I love how the people on here are pretty much always nice.
Yes, there are some *wink AlexDeLarge* who use strong language, some dirty jokes and sometimes there are topics where people don't agree on but I've never seen any honest insults or toxic behaviour (other than the opinion on your shitty client or boss lol).
No annoying trolls (the nearest to a troll I know on here is Jase but he's fun and mostly welcome here).
No spam/ads from users (only maybe recommendations).
And the most unbelievable thing is that devRant itself is free, adfree and based on the community voluntary donating for the server and work costs.

Dude, devRant fucking rules.

Story time:

I was once working on a project that dealt with incredibly sensitive financial data.

We needed a client’s database to do a migration.

They wouldn’t send it over the internet because it was too big and they didn’t think it would be secure.

They opt to send it in the post on an encrypted usb drive.

(Fair enough thinks I)

USB drive arrives.
Is indeed encrypted.

MFW there’s a post it note in the envelope with the password on.

MFW this is a billion dollar multinational petrochem company.

MFW this same company’s ‘sysadmin’ and ‘dba’ once complained because a SQL script I sent them didn’t work - they’d pasted it twice and couldn’t work this out from the fucking “table already created” error message management studio was throwing at them.

5 reasons I love devRant

1. I can't understand the point of Facebook. And it has such a shitty UI, but devRant has a beautiful despite it is complete JS

2. It doesnt have 140 char limit.

3. It is 99% english.

4. Trolls and script kiddies are rare here.

5. It is fairly lightweight.

======================

1 reason I hate devRant

1. Total waste of time.

Story time.

Not sure it counts as data loss, more temporary corruption (and in my own brain).

> be me.
> be clinically depressed
> be recently out of an awful breakup
> recently nearly committed suicide by train
> be bored and lonely one night
> take lsd
> feel fine
> go to McDonald’s
> feel fine
> while eating question the nature of reality
> become convinced I’m an observer of a cosmic story and cannot die
> go outside in only jeans
> run in traffic at 1AM to prove my point
> don’t die
> run around the streets more sure of my new reality than I’d ever been of anything
> feel free and no longer sad
> walk around observing the world
> sit on wall and wonder why the story had the structure I was observing
> fall off wall into grass and mud
> follow cute guy into apartment building
> follow into lift
> ask what everything means
> spend better part of couple hours in lift pressing emergency button asking for help
> get no response
> scare poor Russian lady that gets into lift and finds an overweight topless man on the floor babbling incoherently
> ride to top floor
> get out
> sit on leather chair in corridor
> feelsnice.tiff
> decide I’m actualising my desires and reality
> don’t realise this is just the trip wearing off and consciousness exerting more control
> walk into random apartment (door is unlocked because why wouldn’t it be for the god that I believe I am at this point)
> explore
> gorgeous apartment
> realise it’s a family apartment from clothes in hallway and items
> find bathroom
> decide I want a bubble bath
> run bubble bath
> can’t work out how to drain water. Bath now full of twigs and mud #sorry
> decide that I’d like to go home, or onto my next adventure. Hopefully the seaside as I’m now realising I have more control.
> open bathroom door
> not the seaside. Ah well. Try to walk home
> walk home wrapped in fluffy towel from nice family’s apartment
> get home
> realise what had happened
> throw remaining drugs away
> sit and rock in utter paranoia and guilt for hours until flatmate wakes up.

MFW first bad trip ever.
MFW I wonder whether that family knew I was there and were scared / discovered the mess in the bathroom the next morning and not knowing which is worse.

MFW I still have the towel because it’s fluffy AF.

The moral of the story kids, is that when it comes to the OS rattling around in your brain, installing a virus that is sensitive to what apps you have running is a bad idea when those apps make the virus go to fucking town.

Terrible analogy I know, but fuck it.

When Udacity trolls you

There is one thing I have seen here in devRant. No matter how stupid rant you post no one trolls you. People are kind of humble here. They try to help you.
Just an observation, may not be true.

oh stack overflow trolls... please don't change

State of the interwebz

Ummmmm, Visual Studio Updater, you feeling ok Hon?

It’s that time again. I should be sleeping and instead I’m on here delirious with toothache and the dread of the dentist later.

So have a face reveal thread.

I’ve never actually had a colleague quit while I was there, buuuut, I did have a colleague disappear, here is that story:

I get hired by this colleague, seems like a nice, perfectly reasonable guy.

I’m supposed to be mentored in the codebase by him after I start.

Literally the day or day after I start, he gets a tap on the shoulder from someone in HR while he’s on the phone. He says he can’t come because he’s on the phone.

The HR woman insists, tells him to leave *everything* and he never returns.

Turns out the police were downstairs to arrest him.

He got caught up in Operation Yewtree which for those that don’t know, was the UK’s sting op on historic pedophilia cases.

MFW my manager gets arrested and the senior dev is too busy to mentor me, so I basically have to sink or swim 🤣

Since I'm a rather new devrant user, does these kind of trolls happen here more frequently?

Other than that, i rly enjoy the posts here.

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.

Pm: "so how long should this take?"

Me: "well, I see at LEAST 8 hours of work here for me, some of which can't be done without graphics, but let's assume graphics are done by designers by the time I get to hour 6 and I just have to plug the images in without much editing or tweaking."

Pm: "So you'll have this by tomorrow?"

Me: "Do you think I just sit on my hands all day waiting for one of you trolls to give me something to do? I said AT LEAST 8 FULL HOURS OF MY TIME, that would be assuming I could get 8 consecutive hours to work on this, and let's face it that's not gonna happen."

Pm: "So Friday...?"

Me: "Tell the client that so long as there aren't any unforseen issues it could be done as early as Thursday. I'll put it on my schedule, but it is not a priority until at least Monday. There's only one of me and 5 other active projects on my desk."

Pm: "I'm gonna tell them Wednesday morning we'll show it to them for approval."

What in the hell is wrong with people?

!rant ~dev

I use my headphones religiously every time I code, as well as for things like tutorials & courses.

I was devastated that the slider switch on my pair of H8s snapped and I could no longer use them wirelessly.

I didn’t want to be without headphones for weeks while they were replaced abroad, so...

Hello upgrade. Hello business expense.

Lovely new pair of H9is.

Not specifically dev related other than being hired as a dev, more a corporate thing.

I have medical issues that mean I can be a bit variable in my starting time. Company was aware and floated flexible hours as a possible solution, but never said it *was* a solution, and just left it there really breezy.

Nailed this down with my line manager a couple weeks later after HR lost their shit, apologised and thought nothing of it.

Few days later I read a blog post about IP clauses in contracts that reminded me I intended to ask, as mine didn’t have one.

Asked HR, no response for like an hour, then “we’ll get back to you on that”

Following week, pulled into a sudden meeting. “Sorry for short notice of meeting, but we’re terminating your employment effective immediately for ‘lack of commitment’”.

Utter. Bullshit.

The day before, the company literally had a company day where they banged on about their values and how they wanted to support their employees and foster an environment for good health and good mental health.

No disciplinary proceedings. My line manager found out 5 minutes before I did.

I emailed a few colleagues afterwards and apologised, and they were stunned it had gone down the way it did.

I was so blindsided and angry in the meeting, especially after I believed I’d found a company that was actually different and cared.

And I did my work, I stayed late quite often, even produced a couple internal devops tools in my time there.

The kicker is that it was within the probation period, so I have literally no recourse for any action against them.

What’s the most bullshit corporate clusterfuck you’ve been through devRant?

Late to the party. But renovation complete.

Presenting my new home office / bedroom setup.

👌

Have a painfully relatable meme.

Dear companies of the world.

If you offer customer support over Intercom, and the officer is a cute boy, I am gonna flirt like hell.

Keep this in mind.

Or maybe you do... maybe the photos are thirst traps designed to make us more forgiving... 🤔

Fresh out of dropping out of uni with a real heaping of newly diagnosed depression.

Get job in the industry.

Absolute joke of a company, spiral even further.

Thus begins the saga of boom / bust and the universe / myself fucking me over just as things get good that has been the last 8 years of my life.

Maybe one day I’ll write properly about my experience of mental health, in industry, in welfare and in my family too.

Suffice it to say, anything that leads you to take a whole year out, as well as makes you question whether what you thought was your dream job is actually right for you - is, ultimately, the definition of burnout.

tl;dr - the last 8 years have been a fucking burnout episode.

Crazy code.

You know when you come across some code, where you think: “I kinda see what you were going for, but it’s still hella dumb though...” right?

Currently doing some work on an F# backend, and the dev clearly knew enough of the language, but their code makes me question a lot.

The problem is simple: use a third party tool to generate images of each page in a pdf.

Said tool supports:

1. Querying the number of pages
2. Getting all pages as separate images in a single invocation

Can you guess how the dev solved it?

They’ve recursively incremented a page number, called the external tool to grab the image of that page.

“But how does it know when it’s run out of pages?” I hear you ask.

Simple. Catch the inevitable exception, and check against a hardcoded string literal to see whether it says “must be before the end of the document”.

I shit you not.

I nearly had an actual seizure when I was debugging some semi-related code and ended up in this wonderland of fuckery.

The recursion and pattern matching was flawless though, yet the tool’s website clearly states the supported functionality.

The whole thing feels like they tried to do it the right way, but couldn’t be bothered / couldn’t get it right, so they ended up creating this insane bit of madness.

Trolls or innocents?

When you’re way more experienced and new to a team and are met with “but this is how we’ve done it for ages, and it’s done fine for us” but the sprint performance shows they’ve not completed one in 2 years.

That moment when...

You’re supposed to be doing work.
You have a deadline.
It’s your sister’s baby shower and you promised to help.
Sis comes over every day to hang with family.

I’ve still not managed to get any work done today, video games and hanging and baking have had my time 🤣

I was up from 12-1 making jelly shots from scratch because my mum wanted blue ones and couldn’t find any blue jelly 😂

They’re bubblegum and for my first attempt I think they look pretty sick.

Will have to find out whether they set in the morning 🙈

I ❤️ F#, this function is both beautiful and was an utter nightmare to create 😂

All I want for Christmas is.... for Windows 10 search bar to respond and work in a reasonable amount of time and not suck so much.

Anyone else really struggle with motivation?

Time was back when I was a fresh dev that I couldn’t stop coding, it’s all I ever wanted to do.

I think doing it for a job has sucked the fun out of it, and unless I’m getting paid (and even then), I find actually getting down to it is really difficult.

I’ll start looking into making something, perhaps get as far as opening the IDE and then just nope’ing and bingeing YouTube / gaming / Netflix instead.

Shit man if I thought that S.O for developers was bad.....Stack Exchange Mathematics is just fucking brutal omg I am loling so bad man these dudes have 0 patience and will legit kill trolls on spot.

Saw a dude not agreeing with implicit meanings behind certain symbolic notations, some other dude disagreed, fight ensured.

This shit is awesome. Ima stick with this shit for a while.

S.O still fucking sucks though. The stack is amazing and the app works fantastic. The people there are shitty beyond belief.

"Well, you probably said that beca...." fuck off

!rant

Bought myself a new chair from Ikea. Just finished assembling it.

😍😍😍

So... after a vision test on a whim, it turned out I needed glasses.

Turns out sitting in front of a screen all day did actually mess my eyes up 😂

Luckily I only need them for using the computer for extended periods of time, so managed to run them through my company as an expense.

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

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

Anyone else love how devRant has a dislike button? Really helps shoot down trolls without directly acknowledging and feeding into them. FB, Instagram, Twitter... take note

When that bug you thought you’d fixed comes back.

!rant

I've had a personal project (commercial idea) I've been meaning to get started on for a while, and today I started...

Kudos to the team at Microsoft, they've really gotten .net core and asp.net core to a fantastic place.

And the team at JetBrains have done an amazing job on Rider.

I've been able to get a docker container running SQL Server on linux, as well as Web API projects for an API and an identity server all running with local HTTPS and communicating quite happily, with barely an issue in sight.

Bodes well for the future I hope.

Now I just have to commit to the project and actually finish it 😂

How do you deal with massively poorly-performing and unknowledgeable teams?

For background, I've been in my current position for ~7 months now.

A new manager joined recently and he's just floored at the reality of the team.

I mean, a large portion of my interview (and his) was the existing manager explicitly warning about how much of a dumpster fire everything is.

But still, nothing prepares you for it.

We're talking things like:
- Sequential integer user ids that are passable as query string args to anonymous endpoints, thus enabling you to view the data read by that view *for any* user.
- God-like lookup tables that all manner of pieces of data are shoved into as a catch-all
- A continued focus on unnecessary stored procedures despite us being a Linq shop
- Complete lack of awareness of SOLID principles
- Actual FUD around the simplest of things like interfaces, inversion of control, dependency injection (and the list goes on).

I've been elevated into this sort of quasi-senior position (in all but title - and salary), and I find myself having to navigate a daily struggle of trying to not have an absolute shit fit every time I have to dive into the depths of some of the code.

Compounded onto that is the knowledge that most of the team are on comparable salaries (within a couple thousand) of mine, purely owing to length of service.

We're talking salaries for mid-senior level devs, for people that at market rates would command no more (if even close) than a junior rate.

The problem is that I'm aware of how bad things are, but then somehow I'm constantly surprised and confronted with ever more insane levels of shitfuckery, and... I'm getting tired.

It's been 7 months, I love the job, I'm working in the charity sector and I love the fact that the things I'm working on are directly improving people's lives, rather than lining some fintech fatcat's pockets.

I guess this was more a rant than a question, and also long time no see...

So my question is this:

- How do you deal with this?
- How do you go on without just dying inside every single day?

Needs tidying and I’m not exactly using it for work at the moment... but this is my home office / bedroom setup.

There’s an Alienware Alpha hiding behind the MacBook, but it hasn’t actually been on more than once since the MacBook came home... 😂

Been getting a lot of troll / clown / clueless (?) comments on my posts recently. Select favorites include:

"Why do you have a login form on your website?" wut
"Why didn't you throw away that API key?" wut
"Why do you even need to access your apps' servers?" wut

There are just SO many amazing devs here who have NEVER had do any of those things, I'm quite literally an idiot and don't know what I'm doing, sorry for my ignorance. I'd forgotten that there is only exactly one way to build software, I wish I'd done it "that" way sooner! Foolish me.

Really not sure if trolls, clowns, or clueless. Don't care. 🤡🤡🤡

After being a miserly bastard and settling on VirtualBox for my VM needs on OSX, I downloaded a Parallels trial a couple weeks back, and today, I'm happy to announce I bought a license!

VirtualBox can go do one.

I've ditched Studio for Rider, and now Parallels, what has the world come to when a dev actually buys software?!

The end is nigh I say, nigh.

I love PHP, but...

the PHP API has been designed by crackpipe smoking cave trolls.

Every other function has its params completely reversed or in random order compared to similar functions.

Examples?
array_map, array_filter, property_exists, array_key_exists

Late update to the party, but I’m temporarily occupying the newly decorated living room while my room / office is being prepared for a swish new look.

Obligatory code included.

I don't get what's happening with trolls here. Or people who are trying to be trolls.

Ostream got brutally trolled and deleted his account. Then came back with an alt account.

Same with Alexanderr, Nanos, Chaosesqueteam.

I am not siding with anyone, idc who's right or who's wrong, but there's one golden rule for trolling that you should know, before u attempt to be one -

If you can't handle people clapping back at you or if you don't have thick skin, then don't bother.

As if StackOverflow wasn't full of trolls already, now I get people complaining I didn't make "Stack Snippet" instead of a jsFiddle etc.. AFTER I've already answered the question. Don't even get me started...

Story time:

I worked at a firm that had an infernal off the shelf CRM system that they collaborated with the dev company to customise.

They were seriously behind the competition, and didn’t have any app or web presence for interacting with their system, instead relying on people calling (fine for the nature of the business, but competition was leaving them in the dust).

They decided that they needed to redevelop it in-house, with a focus on supporting the web and apps.

I was hired for this purpose.

It was me and one other dev, who was also the head of IT.

He’d built a small prototype, and was new to the whole WPF / MVVM thing for the in-house app, so with my previous experience it was clear it needed to serve as an example only, and that it would need redeveloping.

I was only there three months.

In that time I singularly (he was pulled away to troubleshoot their VOIP installation - yes, for three months as other companies kept dropping the ball) built:

- A WebAPI with JWT auth
- An MVC skeleton frontend
- A WPF desktop app

It had all sorts of cool shit in it, 2FA, Reactive UI, Reactive extensions, server push to desktop, a custom workflow and permissions system.

It was pretty dang cool.

End of the three months rolled around, and the non-technical managers were concerned about time to market, so they decided to drop me as I’d “not made enough progress”.

I’d also had a bit of absence which they were aware of and were supposedly supporting me through.

But MFW three months is assumed to be enough time to build such a system with one dev.

!rant

Made my research about mechanical keyboard and was worried that my first one was going to be too loud at work.

I can hear the majority of hammering cave trolls smashing their membrane keyboards louder than I can hear my MX Brown.

This shit is like heaven for fingers.

:D

!rant

Just landed my second client, and it’s an exciting one!

*dance*

Strap in...

- Previous employer
- 3rd party partner firm
- integration link between both over SOAP
- Both sides riddled with poor code and messed up political structures (partner firm CEO is an investor in my employer)
- Doing a deployment to update to https (I know)
- Keep http endpoint live
- Other side starts shitting itself
- Diagnose
- Not us
- feelsgoodman.tiff
- Get angry email
- Explain not us
- Back and forth
- Tell client it’s “irrelevant” on https issue, it’s their side that’s gone wrong
- Get angry reply with boss cc’d about how nothing is “irrelevant” for the client
- We all had to have a make up meeting and meal
- Client was calm and reasonable, all agreed we just snapped and it wouldn’t happen again
- 2 weeks later
- Their system shits itself again and suddenly we’re on the hook
- BA on my team (smarmy little bastard) constantly fucking me off
- Get so close to actually screaming and hitting him

So yeah. I don’t tend to hold that a job is more important to me than my dignity.

I have and will never hold my tongue for the sake of a job, I’m not gonna put up with people shouting / belittling / backstabbing etc.

Think I am going to try out my first stuff for my game engine in 2D. The games I have the most fond memories of were 2D. Sure I like what has happened on the 3D side. But it would be fun to recreate some of my favorite 2D games. Except with one caveat: procedural generation. Never play the same game twice. For testing purposes I will have a seed system to regenerate the same worlds. I would have played these games so much longer if they had been based on a seed for generation of content.

I also like the idea of weapons and armor never being exactly the same. Sure they can look similar, but on close inspection you could see differences. It will be fun to start with base models and then add imperfections and differences.

Another issue I have with fantasy games is always leveling up the weapon by buying something better. Sure we have improvement systems though smithing and magic, but some weapons are always better than others. I wanted to have a game where weapons could be improved by usage and upgrades. Kill 1000 trolls and the weapon gets imbued with trollbane. Kill a dragon and the blood infuses and it deals fire damage. So a player could start out with the family sword and end up with a god tier weapon at the end of the game. Make weapons become legendary. Not because it has more power, but because trolls recognize the blade and the wielder and are scared shitless.

Terrain in 2D should be a lot easier to generate. Weapons, armor, etc should be easier to modify and generate. This should give me the grounding I need to develop the algorithms for a future 3D system. Godot is currently stronger in 2D than 3D. That will change in the next couple of years as more focus is put on the engine. There is no reason I cannot experiment with mixing 2D and 3D as well.

Holy shit, I was just thinking I cannot imagine the amazing shit they could have done with the games I played as a kid with 2D physics!

Haha, something they had in the older games was actual gambling. You could bet on monster fights and slot machines in game. I wonder if that takes a hard hit with ESRB now?

Currently stuck in tutorial hell. Learning how the engine works and seeing what features are available. I get more excited each video I watch. The engine is packed with goodies and the addons are crazy good.

tldr: First project will be short game in 2D. Will explore procedural content.

Sometimes I feel like devrant is a "how to" for trolls and sadistic management.

Worst thing? Absuse LINQ and not in a fun sexy way.

Entity framework > check.
LINQ query > check.
Standard IEnunerable magic > check

The developer had decided that it would be a good idea to thread the enumerable all over the place and collapse it anytime they wanted access to the data.

I know it’s a rookie mistake a lot of people make, but it was some pretty core data that ended up being used all over the place, so it was a nightmare to correct and it really impacted performance.

Needless to say they felt very silly when we explained how LINQ was deferred.

Contracting:

Con - It can be hella stressful and last minute, especially when contracts and agencies are a real pain.

Con - finding out you’re probably gonna need to go to site at like 11PM the day before, and train tickets are a fucking scam

Pro - Sitting in first class with a complimentary croissant and orange juice isn’t so bad.

Pro - Being able to finally travel to an Apple Store to get that MacBook you’ve been eying for a while because now you actually have to travel. 👀

This is a long post and if someone comments without reading carefully I don't care about that person's opinion.

I have 3 accounts here, and that is a must have for me. Let me explain:

Let's think of people and who they are in layers.

The innermost layers are made of private and intimate things: fears, dreams, shames, basically things that are mostly shared with very close people, like family, best friends, and specially significant others.

On the other hand, outermost layers are the public persona, who you are as a citizen, who you are in your profesion, and so on.

So, you wouldn't normally tell your boss about your favorite sex positions.

Let's also say there can be layers in the middle, and all the layers sometimes overlap, but let's not get too deep into this as I think I got the point across.

Here on I explain the original thesis.

I am a developer, and as such I want to fulfill my needs on dev communities, one of them being devrant.
I wish to learn from other devs, I expose my (sometimes controversial) points of view. I rant about annoying shit in the workplace.

But also, at some level, I wish to be taken seriously as a developer, I wish to build a reputation, and I wish to be accepted, even in a shallow social level. There is a social factor to what we do and it's totally normal.

Now, the problem is that I also would want to express my inner self.

So what I do is I don't use my main account for that, I use another, in fact 2 other accounts.

There are several reasons for that:

* I want to hide intimate shit from trolls.

Imagine I griefpost about a loved one that died, then later found myself in a heated discussion about some language, and then some troll comments something like "I'm glad your x died". i wouldn't react very well.

* I want to keep my posts consistent.

If people become interested in what I post as a dev, then they are going to expect dev related stuff from me. If I start posting like controversial points of view, that's not very cool because I'd be doing like a bait n switch on them.

* I want to maintain a reputation, and I want to not get banned on the main account

Reputation as a profesional is a real thing, and it shouldn't be affected by your personal shit.
Also sometimes you argue, and things get heated, and sometimes you get suspended or banned.

You try your hardest to be respectful, but in some communities, some mods are trigger happy.

By restricting this on your alt account, you're in a way promising that you'll have the upmost behaviour on your dev account because that means being professional.

Now, I said I had 2 other accounts.

The reason for having 2 is because I separate two layers:

In the 2nd account I am open and direct regarding my points of view, and more argumentative, but still trying to be relatively civil. I would also post things that might be controversial or not popular. I try to be real basically.

You can conclude that the 2nd account is the one posting this, since this post could trigger some people.

In the 3rd account, I talk about intimate shit like traumas, fears, emotional pain, things I know I'll get support for (the same support I give others when in need) and are not controversial in any way.
This way I can vent painful things and avoid trolls.

Cool people appreciate it when you're transparent about your shortcoming and dark thoughts.

But it takes one asshole in a high horse to judge you. And sometimes you need to give that asshole the middle finger without being afraid of ruining your reputation
or getting banned,
or being scared of that asshole laughing about your intimate shit (again, I use this account for that)

I know it sounds like I have multiple personalities but I swear I'm ok, and hopefully what I said makes sense. People might say "don't use alt accounts, go to another site", but I find that devrant has some interesting people.

The obvious downside is that you end up knowing people more than what they assume, because you interact with them through different accounts.

This is kinda shady, but I'm not interested in taking advantage of others anyway so...

Client: Can you lower that estimate?
Client: I know you’ve done, but can you make all this stuff behave this particular way on smaller screens, despite it not being in spec?

Me: *internal sigh* sure.

The perils of newly being a contractor and wanting to please.

At least I’m working from home and the money is good I suppose 😂

Now that I work from home as a freelancer, my favourite way to get through a tough day is:

1. Scream internally
2. Realise I’m getting over-stressed
3. Roll myself a blunt
4. Smoke said blunt
5. Dick about on YouTube / internet for a while
6. Make myself a drink (tea etc)
7. Come back and work the problem with a better perspective and fresh eyes.

!rant
<no trolls tag>

I suffer with anxiety.
I took pills (pristiq), but side effects almost ended with my marriage.
And now I'm having more problems. Even a message from my boss trigger me and I can't think properly.
I have a good job and small mini projects and I enjoy playing games

How do you deal with anxiety?

!dev but definitely a rant.

Ordered a lovely new UHD HDR tv for the family on Monday.

MFW I see the courier is Hermes (notoriously bad).

It arrived today.

Any guesses as to the condition it was in?

Yep. Lovely crack on the screen.

Took all day to clear it up with Amazon.

And the best they could bloody do was a refund, but I have to organise the collection and pay for that (which they said they’ll refund).

FFS.

When you buy a parasol for your mother because you’re a good son, but she didn’t factor in the aerodynamics of having a solid fence next to it funnelling the air upwards.

What do you do when it keeps tipping?

Do the same thing you do with software of course!

Fake it ‘til you make it and use twine and weights (bricks) to hold it still 😂😂

Ah yes, The Hacker News intentionally using intendation errors in python 2 to screw over people using their ddos script. yes. That's gotta be the reason

why the fuck am I even following these trolls

Story time.

Previous role.
Have a BA working and overseeing the team.
Development is an absolute shit show at the company.
Basically constantly focussed on putting out fires and reeling from the 100 WTF’s a minute thanks to the batshit code the yes-men offshore Indian devs had created.

I’m quite outspoken, and don’t just roll over when people are cunts to me.

I ended up in so many meetings about communication and tone, merely because I wasn’t putting up with the BA’s two-faced cuntery where he tried to be my friend but at the same time be an utter fucking jobsworth.

Genuinely, I really got so close to decking him a few times.

Pic related.

!rant

I’m really loving being a contractor and working for myself.

Currently waiting for the client to order the next lot of work, so that means today I got to go out, go swimming, walk down the seafront and just generally have a nice day out in the sun with friends and family.

I can’t believe I didn’t try this whole remote contractor thing sooner.

!dev

Just got done watching Netflix’s new 10 part series ‘Maniac’.

It’s by far the weirdest, most emotionally charged thing I’ve perhaps ever watched.

I spent a solid 5 minutes just crying my eyes out at the end of the final episode.

I can’t recommend it enough.

1) Learning little to nothing useful in formal post-secondary and wasting tons of time and money just to have pain and suffering.

"Let's talk about hardware disc sectors divisions in the database course, rather than most of you might find useful for industry."

"Lemme grade based on regurgitating my exact definitions of things, later I'll talk about historical failed network protocols, that have little to no relevance/importance because they fucking lost and we don't use them. Practical networking information? Nah."

"Back in the day we used to put a cup of water on top of our desktops, and if it started to shake a lot that's how you'd know your operating system was working real hard and 'thrashing' "

"Is like differentiation but is like cat looking at crystal ball"

"Not all husbands beat their wives, but statistically...." (this one was confusing and awkward to the point that the memory is mostly dropped)

Streams & lambdas in java, were a few slides in a powerpoint & not really tested. Turns out industry loves 'em.

2) Landed my first student job and get shoved on an old legacy project nobody wants to touch. Am isolated and not being taught or helped much, do poorly. Boss gets pissed at me and is unpleasant to work with and get help from. Gets to the point where I start to wonder if he starts to try and create a show of how much of a nuisance I am. He meddle with some logo I'm fixing, getting fussy about individual pixels and shades, and makes a big deal of knowing how to use GIMP and how he's sitting with me micromanaging. Monthly one on one's were uncomfortable and had him metaphorically jerking off about his lifestory career wise.

But I think I learned in code monkey industry, you gotta be capable of learning and making things happen with effectively no help at all. It's hard as fuck though.

3) Everytime I meet an asshole who knows more and accomplish than I do (that's a lot of people) with higher TC than me (also a lot of people). I despair as I realize I might sound like that without realizing it.

4) Everytime I encounter one of my glaring gaps in my knowledge and I'm ashamed of the fact I have plenty of them. Cargo cult programming.

5) I can't do leetcode hards. Sometimes I suck at white board questions I haven't seen anything like before and anything similar to them before.

6) I also suck at some of the trivia questions in interviews. (Gosh I think I'd look that up in a search engine)

7) Mentorship is nigh non-existent. Gosh I'd love to be taught stuff so I'd know how to make technical design/architecture decisions and knowing tradeoffs between tech stack. So I can go beyond being a codemonkey.

8) Gave up and took an ok job outside of America rather than continuing to grind then try to interview into a high tier American company. Doubtful I'd ever manage to break in now, and TC would be sweet but am unsure if the rest would work out.

9) Assholes and trolls on stackoverflow, it's quite hard to ask questions sometimes it feels and now get closed, marked as dupe, or downvoted without explanation.

~rant

I started working for myself in January, and work has been few and far between.

I’ve always wanted to work for myself, and now I’m working on a product I’m actually going to sell *gulp*

It’s not ready yet, but I’ll definitely be posting here about it when it’s ready to go :D

It’s going to be a super simple (Windows to start) screenshotting tool (and relevant cloud services) primarily focussed on devs / IT professionals and their needs.

Sound off for feature requests 👍

!rant

As a company director that’s just starting out down my freelance journey, I still find it so scary taking money out of the business, even though I know I have the money to replace it.

The spectre of getting my taxes wrong even though I’ve got established accountants looking out for me is insane.

Launch a product I want to build and diversify my income streams y’all

!rant

Today I got access to the code for the new contract I’m working on.

It all built first time from source.

I’ve never wept such joyful tears.

> lose weight
> get more than one client
> learn to drive and get a car
> try not to cry too much when I can’t afford the Tesla I want
> get my passport sorted and go on my first ever holiday (no joke).

So, the internet is over. Just in case you didn’t notice. If you post a link to anything that involves you: an article, a podcast, a thing you built, a video you made - then mods and admins and trolls get their pitchforks and ban you or roast you or delete you.

This is not the way.

Not only are the walled gardens of apple, Twitter, Facebook/Instagram, breaking the web into little areas - and marketing is buying your time - but we’re doing it to ourselves too.

I can’t post a video about some of my favorite programming books in
/learnprogramming or I’m immediately banned!? Every link that takes people away from your ad dollars is ‘spam?’ Without any useful discourse and content - then why would anyone be there in the first place.

One time I posted a link HERE about how people could get CSS help in the CSS discord and I got fire-stormed for self-promotion. Really? Hundreds of hours helping people learn programming - for free... is my self promotion? Is everyone so insecure that they can’t allow anyone else to talk about their work? It’s super scary.

This is how you control people. This is Nazi shit. It’s a slippery Slope. Watch out.

And whatever you do... don’t share links to your things. That is NOT what the internet was made for.

Anything that has to do with SNMP. Guys who write MIBs are either complete idiots or amazing trolls.

So... I’ve recently started a new role, and luckily I’ve established myself as someone that knows his shit (more or less) TM.

I’m leading the charge on tech debt, and raising issues about it, first on my radar is the monstrosity of their approach to app config.

It’s a web app, and they store config in a key-value table in the database.

Get this. The key is the {type}.{property} path and this is fetched from the database and injected *at construction* via reflection.

Some of these objects get instantiated dozens of times per-request. Eurgh.

Got half my college calling me "Pennywise" cause I work at the "IT" department. Thanks Saturday Night Live!

!rant

Does anyone else use the old “I’m not available today / tomorrow too” with clients when they come knocking?

Y’know, to let them know you’re not at their beck and call?

Am I evil?

If you feed the trolls it makes their nips hard. You don’t want to be responsible for hard troll nips!

That feeling when you know there’s work to be done, and a deadline to do it by... yet you can’t muster the motivation and you’d rather just play video games.

I suppose at least with contracting from home I have the option of taking a break like this so long as the work gets done on time. I mean, if I was in an office I’d just be dicking about online.

Any fellow U.K. devs knocking around?

Any based in the Cambridgeshire / Norfolkshire / London areas?

We should totally organise meetups.

Hey. @dfox, a meetup tool would be pretty cool.

Those feels when you're tasked with producing a detailed breakdown of the structure of the client's application, and you're high-key having to avoid being too negative about the shit-show.

Had a job advert where they legit said a requirement was following the waterfall methodology.

Nope. Nope nope nope nope.

Instagram seems to have a lot of trolls in the comments at the moment...

So I’m a huge fan of visual studio, but it let me down today.

“Find all references” just straight up fails to find all references of a member in this big F# solution I’m documenting.

I need to be able to reliably find what I’m looking for.

Reshaper for visual studio appears to not be that maintained for F#. FML.

Download Rider evaluation on the off chance, it works flawlessly.

One begrudging commercial license purchase later (despite being the only employee) and I now have software that actually fucking works.

What a wonderful time when Microsoft’s official IDE fails in analysis of its own language.

Dear Microsoft, I see what you were going for, and I love you for it; but for the love of god, please fucking fix the clusterfuck that is Nuget.

I use a private feed for client work, and I have the public source registered too, so why would installing a new .core template from Nuget fail just because it tried the private feed first and shit itself?

It really shouldn’t be this hard.

Sincerely,
Brolls

When the requirements change last minute...

Wanna know what I love being able to do now?

Reply to bullshit recruiter emails and basically follow the script:

- Here's my skills
- Here's my availability
- Here's my rate
- Here's my CV

Oh, and BTW, I trade through my own limited company, so stick that up your various orifices you ratchet-fucking moron emailing me about roles that are literally nowhere near related to my publicly available info...

Having no trolls feels weird

What are the origins of your usernames?

Mine is a contraction of B(ack) Rolls from the legendary Alyssa Edwards.

i think kobenz is borderline autistic

he claims he built a predictor of dollar "exchange rate" price (didn't mention against which currency - warning bells), if this were true he wouldn't be on this site...

THEN he claims he built a "framework" like React in 500 LOC...

💩🤡

lotta trolls on this site, beware...

My idea is really good actually my startup is doing great now.

But my first time pitch was a terrible one in front of a small investor. He trolls me but now in bootstrap mode we have more than 50+ customers world wide

Is there any general rule of thumb for whether or not you should have an LLC as an independent developer? Would this help against patent trolls and nefarious clients, or is there some other way to protect yourself?

So I wrote something a little bit insulting about windows while asking a question here and pro windows trolls ruined the question.

Suffering from the cash flow blues.

Remote contracting roles are far and few between, and so far I’ve only found the one client, the problem is that because they’ve been burned in the past by contractors, they only operate on an order by order basis.

So we’re stuck in this perpetual cycle of issues > estimates > order > development > test > tweak > pay and repeat.

The problem is that there is always significant delay between the stages from both sides, either because they’re busy on stuff, or I’ve burnt myself out rushing to meet an estimate and having to take a bit of breathing room.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great working in blocks of a few days to a week and then having some time to myself (and the money is nice too), but the cash flow inconsistency is super scary when you’re having to manage corporation tax, accountancy fees and a salary.

Anyone else have these issues / know good places to find remote contract work?

Anyone have experience with Toptal / Crew et. al?

Toptal’s screening uses Codility which seems to largely just be silly esoteric algorithmic problems rather than evidence for being able to code applications...

Anyone here made it in?

I uploaded my resume video on my channel where I gave out information about everything in my life (almost), thinking that devRant trolls would do their research on me and come up with better insults than before.

Such disappointment. Sigh. You can't have everything can you.

The Typescript team issue trolls are just such asshats it's ridiculous. I've never once seen them even attempt to put themselves in the users shoes.

Not completely a dev thing. But now days it seems like everyone is either an audiophile or a master at phone design. Like for REAL! What do you want???

This sounds like crap (has HD Sound)
This looks ugly (any and every phone)

It seems like there a lot of trolls that just go to events they really don't like... Why do Samsung Fans watch Apple events??

You dont see vegans going to every meet market they see.... Like for real.....

Le me.

Tasked with eval’ing SPA frameworks.

Gets down to business with Vue.

Fuck this shit.

It’s lovely when it works, but heaven help you if *anything* is slightly off.

What the fuck is Webpack?! Fucking ugly-ass, hydra-looking fuckery is what it is.

Cypress? Hah! Does it want to work? No it fucking does not.

Does anything tell me what’s wrong? Nope.

I love OSS, but so much of it a complete clusterfuck of duct tape and prayers.

I'm fairly convinced that a company that replaced their PM:s with socially competent (i.e not complete cave trolls with no sense for UX) engineers (that of course would also get their hands dirty in an operational manner) would be far more successful than than a company that rides the PM/product dev hype wave. I think there is an apparent disconnect between the expectations of a full fledged PM and what the average PM actually seem to deliver on a daily basis in your avarage company.

This is of course a generalization and I bet there are dedicated PM:s that actually pull their weight, and I might very well only had bad experiences, but this is aimed at what I consider to be the avarage company.

Has anyone deployed and actually used a similar model? If so; what are your conclusions?

!rant

That remote contractor life is waiting for work, feeling super unproductive.

Solution? Shorts and shirt in the glorious weather with a spliff.

Oh I fucking hate trolls. Those are the **worst** people on the Internet.

Any U.K. / EEA devs with substantial Angular experience?

Asking for a client, it’d be remote work with visits to the office every so often.

Contract work too, so ideal for freelancers.

When the client expects miracles.