see they managed to do that too. At this point why not just use C or C++. It's going to do everything you wanted if you add compiling and typing and do it way faster at run time.

I talked to the client extensively about everything. We both agreed the project was untenable. We moved everything over another 3 years. His business is doing better than ever before now by several metrics. And I can be productive again. My self doubt was over. OOP is a complicated mess that drags down the software industry, little better than snake oil and full of empty promises. Unfortunately it is all some people know.

Now there is a functional movement, a data oriented movement, and things are looking a little brighter. However, no one seems to care for procedural. Functional and procedural are not that different. Functional just tries to put more constraints on the developer. Data oriented is also a lot more sensible, and again pretty close to procedural a lot of the time. It's just odd to me this need to separate from procedural at all. Procedural was very honest. If you're a bad programmer you make bad code. If you're a good programmer you make good code. It seems a lot of this was meant to enforce bad programmers to make good code. I'll tell you what I think though. I think that has never worked. It's just hidden it away in some abstraction and made identifying it harder. Much like the code methodologies themselves do to the code.

Now I'm left with a choice, keep my own business going to work on what I love, shift gears and do what I hate for more money, or pivot careers entirely. I decided after all this to go into data science because what you all are doing to the software industry sickens me. And that's my story. It's one that makes a lot of people defensive or even passive aggressive, to those people I say, try more things. At least then you can be less defensive about your opinion.

Prior to a tech conference in Las Vegas, the department manager held pre-meetings (yes, more than one)
with the developers to outline their expected behavior (yes, there was an outline in Word). Since
they would be representing the company, professionalism would be expected at all times, not just
during the conference. He knew he couldn’t forbid gambling and drinking, but any unruly behavior
that could reflect badly on the company would be dealt with severe disciplinary action up to and
including termination. He wrote up very detailed itinerary, what track each developer was
expected to attend, meal times (yes, what time to get up for breakfast, meet for lunch, and time
to eat at night). First day was fine, casinos are kinda crazy so having an itinerary wasn’t the
worst idea and no one got lost. Days following however, got interesting. After the first evening
meal, everyone hit the casino as expected (too much drinking, etc..normal single twenty-something
guys do) and the manager especially had a good time.
Next, and following days, the manager could not be found in any of the ‘required’ technical tracks.
Not that they cared that much, but couple of devs decided to check out the casino, and sure enough,
there he was at one of the tables, drunk, and being very loud around at 10 in the morning.
Again, nobody cared much, manager wasn’t very tech savy, and so attending a track on C #threading
would be lost on him. It was more of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ kind of thing.
The manager kept to the itinerary, he met everyone at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, etc, but the
‘WTF’s didn’t get good until the manager was bragging about how wonderful the conference was, how
much he was learning and couldn’t wait to get back and start implementing everything he was learning.
It was such a joke, the guys would bait him on tracks they know he didn’t attend and an amazing amount
of BS could not be believed.
On the last day of the conference several decided to follow him after breakfast to see where he went
and watched him go into a technical track, just to walk back out and straight to the casino floor.
Again, around 10, he was drunk, not quite as loud until he threw up in a trash can (they said it was quite a scene).
He left to go back his room, which they suspected he took a nap before meeting everyone for lunch.
After that, they gathered his daily itinerary was:
- Get up for breakfast
- walk around and make sure it looked like he was heading to a track
- head to the casino
- take a nap
- eat lunch
- walk around some more
- head to the casino
- take a nap
- eat dinner
- head to the casino
- wash-rinse-repeat
Last day caught up with him. After about week of drinking, staying up late, etc, his body (he’s in his mid 50’s, 350lbs+, so imagine)
kinda’ gave up. Could barely walk 50 feet without needing to sit down, and the flight back was worse for everyone,
throwing up occasionally, moaning, you get the idea.
On the following Monday with the VP if IT, everyone was discussing the conference, what they learned,
what they liked, etc, the manager also bragged, yes bragged, on how tired he was because of how much
he learned and the reason why he probably caught the flu (he couldn’t hide how sick he was on the flight)
saying “When you’re in the learning zone, you lose track of time and then you are so exhausted, your
immune system is susceptible to all kinds of things.” . VP was so impressed by his dedication and
fighting through the exhaustion for the good of the company, he gave him the rest of the day off.
Other devs? No, they had to go back to work.

My social life consists of spending much of my free time with my girlfriend, seeing my close family on weekends and meeting with a few friends from time to time.

It's enough for me and since there's not much of it, it isn't hard to "balance". Whatever that means.

Seriously tho, "social/work life balance" is subjective. It depends on what you need to feel good and happy. What works for some will not work for others. Don't try to push others into being social when they don't want to. Don't give me that "you need to go out more" crap. I don't. I'm fine just like this. I prefer to stay home and see a movie with my girlfriend.

That "people need to be social" mindset made me feel bad about myself for too long because I'm just not like that and people keep pushing that idea into my head. I'll go out with you when I feel like it, don't push it. Stop asking me every fucking weekend ffs.

Our project at work goes live in 3 weeks.

The code base has no automated tests, breaks very often, has never had any level of manual testing

will not be releasing with any form of enforced roles or permissions in our first release now due to no time to enforce, however there is a whole admin api where you can literally change anything in our database including roles.

We also have teams in various countries all working separately on the same solution using microservices with shared nuget packages and they aren't using them properly.

Our pull requests are so big - as much as, 75 file changes - in our fe app that I can't keep up with it and I honestly have no idea if it even works or not due to no automated tests and no time to manually test.

We have no testing team, or qa team of any sort.

Every request into the system has to hit a minimum of 3 different databases via 3 different microservices so 1 request = 4 requests with the load on the servers.

We don't use any file streams so everything is just shoved in the buffer on the server.

Most of the people working on the angular apps cba to learn angular, no one across 2 teams cba to learn git. We use git so they constantly face problems. The guy in charge has 0 experience in angular but makes me do things how he wants architecturally so half the patterns make no sense.

No one looks at the pull requests, they just click approve so they may as well push directly to master.

Unfinished work gets put in for pull request so we don't know if the app is in a release state since aall teams are working independently, but on the same code base.

I sat down and tested the app myself for an hour and found 25 fe only issues, and 5 breaking cross browser issues.

Most of our databases are not normalised. Most of our databases make no sense. 99% of our tables have no indexing since there is no expertise with free time to do it.

No one there understands css properly. Or javascript.

Our. Net core microservices all directly use ef in the controller actions so there is no shared code there.

Our customer facing fe app is not dry because no tests so it was decided it was better this way.

Management has no idea on code state, it seems team lead is lieing to them about things like having any level of tests.

Management hire devs that claim to be experts but then it turns out they have basically no knowledge of what they were hired to do, even don't know what json is or the framework or language they are hired for, but we just leave them to get on with it and again make prs too big to review.

Honestly I have no hope that this will go well now but I am morbidly curious to watch. I've never seen anything like the train wreck that we are about to get experience.

There are a couple of them to list! But to sum my main ones(biggest personal heroes):

John McCarthy, one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence and accredited with coining such term(sometimes before 1960 if memory serves right), a mathematical prodigy, the man based the original model of the Lisp programming language in lambda calculus. Many modern concepts that we have in programming where implemented in one way or another from his systems back in the day, and as a data analyst and ML nut.....well I am a big fan.

Herb Sutter: C++ programmer extraordinaire. I appreciate him more for his lectures and published articles than anything else. Incredibly smart and down to earth and manages to make C++ less intimidating while still approaching it with respect.

Rich Hickey: The mastermind behind Clojure, the Lisp dialect for the JVM. Rich is really talented and his lectures behind his motivations and reasons behind everything he does with Clojure are fascinating to see.

Ryan Dahl: Awww shit y'all know how it is. The man changed web development both in the backend and the frontend for good. The concept of people writing their own servers to run their pages was not new, but the Node JS runtime environment made it more widely available to people by means of a simple to use language that was already popular with web developers. I would venture to say that Ryan's amazing contributions to JS made the language better, as it stands, the language continues to evolve and new features that make it overall better keep being added. He is currently building Deno, which would be a runtime environment for TypeScript, in Rust.

Anders Hejlsberg: This dude was everywhere man....the original author of Turbo Pascal and the lead of Delphi back in the day. These RAD tools paved the way for what would be a revolution in the computing world. The dude is also the lead architect and designer of the C# programming language as well as TypeScript.
This fucker is everywhere and I love it.

Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto: Matsumoto san is the creator of the Ruby programming language. Not only am I a die hard fan of Ruby, but of the core philosophies that the man keeps as the core of his language design: Make the developer happy, principle of least surprise. Also I follow: minswan which is a term made by the Ruby community that states Mats is nice so we are nice. <---- because being cool to others is better than being a passive aggressive cunt.

Steve Wozniak: I feel as if the man does not get enough recognition...the man designed the Apple || computer which (regardless of how much most of y'all bitch and whine) paved the way for modern micro computers. Dude is also accredited with designing one of the first programmable universal remotes(which momma said was shitty) but he did none the less.

Alan Kay: Developed Smalltalk and the original OOP way of doing things. Smalltalk as a concept is really fucking interesting. If you guys ever get the chance, play with Pharo, which is a modern Smalltalk. The thing is really interesting and the overall idea of Smalltalk can be grasped in very little time. It sucks because the software scales beautifully in terms of project building, the idea of hoisting a program as its own runtime environment and ide by preserving state through images is just mind blowing to me. Makes file based programs feel....well....quaint.

Those are some of the biggest dudes for me. I know that the list is large, but I wanted to give credit to the people that inspired me the most. Honorary mention goes to other language creators and engineers of course, but it would be way too large to list!

Still on the primenumbers bender.
Had this idea that if there were subtle correlations between a sufficiently large set of identities and the digits of a prime number, the best way to find it would be to automate the search.

And thats just what I did.

I started with trace matrices.
I actually didn't expect much of it. I was hoping I'd at least get lucky with a few chance coincidences.

My first tests failed miserably. Eight percent here, 10% there. "I might as well just pick a number out of a hat!" I thought.

I scaled it way back and asked if it was possible to predict *just* the first digit of either of the prime factors.

That also failed. Prediction rates were low still. Like 0.08-0.15.

So I automated *that*.

After a couple days of on-and-off again semi-automated searching I stumbled on it.

[1144, 827, 326, 1184, -1, -1, -1, -1]

That little sequence is a series of identities representing different values derived from a randomly generated product.

Each slots into a trace matrice. The results of which predict the first digit of one of our factors, with a 83.2% accuracy even after 10k runs, and rising higher with the number of trials.

It's not much, but I was kind of proud of it.

I'm pushing for finding 90%+ now.

Some improvements include using a different sort of operation to generate results. Or logging all results and finding the digit within each result thats *most* likely to predict our targets, across all results. (right now I just take the digit in the ones column, which works but is an arbitrary decision on my part).

Theres also the fact that it's trivial to correctly guess the digit 25% of the time, simply by guessing 1, 3, 7, or 9, because all primes, except for 2, end in one of these four.

I have also yet to find a trace with a specific bias for predicting either the smaller of two unique factors *or* the larger. But I haven't really looked for one either.

I still need to write a generate that takes specific traces, and lets me mutate some of the values, to push them towards certain 'fitness' levels.
This would be useful not just for very high predictions, but to find traces with very *low* predictions.

Why? Because it would actually allow for the *elimination* of possible digits, much like sudoku, from a given place value in a predicted factor.

I don't know if any of this will even end up working past the first digit. But splitting the odds, between the two unique factors of a prime product, and getting 40+% chance of guessing correctly, isn't too bad I think for a total amateur.

Far cry from a couple years ago claiming I broke prime factorization. People still haven't forgiven me for that, lol.

I have an idea to make server side html. Just for fun. Or for noobs who just wants to know web development.
Example syntax:
<html listen=80>
... something amazing
</html>

Any suggestions/ideas??
(This could also be the much needed revolution for backend)

Step 1. Have no dissertation project.
Step 2. Wait for the last 3 hours till the deadline to come up with an idea.
Step 3. Realise that your just-thought-up project idea is something companies like Google and Amazon are still trying to figure out. But there is no time left.
Step 4: Approach your supervisor with the words "Imagine the possibilities". They respond with "Imagine the difficulty".
Step 5: They sign on it regardless since they are curious to see you fuck up with style, also you are too much in love with your idea already, and refuse to drop it.
Step 6: fml

A bot to help you to spend less time on finding a name and design a logo than coding the project

My best prank: A year ago I was at my friends flat, which he finally rented with his new girlfriend. He is a kind of person, which has like constantly opened 110 tabs in chrome, three or four instances of chrome running, torrenting at full speed and in the meanwhile a few films having opened to "watch" later. He is very very secure about his computer and NEVER leaves me or anyone else alone with his computer. That day we were just talking in the same room, and he goes for some food. I was like yeah thats my chance to prank him. So I opened a new tab and came with an idea - what If I change his desktop background to some random chick, to prank both him and his gf. I knew she will not be mad but his reaction would be priceless (it was his first gf). So I started googling, found a three pretty naked chicks. This was like soft porn, they were still "dressed" but not much. I did not wanted to use a porn for this.
So I was about to download image - right click - save as - little window opened and..

...what the hell, that guy had literally like terabytes of porn in download folder, all totally in one chaos, thousands of images, millions of downloaded videos, all categories just everything from gangbang to milfs or old/ young, what the fuck that computer was like cursed station of porn.

In that point I was like fuck that. This prank has no sense then. So I just closed that little window and did nothing. Prank failed.

Nowdays, He still does not know what I know about his "hobbies". And I will never say him lol. About a months after he broke with his gf and moved to different house. He has now three monitors attached to his computer and 4tb of space. He is still complaining about "lack of space" and "too big downloaded movies" but we all know what is going on lol. We call his "working deck" a sacred porn station.

Pulled into an 'emergency' meeting with a group of web designers deeply concerned a particular service wasn't going to meet all their requirements.
DevA: "For each page, Its going to be A LOT of work to retrieve all the data and store it's state. Every page load will require a round trip to the service."
DevB: "Yes, we aren't sure how the service should be changed to do what we need."
Mgr: "What is it not doing now? Doesn't the service already returns all the necessary data?"
DevA: "Well...um...its all the boolean fields. Some may be defaulted from the database or false because the user unchecked the box. We have to know which is which"
Me: "Why? Are you doing anything different in the UI? Checkbox will be true or false. What or who set that value is irrelevant"
DevC: "Well, it matters if the user didn't fill out all other other values."
Me: "How so?"
DevA: "Its matters because the values in the other fields. Its going to be A TON of work to figure out."
<mgr goes to the white board>
Mgr: "Lets map this out...what fields are you needing to trigger the state on?"
DevA: "Um...uh...the 'Approved' field...and um...'OK to Contact' field"
Mgr: "Just those two?"
DevA: "Yea..um...there are other fields, but whether or not to show the edit box depends on those two."
Me: "The service already returns data, you only have two fields to check? I don't see a need to change the service at all."
DevA: "Returning all that data, we are going have a serious scaling problem. We'll be hitting the service A LOT. All that javascript could cause performance problems too"
Me: "How much data are we talking about? Name, address, couple of booleans?"
DevA: "I have to serialize the data. All that logic is going to be reeeaaallly complicated. It might be better if the service returned only the data I need."
Me: "$64,000 question, how often is this feature going to be used on the web site? Maybe once? Few hundred a week?"
Mgr: "We have no idea. A lot of the data will be pre-populated and we're only sending out a few thousand invitations. More around the holidays...but honestly, not very many."
Me: "Changing that service only for this particular area of the web site isn't going to happen. Changing the UI is the only course of action."
DevA: "Oh frack I can't wait until this project is over."

DevA...how the funck do still have a job here? You wasted about half-hour of my time with your cry-baby crap. Where is my hammer...no...no..don't go there...ahhh...thanks devrant. Prison sentence diverted.

This might be a long post. I need some serious advice.

For the past 6-7 months, My friend and I have been working with these two guys "Managers" on their startup idea. He managed the backend and I was managing the 2 frontend systems for them. The Managers are non-technical.

For the longest time, the Managers were very stubborn on how they wanted things to be implemented in my code or how they wanted something to look. Initially, this was not a bother as we thought that their experience bought some insight that we lacked, but after changing dozens of things back to how we originally made them, we started feeling unhappy. I specifically was more affected by this as most of their changes were related to the front end.

This caused a lot of rifts between us and sometimes led to heated conversations. I won't say that it's all on them. I do have an attitude issue. But then, it's the same with them.

Other than that, one of the Managers is very condescending. He used to talk badly, discredit my work and even say things like "Ohh, so you can't do it" for things that I said will take too much time to implement. This was seriously affecting my mental health.

Nevertheless, we completed the system, which was originally supposed to be just an MVP, over the course of these months and now have our sites up and running with almost 100-200 daily hits. But because it's an e-commerce site, that too with a very different model, the revenue has not started yet.

Yesterday, one of the Managers called me and in so many words told me that I should exit, because of my attitude, with my current equity which is just 3% which amounts to nothing as the company has no value right now. On top of that, I, an idiot, had not taken any remuneration for the first 4 months.

Although I too want to leave, now that I have seen their real face and also because of my mental health. I feel that the system I have made is worth more than 3% equity, way more than that. One of them is a multi-featured seller dashboard to manage products, finances, orders, and a ton of complex features like bulk uploads using excel, image cropping for products, and region selection. The other is a highly optimized dynamic site using Nuxt which is used as the store, with SEO good enough to often list it as one of the top results of various google searches. I'll drop the dev links in the comments if you are interested.

But I don't know how to go about it. I do have complete control over my code and have not signed any formal contract with them, but I feel bad about jeopardizing the company at this stage. Not to mention all that work will just go to waste as well.

am i loosing too much sleep over the idea that JavaScripters with their fat atom/electron are going to dominate the app stores of app/windows in the next few years ?

This is a guide for technology noobies who wants to buy a laptop but have no idea what the SPECS are meaning.

1. Brand
If you like Apple, and love their !sleek design, go to the nearest Apple store and tell them "I want to buy one. Recommendations?"
If you don't like Apple, well, buy anything that fits you. Read more below.

2. Size
There are 11~15 inches, weight is 850g ~ 2+kg. Very many options. Buy whatever you like.

//Fun part coming

3. CPU
This is the power of the brain.
For example,
Pentium is Elementary Schoolers
i3 is Middle Schoolers
i5 is High Schoolers
i7 is University People

Dual-core is 2 people
Quad-core is 4 people

Quiz! What is i5 Dual-core?
A) 2 High Schoolers.

Easy peasy, right?

Now if you have a smartphone and ONLY use Messaging, Phone, and Whatsapp (lol), you can buy Pentium laptops.
If not, I recommend at least i3

Also, there are numbers behind those CPU, like i3-6100
6 means 6th generaton.
If the numbers are bigger, it is the most recent generation.

Think of 6xxx as Stone age people
7xxx as Bronze age people
8xxx as Iron age people
and so one.

4. RAM
This is the size of the desk.
There are 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and so one.
Think of 4GB as small desk to only put one book on it.
8GB as a desk to put a laptop with a keyboard and a mouse.
16GB as a normal sized desk to put some books, laptop, and food.
32GB as a boss sized desk.
And so one.

When you do multitasking, and the desk is too small...
You don't feel comfortable right?
It is good when there are spacious space.
Same with RAM.

But when the desk becomes larger, it gets expensive, so buy the one with the affordable price.

If you watch some YouTube videos in Chrome and do some document words with Office, buy at least 8GB. 16GB is recommended.

5. HDD/SSD
You take out the stuffs such as books and laptop from the basket (HDD/SSD), and put in your desk (RAM).

There are two kinds of baskets.
The super big ones, but because it is so big, it is bulky and hard to get stuffs out of the basket. But it is cheap. (HDD)
There are a bit smaller ones but expensive compared to the HDD, it is called SSD. This basket is right next to you, and it is super easy to get stuffs out of this basket. The opening time is faster as well.

SSDs were expensive, but as times go, it gets bigger as well, and cheaper. So most laptops are SSD these days.
There are 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1024GB(=1TB), and so one. You can buy what you want. Recommend 256GB for normal use.
Game guy? At least 512GB.

6. Graphics
It is the eyesight.
Most computers doesn't have dedicated graphics card, it comes with the CPU. Intel CPUs has CPU + graphics, but the graphics powered by Intel isn't that good.
But NVIDIA graphics cards are great. Recommended for gamers. But it is a bit more expensive.

So TL;DR

Buying a laptop is
- Pick the person and the person's clothes (brand and design)
- Pick the space for the person to stay (RAM, SSD/HDD)
- Pick how smart they are (CPU)
- Pick how many (Core)
- Pick the generation (6xxx, 7xxx ....)
- Pick their eyesight (graphics)

And that's pretty much it.
Super easy to buy a laptop right?

If you have suggestions or questions, make sure to leave a comment, upvote this rant, and share to your friends!

Elasticsearch, from the bottom of my heart...

How can one ecosystem be so batshit crazy inconsistent?

Seemingly every agent does the same (e.g. filebeat vs journalbeat vs packetbeat)… yet there are subtle changes in configuration everywhere.

Plus YML. The most shitty markup language one can use and the cockslubbing durps used it fucking everywhere.

Makes fun to have complex stuff and requiring a python Jinja to JSON to YML converter to be able to write the complex stuff without having the fucking migraine to count like a stupid 4 year old whitespace with both hands...

To make it even more absurd: the ingest pipelines which contain a lot of regular expressions / grok and are thus very prone to quoting issues... Yes. Let's do this in YML too.

If you need to add an fucking manual section how to debug YML errors you should have realized what a fucking stupid idea it was, morons.

Now I have the joy of having a python script regex quoting the shit for a Jinja template which then generates JSON which then generates YML.

Why the JSON part?

Yeah... Because ECS and changes in the upstream YML files / GitHub.

To be able to run diffs in a sane way because in YML distinguishing thing is pretty much impossible, so JSON as an intermediary format solely for the purpose of converting upstream YML to JSON to diff it against modified JSON ingest pipelines downstream.

I fucking hate elasticsearch

Story Time!

Tittle: About Larry.

Fun Game: Tell me if / when in this story you know the plot twist.

Setting: Years ago, non coding job.

I work with Larry a lot, Larry works remote. In technical terms Larry is senior to me and I escalate some technical issues that get assigned to Larry. I've never met Larry in person.

Larry can be hard to work with, but he's plenty good at his job and I don't mind his prickly side. Sometimes it takes telling Larry something a few times before it sinks it, but that's not a big deal. Sometimes it seems like Larry doesn't remember his cases entirely, but he has a lot of cases. Also Larry has good reason for how he works considering the land of scubs who usually escalate to him without any thought / effort.

Larry's escalation team is short staffed and they're trying to hire folks, but that's been like that forever.

So one day I get an email that Larry is going to be out of the office for a few weeks. Nothing unusual there.

My current case that I share with Larry sort of floats in limbo for a while. The customer is kinda slow to respond anyhow and there's nothing that I need Larry for.

Finally I get automated notice that my case has had a new escalation engineer. Laura. Laura is much more positive and happy compared to Larry. Understandably Laura isn't up to date on the case so we go back and forth with some emails and notes in the case.

The case is moving along just fine, we're making progress, but it's slow because of the customer's testing procedures. Then we hit a point where this customer's management pushes on sales for a solution (this customer's management is known for doing this rando like for no reason).

Down the management chain it goes and everyone wants a big conference call to get everyone up to date / discuss next steps (no big deal).

Now I really don't want to do this with Laura and throw her into the deep end with this customer, she doesn't have the background and I'd rather do this call with Larry & Me & Laura. Also according to the original email Larry is due back soon.

I start writing an email to Laura about "Let's try to schedule this for when Larry gets back."

Then I stop ... I don't really know why I stop but when it is a "political case" I want some buy in on next steps from management so I go talk to my manager.

-Plot Twist Incoming-

Long story short, my manager says:

"Laura IS Larry..."

O

M

G

I had no idea. Nobody told me, nobody told ANYBODY, (except a couple managers).

Back up a few months Larry apparently went to his managers and told them he was going to transition, surgery and all, in a few months.

Managers wondering how to address this went to HR and some new hire very young to be a manager HR manager drone logiced out in her bonkers head that "Well it shouldn't matter so don't tell anyone."

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!!??

Thank god I didn't send that email...

I did send an email to Laura explaining that I had no idea and hoped I didn't say anything stupid. She was very nice about it and said it was all good.

After that incident made the management rounds (management was already fuming about being told not to tell anyone) things came to another critical point.

Laura was going to visit the company HQ. Laura had been there before, as Larry, everyone knew her as Larry... nobody (outside some managers) knew Laura was Larry either. With nobody knowing shit Laura was going to walk in and meet everyone ...

One manager at HQ finally rebelled and held a meeting to tell his people. He didn't want Laura walking in and someone confused, thinking it was a joke or something horrible happening.

HR found out and went ballistic. They were on a rampage about this other manager, they wanted to interview me about how I found out. I told HR to schedule their meeting through my manager (I knew they didn't want my manager to know they were sniffing around).

Finally the VP in our department called up the HR head and asked WTF was going on / kind of idiots they had over there (word has it legal and the CEO were on the call too).

HR had a change in leadership and then a couple weeks later there were department wide meetings on how to handle such situations and etc.

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.

Company has a severe lack of fresh blood.

"let's recruit everyone who has an IQ over room temperature and barely passes the mark".

Me protesting bloody murder cause I know that the idea is not just profoundly dumb, but frustration from high staff turnover takes a toll on *everyone*.

"nah can't be that bad".

Then the discussion started who could do monitoring and mentoring, so we can sort out the bad apples *quickly*.

Me reminding again that this is exactly what leads to a high staff turnover, as this is nothing else than "hire, hire - quickly fire".

Guess who won the award of being the mentor / monitor ....

*drum roll*

Come on, I know you would NEVER expect this.

Let me surprise you: M E.

Yeah. They chose the person that was absolutely against this idea...

Because that person is "most qualified for the task at hand and has the necessary qualifications".

Today was the first 4 h workshop with a new recruit.

The Lord has had zero mercy on me.

I started to mute myself after 30 minutes in regular intervals to just scream and curse the world.

How profound dumb a person can be amazes me.

Person has had a "very expensive 6 month boot camp course".

I was close asking if the boot camp course was in watching porn and wanking their brain cells out....

Git... Yeah he knew what he was doing...

Except that he messed up every commit by either not sticking to the companies format or - what I found funny the first 2 times, then not so much anymore - just writing a git commit message like a 15 year old teenage girl would write to their diary.

Programming. Oh yeah. He should be a programmer.

He had much Bootcamp.

Bootcamp expensive. Bootcamp good.

If someone is unable to iterate over an iterator... And instead starts creating an integer based array of a map's key name to then fetch the map value in an for loop based on the created key array.

Yeah. Bootcamp much good.

Creating DTOs...

It took an hour to write a DTO with him... Cause constructors are hard and it's even harder when you have to explain primitive datatypes in Java, null safety, constructors, NPEs, final, ...

Like really no experience at all.

The next week's will be amazing.

Either I get a valium drop or I'm gonna blow my head off, cause mentoring will drain the last bit of hope I had left in me.

Note that I do not blame the recruit (yeah he's dumb. But he has ZERO work experience, so it's not unexpected), I'm just too fed up with getting the poo crown despite being against the whole process.

I think the recruit could make it..........

But that I got the shittiest job ever is really haunting me.

I dunno how I survive the next weeks.

And this is just the first recruit... There will be more.

I need to rant about life decisions, and choosing a dev career probably too early. Not extremely development related, but it's the life of a developer.

TL;DR: I tried a new thing and that thing is now my thing. The new thing is way more work than my old thing but way more rewarding & exciting. Try new things.

I taught myself to program when I was a kid (11 or 12 years old), and since then I have always been absolutely sure that I wanted to be a games programmer. I took classes in high school and college with that aim, and chose a games programming degree. Everything was so simple, nail the degree, get a job programming something, and take the first games job that I could and go from there.

I have always had random side hobbies that I liked to teach myself, just like programming. And in uni I decided that I wanted to learn another language (natural, not programming) because growing up in England meant that I only learned English and was rarely exposed to anything else. The idea of knowing another fascinated me.

So I dabbled in a few different languages, tried to find a culture that seemed to fit my style and attitude to life and others, and eventually found myself learning Korean. That quickly became something I was doing every single day, and I decided I needed to go to Korea and see what life there could be like.

I found out that my university offered a free summer school program for a couple of weeks, all I had to pay for was the flights. So a few months later I was there and it was literally the best thing I'd done in my life to that point. I'd found two things that made me feel even better than the idea of becoming the games programmer I'd always wanted to be. Travelling and using my other language to communicate with people that I couldn't in English. At that point I was still just a beginner, but even the simple conversations with people who couldn't speak English felt awesome.

So when I returned home, I found that that trip had completely thrown a spanner into my life plan. All I could think about after that was improving my language skills and going back there for as long as possible. Who knows what to do.

I did exactly that. I studied harder than I'd ever studied for anything and left the next year to go and study in Korea, now with intermediate language skills, everyday conversations no longer being a problem at all.

Now I live here, I will be here for the next year and I have to return to England for one year to finish my degree. Then instead of having my simple plan of becoming a developer, I can think of nothing I want to do less than just stay in England doing the same job every day, nothing to do with language. I need to be at least travelling to Korea, and using my language skills in at least some way.

The current WIP plan is to take intensive language classes here (from next week, every single weekday), build awesome dev side projects and contribute to open source stuff. Then try to build a life of freelance translation/interpreting/language teaching and software development (maybe here, maybe Korea).

So the point of this rant is that before, I had a solid plan. Now I am sat in my bed in Korea writing this, thinking about how I have almost no idea how I'm going to build the life that I want. And yet somehow, the uncertainty makes this so much more exciting and fulfilling. There's a lot more worrying, planning and deciding to do. But I think the fact that I completely changed my life goals just through a small decision one day to satisfy a curiosity is a huge life lesson for me. And maybe reading this will help other people decide to just try doing something different for once, and see if your life plan holds up.

If it does, never stop trying new things. If it doesn't (like mine), then you now know that you've found something that you love as much as or even more that your plan before. Something that you might have lived your whole life never finding.

I don't expect many people to read this all, but writing it here has been very cathartic for me, and it's still a rant because now I have so much more work and planning to do. But it's the good kind of work.

Things aren't so simple now, but they're way more worth it.

!dev

Long time, no rant. Why is facial hair so difficult to control? How do people even grow beards without looking like hobos all the time? Do I have to make some sort of sacrifice to a dark and malevolent entity?

Believe me, it's so much easier to keep on top of shaving body hair than taming face fur. Especially because your facial hair is, you know, on your *face* which means it's very visible. You can't hide it if you mess up. Unless you decide that wearing a balaclava is a good idea when going outside, like when going grocery shopping. Generally that isn't received too well though.

Friend and I work on some side hustle. He does most of the content work, I just manage the tech stuff and pay for infrastructure. Domain renewal is upcoming too, so yeah...

He has refused to adopt project management methodologies and task tracking tools multiple times and it's becoming a real problem since I am paying for infrastructure and there are no plans for generating income. There was, but it's vaguely defined and I have no fucking idea what he's working on. I ask, but it's always vague AF.

I have no idea where this thing is going and I barely have time to work on it. Two weeks before I am writing exams, he asks me to urgently help with a project he's behind on due to power outages. I just fucking can't, I have too much other things on my plate right now.

Gonna have to have a sitdown, I can't keep spending money like this and not have a damn roadmap for planning things.

Concierge shopping service in 2001. You input what you want and your budget and a human concierge will research and get you the best deal with coupons, rebates, etc. The idea was good before e-commerce algorithms got better. Before that you had to find good prices across numerous sites on your own and it was super tedious, hence my idea. Also, it wasn’t scalable as it depended on humans way too much.

How the Common Lisp Community will eventually die soon:

Clojure is the only main Lisp dialect having some sort of heavy presence in today's modern development world. Yes, I am aware of other(if not all) environments in which Lisp or a dialect of it is being used for multiple things, CADLisp, Guile Scheme, Racket, etc etc whatever. I know.

Not only is Clojure present in the JVM(I give 0 fucks about whether you like it or not also) but also has compilation targets for Javascript via Clojurescript. This means that i can effectively target backend server operations, damn near everything inside of the JVM and also the browser.
Yet, there is no real point in using Lisp or Clojure other than for pure academic endeavours, for which it is not even a pure functional programming language, you would be better served learning something else if you want true functional purity. But also because examples for one of the major areas in software development, mainly web, are really lacking, like, lacking bad, as in, so bad most examples are few in between and there is no interest in making it target complete beginners or anything of the like.

But my biggest fucking gripe with Lisp as a whole, specifically Common Lisp, is how monstrously outdated the documentation you can find available for it is.

Say for example, aesthetics, these play a large role, a developer(web mostly) used to the attention to detail placed by the Rails community, the Laravel community, django, etc etc would find on documentation that came straight from the 90s. There is no passion for design, no attention to detail, it makes it look hacky and abandoned. Everything in Lisp looks so severely abandoned for which the most abundant pool of resources are not even made present on a fully general purpose language constrained as a scripting environment for a text editor: Emacs with Emacs Lisp which I reckon is about the most used Lisp dialect in the planet, even more so than Clojure or Common Lisp.

I just want the language to be made popular again y'know? To have a killer app or framework for it much like there is Rails for Ruby, Phoenix for Elixir, etc etc. But unless I get some serious hacking done to bring about the level of maturity of those frameworks(which I won't nor I believe I can) then it will always remain a niche language with funny syntax.

To be honest I am phasing away my use of Clojure in place of Pharo. I just hate seeing how much the Lisp community does in an effort to keep shit as obscure and far away from the reach of new developers as possible. I also DESPISE reading other Lisp developer's code. Far too fucking dense and clever for anyone other than the original developer to read and add to. The idea that Lisp allows for read only code is far too real man.

Lisp has been DED for a while, and the zombies that remain will soon disappear because the community was too busy playing circle jerks for anything real to be done with it. Even as the original language of AI it has been severely outshined by the likes of Python, R and Scala, shit, even Javascript has more presence in AI than Lisp does now a days.

This is going to sound stupid to some.. I recently finished sololearns JavaScript course and I loved it but I want to learn more but I have no idea where to start.. I've been browsing tutorials on YouTube but it doesn't help too much.. does anyone have any suggestions?

ME - me, TM - teammate
I was just recruited to the company. We're starting new project based on few modules.

ME: So this module will do X and Y, I will use good old interfaces and design based on abstractions so that stuff does not get glued too much.

TM: But why? Make good old processor with all the logic and throw objects at it.

ME: B-but unit tests, decomposition and othet stuff...

TM: *insists and forces me to agree*

ME: *gets shit done his way, TM checks on code review and complains but generally doesnt give a fuck*

ME: Ok, its done. Lets get shit shipped.

TM: Well, we were just told by PM that we will need to process one more source with much different logic that does not fit current solution (he did meant GOD-PROCESSOR, idea of his).

ME: What do you mean? *injects another contextual implementation of processing logic to template method pattern solution*.

TM: I will tell PM you cant make it because of the implementation.

ME: But I just did it...

TM: Impossible, processor needs to be reimplemented. Get your shit together!

ME: *still doesnt get the shit about the god processor love*

TM: *rage quits next month*

ME: *module gets reused once more 2 month later, profit*

ZNC shenanigans yesterday...

So, yesterday in the midst a massive heat wave I went ahead, booze in hand, to install myself an IRC bouncer called ZNC. All goes well, it gets its own little container, VPN connection, own user, yada yada yada.. a nice configuration system-wise.

But then comes ZNC. Installed it a few times actually, and failed a fair few times too. Apparently Chrome and Firefox block port 6697 for ZNC's web interface outright. Firefox allows you to override it manually, Chrome flat out refuses to do anything with it. Thank you for this amazing level of protection Google. I didn't notice a thing. Thank you so much for treating me like a goddamn user. You know Google, it felt a lot like those plastic nightmares in electronics, ultrasonic welding, gluing shit in (oh that reminds me of the Nexus 6P, but let's not go there).. Google, you are amazing. Best billion dollar company I've ever seen. Anyway.

So I installed ZNC, moved the client to bouncer connection to port 8080 eventually, and it somewhat worked. Though apparently ZNC in its infinite wisdom does both web interface and IRC itself on the same port. How they do it, no idea. But somehow they do.

And now comes the good part.. configuration of this complete and utter piece of shit, ZNC. So I added my Freenode username, password, yada yada yada.. turns out that ZNC in its infinite wisdom puts the password on the stdout. Reminded me a lot about my ISP sending me my password via postal mail. You know, it's one thing that your application knows the plaintext password, but it's something else entirely to openly share that you do. If anything it tells them that something is seriously wrong but fuck! You don't put passwords on the goddamn stdout!

But it doesn't end there. The default configuration it did for Freenode was a server password. Now, you can usually use 3 ways to authenticate, each with their advantages and disadvantages. These are server password, SASL and NickServ. SASL is widely regarded to be the best option and if it's supported by the IRC server, that's what everyone should use. Server password and NickServ are pretty much fallback.

So, plaintext password, default server password instead of SASL, what else.. oh, yeah. ZNC would be a server, right. Something that runs pretty much forever, 24/7. So you'd probably expect there to be a systemd unit for it... Except, nope, there isn't. The ZNC project recommends that you launch it from the crontab. Let that sink in for a moment.. the fucking crontab. For initializing services. My whole life as a sysadmin was a lie. Cron is now an init system.

Fortunately that's about all I recall to be wrong with this thing. But there's a few things that I really want to tell any greenhorn developers out there... Always look at best practices. Never take shortcuts. The right way is going to be the best way 99% of the time. That way you don't have to go back and fix it. Do your app modularly so that a fix can be done quickly and easily. Store passwords securely and if you can't, let the user know and offer alternatives. Don't put it on the stdout. Always assume that your users will go with default options when in doubt. I love tweaking but defaults should always be sane ones.

One more thing that's mostly a jab. The ZNC software is hosted on a .in domain, which would.. quite honestly.. explain a lot. Is India becoming the next Chinese manufacturers for software? Except that in India the internet access is not restricted despite their civilization perhaps not being fully ready for it yet. India, develop and develop properly. It will take a while but you'll get there. But please don't put atrocities like this into the world. Lastly, I know it's hard and I've been there with my own distribution project too. Accept feedback. It's rough, but it is valuable. Listen to the people that criticize your project.

> Mister IHateForALiving, we need a new table on the website do to thing

No biggie, we know there's a datatable plugin somewhere.

> No, you can't use that, it doesn't have pagination

Oh, right. I also see here it was last updated 4 years ago, it's kinda shit too, it's like the inbred cousin of a real datatable. Ok, how did you tackle the thing until now?

> There's a script template somewhere in the page, we iterate over that to create our tables

Ok, but I'll have to write some logic for that, how much time do I have?

> I want this to be online by this evening

Can't be done, what if we used a normal datatable like normal people?

> No, it looks too different from the real site

How am I supposed to manage the thing then?

> IDK, just reload the page every time

_____________
And here we are, triggering a full page reload on an already bloated Laravel app (something like 600-800ms) for 20 lines of json. Great idea mister team leader, but consider the following: fuck you and your bastard lineage.

Hello and welcome, to a presentation in which I will tell you my thoughts on the shortcomings of modern day computers and programming practices.

Computers are based on a very fundamental and old idea, folders, and files, a file is basically a concrete amount of data, whereas a folder is a group of files, and it comes from the real life concept of files and folders, now it might be quite obvious already that using a concept invented in 1898 by a guy called Edwin G. Seibels, might not be the best way for computers to function in the year 2020, but alas, it is.

Unless of course, you step into the world of a programmer.

A programmer’s world is much different, they use this idea of a data structure, or in simpler terms, an object. An Object is just like what you would think of as an object in your head, something with different properties that you can think about in different ways, for example your mobile phone, it has a battery percentage, it has a screen size, it has free space available. Programmers use these data structures to analyse data very quickly, like finding all phones with a screen size bigger than a certain size for example.

The problem is that programmers still use files and folders to create the programs that use these objects.

Consider this example.

Let’s say you want to create a virtual version of a drink bottle, consider what properties it will have, colour, volume, height, width, depth, material, etc..

As a programmer, you can leverage programming features and change the properties of a drink bottle directly, if you wanted to change the colour, you just say, drink bottle “dot” colour, equals blue, or red.

But if the drink bottle was represented as a file, all the drink bottles data would be inside the one file, so you would have to open the whole file, find the line or section of the file that has the colour data of the drink bottle, and select it, highlight it, delete what’s there, and type in your new value.

One way to explain this better is to imagine a folder that now represents the drink bottle, imagine adding a new file into that folder that represents each property I described before, colour, volume, etc.., well now, you could just open that folder, find the file for colour, either by looking with your eyes or you could do a file search in the folder for a file called colour, open it, and edit the value inside. This way of editing objects is the one that more closely represents the way programmers and a program itself interacts with objects inside a running programming language.

But the thing is, programmers don’t use the folder/file way of creating objects and putting them into programs, because it would be too cumbersome, they just create 1 file for an object, or have lots of objects in a file, and create all the objects in 1 file, and then run the program which creates the objects, then when they stop the program, it deletes the objects. So there is no actual link between the object in a file and the object that the program creates by reading the data from that file, if you change the object in your program, it does not get saved to the file.

So programmers created databases to house these objects, but there is still a flaw in databases, they are hard to interface with, and mostly databases are just used to send data or retrieve data from, programmatically, you can’t really browse a database the way you can browse the files on your computer. You can, but database interfaces are not made to be easily navigated the way files and folders are.

As it stands, there is no way to store objects instead of files on your computer and interact with them in complex ways the way programmers can inside the programs they create.

If the idea of an object became standard the way a file and folder is standard, I think it would empower human’s a great deal to express things far more easily and fluidly than they can today.

Thanks for reading.

I'm starting to feel super frustrated with my job.
Sometimes I feel like people who work for large tech companies must have it easy. My company is trying to do this digital transformation thing. Modern development practices Scrum, agile, CI/CD etc. So I was put on a team to work on a project with this new methodology. The idea was we would build the front end and interface with the core systems via service calls. Of course it didn't work out that simple and we had to add our own server side stuff but whatever. It's really hard without a point of reference for any of this stuff. We don't have established coding standards, the data we are working with is a mess, incompetent vendors, the infrastructure team supporting the environments can be such arrogant fucks when we need their help to get shit done. The team also doesn't have any members who really know the core systems well. I am the only developer on the team who is an employee of the company the rest are contractors who are in and out. Last week it was literally just me. This is my first job out of school btw I've been here a year now. I guess I just feel frustrated that I have to figure out so much on my own I don't really have many senior devs at the company I can look to. And on the team I've sorta ended up in an unofficial leadership position. Feels like a lot on my shoulders. I feel like if i could have worked for a bigger company I could learn to do a lot of things better. I feel like there's too much on me for the amount of experience I have or am I wrong ?

Because I am very interested in cyber security and plan on doing my masters in it security I always try to stay up to date with the latest news and tools. However sometimes its a good idea to ask similar-minded people on how they approach these things, - and maybe I can learn a couple of things. So maybe people like @linuxxx have some advice :D Let's discuss :D

1) What's your goto OS? I currently use Antergos x64 and a Win10 Dualboot. Most likely you guys will recommend Linux, but if so what ditro, and why? I know that people like Snowden use QubesOS. What makes it much better then other distro? Would you use it for everyday tasks or is it overkill? What about Kali or Parrot-OS?

2) Your go-to privacy/security tools? Personally, I am always conencted to a VPN with openvpn (Killswitch on). In my browser (Firefox) I use UBlock and HttpsEverywhere. Used NoScript for a while but had more trouble then actual use with it (blocked too much). Search engine is DDG. All of my data is stored in VeraCrypt containers, so even if the system is compromised nobody is able to access any private data. Passwords are stored in KeePass. What other tools would you recommend?

3) What websites are you browsing for competent news reports in the it security scene? What websites can you recommend to find academic writeups/white papers about certain topics?

4) Google. Yeah a hate-love relationship, but its hard to completely avoid it. I do actually have a Google-Home device (dont kill me), which I use for calender entries, timers, alarms, reminders, and weather updates as well as IOT stuff such as turning my LED lights on and off. I wouldn"t mind switching to an open source solution which is equally good, however so far I couldnt find anything that would a good option. Suggestions?

5) What actions do you take to secure your phone and prevent things such as being tracked/spyed? Personally so far I havent really done much except for installing AdAway on my rooted device aswell as the same Firefox plugins I use on my desktop PC.

6) Are there ways to create mirror images of my entire linux system? Every now and then stuff breaks, that is tedious to fix and reinstalling the system takes a couple of hours. I remember from Windows that software such as Acronis or Paragon can create a full image of your system that you can backup and restore at any point to get a stable, healthy system back (without the need to install everything by hand).

7) Would you encrypt the boot partition of your system, even tho all data is already stored in encrypted containers?

8) Any other advice you can give :P ?

I need to get this out there because you guys and gals are honestly the only people I can vent this to.

I’m working on a program for fun that’ll transfer files over sockets. Nothing too special. But this project is just boring me. I’m not getting any motivation even when I’m getting started. Which didn’t happen last project.

I have a general idea how I’m going to do it but I just can’t sit down and do it because I start overthinking about everything. Like how am I going to do this or that. How am I going to handle feature a, feature b, etc. And I’m just getting a headache and I’m not writing code and I’m JUST FUCKING STARING LIKE AN IDIOT. I don’t even know why it’s not inspiring me because I’ve always wanted to program a file transferring application of some kind and I still do.

I keep doing a bunch of small patches when I work on it and they work and improve it but I am hard on myself because it’s not one big feature or I didn’t work on it for hours. I’m always so fucking hard on myself fuck.

I want to do so much other stuff but I just wanna tough it on through and finish but it’s so uninspired because I don’t even feel like what the final product will feel like others. Like any service that involves transferring files I feel like they don’t function like how I’m thinking they do like I’m trying to make this function.

I feel like everything I’m making is just subpar and not good and I’m trying and I’m trying to improve but I feel like I’m not getting anywhere. And I want to learn a lot of stuff I have shit planned but I can’t get to it because I have to go through uninspired bullshit hell.

Idk

Well this is the thing. I have been starting to replace a lot of my shit with Golang. I think it is a great language because of one small fact: it is a boring language.

With this I don't mean that it is not incredibly fun to use. It is and honestly I feel that a lot of the concepts that I had from C passed quite nicely with some additions. The language does not do anything special and there is no elegant code. It works in a very procedural fashion without taking into consideration any of the snazzy things found in JS, Python, c# etc etc. Interfaces and struct make sense to me, way more than oop does in other languages. I don't need generics with the use of interface parameters and I have hadly found a situation in which I have to strive too far away from the way things are done with Go to be happy with it, then again my projects are not hard or by any means groundbreaking (most of them deal with logistics or content management and a couple of financial apps that I am rewriting in Go from work)

The outcome is fast and easy to read since idiomatic go is for the most part very readable(no people...single letter variable names are by no means a standard and they should feel ashamed from it)

I miss the idea of a framework, but not so much and the docs and internal code for Go is just way top inviting. I believe the code to be readable enough than anyone that has gotten used to the syntax and ideas of the language can just jump in and start learning. This is the first language that I have learnt from studying the code as it is inside of the standard lib, the same I cannot say for any other language or framework.

Also, it play beautifully nice with vs code.

I dunno man, I feel that I am doing something wrong. I have projects built in Node, php, python, ruby and spring java as well as .net core and I still find Golang way more appealing simply because it goes harder than Python with "one preferred way" to do things.

The lang does not make me feel like a pro, i certainly develop in it at pro speeds, but it was made with beginners in mind to built fast and concurrent apps, with the most minimal syntax possible.

I guess my gripe with it is that it gets shunned from this, saying that it ignored years of lang research to make it as dumbed down as possible. Which it did, lack of generics amongst other things certainly make it seem like, but I will not say that it was poorly designed. Not at all, I believe it is a testament of amazing engineering. To be able to create such a simple yet amazingly powerful language.

Wish there were more to it. Wish there was a nice gui lib or a ml framework comparable to the ones offered by python and java. But I guess such things will come with time.

I feel stupid with this language.

And that is fine.

Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.

Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.

Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.

I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.

Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

tl;dr. web hosting && a panic attack && security threat

i wasn't sure whether my brother's domain was hosted or not (because it wasnt showing a website and he didnt know any better).
so i decided to host a react-app for it on netlify and pointed the domain's nameservers towards it (a separate security threat at bottom).
all went well and now when you punch in the domain it ..all-behold.. shows a website.

NOW, i remember my brother was using the domain's email which probably means it was hosted, right?. so im panicking because im not sure whether i just deleted all his emails or not because it's 1:15 am and he's asleep.
there is a rant in there somewhere but im in too much of a shock as to how much data i might have just accidentally deleted
.
.
another tl;dr: my domain registrar let me change someone else's settings..
the reason i didnt know his domain settings is that he didnt know his password.
i had bought a couple of domains and was gonna host them on netlify. while i was doing this a bright idea hit me.. "you should finally build a website for your brother for the domain he bought 7 years ago"..
this is where the fun begins.
i sent an email to my registrar to point all nameservers of all domains to my nameservers and just to try out i included my brother's domain into it (i dont own this domain it's not registered by my email), and the next day i get an email telling me they've successfully made all changes.
.
Now tomorrow is monday and i'm going to their office to tell them i found a security flaw and see how long i can stall before actually telling them what it was and how their live's could've been made hell.

The best happened today.

These past 2 weeks have been shit. People wronged me big time, got thrown under the bus for shit that the people behind refused to own up to it. Took that shit because I just couldn't be bothered to fucking argue.

I'm the only dev on this project and we're so close to release so I bit my tongue and took it on the chin but it's been eating me alive since then.

The tipping point was yesterday. 5 people failed to communicate shit properly amongst themselves on all channels got me forced to be the last one finishing work yesterday 4 hours after everyone left. I had every right to refuse and leave on time but again, we're so close to release and I don't want to see this project fail.

But see, I got angry. So fucking angry that nothing else has been on my mind since yesterday.

I don't take out my anger at others, that's not who I am (moslty) so today I was at work and secluded myself from everyone else otherwise I would've exploded in someone's face.

I was also supposed to meet up with friends tonight but with all this shit going on I decided not to go because I would not have been fun to be around.

Left work on time today, fell asleep on the train because I am too exhausted.

When I was about to walk into my house I noticed this little super cute puppy following me. I had no idea where or how long he's been behind me as I was walking home but he seemed way too happy when I saw him. His tail wagging like he's excited to see me even though I have never seen him. I petted him, played a bit with him. He seemed to be the happiest dog ever 😁. He managed to put a smile on my face for the first time in the last few days.

He then ran away.. I guess he got bored 😅

I am feeling so much better now all because of this little puppy 🐶. I'm so glad I ran into him because I've been smiling since then.

I wish I had took a picture of him 😥

Doggo, you probably won't read this, but thanks mate you made my month in those few minutes 🤘

If you have a dog, go pet him and appreciate how much happiness they bring in your life. If you have a cat.. Uhh I don't know... Uhh pray it doesn't kill you in your sleep I guess?

Thanks for reading

Global variables destroyed my day

Of course you can call me a bad programmer and all. When you have the idea, sometimes globals make it seem easy, accessible and "saving resources". They are devils.

The app was connected to a suite of applications. So I ended up silently destroying it neighbors. I committed and pushed the shit. Just when the testers made their weed high smoke tests, a server stopped working.

I got an email that boss wanted the latest version, I reverted the wrong branch, which had code unrelated to its name, pushed shit again and voila.

I went to the bathroom and laughed. I had to take a smoke. I'm still laughing while typing this. The damage is too much and I can't help it. I'll go home, leave this pc on and work remotely through the night. It might be the hysterics speaking now, but I messed up, and I need magic by friday morning.

Oh my, never was i triggered more. Of course i can only speak for my experience. I study software development as focus.

First off, the starting languages and or concepts you learn.
Why the fuck do they start with java and don't even really explain how instances actually work? Of course they don't. Because it would be way too fucken much for a semester to go over garbage collection, Instanciation of stuff, allocation in such an advanced system, etc..
How about starting with something not 50% managed by a vm?
Good ol' C. And now don't tell me thats a rough start. We all know about these subjects or exams where it's all about sorting people out. Who will be able to manage a whole bunch of shit or who should consider something else.
Yo dawg sick idea: how about sorting it via the will to achieve the skill of coding?
Nah but we make the exams around coding (by the fucking way done on paper, what the hell) such a fucking breeze, asking you how to convert hex do dec.
Meanwhile maths will make you cut yourself in a dark corner, after you nearly shot yourself because of some lame-ass business-subject.

Gives an award winning VR idea to our 'Digital Manager'

Says it's too hard for us to do ( it wasn't ) , goes out and pitches it to another digital agency for 'Help', ( mainly coz of the freelance commission )

They go ahead with the idea and make their campaign with it.

we don't get anything. no credit, nothing.

I wonder how the hell someone become a manager with that much of stupidity.

HEYYY!!
Glad to see ya all, how have ya been?

Gosh, it has been forever since the last time! I feel like I forgot about this platform too much, it feels good to have a place full of wonderful people to speak to, and you don't see those everywhere. I'm sorry I haven't been here much, it was mostly due to me not being able to practice programming much and thus falling back on tech stuff.

BUT - that period is now over. Maybe.
I'm gonna be more active on here, in the past recent years I've seen how bad most social medias turned out to be, with a few very special exceptions. I think devRant deserves more activity, so for better or for worse (hopefully better), I'm back!

I think my biggest problem right now is the need for a better PC, one Italians would call "a PC with the controcazzi", lol. A good one, is what I'm sayin. But would ya look at that, thr moment I start searching up for one, a friggin pandemic takes place and prices skyrocket! Ain't that fun. XD

I would probably have found an awesome PC build by now if I knew jack shit about hardware, but unfortunately I was always more into software than hardware. ^^"
So if anybody has any idea, I mean, I'm open to suggestions~ they'd be very appreciated, and thanks in advance. <3

But enough about that - how are you holding up? I hope you're doing good.
Misadventures and bad stuff happen, but I promise you we're all gonna get out of it soon. In the meantime, always remember to drink water, eat properly, keep yourself sanitized, exercise, and do things you love doing. That's what life is about. I'm looking forward to hearing from y'all, once again. 💙

Keep fighting the good fight, and kick ass! And chew gum, too.

Agreed to help out these 2 guys on a minecraft mod pack idea they had... stipulated this is a side project for me and I'm not going to dedicate too much time to it. They were fine with that

Fast forward a few months main 'idea guy' loses his job so spends more time on the pack and starts hounding me for progress and updates and throwing more and more things for me to do. He's also getting progressively angrier at my lack of substantial progress

Like fuck dude i told you this is s fucking side project to me. I'll work on it when I fucking want to. Hell I'm one more shouting match away from telling him to fuck off and find some other dumbass to be the only programmer in this group and get ignored when it comes to fucking anything else

Their idea of 'source control' is a fucking multi Mc instance that gets shared by the main guy every time HE changes anything. Any scripts or configuration edits I do I need to walk him through so he can update that instance

No clue why I put up with it so long. Maybe because other guy was a cool friend back in college. But at this point they both can fuck off

Does anybody has an idea what to "code" when you have too much free time? I am done with school and waiting for my university acceptance. No Websites.

TL;DR
Project ideas?

How do I convince a dev department to take source control, peer code review and unit tests seriously?

I'm a recent software grad with internships that recently started at a smallish company (less than 20 employees but has been around for 10 years, with most senior non-mgmt employee around 6 years). I've been working here for less than a year (approx 5 months) and I love the company - lots of talented and passionate people.

We are a creative industry with a handful of devs and one of the issues I'm seeing is that often devs are working in silos. I'm trying to make suggestions to upper management like encourage more usage of source control, documentation, etc and most of the senior devs are pushing back - saying that they don't feel that it is necessary and due to the fast moving nature of our projects that all this would be a total waste (they were so fast on the idea of not having PR's because it would be "too much of a blocker").

I understand that a large part of this has more to do with shifting the culture in the department and that can be very hard to do, especially since i'm fresh out of school, but I see these devs have so much potential but it seems that they think having these implementations in place would mean more rigid rules and bureaucracy.

I've been speaking to some of my engineering friends and they're pretty much all just telling me that I am shooting myself in the foot if I continue to stay at this company because I'll be behind skill wise, but part of me isn't ready to just give up yet.

looking for some advice

Even if I would want to change from vscode to php storm or intellij idea, I most likely wouldn't be able to, because I love monokai pro too much 😥

Imagine a web way ahead of our time where its size goes beyond our imagination...

This is my first rant, and I'll cut to the chase! I don't like how web currently stands. Here's what makes me angry the most altough I know there's a myriad of solutions or workarounds:

- A gazillion credentials/accounts/services in your lifetime.

- Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel.

- There's no single source of truth.

- Why the fuck there's so much design in a vision that started as a network of documents? Why is it that we need to spend time and energy to absorb the page design before we can read what we are after?

- What's up with the JS front end frameworks?! MB's of code I need to download on every page I visit and the worse is the evaluation/parsing of it. Talk about acessibility and the energy bills. I don't freaking need a SPA just give a 20-50ms page load and I'm good to go!

- I understand that there's a whole market based on it but do we really need all that developer tools and services?

- Where's our privacy by the way? Why the fuck do I need ads? Can't I have a clue about what I wan't to buy?

Sticking with this points for now... Got plenty more to discuss though.

What I would like to see:

A unique account where i can subscribe services/forums/whatever. No credentials. Credentials should be on your hardware or OS. Desktop Browser and mobile versions sync everything seemlesly. Something like OpenID.

Each person has his account and a profile associated where I share only what I want with whom I want when I want to.

Sharing stuff individually with someone is easy and secure.

There's no more email system like we know. Email should be just email like it started to be. Why the hell are we allowing companies to send us so much freaking "look at me now, we are awesome", "hey hey buy from me".. Here's an idea, only humans should send emails. Any new email address that sends you an email automatically requests your "permission" to communicate with you. Like a friend request.

Oh by the way did I tell you that static mail is too old for us? What we need is dynamic email. Editing documents on the fly, together, realtime, on the freaking email. Better than mail, slack and google docs combined.

In order for that to work reasonably well, the individual "letter" communication would have to be revamped in a new modern approach.

What about the single source of truth I talked about? Well heres what we should do. Wikipedia (community) and Larry Page (concept) gave us tremendous help. We just need to do better now.

Take the spirit of wikipedia and the discoverability that a good search engine provides us and amp that to a bigger scale. A global encyclopedia about everything known to mankind. Content could be curated from us all just like a true a network.

In this new web, new browser or whatever needed to make this happen I could save whatever I want, notes, files, pictures... and have it as I left it from device to device.

Oh please make web simple again, not easy just simple and bigger.

I'm not old by the way and I don't see a problem with being older btw.

Those are just my stupid rants and ideas. They are worth nothing. What I know for sure is that I'll do something about or fail trying to.

Yet another day at my company, Im rewriting some old code for client (rewriting old, php 4 system for vindications managment) and you know the moment when you are focused and someone comes to you to absolutely ruin your focus. Fine, whatever. Oh, for fuck sake. Again dev is doing as support becouse one moron with second can't login into zimbra admin panel and add fucking mailbox. I show them exacly how they login, remind them they are admins too, slowly show them, so you click "manage" than you click that gear icon and than you click "new", fill in email address and password. As simple as 1-2-3. Okay, fuck it, time to go for a cig. I just finish up few lines and stand, grab my vape and start walking towards door. In door I find my buddy with 2 random people. He told me that they are interns and that I should show them some basics and stuff around that. Oh god, fuck my life. If anything, Im definitely very bad teacher, mainly becouse I often have problems with saying what I mean in the way that somebody actually understans and knows what I am trying to say. Whatever. Fuck it all. I grab two of our old laptops that nobody used in like a year or so, and first thing I quickly figure out, is that one day for some what the fuck reason I dont even dont bothered to remember I installed Arch on both while I dont usually use Arch. I just needed it for some specific reason. Whatever. So I guess I will need to upgrade fucking system. Our network isn't really great so that was like... hour or so. In the meantime I figured what they know about coding in general etc, and holly shit. One of them (there was boy and girl), girl, apparently never ever in her life even touched code. Well... fuck. Why am I wasting my time? Becouse there was some programme or some shit like that... Someone could tell me before so I could mentally prepare.. fuck it. whatever. So while laptops are doing their pacman thing, I sit with them and slowly start to explain based on my machine some really basic concepts. Second guy actually had some expirience, he knew how to make some really really basic logic and stuff, so he had another world of problems, becouse it was PHP and, as we all know, everyone hates PHP, and... yeah.. You can probably imagine his approach. Yes, you get user input in super global array. I really wanted to say "Now shut the fuck up and write that fucking $_POST".

hour or so passed, I was close to giving up to not let my anger rise (im not really good teacher... I mentioned it. I suck at teaching others) but luckly machines upgraded. He wanted to use visual studio code, she didnt care too much, so I installed phpstorm in trial mode. whatever. Since that's linux and they were not comfortable with that, I walked them through installing LAMP stack, and when finally it started to look like LAMP stack, I requested them to google how to install xdebug, becouse xdebug is very usefull and googling skill is your best weapon on that field. I go for cig, come back and what I see boiled me a little bit. The girl was stuck looking at github page randomly looking through xdebug source code and idk... hoping for miracle (she admited she thought there will be instructions somewhere) and the guy was in good place, xdebug has a place to paste your phpinfo() for custom instructions. But it didn't work for him, he claims that wizzard told him it cant help him.. hmm intresting, you are sure you pasted in phpinfo? yes, he is sure. Okay, show me.

Again mindblown how someone can have problems with reading.

so his phpinfo() looked like that:
```<?php
phpinfo();```

I highlighted on the page the words "output of phpinfo". He somehow didn't see it or something. He didnt know, he thought that he needs to put in phpinfo so he did. OMG.

Finally, I figured out I can workaround my intern problem, and I just briefly shown them php.net, how documentation looks, said to allways google in english, if he uses tutorial to read whole fucking thing, not just some parts of it, and left them with simple task, that took them whole day and at which they ultimately failed.

To make 3 buttons labeled "1" "2" "3" and if someone presses one of them, remember in session that they pressed it and disallow pressing other ones.

Never fucking again interns. Especially those who randomly without apparent reason almost literally just spawn in front of you and here, its your fucking problem now.

Fuck it, I have some time to get back to my stuff. Time is running so lets not waste it.

After around 15 minutes my one of my superiors comes in and asks me if I can go on meeting with him and other superior. My buddy goes with us, and next 3 hours I was basically explaining that you cannot do some things (ie. know XYZ happened without any source of information) in code, and I can't listen for callbacks from ABC becouse it wont send anyc cuz in their fucking brilliant idea ABC can't even know that this script would even exist, not to mention it wants callbacks.

Sometimes I hate my job.

This started as an update to my cover story for my Linked In profile, but as I got into a groove writing it, it turned into something more, but I’m not really sure what exactly. It maybe gets a little preachy towards the end so I’m not sure if I want to use it on LI but I figure it might be appreciated here:

In my IT career of nearly 20 years, I have worked on a very wide range of projects. I have worked on everything from mobile apps (both Adroid and iOS) to eCommerce to document management to CMS. I have such a broad technical background that if I am unfamiliar with any technology, there is a very good chance I can pick it up and run with it in a very short timespan.

If you think of the value that team members add to the team as a whole in mathematical terms, you have adders and you have subtractors. I am neither. I am a multiplier. I enjoy coaching, leading and architecture, but I don’t ever want to get out of the code entirely.

For the last 9 years, I have functioned as a technical team lead on a variety of highly successful and highly productive teams. As far as team leads go, I tend to be a bit more hands on. Generally, I manage to actively develop code about 25% of the time to keep my skills sharp and have a clear understanding of my team’s codebase.

Beyond that I also like to review as much of the code coming into the codebase as practical. I do this for 3 reasons. I do this because as a team lead, I am ultimately the one responsible for the quality and stability of the codebase. This also allows me to keep a finger on the pulse of the team, so that I have a better idea of who is struggling and who is outperforming. Finally, I recognize that my way may not necessarily be the best way to do something and I am perfectly willing to admit the same. I have learned just as much if not more by reviewing the work of others than having someone else review my own.

It has been said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. This describes my relationship with software development perfectly. I have known that I would be writing software in some capacity for a living since I wrote my first “hello world” program in BASIC in the third grade.

I don’t like the term programmer because it has a sense of impersonality to it. I tolerate the title Software Developer, because it’s the industry standard. Personally, I prefer Software Craftsman to any other current vernacular for those that sling code for a living.

All too often is our work compiled into binary form, both literally and figuratively. Our users take for granted the fact that an app “just works”, without thinking about the proper use of layers of abstraction and separation of concerns, Gang of Four design patterns or why an abstract class was used instead of an interface. Take a look at any mediocre app’s review distribution in the App Store. You will inevitably see an inverse bell curve. Lot’s of 4’s and 5’s and lots of (but hopefully not as many) 1’s and not much in the middle. This leads one to believe that even given the subjective nature of a 5 star scale, users still look at things in terms of either “this app works for me” or “this one doesn’t”. It’s all still 1’s and 0’s.

Even as a contributor to many open source projects myself, I’ll be the first to admit that have never sat down and cracked open the Spring Framework to truly appreciate the work that has been poured into it. Yet, when I’m in backend mode, I’m working with Spring nearly every single day.

The moniker Software Craftsman helps to convey the fact that I put my heart and soul into every line of code that I or a member of my team write. An API contract isn’t just well designed or not. Some are better designed than others. Some are better documented than others. Despite the fact that the end result of our work is literally just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, computer science is not an exact science at all. Anyone who has ever taken 200 lines of Java code and reduced it to less than 50 lines of reactive Kotlin, anyone who has ever hit that Utopia of 100% unit test coverage in a class, or anyone who can actually read that 2-line Perl implementation of the RSA algorithm understands this simple truth. Software development is an art form. I am a Software Craftsman.

#wk171

Any night, 1:30am, bedtime: "Yes! I can't WAIT for tomorrow to begin! I'm gonna make SO much progress on that personal project that I just KNOW is gonna change the world and make me a billionaire! My time is now!"

Next day, 9am, first call of the day: "Ugh, waking up SUUUUUCKS! But, fine, just gotta get through the workday, then it's beast mode time!"

5pm: "Ugh, that day SUCKED... meeting after meeting, constant interruptions for the few minutes I got to hack code, SO many emails, and hey, good day, only five new things pushed down from corporate to bang my head against! Feelings pretty mentally exhausted, but it's all good, I fortunately love this programming stuff, so first dinner, then a little exercise, spend some time with the family, and then it's time to COOOODE!"

10pm: "Ok, house is FINALLY quiet (fucking dog), just a little noise from my daughter staying up way too late again... kinda spent, but this project still excites me, and I may not get as much done as I was hoping, but fine, I can still make some tangible progress and that's what matters. Maybe just one last quick check of email, Reddit, make sure there's no new Hot Ones or Honest Trailers I gotta watch, update IDEA plugins and see what's new, then it's work time! Nothing can stop me now!"

Any night, 1:30am, bedtime: "SHIT! I GOT FUCK ALL DONE AGAIN! GO DAAAAAAAMN IIIIIT!!!!"

Why things are fucking hard when you're not too good and not too bad at work. I'm like normal dev just throw things at me give me any task any framework I will learn it, I will solve production issues, I will help my co-workers to get their shit done even my JIRA is clean but it feels like I'm going nowhere. I'm like an average guy who knows many things other than normal guys or devs (by considering I'm junior and the people who are working with me).

I'm feeling like I'm in a fucking loop, where every day is same.
Is there anything I can do? which will make me feel little better?
I think every guy on earth have some innovative ideas even I have some(of course some of them are implemented already even they are kinda same, even some ideas are totally new, some are not possible, some requires much knowledge of certain field). But by just having an awesome idea doesn't change anything.

Maybe I'm not trying hard, there are several other reasons which are coming in my way but of course, I shouldn't tell any reasons.

I need some opinions on Rx and MVVM. Its being done in iOS, but I think its fairly general programming question.

The small team I joined is using Rx (I've never used it before) and I'm trying to learn and catch up to them. Looking at the code, I think there are thousands of lines of over-engineered code that could be done so much simpler. From a non Rx point of view, I think we are following some bad practises, from an Rx point of view the guys are saying this is what Rx needs to be. I'm trying to discuss this with them, but they are shooting me down saying I just don't know enough about Rx. Maybe thats true, maybe I just don't get it, but they aren't exactly explaining it, just telling me i'm wrong and they are right. I need another set of eyes on this to see if it is just me.

One of the main points is that there are many places where network errors shouldn't complete the observable (i.e. can't call onError), I understand this concept. I read a response from the RxSwift maintainers that said the way to handle this was to wrap your response type in a class with a generic type (e.g. Result<T>) that contained a property to denote a success or error and maybe an error message. This way errors (such as incorrect password) won't cause it to complete, everything goes through onNext and users can retry / go again, makes sense.

The guys are saying that this breaks Rx principals and MVVM. Instead we need separate observables for every type of response. So we have viewModels that contain:

- isSuccessObservable
- isErrorObservable
- isLoadingObservable
- isRefreshingObservable
- etc. (some have close to 10 different observables)

To me this is overkill to have so many streams all frequently only ever delivering 1 or none messages. I would have aimed for 1 observable, that returns an object holding properties for each of these things, and sending several messages. Is that not what streams are suppose to do? Then the local code can use filters as part of the subscriptions. The major benefit of having 1 is that it becomes easier to make it generic and abstract away, which brings us to point 2.

Currently, due to each viewModel having different numbers of observables and methods of different names (but effectively doing the same thing) the guys create a new custom protocol (equivalent of a java interface) for each viewModel with its N observables. The viewModel creates local variables of PublishSubject, BehavorSubject, Driver etc. Then it implements the procotol / interface and casts all the local's back as observables. e.g.

protocol CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable: Observable<Car>
isErrorObservable: Observable<String>
isLoadingObservable: Observable<Void>
}

class CarViewModel {
isSuccessSubject: PublishSubject<Car>
isErrorSubject: PublishSubject<String>
isLoadingSubject: PublishSubject<Void>

// other stuff
}

extension CarViewModel: CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isErrorObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isLoadingObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
}

This has to be created by hand, for every viewModel, of which there is one for every screen and there is 40+ screens. This same structure is copy / pasted into every viewModel. As mentioned above I would like to make this all generic. Have a generic protocol for all viewModels to define 1 Observable, 1 local variable of generic type and handle the cast back automatically. The method to trigger all the business logic could also have its name standardised ("load", "fetch", "processData" etc.). Maybe we could also figure out a few other bits too. This would remove a lot of code, as well as making the code more readable (less messy), and make unit testing much easier. While it could never do everything automatically we could test the basic responses of each viewModel and have at least some testing done by default and not have everything be very boilerplate-y and copy / paste nature.

The guys think that subscribing to isSuccess and / or isError is perfect Rx + MVVM. But for some reason subscribing to status.filter(success) or status.filter(!success) is a sin of unimaginable proportions. Also the idea of multiple buttons and events all "reacting" to the same method named e.g. "load", is bad Rx (why if they all need to do the same thing?)

My thoughts on this are:

- To me its indentical in meaning and architecture, one way is just significantly less code.
- Lets say I agree its not textbook, is it not worth bending the rules to reduce code.
- We are already breaking the rules of MVVM to introduce coordinators (which I hate, as they are adding even more unnecessary code), so why is breaking it to reduce code such a no no.

Any thoughts on the above? Am I way off the mark or is this classic Rx?

I’d been working event based and freelance jobs in the security and entertainment fields for years, with odd stints as a bartender sprinkled in. My pay was mostly decent, but I had no job security, and I was more on the road than at home. A few years before this job search experience I had already realised I can’t continue on this path for ever, especially if I ever want a serious relationship (e.g. 16 weeks straight touring Europe with on avg. 16h work days pretty much every day isn’t ideal in that regard, and also really though on both body and mind). So I decided to study. As I applied in autumn, not every line of study accepted students. The closest to my interest I found was BBA in Business IT.

Fast forward 1,5 years. After moving away from my previous base due to then-gfs studies, I had also been able to accept less work. Well, there were really two reasons: I didn’t want to go on weeks long big tours anymore, and I’d had to price up on my freelance job due to reasons. I still managed to keep our household going, but not knowing when the next paycheck would be available was becoming a little too stressful. I wanted job security. So a few weeks after my wedding I scoured the internetz for positions I could apply to, and applied to a dozen or so places. They were a variety of positions I had a vague understanding of from what I’d learned at UAS: from sales to data analytics to dev… I was aware pretty much all of the applications were a long shot by best, so I expected to be ghosted…

Two of the organizations I applied to wanted to go forward with me. Both dev jobs. I can’t even remember the specifics of the other one anymore, but I do remember the interview: I got in to their office (which was ridiculously open), and got marched into a tiny conference room. The interviewer was passive-aggressive and really bombarded me with questions, not really leaving a socially awkward introvert with any time to answer. I started to get really anxious and twitchy, sweating like a pig. Just wanted out. But nooo, they wanted me to do a coding test live. So they sat me on a computer with Eclipse open, gave me an assignment and told me not to use the internet. What’s even worse is that I could literally feel the interviewer breathing down my neck when I tried to do the test. Well, didn’t happen cause I was under so much pressure that I couldn’t think at all… yeah, that was horrible.

Anyhow, the other position I really applied to because it was in my hometown and I recognised the company name from legendary commercials from the 90s - everyone in this country who watched TV in mid-to-late 90s remembers those. Anyway, to my surprise, my present day manager contacted me and wanted me to do a coding test. At the time he asked I was having a bout of fevers after fevers, not really able to get healthy. I told him that I’d do it as soon as I’m healthy. A month went by, maybe more. He asked again. Again I replied that as soon as I get healthy, but promised to do it next week the latest. I didn’t deliver on that, but the next week after that, even if I was the most feverish I had been, I did the tests. I could only finish half of them, cause I couldn’t look at a screen for long at a time and had to visit the loo every 10min or so, but apparently that was enough. Next week I was already going to the interview… oh I also googled what is PHP on the way there, since it was mentioned as a requirement and I had no idea what it was. Imagine that…

The interview itself couldn’t have been more different from the other one. We were sitting in a nice conference room with my manager and the product’s lead dev, drinking coffee, our feet on the table and talking smack. Oh, and we did play a game of NHL<insertNumber> on PS4 during the interview… it was relaxed. Of course the more serious chat was there, too, but I can only really remember how relaxed it was. When I left the interview, I had been promised the position and that I would be sent the contract to be signed as soon as the CEO had reviewed and approved it. Next day, I had signed it and some time later I started at my current job (I gave a date when I was available to start, since there was a tour still agreed upon between the interview and the start).

Oh, and the job’s pretty much like the interview. Relaxed. It’s a good place to be in, even though the pay could be better (I regularly get offers for junior positions with more pay, and mid level positions with double the pay). I do value a pleasant working environment and the absence of stress more than big munny, what can I say?

Rant!!!

Fuck!!!

Clowns!!!

And it is only Monday!!!!

Involved in a pretty large it project. Several years endevour. Global. Tens and tens of millions of dollar budget.

It is obvious for all that this waterfall approach will cause enormous pain. Pain and suffering.

Multiple consultant firms involved. Loads of management, leads and the likes. Several with no it background.

🙄

Yes. No real concept of a database or what not. I mean. It is an actual IT project.

Several leads. One of the managers have no idea what he is doing. None. One would guess he should have his shit together regarding NON-it stuff. But no. And they work with this full-time and can’t even setup a descent way of working in a sub-sub-sub-project.

Clowns.

One would imagine in a waterfall setup that things is…formal. But no. It’s just people doing their thing. Lots of words. Lots of words.

I think there are nice problems to solve at the end. When it is delivered and done. So I will plan to stay and learn as much as possible. But I have to do the clowns work. Which sucks so much I can’t believe. But there are so many people involved so I guess I can get away with it in one piece without too much effort.

I am not even going to write a single line of code. 😬

All is fine.

Fucking Monday.

i have realised that a major portion of a human's life involves interaction with other people and most of the time, our happiness depends upon that situation.
so in a way having a group of people who you love and who loves you are important for you to be happy.

i recently realised there are not a single non blood related person in my contact list that i now feel for , even a bit. i recently went for a trip with friends which turned out to be very toxic, and i just realised, that those were my most trusted friends with the highest level of love and trust among my other 900 contacts.

now i don't wanna be with anyone. in a few days i will be 24, and i can't help but feel helpless and alone. Helpless, because people become toxic around me and alone coz i can't have non toxic people. this year started on a very high note for me since i got travelling a lot, got a good paying role that required less work and more relaxing time and , i started focusing on my body too.

so i got more carefree, started hanging out with people more, got more socially active. but then life gave me a slap on the face for enjoying it too much.

i don't know what i want now. i want happiness, but what will make me happy? i have no idea

Hello guys, I really need some advice today...

I'm currently 18. I got accepted in two pretty equivalent colleges. One is in my city, 1h with the bus, and the other one is in another city.

Both are somewhat equivalent schools, the one in another big city is much nearer to other colleges I'd like to go to later (this one will last 2 years, then I'll have to go to engineering school for 3 years).

I have to decide monday where I'll go. It's horrible.. here, in my city, I have the person I love and the comfort of living by the parents (even tho it's a discomfort too). But the other city attracts me a lot too, independance does too.. it's horrible, I can't decide, I don't know if it's a good idea to leave, and I fear having regrets if I stay.

Have you some experience to tell me about? Some regrets you have? Or basically some advice?

It would help me so much, thank you!!