A: Hey, can we talk about X for 5 minutes?

B: Yes, sure. I'm joining the meeting

...

...

You have left the room:
Meeting duration: 1 hour and 15 minutes

Tragedies of Non-Technical Boss:

Boss: What happened yesterday, tried reaching you several times, you were just unavailable!

Me: My wifi stopped working as there was some issue at the ISP's end.

Boss: You could've atleast dropped a skype message that your internet is not working!

Me: Yes sir but the internet was not working, so I couldn't drop that message too!!

Boss: But you should have, I was in panic what happened to you...You were alright or not?...

Me: Yup I know, I didn't see the wifi tragedy coming.

Boss: If ever the internet goes down or anything sort of that happens just drop me a text on skype, that your internet is not working. Okay!

Me: *Confused* as to if he is high or just not listening to what I am saying...

Story time:

At a precious employer.
Hire shit-hot contractor.
No technical test at interview stage because he’s so shit-hot.
Is a uni lecturer.
PhD in mathematics.

Me: Shit, this guy must be good!

6 months later and a tragedy of errors and clearly misspent company funds later:

Manager: can you look at what x did and merge it into the product?

Me: Sure. *looks* *yells fuck very loudly*

*walks over to manager*

“Soooo... you know those 6 months and thousands and thousands you spent? It’s all for nought. There’s barely anything there, and none of it works.”

Manager: “Shit. What are we going to do? Can you fix it?”

Me: “To be honest, it would be quicker to just do it from scratch than try to work out what he’s done and failed to do.”

Manager: “Fuck. Ok. Go for it.”

I then had to build this entire new lot of systems, a workflow system, a user management and permissions system.

I got it done inside a month or so.

For context, we (the devs) knew something was afoot when the contractor couldn’t work out why his keyboard wasn’t working (it wasn’t plugged in), and he also *really* struggled to find his way around visual studio and git.

The moral of this tale? *always always* screen your candidates. Even if they seem amazing on paper.

For the first two year of my engineering I believed having a good developer profile will land you in top companies(eg FAANG).

Later I realised doing competitive coding will help you to get in those companies.

But at the end I saw one of my friend getting into those companies by only doing specific type questions that are usually asked in these companies.

Moral of the story - Just by practicing some specific question from some premium website(eg leetcode), you could easily get into your dream company.

PS- I was not selected in any of these giant companies and later on took an internship in some start up which was again a tragedy for me.

Hardware of laptops today.
Displays: Glossy screens everywhere. "Hurr durr it has better colors". Idgaf what colors it has, when the only thing I can see is the wall behind me and my own reflection. Make it matte or get it out.
Touchpads: Bring back mechanical buttons. Haptic feedback dying with touchscreens/surfaces is a tragedy. "But we can have bigger touchpad area without buttons" ...why? the goal shouldn't be 1:1 touchpad vs. display ratio. It ain't a bloody tablet.
Docking stations: Some bright fucker figured out that they can utilize USB C. That thing keeps falling out with slightest laptop movement disconnecting all peripherals (guess why microUSB had those small hooks?). Also it doesn't have sufficient throughput, so the 5 years old dock can feed 3 full HD monitors just fine and the new one can't.
Keyboards: Personally I hate chiclet. And it's everywhere, because "apple has it so we must too". But the thing I hate even more is retardation of the arrow keys (up and down merged into size of one key), missing dedicated Home/End/PgDwn/PgUp buttons and somebody deciding the F keys are not needed and started replacing them with some multimedia bullshit.

My overall feeling is that this happens when you give the market to designers and customer demand. You end up with eye candy and useless fancy gadgets, with lowered ergonomy and worse features than previous generations of the same hardware. My laptop dying is my daily nightmare as I have no idea with what on the current market I would replace it.

Something I refer to as the "Lost Cause Syndrome".

Basically you start working on a project enthusiastically with the resolution to write the best possible code. But either one (or some or all) of management, client and colleagues succeed in transforming the project into a comedy (or tragedy, depending on your outlook) of errors.

Then finally, one day you decide that the project is a lost cause and stop caring about it. You end up in a "Let's get this over with and get out of here" type of mindset without making any efforts to improve the situation.

Modern tragedy in four lines:

- I just bought a new 1TB SSD
- Look at all this free space
- Let's do npm install
- Oh no

My first job was actually nontechnical - I was 18 years old and sold premium office furniture for a small store in Munich.
I did code in my free time though (PHP/JS mostly, had a litte browsergame back then - those were the days), so when my boss approached me and asked me whether I liked to take over a coding project, I agreed to the idea.

Little did I know at the time: I was supposed to work with a web agency the boss had contracted to build their online shop. Only that he had no plan or anything, he basically told them "build me an online shop like abc(a major competitor of ours at the time)"

He employed another sales lady who was supposed to manage the shop (that didn't exist yet). In the end, I think 80% of her job was to keep me from killing my boss.

As you can imagine, with this huuuuge amout of planning and these exact visions of what was supposed to be, things went south fast and far. So far that I could visit my fellow flightless birds down in the Penguin's republic of Antarctica and still need to go further.

Well... When my boss started suing the web agency, I was... ahem, asked to take over. Dumb as I was, I did - I was a PHP kid and thought that Magento, being written in PHP, would be easy to master. If you know Magento, you know that was maybe the wrongest thing I ever said.

Fast forward 3 very exhausting months, the thing was online. Not all of it worked yet, but it was online and fairly secure.

I did next to everything myself, administrating the CentOS box the shop was running on, its (own) e-mail server, the web server, all the coding required for the shop (can you spell 12 hour day for 8 hour pay?)

3 further months later, my life basically was a wreck, I dragged myself to work, the only thing I looked forward being the motorcycle ride home. The system worked though.

Mind you, I was still, at the time, working with three major customers, doing deskside support and some admin (Win Server 2008R2 at the time) - because, to quote my boss, "We could not afford a full time developer and we don't need one".

I think i stopped coding in my free time, the one hobby I used to love more than anything on the world, somewhere Decemerish 2012. I dropped out of the open source projects I was in, quit working on my browser game and let everything slide.

I didn't even care to renew the domains and servers for it, I just let it die without notice.

The little free time I had, I spent playing video games and getting drunk/high.

December 2013, 1.5 years on the job, I reached my breaking point and just left, called in sick at least a week per month because I just could not see this fucking place anymore.

I looked for another job outside of ALL of what I did before. No more Magento, no more sales, no more PHP. I didn't have to look for long, despite what I thought of my skills.

In February 2014, I told my boss that I quit. It was still seven months until my new job started, but I wanted him to know early so we could migrate and find a replacement.

The search for said replacement started in June 2014. I had considerably less work in the months before, looks like he got the hint.

In August 2014, my replacement arrived and I got him started.

I found a job, which I am still in, and still happy about after almost half a decade, at a local, medium sized ISP as a software dev and IT security guy. Got a proper training with a certificate and everything now.

My replacement lasted two months, he was external and never really did his job - the site, which until I had quit, had a total of 3 days downtime for 3 YEARS (they were the hoster's fault, not mine), was down for an entire month and he could not even tell why.

HIS followup was kicked after taking two weeks to familiarize himself with the project. Well, I think that two weeks is not even barely enough to familiarize yourself with nearly three years of work, but my boss gave him two days.

In 2016, the shop was replaced with another one. Different shop system, different OS, different CI. I don't know why and I can't say I give a damn.

Almost all the people that worked at the company back with me have left for greener pastures, taking their customers (and revenue) with them.

As for my boss' comments, instructions and lines: THAT might not be safe for work. Or kids. Or humans in general. And there wouldn't be much left if you put it through a language filter...

Moral of the story: No, it's not a bad thing to leave a place if you're mistreated there. Don't mistake loyalty with stupidity!

And, to quote one of my favourite Bands: "Nothing matters when the pain is all but gone" (Tragedy + Time by Rise Against).

*looks for some reviews of a dentist*
Yelp: ah yes we have that.
*Enters Yelp site*
"Oh noes, you have JavaScript disabled! You should enable it because it can make websites really cool (why does this seem like a front-end wank), gives you compliments when you had a bad day (fuck you Yelp), can save the world from tragedy on its own (does savetheworld.js exist yet?). But that you'll never realize anymore. Because YOU disabled JavaScript, filthy piece of shit you are. So enable JavaScript so that we can have so much more fun!"

Ah, not providing any content that I visited your shitty site for, guilt-tripping me into enabling JavaScript for your dribble, and on top of that saying that we'll have fun when I whitelist you. Fun ey.. you know what'd be fun Yelp? For me to go there and shove my dick into every one of your front-end and marketing cunts' faces until they turn blue. Now THAT would be a lot of fun!!!

Warning: pretty sad thoughts. If you're having a blast of a day, please skip. It's for your own good.

That feeling when you finish watching a piece of art. Be it a film or anime or anything. You're confused why you feel good, but at the same time you're hurt. You smile but the pain is still there when you reflect on the feelings and the experiences you had and you realise that none of it will ever happen again. No art or any of the past will happen again exactly the same way how you felt and experienced.

You think of the best friend you once had. Think of the girl you held hands with and time stopped. The first time you embraced her and knew you loved her more than anything, even if she didn't know your feelings. Think of your first kiss. Your first serious relationship. The last time you saw your parents, your wife, your children, family.

Now look at the perspective of the future and the past you: blissfully ignoring the certain end to all experiences until they all abruptly end reminding you of this and it hurts. Damn it hurts.

I will never be able to see me best friend again, nor will I ever be able to hold hands with her either. First time I kissed is now long gone. It's almost like you wish you were aware of how valuable and important the experience was and to not just throw it away like the last time and the several times before that. But the sad part is, you don't know which experience will make you realise how much you missed it.

But even if you do realise by placing yourself in the place of your future self, and you cherish the experience, you blame yourself because you could have either avoided it's end or did something better.

Like your break up: could it be fixed? Was it worth the little time you have on this plante?
Like your friends argument you had: could you have done better? Could you have stopped it?
Like your parent's death: could you have been a better son to your now overworked dying mum? Could you see how hard they tried even though you thought they were total dicks?

Now you realise that literally anything you do, you will have a problem with somewhere down the line. You're destined to be sad shattered and broken by every day that is tragedy.

But it's similar to art. After all, your life is a piece of art about how you died. Which is why you smile and enjoy the last second of the experience which you just had. That chest warming feeling will only last a little. You smile through pain, yet you realise its not the end.

Then again, its just my thoughts that i need to vent. Take it with a pinch of salt.

Coding seems to help me overcome tragedy and depression.

There are various times when things seem helpless to me, and many times when I feel I'm not in control of anything in life, but coding I know where I am, and challenges are overcomeable.

Thanks coding.

what the fuck is wrong with boomer professors ?? I enrolled in a front-end development elective at my uni in hopes to just brush up on some little things I may have missed on my self taught education.

this class has been an absolute tragedy. he spends about 1 hr each class trying to figure out how to configure docker... FOR A PROJECT THAT IS JUST BARE HTML CSS JS. WHY??? he is so adamant that we use DOCKER for this class. I don't understand why.

most of the students are BRAND NEW to front end development and know Jack shit. and here this professor is insisting on nuancing the class with docker. it makes absolutely no sense.

Today tragedy has struck, I forgot my ear phones

I couldn't get into the zone, had issues with bugs and had to listen to people breathe and make mouth noises in the train.

I had to resort to playing songs in my head which didn't draw out any distracting noises

Linux networking: A tragedy in three acts

ACT 1:
Wherein the system administrator writes their /etc/network/interfaces file as is the custom.

ACT 2:
Wherein the kafkaesque outputs of basic networking commands threaten basic sanity. Behold:

```
# ifup ens3:1
RTNETLINK answers: File exists
Failed to bring up ens3:1.
# ifdown ens3:1
ifdown: interface ens3:1 not configured
```

ACT 3:
Wherein all sanity is lost:

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)

As many of you might know, the PYX servers are down. It happens that I run an Android client for PYX, that was obviously a tragedy for me. I didn't give up and I've immediately setup a backup server, then due to lack of resources I had to shut it down, but I provided a list of servers run by other people.

Yesterday I've updated the app once again to do some fixing. Today, this guy leaves a review: "Absolutely useless until they bring back the servers. Why update the app when literally NOBODY is playing??"; Why am I updating the app?! Jesus Christ, why can't I update my app?!?! Should I delete it from the Play Store just because some servers are down? I get it, there are a few people playing, but please, don't fucking say that the app is useless.

This kind of people makes me very angry.

I... I just got on the bus to work and left my beautiful contigo coffee thermos at the stop. I'm done guys. I'm not going to make it.. ..

How do you guys deal with tragedy?
My mother didn't, but almost lost her fingers today. I couldn't control myself, I panicked and cried harder than she did

Another day, another tragedy...
1,5 half year later 2 devs were able to deliver :
- custom authentication. Basically they did a very simple client credentials grant.
- a custom wrapper to manage windows services
- a custom job scheduling system
- a custom logging library to log everything to windows event viewer!!!!!!
- all csv reports are created using string interpolation WriteLine("'{varA}','{varB}'") like this...

There are a lot of defects in those functionalities and they delivered almost 0 business features.

I just wondered that big celebrities and politicians don't even have the freedom to fart whenever they want. Imagine, Putin holding his farts in, while he's discussing some important matter in his office.
It's a tragedy of fame.

Rant: there's people in the world who don't properly venerate Elon Musk and they are wrong and it's a tragedy and there's even those who dislike him and I find that absolutely abhorrent.

I sincerely hope the tragedy in Manchester won't be used as a pretext by our technically inept politicians to push through crackdowns on encryption and further surveillance.

Tragedy of the commons.... Americans and Europe enjoy WW3 and nuclear exchanges. Brought to you by weak men. Reduce some population ;)

I've moved far away to be bothered now. xD

The mission of the Russian people is turning solar energy into tragedy and desperation.

I could probably continue on long enough to reach the character limit, but then... you know... "tl;dr".

So here's just the first three that came to mind.

1. Never get too attached to your code. Sooner or later, by intention or tragedy, it will be gone. Instead, hold value in the lessons you learned when writing it.

2. Always be experimenting. Don't be afraid to try new languages, frameworks, technologies, etc. However, when it comes to projects intended to eventually reach production, stick with what you already know.

3. Ask questions whenever you have them. The explanation of your ignorance can sometimes alone be enough to shed light on some related technical paradigm.

The tragedy of my life has been I grew up in the sane real world not knowing it was insane and that the inmates thus interred in the asylum they embraced used the real
World to cover their perversity and inhumanity. When they had less freaks all around and more normal people to mimic they mimicked ordinary people better and I not knowing what they were, made explanations that seemed more reasonable than the truth for their strange behavior. And behind the scenes they were lying and taking advantage of a man who only wanted to live and have the things that seemed reasonable: a home, a companion, and some set of interests to follow when not working. Maybe some ambition in there as well but it’s evident that only the most evil people truly thrive and then only a small subsection of them. And now I wander back through looking at what amounts to moving museum pieces of trash all standing in the same places telling the same lies and in some cases so inane and stupid they think this benefits them. That the destruction of all the light in the world availed them somehow. Definition of pathetic.

Funny how I sat here watching a fictional depiction of a police interrogation and it made me doubt that I know they are not effective against a specific group of people who plan everything in advance even creating or recruiting their victim ahead of time in a group activity so everything adds up.

And then also this allows collaboration with dirty cops. And of course polygraphs are inadmissible.

Thank God at least once they commit their crimes the story imprisons them. In the story.

But being a purist I was thinking how just knowing they lie is not really enough. Determining who coached them who they were in contact with how they were hooked up with them etc and what the organizational graph looks like is needed.

And even a socially retarded, nasty little empty hearted, soulless piece of garbage can stonewall away the tragedy that claims an innocent life against the background of a system that is supporting them and causes them to feel camaraderie with other more sophisticated monsters.

So then I think. A pair of skinning knives and an ekectric hand crank generator and a cauter might work better than sodium penithol was fabled to do.

So.
When a real person dedicated to justice and dedicated to the war against monsters is confronted with the truth of said monsters

And they laugh
And smirk
Or hide behind shallow masks of innocence my question is thus.

If a man so gentle and kind as I began and mostly remain can be tempted towards this

What does an angry man whose seen even more than I have whose hate for monsters burns endlessly because it's constantly fueled by exposure feel ?

In the end
Remember monsters
You think hurting something small and weak and innocent or simply alone and naive and lying makes you strong ? Makes you a big bad monster?

We're everywhere, and our hatred burns white hot. And when we explode we don't hunt weak innocent things that can't fight back. We hunt things that no one could ever pity and the death of which makes the world better.

And best of all because of this bullshit some of us can pass the polygraph even the next day.