What it's like to be a network engineer...translated into normal people speak

User: I think we are having a major road issue.

Me: What? No, I just checked, the roads are fine. I was actually just on the roads.

User: No, I’m pretty sure the roads are down because I’m not getting pizzas.

Me: Everything else on the roads is fine. What do you mean you aren’t getting pizzas?

User: I used to get pizzas when I ordered them, now I’m not getting them. It has to be a road issue.

Me: As I said, the roads are fine. Where are you getting pizzas from?

User: I’m not really sure. Can you check all places that deliver pizzas?

Me: No I don’t even know all the places that deliver pizza. You need to narrow it down.

User: I think it is Subway.

Me: Okay, I’ll check…No, I just looked and Subway doesn't deliver pizzas.

User: I’m pretty sure it is Subway. Can you just allow all food from Subway and we can see if pizza shows up?

Me: Sigh, fine I’ve allowed all food from Subway, but I don’t think that is the issue.

User: Yeah I’m still not getting pizza. Can you check the roads?

Me: It’s not the roads, the roads are fine. I’m pretty sure Subway isn’t the place.

User: Okay, I found it. It’s Papa Johns.

Me: Okay, I looked and Papa Johns does deliver pizza. Is it the local Papa Johns or one in a different town?

User: I don’t know. Can you allow pizza from all Papa Johns to me?

Me: No I can’t do that. Can you get me an address for Papa Johns?

User: No, I only know it as Papa Johns. Can you get me all the addresses of all Papa Johns and I’ll tell you if one of them is correct?

Me: No, I don’t have time for that. Okay, I looked at the local one and it looks like they have sent you pizza in the past and they are currently allowed to send you pizzas. Try ordering a pizza while I watch.

User: Yeah still no pizza. I’m guessing they are getting blocked at the freeway. Can you check the freeway to make sure they can get through?

Me: No, this is a local delivery. They aren't even using the freeway.

User: Okay, well then it has to be a road issue.

Me: No, the roads are fine. Okay, I just drove from the Papa Johns to the address they have on file for you and there is nothing there.

User: Hmm, wait we did move recently.

Me: Did you give your new address to Papa Johns?

User: No, I just thought they would be able to look me up by name.

Me: No they need your new address. What’s your new address?

User: I’m not really sure. Can you look it up?

Me: Sigh, give me a second…Okay, I found your address and gave it to Papa Johns. Try ordering a pizza now.

User: HEY! PIZZA JUST SHOWED UP!

Me: Okay, good.

User: (To everyone else they know) I apologize for the delay in the pizza but there was a major road issue that was preventing the pizza from getting to me. The network engineer has fixed the roads and we are able to get pizza again.

Me: But it wasn’t the roads…whatever.

User: Oh, can you also check on an issue where Chinese food isn’t getting to me? I think it may be a road issue

Some empty-headed helpdesk girl skipped into our office yesterday afternoon, despite the big scary warning signs glued to the door.

"Hey, when I log in on my phone, the menu is looking weird"

"Uh... look at my beard"

"What"

"Just look at this beard!"

"Uh.... OK"

"Does this look like a perfectly groomed beard"

"Uh... it's pretty nice I guess"

"You don't have to lie"

She looks puzzled: "OK... maybe it could use a little trimming. Uh... a lot of trimming". "I still like it though" she adds, trying hard to be polite.

"I understand you just started working here. But the beard... the beard should make it clear. See the office opposite to this one?"

"Yeah"

"Perfectly groomed ginger beards. It's all stylish shawls and smiles and spinach smoothies. Those people are known as frontend developers, they care about pixels and menus. Now look at my beard. It is dark and wild, it has some gray stress hairs, and if you take a deep breath it smells like dust and cognac mixed with the tears caused by failed deploys. Nothing personal, but I don't give a fuck what a menu looks like on your phone."

She looked around, and noticed the other 2 tired looking guys with unshaven hobo chins. To her credit, she pointed at the woman in the corner: "What about her, she doesn't seem to have a beard"

Yulia, 1.9m long muscled database admin from Ukraine, lets out a heavy sigh. "I do not know you well enough yet to show you where I grow my unkempt graying hairs... . Now get lost divchyna."

Helpdesk girl leaves the scene.

Joanna, machine learning dev, walks in: "I saw a confused blonde lost in the hallway, did you give her the beard speech?"

"Yeah" -- couldn't hold back a giggle -- "haha now she'll come to you"

Joanna: "No I already took care of it"

"How?"

"She started about some stupid menu, so I just told her to smell my cup". Joanna, functional alcoholic, is holding her 4pm Irish coffee. "I think this living up to our stereotype tactic is working, because the girl laughed and nodded like she understood, and ran off to the design department"

Me: "I do miss shaving though"

I don't understand why every non-technical person who comes to do work in my apartment messes up my fucking router.

The cleaning lady - multiple times knocked the antennas partially off. Like fucking clock work. I don't get it, why is the cleaning lady attracted to my router antennas and why does she need to be so hard on them? Whatever.

The most ridiculous episode was today. And it wasn't the cleaning lady. I had a few people here doing some work today and the woman in charge who was here informed me before that they might have to move the furniture "a little."

I come home, and like a bad omen, the plastic parts on BOTH my router antennas are missing. Completely gone. It's just the the wires. Now, the router still works fine in my tiny apartment, but it is a fancy Asus router (I learned the hard way not to buy cheap routers) and I'd like it to not have fucking wires as antennas.

I email the woman (paraphrased):

Me: hey, it seems the antennas got knocked off my router, do you have any idea where they might have went?

Her: Apologies if we didn't put everything back (no shit you didn't, that's why I've had to email you). If we knocked the antennas off the router (fucking "if"???? I literally just told you in my email that they were knocked off) , they are probably somewhere by the window on the floor (they weren't).

And I still haven't found them. Why the fuck do these people seemingly attack my router? I can't figure out what it is about it. You would think people would be more careful around electronics but naaah. Anyway, going to go keep looking for my router antennas.

I am so sick and tired of hearing "I'm not good with computers" from these god damn secretaries I have to work with.

Fuck you! I mean, seriously, FUCK YOU! That God damn piece of shit Windows XP door stop has been on your desk for at LEAST a decade (shit, I think that was the same PC my highschool had, and I'm in my mid thirties)!

What in the FUCK do you mean you don't know the difference between files and folder? How? HOW can you stare at that damn screen every fucking work day off your life and not grasp simple concepts!

And FUCK THE ADMINISTRATION for hiring these volunteerily ignorant babies who refuse to bother figuring out more than just where the power button is (and, fuck me, even THAT took years).

Fuck me if, after spending 40 God damn minutes of my time trying to guide some secretary, who's been working twice as long as I have and making probably twice as much, on how to copy a file from one folder to another, I have to listen to some fucking pity speech "I just don't get this high tech computer stuff. I'm just too old"

And FUCK society for allowing this fucking behavior! I don't know any other piece of technology where people are happy being so blindly ignorant to even the basics! I don't know Jack shit about the internal working of a car, but I know where and how to use my steering wheel and peddles and that I need to take the thing for an oil change. Hell, I even know when my tires look bad... If I can do that, you can fucking learn how to copy a god damn file without needing me to help you... FOR A FUCKING HOUR!

FUUUUCK!

*Takes a deep breath*
So... How was your day?

Worst dev I've interviewed?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Client: Where are we with the project, it's been a week and I see nothing.

Me: You asked me to do something that was not in the agreed scope of work, which has kept me from starting on the project.

Client: Do I need to plan out everything in advance on paper for you to get it done in a timely manner?

Me: Is that a serious question? Yes, you should. That's the whole point of creating a scope of work. It's to allow me to schedule out the time necessary to build out a product in a "timely manner".

Client: I don't appreciate your attitude. This is not how you should be doing business if you like making money.

Me: I don't appreciate your condescending, unreasonable, dickhead mentality that makes you think it's remotely okay to act like you're better than me. Money doesn't grant you the right to be a dickwad, and just because I'm being paid doesn't mean I have to put up with any level of arrogance or disrespect.

I am in this business to make money, but not at the cost of my dignity and self-respect. You will be receiving a full refund later today, not because I have to provide a refund, but because I never want to communicate with you ever again moving forward. Take your unacceptable bullshit somewhere else.

The problem with being a programmer...

I just broke up with a girl I've been seeing the past 2 months, that I was really into.

But in the end, it became a question of, either i'm with her, or I'm with my work.

I don't think that would happen with other professions, at least, not as easily.

I think, with other professions or projects, you tell someone "I need to work" and it's really fucking understood. "Ok, you need to work"

They understand it. If I was a lawyer.. I have a case. if I was a carpenter, I have a wall to build,
or a house. Etc. All understood things. Or physical things that can be seen.

But with programming, first of all, I work my own hours, I write software and then sell it. I do it all myself, I own my own business. I don't have normal hours like a job, but I do know my requirements, which is at LEAST 8 hours a day of solid, uninterrupted work.

If I had a "job" it would be like "gotta go to work" and that would be it.

But, because I work for myself, and because the things I build, aren't like something you physically see, nobody gets it.

My parents, as supportive as they are, will never understand how I just implemented a new design pattern and like, leveled up because of it.

They see software... buttons, and even then, when I try to explain what excites me, it's like trying to get a 3 year old interested in calculus.

How could they possibly understand the richness of what I do, how fulfilling it is
and how much I love it, when all they see
is me on a computer, clicking keys.

The same for this girl I dated.

The only place I feel where people understand,
is here.

Do you have any similar experiences to share?
Would love to hear it right now.

I tutor people who want to program, I don't ask anything for it, money wise, if they use my house as a learning space I may ask them to bring cookies or a pizza or something but on the whole I do it to help others learn who want to.

Now this in of itself is perfectly fine, I don't get financially screwed over or anything, but...

Fuck me if some students are horrendous!

To the best of my knowledge I've agreed to work with and help seven individuals, four female three male.

One male student never once began the study work and just repeatedly offered excuses and wanted to talk to me about how he'd screwed his life up. I mean that's unfortunate, but I'm not a people person, I don't really feel emotionally engaged with a relative stranger who quite openly admits they got addicted to porn and wasted two years furiously masturbating. Which is WAY more than I needed to know and made me more than a little uncomfortable. Ultimately lack of actually even starting the basic exercises I blocked him and stopped wasting my time.

The second dude I spoke to for exactly 48 hours before he wanted to smash my face in. Now, he was Indian (the geographical India not native American) and this is important, because he was a friend of a friend and I agreed to tutor however he was more interested in telling me how the Brits owed India reparations, which, being Scottish, I felt if anyone was owed reparations first, it's us, which he didn't take kindly too (something about the phrase "we've been fucked, longer and harder than you ever were and we don't demand reparations" didn't endear me any).

But again likewise, he wanted to talk about politics and proving he was a someone "I've been threatened in very real world ways, by some really bad people" didn't impress me, and I demonstrated my disinterest with "and I was set on fire once cos the college kids didn't like me".

He wouldn't practice, was constantly interested in bigging himself up, he was aggressive, confrontational and condescending, so I told him he was a dick, I wasn't interested in helping him and he can help himself. Last I heard he wasn't in the country anymore.

The third guy... Absolute waste of time... We were in the same computer science college class, I went to university and did more, he dossed around and a few years later went into design and found he wanted to program and got in touch. He completes the code schools courses and understandably doesn't quite know what to do next, so he asks a few questions and declares he wants to learn full stack web development. Quickly. I say it isn't easy especially if it's your first real project but if one is determined, it isn't impossible.

This guy was 30 and wanted to retire at 35 and so time was of the essence. I'm up for the challenge, and so because he only knows JavaScript (including prototypes, callbacks and events) I tell him about nodejs and explain that it's a little more tricky but it does mean he can learn all the basis without learning another language.

About six months of sporadic development where I send him exercises and quizzes to try, more often than not he'd answer with "I don't know" after me repeatedly saying "if you don't know, type the program out and study what it does then try to see why!".

The excuses became predicable, couldn't study, playing soccer, couldn't study watching bake off, couldn't study, couldn't study.

Eventually he buys a book on the mean stack and I agree to go through it chapter by chapter with him, and on one particular chapter where I'm trying to help him, he keeps interrupting with "so could I apply for this job?" "What about this job?" And it's getting frustrating cos I'm trying to hold my code and his in my head and come up with a real world analogy to explain a concept and he finally interrupts with "would your company take me on?"

I'm done.

"Do you want the honest unabridged truth?"

"Yes, I'd really like to know what I need to do!"

"You are learning JavaScript, and trying to also learn computer science techniques and terms all at the same time. Frankly, to the industry, you know nothing. A C developer with a PHD was interviewed and upon leaving the office was made a laughing stock of because he seemed to not know the difference between pass by value and pass by reference. You'd be laughed right out the building because as of right now, you know nothing. You don't. Now how you respond to this critique is your choice, you can either admit what I'm saying is true and put some fucking effort into studying cos I'm putting more effort into teaching than you are studying, or you can take what I'm saying as a full on attack, give up and think of me as the bad guy. Your choice, if you are ready to really study, you can text me in the morning for now I'm going to bed."

The next day I got a text "I was thinking about what you said and... I think I'm not going to bother with this full stack stuff it's just too hard, thought you should know."

Biggest hurdle: torn between having boobs and missing an arm. I swear some people are under the assumption the brain is in the arm.

I am fully capable of building your network, resolving your outage due to your faulty code, can even tell you how many users your database can support at once. I don't need arms for that. Nor do my boobs distract me that badly.

"but men are going to make your life so hard" yup. And that's true no matter where i go

"all that typing with one arm can't be good for your back" welp. Find me a job that doesn't require a computer. Or manual labor. If you think typing will fuck me up, that's DEFINITELY out of the equation

"you're too pretty, there's no way this can make sense" dafuq you just say?!?!

"why don't you just stay home on disability, I'm sure you qualify, you wouldn't need to work" I'd rather be a fucking trophy wife if I'm staying at home. Fuck that.

And many more.

Sometimes they're fun. Give me more dumb arguments to counter? ;)

Anyone know this bitch hacker 127.0.0.1 story?

WORST HACKERS OF ALL TIME

CONTINUED IN THE COMMENTS BECUASE IT IS SO LONG...

TLdr bitch hacker hacks himself by localhost

bitchchecker (~java@euirc-a97f9137.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-61a2169c.dip.t-dialin.net) has joined #stopHipHop
<bitchchecker> why do you kick me
<bitchchecker> can’t you discus normally
<bitchchecker> answer!
<Elch> we didn’t kick you
<Elch> you had a ping timeout: * bitchchecker (~java@euirc-a97f9137.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
<bitchchecker> what ping man
<bitchchecker> the timing of my pc is right
<bitchchecker> i even have dst
<bitchchecker> you banned me
<bitchchecker> amit it you son of a bitch
<HopperHunter|afk> LOL
<HopperHunter|afk> shit you’re stupid, DST^^
<bitchchecker> shut your mouth WE HAVE DST!
<bitchchecker> for two weaks already
<bitchchecker> when you start your pc there is a message from windows that DST is applied.
<Elch> You’re a real computer expert
<bitchchecker> shut up i hack you
<Elch> ok, i’m quiet, hope you don’t show us how good a hacker you are
<bitchchecker> tell me your network number man then you’re dead
<Elch> Eh, it’s 129.0.0.1
<Elch> or maybe 127.0.0.1
<Elch> yes exactly that’s it: 127.0.0.1 I’m waiting for you great attack
<bitchchecker> in five minutes your hard drive is deleted
<Elch> Now I’m frightened
<bitchchecker> shut up you’ll be gone
<bitchchecker> i have a program where i enter your ip and you’re dead
<bitchchecker> say goodbye
<Elch> to whom?
<bitchchecker> to you man
<bitchchecker> buy buy
<Elch> I’m shivering thinking about such great Hack0rs like you
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-61a2169c.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-b5cd558e.dip.t-dialin.net) has joined #stopHipHop
<bitchchecker> dude be happy my pc crashed otherwise you’d be gone
<Metanot> lol
<Elch> bitchchecker: Then try hacking me again… I still have the same IP: 127.0.0.1
<bitchchecker> you’re so stupid man
<bitchchecker> say buy buy
<Metanot> ah, [Please control your cussing] off
<bitchchecker> buy buy elch
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-b5cd558e.dip.t-dialin.net) Quit (Ping timeout#)
bitchchecker (~java@euirc-9ff3c180.dip.t-dialin.net) has joined #stopHipHop
<bitchchecker> elch you son of a bitch
<Metanot> bitchchecker how old are you?
<Elch> What’s up bitchchecker?
<bitchchecker> you have a frie wal
<bitchchecker> fire wall
<Elch> maybe, i don’t know
<bitchchecker> i’m 26
<Metanot> such behaviour with 26?
<Elch> how did you find out that I have a firewall?
<Metanot> tststs this is not very nice missy
<bitchchecker> because your gay fire wall directed my turn off signal back to me
<bitchchecker> be a man turn that shit off
<Elch> cool, didn’t know this was possible.
<bitchchecker> thn my virus destroys your pc man
<Metanot> are you hacking yourselves?
<Elch> yes bitchchecker is trying to hack me
<Metanot> he bitchchecker if you’re a hacker you have to get around a firewall even i can do that
<bitchchecker> yes man i hack the elch but the sucker has a fire wall the
<Metanot> what firewall do you have?
<bitchchecker> like a girl
<Metanot> firewall is normal a normal hacker has to be able to get past it…you girl
<He> Bitch give yourself a jackson and chill you’re letting them provoce you and give those little girls new material all the time
<bitchchecker> turn the firewall off then i send you a virus [Please control your cussing]er
<Elch> Noo
<Metanot> he bitchchecker why turn it off, you should turn it off
<bitchchecker> you’re afraid
<bitchchecker> i don’t wanna hack like this if he hides like a girl behind a fire wall
<bitchchecker> elch turn off your shit wall!
<Metanot> i wanted to say something about this, do you know the definition of hacking??? if he turns of the firewall that’s an invitation and that has nothing to do with hacking
<bitchchecker> shut up
<Metanot> lol
<bitchchecker> my grandma surfs with fire wall
<bitchchecker> and you suckers think you’re cool and don’t dare going into the internet without a fire wall
<Elch> bitchchecker, a collegue showed me how to turn the firewall off. Now you can try again
<Metanot> bitchhacker can’t hack
<Black<TdV>> nice play on words
<bitchchecker> wort man
<Elch> bitchchecker: I’m still waiting for your attack!
<Metanot> how many times again he is no hacker
<bitchchecker> man do you want a virus
<bitchchecker> tell me your ip and it deletes your hard drive
<Metanot> lol ne give it up i’m a hacker myself and i know how hackers behave and i can tell you 100.00% you’re no hacker..

My most awkward recruiter interaction?

Just graduated college and got 'suckered' by an programming position ad that turned out to be a recruiting company. It was fine since they charge the company for their services and not me.
After a couple of weeks of waiting (they initially promised I would/could have at least 3 interviews a week, which hadn't happened.) I decided to start looking again on my own, found a position, and I was hired.

About two months later I get a phone call:

<skipping the pleasantries>
R: "I see you are working for D, congratulations. I've started the paperwork for our reimbursement."
Me: "Reimburse for what? I found that job on my own."
R: "D is one of the companies we work with and when we submitted your resume, they told us you were already hired."
Me: "And?"
R: "And you signed a contract and now its time to pay. The fees only start at $500"
Me: "Not me. I have the contract, it states, in the second paragraph, I am not responsible for any hiring fees."
<couple of seconds of silence>
R: "Yes, but that is only if we negotiated the contact. Since you went behind our back, we couldn't start the process"
Me: "And?"
R: "And its a breach of contract."
Me: "I'm not a lawyer, I don't understand what you're saying. It says right here on the contract I signed, I don't pay any fees. No where does it say I'm not allowed to look for a job on my own. Right?"
R: "Um..yea..right..right...but you were hired by one of our contracted companies."
Me: "No way I would have known that. Maybe you should have set up an interview long before now."
<R is getting pretty angry at this point>
R: "I'm sure we gave you list of companies we work with. Contacting those companies is a breach of contract. Unless you want our lawyers to get involved, the fee is only $500. Failing to honor your side of the agreement and we'll be forced to contact your employer and begin garnishing your wage until the fee is paid. You don't want that, do you?"
Me: "There was no list and I am allowed to find a job on my own. Again, I'm not responsible for you not setting up an interview so do whatever you think you can do. Have a good night"
<I hang up>

About a week later..

Boss: "Got a phone call from XYZ Recruiting requesting a wage garnishment. Do you know anything about that?"
<I explain the situation>
Boss: "Oh good grief. We've worked with them a couple of times and we contact them on an individual basis for new hires. You're fine"
Me: "You're not going to garnish my paycheck?"
Boss: "No no no, that's not how this works. He was probably trying to scare you into paying their crazy fees."
Me: "What if they get their lawyers involved? I don't want to cause any trouble"
Boss: "Ha ha...XYZ Recruiting is a couple of guys in an office and we have lawyers on the 3rd floor who eat and breath this shit. They know that and you won't hearing from them again."

*meeting with boss about a quick site for one of her clients*

Boss- "okay so basically I just want you to copy the content from -already made site- and put it on the new one"

Me- "okay sure do you want it verbatim or "

Boss-"no but something similar"

Me-"okay so you want me to paraphrase this list that's on the homepage?"

Boss-"Well no we dont actually need the list at all as it isnt relevant to us so just take that out"

Me-"okay well that is the only thing on the homepage so what should I replace it with"

Boss-"I dont know, something similar to the list. You can figure something out"

Me-"....I dont know anything about the clients business. I am not going to just make up content, you guys can at least give me some direction there"

Boss-"i didnt think it would be that hard"

Me-"it's really not hard. You're making it harder than it needs to be for me though. Anyway, do you wanna keep the same exact pages as the other site or only transfer some of them or"

Boss-"something that resembles that website but isnt exactly it so some of the pages but not all"

Me-"which ones"

Boss-"the ones relevant to client's business"

Me-*closes notebook, stands up, starts to leave room*

Boss-"where are you going"

Me-"I'm going to get another two cups of coffee cause I didnt have enough this morning for this bullshit"

Boss-*raises eyebrow*

Me-"dont tell me to copy paste a website at first and then continue to tell me its going to be "similar" but different and then further continue to be as vague as possible about what is expected of me to be done in order to make it different! Take the time to decide what it is you want exactly and then tell me, with detail, what you're criteria is so I can do the thing!! I cant read your mind."

Boss-"..... I just didnt think it would be that hard to jot in a few sentences here and there"

I left the room at that point. Irritating as fuck. You dont know tech stuff, don't expect me to know enough about YOUR job to write about it as if I'm a professional. I cant fucking read minds, I have no interest in researching anything just to create the site content myself, and its fucking rude that they wont even take the time to sit down and decide what they want for a website that THEY are paying for. For fucks sake people get your fucking shit together

I think I'm going to delete my account.

I browsed through my personal feed, and even though I've spend some time curating, only about 1 in a 100 is a real rant. The rest are memes, mildly funny observations, the kind of programmer humor which is only funny to non-programmers, and bland anekdotes.

And when I post something IN ALL CAPS WITH SOME FUCKING CURSEWORDS AND RAGE IN THERE YOU CUNTS ALL TELL ME TO CALM DOWN AND BE MORE POSITIVE?

What kind of a weak, smoothieslurping mindfulness convention has this community become? Do you guys just want to be a mildly funny reddit clone for easily offended hipsters?

This place was my outlet, my venting space, the spot where I didn't feel alone in frustrations.

I find this new content fucking sickening.

Computer Science is probably the only major where if you suck at it and end up dropping out, you're more likely to be a leader than someone who is good at it and sticks with it.

There were roughly 200 people in my freshman class majoring in CS, by my sophomore year that number had dropped to about 120. A lot of people dropped out because it was too damn difficult for them, and they switched to less technical majors like "Business Information Technology" or "Management Information Systems." Almost without exception, the people who dropped out are now managing teams of developers, they actually have programmers reporting to them. Seriously, WTF?

This isn't even the worst of it, there are people who majored in art history who are now "product managers," who take the word "manager" in their job title literally, they think they're above developers. Some of them will even profess with no small amount of pride that they "know nothing about technology." You can hear the pride in their voice when they say it, as if they're saying "I'm a lot of things, but at least I'm not a geek." Is there any other field of study where people boast with such pride that they know nothing about it? I mean, very few people will say "I know nothing about history" or "I know nothing about literature", and if they do say it, they'll say it with a bit of humility. When it comes to Computer Science though, knowing nothing about it is almost a badge of honor.

Rant the f**k over.

User: We have been dealing with this bug for a month now! How come nobody has fixed it?

Dev: Who did notify about this issue?

User: You’re not listening we have been dealing with this for a MONTH!

Dev: When this issue first occurred did you tell anyone?

User: Yes!

Dev: Who?

User: …. Ok I don’t remember but I know I said something to someone. Anyway it doesn’t matter, your job is IT so how come this isn’t fixed?

Dev: Did you have an email? Ticket number? Teams message? Any record of where this was dropped?

User: I think you’re missing the point. We haven’t been able to do out jobs for A MONTH. We’ve just been sitting around completely helpless. We’ve been trying to figure a system using paper and pencil to replace the electronic one but it’s too complicated. How come this wasn’t fixed the second it happened?

Dev: It’s hard to respond to an issue if it’s not brought to out attention.

User: Ok but we are too busy to create a ticket! We have a million things to do and we can’t do any of them because your app doesn’t work! We’ve been sitting here telling each other how terrible this system is AND IT HAS BEEN A MONTH.

Dev: …. Yeah I got that

Lamer rant

For a really long time I said to myself that this is too basic to rant about but lately it became so frequent and extreme that here is my rant about completely clueless users that ask me IT related questions.

Disclaimer: Said users are people that I generally can't avoid. Distant family members, neighbors and etc.

Case 0:
U: I don't know what's happening!! The computer doesn't work!!
M: What do you mean?
U: There's no Facebook! And everything is stuck and no messenger!!!
M: The WiFi on your laptop was off. I turned it on. Still, this doesn't mean that the pc wasn't working.
U: I don't understand this shit!!!

Case 1:
U: I hate this computer!!! It never works!!! Help meeee!!!
M: What now?
U: Where did the internet disappear?!
M: (assuming it's wifi or browser related)
Actually user moved the Chrome window to bottom-right corner and lost it.

Every time I try to show the user how I resolve the issue the user yells that there are too many steps, that they are complicated and that I'm a bad teacher and doing it too fast.

Case 2:
U: My computer is so slow! It barely can load google translate! And I can't listen to music on youtube!! Shitty laptop! It's you! Your computers in the apartment drain everything!!!
M: You have no idea what you are talking about.
U: My husband told me that your computers are heavy and drain everything!
M: What exactly did he tell you that my devices drain?
U: I don't know! All the energy! I believe him! He knows!
M: My computers drain less electricity than your vacuum and I have a separate internet connection. Not only we share nothing but also I drain nothing.
U: Since you appeared all the computers are slow!!!!

Fkk...

Case 3:
U: I don't understand, where is my whatsapp?
M: You can't locate the app on your phone?
U: Yes! F*ck, help me! I'm so angry and I really need this NOW!!!
M: Shut up. I'm already here and helping.
(I open users phone and whatsapp is the active app...)
U: I can' t find my whatsapp with Clara!

F*ck you! F*ck you! Ghckjfshij!!!

Case 4:
(crazy hitting on my door)
U: I don't have THE internet!!!
It's you again! You took all of THE internet!!!
M: No, it doesn't work like that. Your provider is bad, your package is cheap and your cables are of low quality.
U: I need THE internet immediately!!! Stop playing with your typing and fix the facebook or I'll cut the power cables to the house!!

I can go on, just don't think that recalling all those events is healthy for me.

Watch 3 videos about iOS/Swift on YouTube, and now I'm getting a frontpage full of recordings of app development events and iPhone reviews.

Listen to one kpop track on Spotify out of curiosity, and now the recommendation playlist is polluted with music I really don't like.

If we are going to hand our balls to AI and expect it to be a glorious fondling fest, don't cry if it suddenly realizes "nuts? aren't those supposed to be cracked?".

I mean what's fucking next? Where will this "smart" shit end up?

I accidentally click on a my little pony meme, and amazon will drone-strike me with 500 gallons of glitter? I drunkenly mumble "OK google how do kangaroos fuck" in the back of a self-driving Uber, I'm going to be dropped off in a shady alley and raped by a dozen walibis?

STOP FUCKING TRYING TO UNDERSTAND ME, INTERNET. I JUST WANT TO FUCKING USE YOU, NOT BE USED BY YOU, THIS WASN'T THE DEAL.

If you truly understood me, internet, I would probably not even give a fuck about privacy. But you are all building these profiles wrong.

You don't understand that I might be interested in juggling tricks today, tomorrow it might be all about crocheting a wool sweater for my penis, and the day after that I'm curious how many corpses it would take to fill up an olympic swimming pool.

NO I'M NOT ACTUALLY INTERESTED IN THAT QUORA, STOP SENDING ME RECOMMENDATION EMAILS ON HIDING MURDER VICTIMS, MY BOSS WILL THINK I'M WEIRD.

Yeah of course I could pulls some plugs, anonymize the shit out of my online life. I respect those who manage to just say "Fuck you Google, I'm sick of your shit, I'm going cold turkey".

But these platforms are feeding us heroin-laced candy.

All your coworkers friends and family with their oled-lit zombiefaces, staring at tiny screens, all absent-mindedly grasping your ankles whispering "aww take one more hit with us, check out this funny youtube clip, let me send it to you on whatsapp.... what you don't have whatsapp? You deleted your facebook? don't you love grandma anymore? Why do you hate your family?"

Before you know it, you watched ten episodes about cultivating cactuses, have a year subscription to brilliant, skillshare, squarespace and 3 different organic foodboxes are delivered to your door, Netflix is spamming you about a cupcake baking show, and you're thinking about same-day delivery for a baseball bat so you can just beat the crap out of every pretty glass display you see.

I want to break up with you, Internet.

I love you, but I hate you.

Since you passed 2.0, you have grown into a manipulative bitch.

I just don't know if I'm strong enough. It's all "let's just be friends" with you, but I know you'll be trying to reel me back in.

Before I know it, you're feeding me cookies once again, and I'll end up balls deep with your trackers stuck to my dick.

To be a good developer, you must thrive in chaos, and have an insatiable desire to turn it into order.

All user input, both work tasks and actual application input, is pure fucking chaos.

The only way to turn that input into anything usable, is to interpret, structure and categorize it, to describe the rules for transformation as adequately as you can.

Sometimes companies create semi-helpful roles to assist you with this process. Often, these people are so unaware of the delicacy of the existing chaos, that any decision they make just ripples out in waves leaving nearly irreparable confusion and destruction in its path.

So applications themselves also slowly wear down into chaos under pressure of chaotic steak-holders which never seem to be able to choose between peppercorn or bernaise sauce for their steaks.

Features are added, data is migrated between formats, rules become unclear. Is ketchup even fucking valid, as a steak sauce?

The only way to preserve an application long term, is refactoring chaos into order.

But... the ocean of chaos will never end.

You must learn to swim in it.

All you can hope to do is create little pools of clarity where new creative ideas can freely spawn.

Ideas which will no doubt end up polluting their own environment, but that's a problem for tomorrow.

So you must learn to deal with the infinite stream of perplexed reactions from those who can't attach screenshots to issue reports.

You must deflect dragging conversations from those who never quite manage to translate gut feeling into rational sentences.

You must learn to deal with the fact that in reality there are no true microservice backends. There are no clean React frontends. There are no normalized databases. Full test coverage, well-executed retrospectives, finished sprints -- they are all as real as spherical cows in a vacuum.

There is no such thing as clean code.

There is only "relatively cleaner code", and even then there are arguments as to why it would be "subjectively relatively cleaner code".

Every repository, every product, every team and every company is an amalgamation of half-implemented ideals, well-intended tug of war games, and brilliantly shattered dreams.

You will encounter fragmented shards of perfect APIs, miles of tangled barbed documentation, beheaded validator classes, bloody mangled corpses of analytical dashboards, crumbled concrete databases.

You must be able to breathe in those thick toxic clouds of rotting technical and procedural debt, look at your reflection in the locker room mirror while you struggle yourself into a hazmat suit, and think:

"Fuck yes, I was born for this job".

I have to let it out. It's been brewing for years now.

Why does MySQL still exist?

Really, WHY?!
It was lousy as hell 8 years ago, and since then it hasn't changed one bit. Why do people use it?

First off, it doesn't conform to standards, allowing you to aggregate without explicitly grouping, in which case you get god knows what type of shit in there, and then everybody asks why the numbers are so weird.

Second... it's $(CURRENT_YEAR) for fucks sake! This is the time of large data sets and complex requirements from those data sets. Just an hour through SO will show you dozens of poor people trying to do with MySQL what MySQL just can't do because it's stupid.

Recursion? 4 lines in any other large RDBMS, and tough luck in MySQL. So what next? Are you supposed to use Lemograph alongside MySQL just because you don't know that PostgreSQL is free and super fast?

Window functions to mix rows and do neat stuff? Naaah, who the hell needs that, right? Who needs to find the products ordered by the customer with the biggest order anyway? Oh you need that actually? Well you should write 3-4 queries, nest them in an incredibly fucked up way, summon a demon and feed it the first menstrual blood of your virgin daughter.

There used to be some excuses in the past "but but but, shared hosting only has MySQL". Which was wrong by the way. This was true only for big hosting names, and for people who didn't bother searching for alternatives. And now it's even better, since VPS and PaaS solutions are now available at prices lower than shared hosting, which give you better speed, performance and stability than shared hosting ever did.

"But but but Wordpress uses MySQL" - well then kill it! There are other platforms out there, that aren't just outrageously horrible on the inside and outside. Wordpress is crap, and work on it pays crap. Learn Laravel, Symfony, Zend, or even Drupal. You'll be able to create much more value than those shitty Wordpress sites that nobody ever visits or pay money on.

"But but but my client wants some static pages presented beside their online shop" - so why use Wordpress then? Static pages are static pages. Whip up a basic MVC set-up in literally any framework out there, avoid MySQL, include a basic ACL package for that framework, create a controller where you add a CKEditor to edit page content, and stick a nice template from themeforest for that page and be done with that shit! Save the mock-up for later use if you do that stuff often. Or if you're lazy to even do that, then take up Drupal.

But sure, this is going a bit over the scope. I actually don't care where you insert content for your few pages. It can be a JSON file for all I care. But if I catch you doing an e-commerce solution, or anything else than just text storage, on MySQL, I'll literally start re-assessing your ability to think rationally.

I've had this twice in a very short period of time now and it really pisses me the fuck off.

Sitting in the train (I think the grammatically correct version is on the train but no that would be a little too dangerous for me I think), on my phone devRanting/Signalling/Rioting around when an an elderly person says (aiming towards me):

"Oh, youngsters and their technology, where has socializing gone? Why are you people always on your phones? Go socialize sometimes!"

Excuse me but fuck right off.

Because you know what, I am currently socializing.

Just not in the way you are used to or maybe even 'okay with'.

I'm talking with friends from all around the world (Signal + Riot), participating in interesting discussions (on here) and what not.

I do have very strict rules for myself though. When in company with people I am actually going to socialize with or when hanging out with friends, the phone goes the fuck away unless I NEED to be reachable.

But I'm on a fucking train with people I don't know and frankly I'm done with socializing for the day as I've had to hear (often stupid) people asking for help all day long.

Next to that, I don't know you, you don't know me, who am I to judge you? I'm not going to socialize with anyone here anyways and even if they'd like to, I'm fucking done with people for to-fucking-day.

Sincerely fuck off please.

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

So I own a webshop together with a guy I met at one of my previous contract jobs. He said he had a great idea to sell product X because he can get them very cheap from another European country. Actually it is a great idea so we decided to work together on this: I do everything tech related, he does the non tech stuff.

Now we are more than 1 year in business. I setup a VPS, completely configured it, installed and setup the complete webshop, built 2 custom PrestaShop modules, built many customizations, built a completely new order proces (both front and back end), advertised quite some products, did some link building, ensured everything is in place to do proper SEO, wrote some content pages, did administration and tax declarations, rewrote a part of a PrestaShop component because it was so damn inefficient and horribly slow, and then some more. Much more.

He did customer relation management, supplier management and some ad words campaigns. Promised me many times to write the content for our product pages. This guy has an education in marketing but literally said: I'm not gonna invest in creating some marketing plan. I have no ambition in online marketing.

What?! You have the marketing knowledge and skills but refuse to use it to market our webshop and business? What the fuck is wrong with you?!

Today he says to me: 'Hey man, this is becoming an expensive hobby as we don't sell much and have lots of costs. I don't understand why I should be the one to write these content pages. Everything you did in the past 8 months can be done in less than 20 hours! You are a joke and just made it a big deal by spreading your work over so many months. I know for sure because I currently work at a company where I'm surrounded by front end devs! Are you fucking crazy?! You're a liar.'

He talks like this to me every 2 months or so while he can't even deliver the content for 1 single product in 6 fuckin' months! We even had to refund a few of our customers because Mr. client relations manager didn't respond to their e-mails within 1 fucking week!! So I asked him how could that have happened as you do the client relations and support. Well, he replied to me: 'Why didn't YOU respond to our clients? You don't log on in our back office at least once a day?!'.

Of course I do asshole. But YOU don't. He replied that I was lying just like I was lying about what I did for our business.

So, asshole, let's have a look at PrestaShops logs to see who's logging in daily. Well, you can probably guess who's IP was there in most of the entries. It wasn't his.

So, what the fuck have you been doing then?! You can't even manage to respond quickly to a client?!! We have maybe 50 clients and if we get 1 question a month by email it is already a lot. But you keep bitching, complaining and insulting me instead?!!!

Last time he literally admitted on a WhatsApp conversation that he had and still has the hope that he could just sit back and relax and watch me do ALL the work.

Well, guess what you fucking moron. That's not what we agreed upon. You fuckin' retard think you're so smart but you say EVERYTHING on WhatsApp! Including your promises to me. Thank you you fuckin' piece of dog shit because now I have hard evidence and will hand it over to my lawyer to make you pay every god damn cent for all the hours I've spent working on our business. Oh, and I'll take over the webshop and make it a success on my own because I know damn well how to get relevant traffic and thus customers.

You just go get yourself fucked in the ass without lubricant you fuckin' asshole. I have told you you shouldn't fuck with me because I take business very seriously. I even warned you when you were crossing a line again. Well, if you don't listen... You will pay for the consequences. I will be so damn happy to tell you 'I told you so' with a very very big smile on my face. That momemt WILL come, 'partner'.

Fuck you. You will be fucked. Count on that. Fucking asshole.

Her: What do you do?
Me: I'm writing my thesis on bringing AI to smartphones.
Her: I think AI is terrible!
Me: oh, you are an engineer too?
Her: No
Me: oh, you've studied economics and or ethics and are worried about its implications on society?
Her: No, but have you?
Me: I have a degree in economics, an MBA and an now about to get my BSc in CS.
Her: well, regardless I still think it's terrible.
Me: well in that case how about you shove your unfounded opinion where the sun don't shine!

A couple of months back I got an interview for a junior android devel position. I do not consider myself a junior devel, bt fuck it they paid 78k a year plus benefits and this is for south texas where it ain't thaaat expensive. So i kept my mouth shut and went with it.
The company was glorious, one of those hipsert marketing companies with cool couches and shit and people doing fuckign whatever all over the place and cool tools and desks.

So the initial interview with the hr dept went amazing, real cool guys and very down to earth. Next was the senior android dev.

This dude.

It was to be a phone interview, with a lil coding test. Fine whatevs. But the moment he called i knew shit was going down hill. Dude sounded dead af. Like he could not stand being himself that day. Asked asshole questions that every developer in Android should know that were frankly quite insulting ("what company develops the Android os" kind of deal) but kept my mouth shut and answered as needed.

Then the coding portion. Given a string, find the first position of the first repeated char, so if I had , fuck i dunno "tetas" then t was the first (and only) char repeated and it should have given out 2.
Legit finished it up in less than 6 mins and only because he was making me explain my entire thought process.

He got angry for some reason. Mind you I speak like a hippie, with a melow town and calm voice all the damned time, got that Texas swag going on as well as any good ol' boy from Texas should right?
Well this dude was not having none of that shit that day.

Dude was all like "ok now....why exactly did you do it this way?"

With a VERY condescending tone. And i explained that at first I normally think about solutions in pseudocode, so I wrote that as well...1 min or less. In python. This is after I still had the Java solution on screen with perfectly clean and working Java. I saif that since Python was as close to pseudocode as it gets that I figured i would just write the "pseudocode" in python and then map it to Java with all the required modifications.

"Welk i did not ask you to write it in java, so i dunno why you would even do that to begin with"

That is one of many asshole remarks. The first when I mentioned that I found React Native good for prototyping complex ideas for FUCKING FUN. Passion motherfucker. Shit so fly I do it for fun. "We don't deal with that here so I am not interested in what you can do with that or how would it help me"

Mofocka plz.

Well going back to the python shit. I explain (calmly) that it was just a way that I had to figure details, to think of different implementations. He continues by saying that it takes valuable company time.

Then he proceeds to tell me that he believes that i cheated since i fi ished the java "problem" too fast.
I told him that simple stuff like that should take even less for any senior java dev and that we could run another example if he wanted.
Bring it puto.
But no.

He then said that he still did not understand the need for Python in my solution. I lost it.

"Look man, getting real tired of your tone, i explained already, it is just a mental process, i do this when comming up with solutions, thinking in theory, not languages, helps me bridge the gap between problem and implementation, the solution works, it is efficient and fast and i can do it in 5 diff ways if you wanted, i offered and you said no. Don't really know what else you want"

"All i am saying, i am not going to hire you if you are going to be writing Python for Android, that is useless to me"

Lost it more.

I do sound different when pissed. So I basically told him that he asked for my reasoning behind and it was given, that not getting it was a you problem.

Sooooo did not get the job. Was relieved really. Can't imagine having a twat like that as a lead devel.

This is where everything started. I got the chance to work with actual production code. While it is very fun to work with, in some places it's also very frustrating. And this is from where, most of my rants come from.

Thank you @dfox and @trogus for making such a beautiful community.

The best part of this community is I never have to think or take time to make jokes or posts so that I can get upvotes. I've always wanted likes or retweets or reddit upvotes. But it never worked out because I have to think so much to make clever comments or posts. Most of the time, I gave up.

But in devRant, all I do is just share what's happening in my daily dev life. My frustrations, my happiness. That's all it takes. Everyone understands, everyone cares and everyone loves.

Over time, thanks to devRant, I've understood that I was part of the wrong community. This is the community that I deserve, this is the community that every dev deserves.

Thank you all. I love you. And I promise, more rants are coming :D

Especial thanks to @Yeah69 @kevbost @yarwest @tisaconundrum @Linux @donkeyScript . I have no idea why you guys all of a sudden rapidly upvoted me. Although I would love to reach 10k naturally but won't complain haha

For people who think/find that open source solutions are always better than commercial/paid/proprietary ones, you are not going to like this rant.

I'm starting to get really fucking fed up with people always, whenever I see someone (including myself) mentioning that an open source solution which is an alternative to a closed source one, saying that it's shit.
I've had countless encounters on here (also irl) where someone mentions that an open source solution (GIMP or Libre Office for example) is shit by default while they've maybe (or probably?) not even used it themselves.
Also people going "you can't even compare those two as for what they can do/features/functions". I'm definitely not saying that those open solutions are perfect. But to call them worthless or shit and/or to say that you literally 'cannot compare them' or that the open solution just doesn't work as a *FACT* is fucking bullshit.

Let's take GIMP for example, the use case of a friend of mine:

- He works both with macOS and Linux Mint, he *needs* a design/photo editing tool which is cross platform. (or at least one which works on macOS+Linux)
- He does not mind paying for software but he prefers to use software which is free as in freedom because he also likes to tinker with the software (a lot of people find this argument bullshit, I noticed on here. Why is that? It's a valid reason. Maybe not for you but we're not talking about you right now).
- He likes Photoshop but due to Linux incompatibility and the fact that he can't tinker around with the code, it's not an option for him.
- He'd gladly go for paid software but GIMP fills all his design/photo editing needs (also the more advanced ones but don't ask them to me because I have no fucking clue how that shit works)
- GIMP *just works* for him, he never has trouble with it.

Let's take Libre Office, my own use case:

- It *NEEDS* to work on Linux, which Libre does.
- It *HAS* to be open source, ethic/moral thingy; Libre Office is open source.
- It doesn't need to work complete magic but it needs proper basic document and 'excel' sheet functionalities which is the case with Libre and it works *for me*.
- I don't mind paying for it, will probably donate in the future (seeding the macOS+windows+linux versions fulltime at the moment)

See, for our use cases, it works very well. So why go into "it's no match for proprietary alternatives" mode right away? It actually is, as you see in the examples above.

Please stop saying that those solutions *don't work* or *are shit* because they do work and are useful for me and loads of people around the world.
Do they have *ALL* the features which their proprietary alternatives have? Maybe, maybe not, maybe they're missing some and maybe they even have some features which the proprietary alternatives don't have, I haven't checked out every feature.

I'm not saying that it works for you, for the record, I'm just saying that just because for you it is a fact that they're bad/shit/hardly working, doesn't mean they are for others.

Wrote my friend Sam a letter when I was still working in support. I think it still holds up today.

---

Dear Sam,

I understand that you will join us in our overseas office. Congratulations on landing that job. It’s good steady work. I’ve been doing it for the last ten years.

Your still young so maybe I can give you some little wisdom that will help you in your working years to come.

Let me begin by shedding some light on phone calls.

I try. I really do try Sam. But it is getting so hard for me to hold back the rage that builds up during certain phone calls. Especially the ‘Sorry, I just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’ ones.

Those are the times that I have no access to what they see. I’ve no team-viewer, can not take over that screen in any other way. And why-oh-why can I not take over that terminal session dear Sam? It’s because the caller can not double-click an icon or find a terminal session number.

And what is the reason for this? Because they ‘just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’. This is a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. Beware of these callers Sam.

There is nothing so nerve-wrecking then finding yourself at the mercy of people describing Internet Explorer (do not even get me started) as ‘the big ‘E’, if they use Chrome for their webmail then they most likely will say ‘Mail’ if they mean Chrome. There is no logic Sam. That is just the way these people work.

They will suck all enjoyment out of your work. They will make you want to hunt them down in dark office hallways and show them your tears Sam. Because cry you will.

Sure, I understand that not everyone can be tech savvy. Why, if everyone would be, where would that leave us? No. I love the technologically challenged. They put the fiber in my internet. They make me LOL for real. After the initial anger subsides anyway.

But just below that well-willing folk, on the other side of that border… there they dwell: Management.

Nice cars, suits and iphones Sam. First thing a new manager will require is a brand spanking new business-card. It will hold his/her new title. Then an iphone or overpriced android model will follow suit.

Then they will barge into your office, holding it like it’s the next best thing since sliced bread.

Any manager will automatically assume that you will drop anything you are doing at the present moment to acknowledge the presence of greatness. Failing to do so will result in awkward yet fulfilling situations. I recommend that you do not take your hands of the keyboard and give only the slightest of nods after 5 minutes of complete silence and glaring.

Well… you feel the glare. You do not glare yourself. You do not break eye-contact with the monitor. It does not even matter if you are typing for real or not. I once clicked away happily for 5 minutes. I just typed ‘he is still there’ over and over again. Do not break down Sam. This moment will decide your relationship with this individual.

After the nod there will be a flood of words aimed in your general direction. You can disregard anything that is said. It boils down to ‘can not operate device’.

You then take the device from this person and put it next to you on your desk. You’ll ask the name of this simpleton, write it down on a sticky-note, slap that on the phone. Then you’ll write a random date in the not so near future on another sticky and hand that to the bewildered person in front of you.

It will usually utter some incoherent words about ‘needing, time or but’ (I find that ‘but’is a word they like. They tend to use it three or four times consecutive before you usher them through the door).

Now you’ve won Sam. Well… not really. But it will feel good, I can guarantee that.

This must do for now. A new suit is glaring at me for the last five minutes.

Felt good to do something productive with this time.

Take care,

Baltasar

P.s. I just noticed that there is some foam around his mouth. So if you encounter this, don’t worry: it seems to be perfectly normal.

I have a bunch of contesters fort the worst interview.

#1 The Dishonest Ignorant

Me: *asks question*
#1: *stumbles*
Me: It's okay to say that you don't know.
#1: *continues to ramble on without making sense*
Me: Well, okay. That is all. I don't think that this will be a fit.

#2 The fraud

Me: How would you rate your knowledge in object orientated programming?
#2: Very advanced! I am an expert!
Me: Can you state the difference of an interface and an abstract class?
#2: *surprised pikachu-face* Well not that advanced!

#3 The trickster

During a skype call (without video):

Me: *asks question*
#3: *keyboard sounds aclacking*
Me: Are you googling?
#3: No *click clack click a clack* ... and to answer your question: *starts reading from the first search results*

The real bummer is, that in all of these cases, just saying "I don't know" would have been fine. (The "expert" OOP-guy would still have some explaining to do.)

It's not like that our interview process resolves around trick questions or that you'd get kicked out for getting one answer wrong. Though how can I trust somebody not to lie to me on a daily basis if they fake their interview?

We keep the interview relatively basic and rely on real-word coding exercise anyway and it helps us to get an idea on where we would gain support from them and where we need to support them.

As a developer you spend a lot of time learning new stuff anyways.

It blows my mind.

"Hey nephew, why doesn't the FB app work. It shows blank white boxes?"
- It can't connect or something? (I stopped using the FB app since 2013.)

"What is this safe mode that appeared on my phone?!"
- I don't know. I don't hack my smartphone that much. Well, I actually do have a customised ROM. But stop! I'm pecking my keyboard most of the time.

"Which of my files should I delete?"
- Am I supposed to know?

"Where did my Microsoft Word Doc1.docx go?"
- It lets you choose the location before you hit save.

"What is 1MB?"
- Search these concepts on Google. (some of us did not have access to the Internet when we learned to do basic computer operations as curious kids.)

"What should I search?"
- ...

"My computer doesn't work.. My phone has a virus. Do you think this PC they are selling me has a good spec? Is this Video Card and RAM good?"
- I'm a programmer. I write code. I think algorithmically and solve programming problems efficiently. I analyse concepts such as abstraction, algorithms, data structures, encapsulation, resource management, security, software engineering, and web development. No, I will not fix your PC.

A real interaction I just had...

Team Member: "Can you handle this ticket for a bug fix?"

Me: "Whats the problem?"

TM: "We aren't exactly sure..."

Me: "Ok, so can you show it to me?"

TM: "We can't get it to happen again, and when it does the machine freezes and we can't debug it..."

Me: "So, if I find a fix then how do we test to make sure it worked?"

TM: "I'm not sure..."

Then today,

Product Manager: "How's that bug fix going?"

Me: "Well, let's see. The problem still hasn't been defined. I have never been able to recreate the issue. I have a hacky fix in a PR..."

PM: "Great, so we can deploy today?!?"

Me: "No, because we have no way to reproduce or test this issue at all..."

PM: "Do you think your fix will work?"

Me: "Honestly, no. If you're asking for my opinion then you can have it. IMO this is NOT a bug fix but a change to how the system operates altogether. This system was built by someone who didn't know what they are doing. We have done our best with it but it is a house of cards. And now the solution is to replace a card at the bottom layer. It is likely that no matter what fix we do (even when we can fucking test it) that it will topple the house of cards..."

PM: ~Looking at me in disbelief~

Me: "If you ask me for my honest professional opinion then you will get it. Keep that in the future if that honest response was outside what you expected."

PM: "I will do that, thanks for your assessment"

Where do we go from here? God only knows.

Praise Joe Pesci

On being a woman in tech...

You lads probably have (and my fellow ladies certainly have) heard of "impostor syndrome" and, if you don't experience it, you possibly wonder what living with it is like.

Here's an example from this weekend.

Be me, about 5 years into my career, graduated from a top college, feeling decent but still unsure of skill.

Company gets a 4 week trial of an online learning website. It includes optional assessments, so that you know where in the video lessons to start. Rankings are novice, proficient, expert.

Hear from our QA that he got ranked "proficient." Which is a pretty broad category, but I become super afraid that I'll also be assessed as "proficient" and it will look like I have the same dev skills as a fucking QA (our management overlords can see our scores).

Boyfriend has me do some deep breathing before starting the test, because it's obvious how stressed I am.

Finally take it and get ranked "expert", in the 97th percentile, even though some technical difficulties made me miss four questions in a row. I decide to use my do over, and get ranked "expert" again, this time in the 99th percentile.

You'd think I'd be like, "Lawl, I can't believe I'd get the same score as our QA!" And there is some of that. But there's also the thoughts of, "that test could have been more thorough," "that score wasn't real because I resaw a question and got the right answer the second time," and "99th percentile isn't that great on a platform where new developers are over represented."

And this is all despite the fact that, if you were to ask someone how confident I am, the answer would probably "confident as hell."

Not saying this to start any fights. Figured it could be some interesting insight into a world that some people don't experience! (not that males aren't allowed to have impostor syndrome!)

DevRant rant:

I am on DevRant for quite a while now and I really enjoy it here. The overall atmosphere is great, as well as the community. (Yes, that includes you!)
Since I came here I've learned some very valuable lessons regarding work (conditions), annoying coworkers and programming itself. I like to think of DevRant as a huge ball of experience by very talented people, as well as a great place for discussions about a topic we all love: code. But lately I am seeing more and more memes on here, with titles like "I think everybody know this", "I think everybody can relate" and "Soo true". Those posts have no value at all and are (most of the time) reposted from 9gag or similar networks. Sometimes those "rants" don't even have anything to do with devs anymore, but are only here to farm ++'es. In the beginning I really enjoyed funny "rants", but now the majority of them just annoy me. It becomes especially annoying when you see the same meme three times in 15 minutes.
I'd be in for some kind of DevFun section, where everybody is able to post his or hers jokes/memes/etc, but the current situation just really gets on my nerves.

I hope that I am not the only one who thinks like that, because I really feel uncomfortable ranting about something I actually love.

end rant

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

Following a conversation with a fellow devRanter this came to my mind ago, happened a year or two ago I think.

Was searching for an online note taking app which also provided open source end to end encryption.

After searching for a while I found something that looked alright (do not remember the URL/site too badly). They used pretty good open source JS crypto libraries so it seemed very good!

Then I noticed that the site itself did NOT ran SSL (putting the https:// in front of the site name resulted in site not found or something similar).

Went to the Q/A section because that's really weird.

Saw the answer to that question:

"Since the notes are end to end encrypted client side anyways, we don't see the point in adding SSL. It's secure enough this way".

😵

I emailed them right away explaing that any party inbetween their server(s) and the browser could do anything with the request (includingt the cryptographic JS code) so they should start going onto SSL very very fast.

Too badly I never received a reply.

People, if you ever work with client side crypto, ALWAYS use SSL. Also with valid certs!

The NSA for example has this thing known as the 'Quantum Insert' attack which they can deploy worldwide which basically is an attack where they detect requests being made to servers and reply quickly with their own version of that code which is very probably backdoored.

This attack cannot be performed if you use SSL! (of course only if they don't have your private keys but lets assume that for now)
Luckily Fox-IT (formerly Dutch cyber security company) wrote a Snort (Intrustion Detection System) module for detecting this attack.

Anyways, Always use SSL if you do anything at all with crypto/sensitive data! Actually, always use it but at the very LEAST really do it when you process the mentioned above!

Pm: OK what you've got here?
Me: a bug, haven't tested yet
Pm: *grabs a phone* follow me we will do it
Me: mkay
Pm: *attaches it, goes to the DOM inspector, starts clicking random divs* OK where the fuck the canvas is?
Me: uhmm there in this tree
Pm: *inspects the canvas element for a few sec* what do you think?
Me: ... ... Well the bug was that it wouldn't resize properly after you change to landscape
Pm: *rotates the phone back and forth looking at the canvas properties*
Pm: gotcha, see? Width and height
Me: yes, those are the default html prope...
Pm: now see, there's another width and height. That's the malfunction right there. I'm telling you.
Me: no, this is css. It overrides the html properties there
Pm: well, say what, it doesn't
Me: no it does, that's how html works for decades already
Pm: but why does that not work properly then? Mm? *stares at me wide open*
Me: well I need to do some testing before I can sa...
Pm: then what do you think we are doing now?
Me: we jus...
Pm: *gets a phone call, stands up and walks away*

If you are a salesperson, you can just go straight to hell. You're all a bunch of cocksucking twats and I'm amazed you manage to get yourselves dressed each day. You're a no good fucking waste of oxygen and you need to put your fork in a socket the next time you're eating.

I'm working on building a crm and ticket management system for use in the office to handle client passwords. Since I'm building from scratch I wanted to make sure I had properly planned my classes and functions before opening the code editor so I put a message on my door that says "Don't interrupt, thanks" followed by the date so people knew it was a fresh message and not something left from the previous day.

I'm deep in the zone, the psuedo code and logic is flowing, I'm getting classes planned and feeling really productive for an hour or so when suddenly my door flies open and in comes a sales person.

SP: "Hey, do you have any extra phones lying around? Mine's being slow and keeps hanging up on people."

Me: "Do you see the sign on my door right there at eye level which says not to bother me?"

SP: "oh, do you want me to come back later?"

Me: "You've already interrupted me now, let's go see what's going on before I spent an hour setting up a new phone for you." While we are walking across the office I asked him when the last time the phone rebooted.

SP: "idk, Salesperson#2 suggested that as I was headed over here but I figured I'd just ask you."

We get over to his desk and I see he has two phones sitting on his desk. "Where did this one come from?"

SP: "Oh that was on the desk over here but I figured I could use it."

Me: "Well aside from the fact that the phones are assigned to specific people for a reason, you took the time to unhook your phone to set this one up and you didn't think to reboot your phone first. Plug your phone back in."

He plugs the old phone, which is assigned to him, and while booting it does a quick firmware update and boots up fine. He tests a few things and decides it's all better now.

So someone suggested a fix for you and you decided, instead, you would break company IT policy by moving equipment from one station to another without notifying the IT department. You entered a room which had a closed door without knocking, and you disobeyed the sign on the actual door itself which politely requests that you go away. All because you couldn't be bothered to take 2 minutes and reboot your phone, which you had to do anyways.

You completely broke my train of thought and managed to waste 2 hours of effecient workflow because you had an emergency.

Dear all wonderful ranters,

I apologize profusely in advance if over the next few days I cannot contain my anger at people and rant about non-dev things. I promise I will try my best to not do this, but there are very few places (none) other than here where I feel comfortable enough to express myself freely and not censor my words.

I will be working as a security guard (3rd job) for a car show full of pretentious assholes who have a tendency to think I'm their servant. I have wonderful bosses who have my back, and there are truly amazing people in attendance as well, but if someone tries to run me over again after a long ass day, I might need to vent.

I fully accept any and all down votes, and will likely delete the rant after it's out of my system, unless there's a conversation going in comments (I wouldn't do that to you).

Please bear with me while I try boot to strangle everyone I come across. I'm hoping this year is the year everyone is nice, but history tells me that's naive and won't happen.

All my love,
Your (co)queen who may end up arrested for using her bionic arm to rip their balls off and feed them to their wives

Guy I work with: Hey can I borrow you for a minute

Me: sure. What do you need?

Him: so this is a project me an the other dev worked on

Me thinking: Well I know he did it all and sent you the project so don't tell me you worked on it

Him: so we use it to do this and this and send an email to this new account I made because (2 minute explanation)

Me thinking: I don't care. Just tell me what your issue is! I already know what it is and does from what you told me the last time when you showed me. Which took an hour of my time.

Him: so he sent me this code which is called <Descriptive name> and in the method we have variables call <descriptive name> and it returns a <variable name>

Me thinking: You mother fucker! I don't give a shit what your method is named, what it the variable names are, and you don't need to read through every line of code to me! Just from the descriptive name you just said I know what it does! What the fuck is your issue!?

Him: we also have these other methods. This one is called <Descriptive name> which does...

Me: are you fucking seriously going to read me your code line by line and tell me what you named your variables AGAIN!?

Him: and we named this one <descriptive name>

Me: you mother fucker...

Him: and it calls this stored procedure. (Literally opens the stored procedure and shows me) and it is called...which has parameters called... And it is a select query that inserts

45 minutes later after he finishes explaining all 3 pages of his code and his 5 stored procedures that the other dev wrote...

Him: So anyway, back to this method. I need to know where to put this method. The other dev said to put it in this file, but where do you think I should put it in here? Should I place it after this last one or before it?

Me thinking: You fucking wasted my fucking time just to ask where to place your mother fucking method that the other dev sent to you in a project with only 3 files, all less than 500 lines of code with comments and regions that actually tell you what you should put there and 5 small stored procedures that were not even relevant to your issue! Why the fuck did you need to treat me as a rubber ducky which would fly away if you did have one because you didn't have an issue, you just didn't know where to put your fucking code! FUCK YOUR METHOD!

Me: Where ever you want

Him: Well I think it won't work if I placed it before this method.

I walked away after that. What a waste of time and an insult to my skills and really unchallenging. He's been coding for years and still can't understand anything code related. I'm tired if helping him. Every time he needs something he always has to read through and explain his shit just to ask me things like this. One time he asked me what to name his variable and another his project. More recently he asked why he couldn't get his project he found online to work. The error clearly stated he needed to use c# 7. His initial solution was to change his sql connection string. 😑

He should just go back to setting up computers and fixing printers. At least then he would never be in the office to bug me or the other dev with things like this.

My college organised some interview with a company, with the whole demn class. We went there, it was quite far away (50km) and the CEO invites us to a meeting room.

Where he bores me for 2 hours talking about their projects in argiculture and NSA like spying systems at tankstations.

They were caputuring license plates at gas stations and with that information gather data about the person, such as salary (by looking at their car), house adres ect. All without people knowing. And than targeting them with specific ads and offers.

The class of sheep were super excited but it pissed me off. Because he told it like it was some awesome advancement in technology that none of us could probably ever do.

He was demeaning us, saying we would do some simple wordpress sites there and other things. We are probably not good enough forc te big stuff.

Asking him some really hard questions about his projects made him so pissed he almost wanted to kick me out.

When it was finally over, there was some test that you have to do if you want to work there. If you were good enough at the test, you could!!!! (YEEY)

Uhm, I said; no thank you I dont want to work here.

Later I talked to my classmate and friend who always thinks he's better then everyone in class even tho he barely understands OOP programming. He was asking me if he should try to get the internship. I told him; dont. They have no value for us and they think they are the greatest company on the planet.

The fucking idiot go so pissed, he stopped talking to me alltogether and blocked me everywere. I AM NOT EVEN JOKING. Just because I gave my FUCKING opinon about a company he likes for no reason.

So this idiot does the test (which was fucking simple btw, I did it too and compared the results and I had 95%) He gets invited for another interview and gets told he will be paid 200 euro's per month 😂. and a free meal everyday!! 😪 hahaha . That doesnt even cover commuting costs!

My "friend" told him that the train costs more every day. You know what the CEO said? "Yeah but you can learn so much here the also brings value and you're just a last year student. But I think you are really brave for asking more"

So in the end, he couldnt take the internship and I was fucking right. Really I hate these kinds of companies thinking they are heaven on earth when they are clearly not.

I am happy I told them no before putting my dignity on thd line.

Hashedram's compilations #1
List of most annoying website designs.

1) Pages with AUTO PLAYING VIDEOS.

Yes I'm looking at you Netflix. Along with every news website known to man. I'm looking to read a fucking article, so why would you even waste your money and bandwidth trying to shove a video of some shit I don't care about in my face, and make it follow me as I scroll down like a fucking insecure puppy. Also, fuck you Instagram.

2) Pages that redirect once immediately after you visit them, thereby fucking with the browser history and the BACK BUTTON just leads back to the same fucking site.

I mean, just why. Did you think I would just go "Hey the back button doesn't work so let's stay on the site and read their awesome content"?

3) Sites showing things in a SLIDESHOW, when it actually should be in a list.

Slideshows are for progressive stories or for showing lists where you don't care about what's in them. Top 10 foods that reduce weight. Slideshow 1/15. Fuck you.

4) LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE USING AN AD BLOCKER

Yes. Yes I am. No I will not turn it off for you, you narcissistic snowflake fuck. And don't even try to guilt shame me into turning it off, because I know you're just going to bombard me with videos of sexy singles in the area if I do.

5) Pages where I see the first 3 lines of an article and have to SUBSCRIBE to see more.

Yes. Brilliant fucking idea. A user wants to see what your site has to offer, so within the first three seconds, don't show him exactly that.

6) Looking up an article and having to read through the entire motivational life story of the author.

I just want to know how to boil eggs, not read about your journey across Africa learning how to make difference recepies using boiled rhino dung.

7) CLICK BAIT.

Title: School boy designs blockchain machine learning game engine

Actual Content: Tic tac toe program made using linked lists

So yesterday was a regular old day where I came into the office and began my work. My office mate that sits next to me happens to be having an issue with her batch script. It wasn't running correctly so she had decided to call in IT and have them take a look at it. What she was trying to do was process some images through a dedicated super-computer located on site.

So as you can imagine with both of them standing right next to me it was hard not to listen in on their conversation. The IT guy decided to go through a barrage of different troubleshooting methods to figure out what was happening with her script. And soon enough they discovered what was wrong. It happened to be an issue with how Windows decides to deal with new line characters. FYI it looks like this shit "\n \r"

The fucking \r looked like a directory to Linux. So it would squeal to a halt every single time she tried to run.

How this happened was due to her using notepad to edit her batch file.

At this point, I made a comment about her use of Notepad.
"Oh, you're using notepad? I've had similar issues like this in the past when I've used notepad. I really hate notepad." I said with a slight chuckle.

And that was pretty much the end of our encounters. However, at the end of the day, she decided to speak up about this.

"I don't appreciate you making comments about my use of Notepad. That was a form of microaggression towards me, and I don't want you to do it again."

Completely taken aback I replied.
"I'm sorry you took it that way, it was a joke and wasn't meant to be taken personally."

"Well, your intent does not change impact. And by the way, I take pride in my code and scripting. I don't need your commentary about my code nor your micro-aggressions." She said in a huff.

"Well again, I'm sorry you feel that way," I replied back

*I'd like to say that this situation is loosely paraphrased, but the essence of what happened is still there.

At this point, this is what I have to say about this situation. Why the FUCKING FUCK are you using notepad to program anything. There ARE A SHIT TON of differing programs that are available for your use and you decide to use fucking notepad?!?! $%&*@#$^

You could use notepad++, you could use Sublime, you could use every-fucking-thing except Notepad!!! If anything I think I had every right to make a comment about your stupid use of notepad. And darling, your script not working was well deserved, I hope you run into more errors like this because you deserve nothing less for your arrogance. So you can take your opinions and shove them up your fat-ass because at the end of the day I don't give a FUCK about your opinions on my micro-aggressions that you're spouting off about.
I suggest the next time you feel attacked about your code perhaps you should take a cold hard look at yourself before thinking that I'm the one that is the FUCKING problem.

I've found sites like Udemy/Khanacademy/Codecademy/Brilliant/Edx to be very useful — possibly more useful than expensive education.

But they still need:

1. Better correction/update mechanisms. Human teachers make mistakes and material gets outdated, and while online teachers are rectified faster than classroom teachers, the procedure is still not optimal. Knowledge should be a bit more like a verified wiki.

2. Some have great interactive coding environments, some have great videos, some have awesome texts, some have helpful communities. None has it all. In the end, I don't want to learn a new language by writing code in my browser. It could all be integrated/synced to the point where IDEs have plugins which are synced to online videos, with tests and exercises built in, up to a social network where you could send snippets for review and add reviews to other people's code.

3. Accreditation. Some platforms offer this against payment, but I think those platforms often feel very old school (pun intended), with fixed schedules, marks and enrollments. Self paced is a must.

4. Depth is important. Current online courses are often a bit introductory. We need more advanced courses about algorithms, theoretical computer science, code design, relational algebra, category theory, etc. I get that it's about supply/demand, but we will eventually need to have those topics covered.

I do believe that for CS, full online education will eventually win from the classroom — it's still in its infancy, but has more potential to grow into correct, modern education.

Well here is my new setup.
Left and center screens are connected to one laptop. Where I run my editors and terminals.
Rightmost is connected to another old laptop. This is for browsing and slack.
Using synergy to share mouse and keyboard.
What do you think of this setup? Any better way to do this?

"Thank you for choosing Microsoft!"

No Microsoft, I really didn't choose you. This crappy hardware made you the inevitable, not a choice.

And like hell do I want to run your crappy shit OS. I tried to reset my PC, got all my programs removed (because that's obviously where the errors are, not the OS, right? Certified motherfuckers). Yet the shit still didn't get resolved even after a reset. Installing Windows freshly again, because "I chose this".

Give me a break, Microshaft. If it wasn't for your crappy OS, I would've gone to sleep hours ago. Yet me disabling your shitty telemetry brought this shit upon me, by disabling me to get Insider updates just because I added a registry key and disabled a service. Just how much are you going to force data collection out of your "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" users, Microsoft?

Honestly, at this point I think that Microsoft under Ballmer might've been better. Because while Linux was apparently cancer back then, at least this shitty data collection for "a free OS" wasn't yet a thing back then.

My mother still runs Vista, an OS that has since a few months ago reached EOL. Last time she visited me I recommended her to switch to Windows 7, because it looks the same but is better in terms of performance and is still supported. She refused, because it might damage her configurations. Granted, that's probably full of malware but at this point I'm glad she did.

Even Windows 7 has telemetry forcibly enabled at this point. Vista may be unsupported, but at least it didn't fall victim to the current status quo - data mining on every Microshaft OS that's still supported.

Microsoft may have been shady ever since they pursued manufacturers into defaulting to their OS, and GPU manufacturers will probably also have been lobbied into supporting Windows exclusively. But this data mining shit? Not even the Ballmer era was as horrible as this. My mother may not realize it, but she unknowingly avoided it.

Story time:
Yesterday I wanted to go to the theater with my girlfriend. It was her idea because as a student you can get reduced tickets for the play, but only via the online store exactely two hours before the play starts. We had already tried two weeks before but with no success. So this time I said i want to be on my pc with a proper browser and not a mobile version like last time. So we are sitting at home me in front of their website on one screen and with a clock on the other screen. Two minutes realy i hit refresh and I get a selection for the reduced tickets, nice.

You would think.

After selecting the amount. ERROR: Can not get your tickets. I was like fuck they are already sold out because it's a popular play. But hey let's try again. I got one ticket but not the second one, okay strange lets try again, same ERROR again. WHAT the FUCK, no feedback what so ever. My girlfriend had then the idea that they maybe restricted the amount for reduced tickets to one (does not state this explicitly but hey lets give it a shot). Use second browser select one ticket. ERROR can not get you the amount of seats. Rage level near to a 1000 why did it work two minutes before but not anymore. Trying around for five more minutes finally got the second ticket.

Now the real fun begins.

Proceeding to checkout should not be that hard you would think, but you need to be registered for that. Okay so let's do that. The salutation is not required neither is the address for the tickets but you need to have a company name??!!!!! The fuck?? I am not self employed and neither are a most other people around here so why is this field mandatory? Beeing a little under stress I decided to found the "asdf" company with my girlfriend.

Now one would think checking out is easy. Not so fast.

After accepting the terms of service another ERROR, unable to accept your data. What data? I did not input anything new? Where does this come from? Ok never mind I am going to pay with credid card that must work!
ERROR: Internal paymentservice initialization failure! Sorry what? I thought maybe I was to long idle in this browser and they do not reserve the tickets for so long (which would be no surprise to me at this point). Let's try again. Nope same error.

Now my rage level was really over 9000 but we really wanted to go so I decided to call the customer SUPPORT. Or better to say I had a answering maching telling me for ten minutes how sorry they are that this takes so long, yeah you bet. Then and this is now really great: the support guy asks me: "What error do you see? Internal paymentservice initialization failure?" I was like, okay he knows this so they need to know how to handle it. FUCK NO. "Sorry I can't help you. This is our payment system maybe they (IT) are doing some maintenance I can't halp you. Call the theater directly good day." Sorry what just happened, you fuckers are the vendors for the tickets for nearly all big events around here and the theater explicitly states to call you for tickets but you can not help me? Like hell.

This process took 25 very frustrating minutes and I was really angry and wanted to quit, then I saw that there is also a paypal option which I had not tried. With very little hope i selected everything for the payment, registered with paypal and they told me I already had an account. So reactivated this five year old account payed with all the mobile passwords and tans to finally, after 30 fucking minutes, get a pdf file for a ticket. Repeated the last step for the second ticket and with some time left to get there we were off.

If you need to learn/teach object orientation, these are my approaches (I hate that classic "car" example):

1) Keep in mind games like Warcraft, Starcraft, Civilization, Age of Empires (yes, I am old school). They are a good example of having classes to use, instantiating objects (creatures) and putting them to work together. As in a real system.

2) Think of your program as an office that has a job to do, or a factory that has something to deliver. Classes are the roles/jobs and objects are the workers/employees. They don't need to be complex, but their purpose must be really (really, really) well defined. Just like in a real office / factory.

3) Even better (or crazier), see your classes and objects as real beings, digital creatures in a abstract world, and yourself as a kind of god, who creates species (define classes) with wisdom. Give life when it is the time for them to come into the world (instantiate object) and kill them when they are done with their mission (dispose an object). Give them behavior, logic, conditions to work with, situations where they take action, and when they don't. Make them kinda "smart". Build them able to make decisions and take actions based on conditions. Give them life. Think on your program as an ecossystem. There must be balance, connection, species must be well defined and creatures must work together to achieve a common objective. Don't just throw code and pray for it to run. Plan it.

-----

When I talk about my classes like they are real beings, and programs as mini-worlds, some people say I am crazy, some others say that's passion.

It is both! @__@

**Web Host Rant**

I can't believe how saturated the market is. I also can't believe how many Web hosts do not know a thing about development. You would think you'd want to read up on development practices before going into the business since developers are your customers.

Not to mention that a lot of hosting services are resellers of resellers of resellers. It's to the point where a 15 year old with their mom's credit card can start doing Web hosting. The problem is... they don't know how to answer actually development questions... they won't be in a conference call with you while you do deployments.

It infuriated me to the point where I've started my own hosting company. Completely managed and using the most advanced technologies aimed towards developers. Not only that but an advanced managment package that will teach proper deployment procedures and be there to hold your hand when you do deploy.

Oh and did I mention git will be available to even shared hosting? Oh and did I also mention that we are currently setting up put own git server?

A nice word to all developers who say stuff like "I know I write bad code, but what does it matter.":
Please try to think in a logical way about what this part you are about to write has to do. It is much more difficult to rewrite code, the longer you wait after you started to code.
Bad code can have big impacts on different levels.
For example financially: Bad coding style or program structure can lead to thousands or much more in losses because of nasty bugs, bad performance, expandability or maintainability.
Think about quality over quantity.

A little example: I had to work together with other coders to meet a fucking tight deadline. The last day we coded like crazy and these dudes started to apply styling changes (CSS) directly as inline styles to the HTML code, instead of taking a few minutes more to find where in the CSS files they had to make the changes.
At the end of the deadline we had more stylingbugs than before. It took us another whopping 3 hours to fix what they had done.

So next time you code: Thinking before coding is mostly faster than just straightahead coding and fixing at the end. 😉

How it is to be a dev in my country?

At bit of an odd question this week.

For me (in the USA), it's being technical support for *every* website my family uses.

Over the weekend my wife visited her aunt and I get a call.

Wife: "How do I create an ebay account?"
Me: "I don't like where this is going. We already have an account."
Wife: "Not for me, dummy, Aunt T. She found some books she wants to buy on ebay."
Me: "You go thru the process to create an account? Email, name, password, etc."
Wife: "We tried that, but it's not working."
<few seconds of silence>
Me: "Oookaaay...why isn't it working? Is there an error?"
Wife: "I don't know, we already clicked off of it. Something about the email."
<few more seconds of silence>
Me: "Can you reproduce the error and tell me?"
Wife: "Uggh..are you serious? We've done it like 10 times, its not working. Just tell me what I need to do."
Me: "If you can't tell me the error, I can't help you. I'm not there and can't see what you see."
Wife: "Stop being an asshole."
<Aunt T takes the phone>
T: "Said something about using another email address. Does that help you?"
Me: "Are you sure you don't already have a ebay account?"
T: "No, I don't think so. I hate ebay. but I really want these books. I don't want the same problems as last time."
Me: "Last time?"
T: "Yes, I bought a coffee cup on ebay from China and it never arrived."
Me: "OK, so you do have an account?"
T: "I don't know, I mean, I never got the cup."
Me: "What email address did you use? I'll send a 'remind me' email so you can reset the password and login"
<go thru the motions, she is able to login>
T: "Ahhh...I do have an account! There are the golf balls I bought for <husband> for Christmas."
<face smack>
Wife: "Why didn't you do this from the start? I thought you knew a lot about computers. We basically figured this out ourselves. Goodbye!"
<click>

During my first-ever technical interview, the interviewer asked me "Do you know the FizzBuzz problem?"
"Uhh, not really." (I was just thinking ok this problem has a name, must be some algorithm problem)
"So the problem is basically to give you the numbers 1 to 100, if the number is divisible by 3, print 'Fizz', if divisible by 5, print 'Buzz', if divisible by 3 and 5, print 'FizzBuzz'. For other numbers just print out the number itself."

After hearing the problem, I felt so many ideas popping out of my stressed brain.

I thought for a bit and said "ok, so if the digit sum of a number is a multiple of 3, then the number is divisible by 3, and if the last digit is either 0 or 5, it's divisible by 5."
Then I started to code out my solution until the interviewer said "there's an easier solution. Can you think of it?"

This stressed me out even more.

I thought for a bit and said "well, starting from 3, keep a counter that records how many iterations are done after 3. When the counter hits 3, that number would be divisible by 3 for sure. Should I try this solution?"
The interviewer said "Sure." So I started again.

However, I struggled for about another 3min until I realized this solution is a lot harder to implement. The interviewer probably saw my struggle too.

This was the point where he stepped in and asked me "Ummmm there's an easy way of solving this. Have you heard of the MODULO OPERATOR?"

In sheer embarrassment, I finished the code in 30s.

Of course, there was no further question after this, and I felt the need to seriously reevaluate my intelligence afterwards.

My Love I am writing to you from the front lines roughly 1 month into Microsoft Access. I hope you are doing alright and no harm has found you.

You might have heard the news that it has not been going well for us. The truth is we were not prepared in any way for this. We are constantly facing problems with the code and when we understand one function another two are referenced inside of that function.

The high command does not provide us guidance, truth be told I do not think they know what their application is doing. I am surprised we got this far. Our new objective is to focus our primary forces on the if/else and cases. The name for this assault is "Operation Logical Function" and I fear for my life as I do not know what is in those cases or where the road will lead.

Morale is very low, many of the soldiers spend time writing letters to their loved ones, recreating their blog for the 5th time or just daydreaming when they were free from this tyranny of legacy war.

For now , I long to be in your arms and smell your lilac and gooseberries cologne I love so much

My love and thoughts always with you , your John

Fellow developers,
For all people asking u to be partners of their "billionaire" idea, and to be paid from revenue ONLY when the plateform goes live or shit like this, BEWARE.
For all of them i had the same answer: "ok, ill share with you the project, but until it goes live, i am the only one who is giving sacrifice, and since we are partners, i want us both to do same level of sacrifices in order to deserve later the share of revenue... That being said, u have to pay the hours of devlopment, all of them, and when it goes live, from the revenue ill get, ill pay you back what you paid on dev cost"

It is the only way to be really even...
And if he refuse, ask them again "why? I taought u where 100% sure that your idea will work and become a billionaire why u think it is risky tp pay few thousands????"
... Now he is having second thaughts

A colleague of mine from the administration department suddenly enters my room where my team and me are all busy and, without considering I'm talking with someone else, interrupts us.
he: "I needed to call you but your phone is in do-not-disturb mode"
me: "that's because I'm busy working on something urgent and I don't want to be disturbed"
he: "but I need your help!"
me: "we're working on a urgent thing, but, anyway, what's the problem"
he: "I need help with digital invoicing"
me: "I deal with programming, I don't think I can help..."
he (interrupting): "I created a digital invoice but I need to send a printable version to a customer"
me: "digital invoices should be XML files so you can't simply take the file's content and paste into Word and print..."
he: "in fact that's what I did and the result was horrible"
me: "I was saying just that. I'm sure, anyway, there should be some online tool for producing a well-formatted PDF from a digital invoice"
he doesn't say anything
me: "you can try with a search on Google..."
he: "but I'm not an IT guy, that's not my business"
me: "this has nothing to do with programming, you simply need to find a tool online for doing this"
he (disappointed): "ok, but this is computer stuff, I'll try..."

Me: "Concierge, I have noticed this issue with live potential on ground a couple of months ago, just a friendly reminder that this still hasn't been fixed."
Concierge: "Well yeah this building is certified (god I hate that word) so whatever measurements you've taken, it doesn't mean anything when it isn't done by the electricians."
M: "Aha, back to that piece of paper huh.. taking measurements requires a piece of paper these days, doesn't it."
C: "Glad you're quick on the uptake."
M: "Well I have the brains in my head to do a proper measurement without dying, and the numbers don't lie."
C: "What do you think that the landlord is going to say? I'm sure you still remember that email "DON'T TOUCH THE ELECTRICITY!""
C: "And remember that she'll probably rather file a complaint against you than to let an electrician come check it, because the latter costs money for something that's already certified."
M: "Well that sucks..."
C: "The certified electricians certified this building. Your hands are pretty much tied."
M: …

*walks off in frustration*

Now, as for the rant. *inhales deeply*

YOU KNOW WHERE YOU CAN SHOVE THAT PIECE OF PAPER?! DOWN YOUR FUCKING ASS! WHAT DOES A FUCKING PIECE OF PAPER MEAN TO JUSTIFY WRONGDOING?! WHAT DOES IT FUCKING MEAN WHEN IT ISN'T BACKED BY A FUCKING BRAIN?!

Yet I apparently can't do anything, because I refuse to certify myself. Now you know why I fucking hate certified enganeers, and why I use that word. The piece of paper doesn't mean shit when you can't back it with an actual fucking brain. And requiring a certificate to do stupid shit, even for changing a fucking light bulb, or a switch or an outlet or whatever. Certified enganeers, because fuckers like that don't deserve to be called engineers. You know what, certified motherfuckers? FUCK YOU!! I can change it myself and I don't (shouldn't) need a bloody fucking certificate for that!!

Was explaining a technical concept at a "family" dinner. Suddenly stepmother wanted my help for something technical.

Stepmother: Say Awlex, could you help me install some software I recently bought?

Me: (Not this shit again) I even don't know what software you're talking about. How is the software called, what does it do?
Sm: it's calles digital... *long pause*
Me: (I don't like where this is going)
Sm: software... *another long pause*
Me: (fuck me harder than that lightly clothed woman outside)
Sm: something... *long pause*
Me: (alright brain, which way out of here doesn't involves me creating a bullet hole in either one of us?)
Sm: And you can use it to sell something...
Me: (tf do you event sell?!)
Sm: but not like ebay
Me: (what is it then? A platform for selling services? I don't even know what kind of software you'd have to install, given that most of these platforms are be web applications, whcih makes sense for selling stuff on the internet)
Sm: Anyway, could you help me install it? It would take me hours to get into it.
Me: (You think just installing would solve it? As soon as I install it, you probably expect me to be your walking manual as well, don't you?) Look, I'm gonna be honest with you, since I started working I don't have nearly as much free time as I used to have (Not everybody works when they feel like it, you know that?) I get home at around almost 7pm (most of the time) and don't really wanna work afterwards. Most of the time there's a support service from the people who made this software and they would be glad to help you. (Sorry support team, for pushing this bundle of incompetence onto you, but I guess she didn't even listen to my advice).

After that she didn't back down and still wanted my help. Then my grandmother derailed the conversation and got me out of this. When I thanked her later she yold me that she saw I saw uncomfortable and wanted to help. I love my grandmother.

So I am not going to be your "family" tech support. You b(r)ought this onto yourself. Are more than twice my age and still can't use your brain to solve problems like these on your own and you can even less reason abiut your motives and desires when asking for help. I am sick of you and shutty opinions about people, just because I work as a software engineer doesn't mean I'm exist solely for satisfying your unreasonable desires.

Stop offending me and my profession and get yourself some common sense.
Protip #0: Give me one fucking reason to help you, because you're not family enough and your personality really doesn't bring forth any emotion but annoyance

(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)

Dear Current Workplace,

Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.

Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".

Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.

Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.

Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.

Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.

Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.

Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.

Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.

Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.

Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.

Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.

Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.

Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.

Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.

Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.

Fuck you for your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.

Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".

Fuck your mediocrity.

Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?

Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.

Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.

Some of these have been mentioned already but here they are, these things make me be a bit better at programming (at least I think so)

• sleep, I love sleep and I think a good night's sleep can do wonders

• music, music theory which is a language in itself and playing an instrument which teaches hand-eye-coordination and also creates patterns in your head, but certainly teaches us that you need to practice a lot to achieve your goals, that it's hard for beginners but gets a bit easier with time

• solving puzzles and riddles, I've been a huge fan of puzzles from an early age, it is something that teaches us solving problems and creating strategies

• other types of games that are helpful are games where you have to find things in a picture or in an environment, this has trained me a bit on finding nasty bugs in my code or at least syntax errors

• googling: sometimes you find out something that is not really related to your problem, but you remember it nevertheless and later on it can help you with something else

• maths, yes, you read correctly, I'm not a big fan of maths either, but what you learn in maths is that there are certain procedures you're often repeating and that you're always building on your knowledge and expanding it, sometimes solving mathematical problems is fun too ;)

• getting fresh air - self explanatory

• listening to other people's life stories, this helps me generally in life, to know that I'm not the only one struggling with something and so on

And I probably could go on with a lot more things, but I think that's enough for now

Ah the day before launch of a new app. And right on schedule the businesses is attempting to completely alter their requirements including a COMPLETE OVERHAUL OF THE DATABASE MODEL TO ADDRESS AN ISSUE THAT HAS ALREADY BEEN FIXED. I wish they would share the drugs they are clearly on so I could also live in this dreamland delusion where you can turn something completely on its head right on the finish line and expect everything to go well.

Manager: Hey I think I have a solution to that performance we talked about last week

Dev: I already fixed it, it only takes 1 second instead of 30 now.

Manager: Ok but I’ve also figured out a solution. If we completely change the entire database model that one query could potentially be even faster according to my understanding of how databases operate.

Dev: I fixed it without the need for that, actually it was just a matter of better conc—

Manager: I think we should go with MY solution. Drop everything and restructure the database immediately! Be quick, as you know we launch this application tomorrow! Have an extra coffee today and just crush it out, don’t overthink this either just do it.

Dev: …

I had applied a job , where the interviewer told me this "We don't think you are good fit for this company, you don't have proper education. We highly doubt that all the application in your portfolio are coded by you."

I was like :"WTF? I have been develop software for years . what do they mean by the application weren't developed by me? if that's so, how miraculously I have the source code of the application I presented?

Almond: Look at these stats - our signup process sucks! We really need to make it better.

Boss: Yeah, maybe at some point. It doesn't affect live running though. Leave it for now.

<1 month later...>

Almond: These stats are getting worse. I really think we should redesign this to do x, y and z and avoid a, b and c.

Boss: Yeah, we probably should do at some point, but there's no rush. You can work on it if you really want to, but only if there's nothing else going on.

<2 months later...>

Boss: I'VE JUST SPOKEN TO TWO POTENTIAL CLIENTS, BUT OUR SIGNUP PROCESS SUCKS SO THEY'RE GOING ELSEWHERE! WE NEED THIS FIXED NOW!! WHERE ARE YOU ON THIS? CAN WE GET IT DONE AND DEPLOYED BY FRIDAY?!?!

You know. I have mixed feelings on the way people have been reacting to senzory's rant regarding the way he deals with clients. Some people believe that he is unethical, some people see it as just business(me included) but to see what the community says is somewhat interesting.

First, let me be clear on something: i have been fucked over by clients many times for being a nice guy and trying to play it nicely.

Because of this I am selective of who deserves good treatment and who gets to fuck off. But regardless of the client I do the same thing: regardless of who it is, nice or otherwise. If a project will take 1 week to complete then I tell them that it will take 3 to 4 weeks. Why? Well because I have many things on my plate, I am married and have two children, one lives with me and I try to spend as much time with them as I can. I work from 8 to 6, sometimes later and when I get home I sometimes don't do shit since at work I maintain the web services of 2 fucking college campuses.
I don't look for my clients. Through word of mouth they come to me. And being in a privileged position(there are about 5 devs here and they all suck) they can either do with my times and fees or can fuck off over the border where Pedro will do their shit on vbscript and classic ASP(which I like, but you know why this is not an option in 2018)

Apps can be sold for large quantities of money, regardless of what their use case is, if a company wants to outsource their apps to an external developer(such as yours truly) that means that they are willing to play the game. And that is what business is: a game, a survival game.

Where I live, a company will not think twice of firing a single mother for whatever reason. In the U.S of A, and specially in Texas, you can be fired for whatever reason. I have automated people's jobs without knowing it, I have made people lose their jobs and saved companies thousands with my apps. Things like that were not know to me, had I known that someone would have lost their jobs I would have tried differently.

If a company is willing to tell employees(loyal employees) to fuck off, then i do not regret charging what I do and hustling the way I do with rat faced dickheads that care not for people. If I could I would destroy entire companies here. But that is for another story.

I have been used, insulted, gambled with and have been lied to, to my face by these companies. Which has left me jaded.

Oh now, trust me. I am still highly optimistic and nice. And if someone has a small business and I can help them out, then I will lower my rate and give positive vibes in the hopes of making things better through karma. I want to see the best in people. But this does not stop me from being a shark and giving quotes the way I do.

Because companies, as an overall entity are not people with the best intentions(sometimes) and they will not take your kindness, they will take advantage if possible in an effort to save money. Its just dickhead business.

So why, as a professional and privileged developer that obtained his skills through intense study and practice, a wizard by all means, should lower to these nameless, Faceless entities?
Why should i give them the fairness they do not give others? Why should I play the high morale game and come out as a loser?

At the end of the day, I get to swim in my own pool of success, knowing that they did not get the chance to fuck me over

So if you tell me that you took advantage of your hard earned skillset, and built a cross platform app(which compiles to native binaries) and sold 2 products for one, I will tell you that you are an excellent player at their game. If you tell me that you finished before and got to charge for 2 weeks of work doing just 2 days I will say that you are an excellent time manager. And if you tell me that at the end of the day you managed to keep said customer I will tell you that you are a true professional.

There is a difference lads, in selling a product to big momma jamma's cajun restaurant, to the largest logistics company around.

Be nice to those that desserve it.

When I saw that the Zuckman was gonna go testify for congress I already knew that shit was gonna be retarded.

I had 0 expectations of congress asking the correct questions.

I was still disappointed. That is the beauty of my government. I have 0 expectations and they still disappoint me.

I love playing the devil's advocate. I really do, in this case and even tho I think Facebook is the most toxic shit on the internet (right next to SO) I could not help it but think the entire time that we aaaare told that all our date are belongs to them as soon as we put shit on their application. Its just the nature of the beast. Don't like it? Don't use it! But if you are gonna use it then account for the fact that your data will be used for targeted adds. It makes more sense, I would rather have an add for tutorials and books and shit like i normally get rather than knowing that 10 hot singles are in my area (because those are all lies 9 times out of 10) but then again I would rather not have any adds at all.

One has to account for all the money that fb pours into shit, where do people think fb makes that money from ..duh our data and adds. But shit was too hard to understand for Congress.

Admin Access

Have you ever been in a position where you become the de-facto person who works with a certain tool, but are denied full admin access to that tool for no real reason?

Two years ago I was put on the Observability squad and quickly discovered it was my thing, implementing tracking and running queries on this third-party tool, building custom stuff to monitor our client-side successes and failures.

About a year ago I hit the point where if you asked anyone "Who is the go-to person for help/questions/queries/etc. for this tool", the answer was just me lol. It was nice to have that solid and clear role, but a year later, that's still the case, and I'm still not an admin on this platform. I've asked, in an extremely professional way armed with some pretty good reasons, but every time I'm given some lame non-answer that amounts to No.

As far as I'm aware, I'm the only dev on our team at all who uses custom/beta features on this site, but every time I want to use them I have to go find an admin and ask for an individual permission. Every time. At the end of 2020 it was happening once a month and it was so demoralizing hitting up people who never even log into this site to ask them to go out of their way to give me a new single permission.

People reach out to me frequently to request things I don't have the permissions to do, assuming I'm one of the 64 admins, but I have to DM someone else to actually do the thing.

At this point it feels very much like having to tug on the sleeve of a person taller than me to get what I need, and I'm out of ways to convince myself this isn't demoralizing. I know this is a pretty common thing in large companies, meaningless permissions protocols, and maybe it's because I came from IT originally that it's especially irritating. In IT you have admin access to everything and somehow nobody gets hurt lol-- It still blows my mind that software devs who make significantly more money and are considered "higher up" the chain (which i think is dumb btw) are given less trust when it comes to permissions.

Has anyone figured out a trick that works to convince someone to grant you access when you're getting stonewalled? Or maybe a story of this happening to you to distract me from my frustration?

Some of the penguin's finest insults (Some are by me, some are by others):

Disclaimer: We all make mistakes and I typically don't give people that kind of treatment, but sometimes, when someone is really thick, arrogant or just plain stupid, the aid of the verbal sledgehammer is neccessary.

"Yeah, you do that. And once you fucked it up, you'll go get me a coffee while I fix your shit again."

"Don't add me on Facebook or anything... Because if any of your shitty code is leaked, ever, I want to be able to plausibly deny knowing you instead of doing Seppuku."

"Yep, and that's the point where some dumbass script kiddie will come, see your fuckup and turn your nice little shop into a less nice but probably rather popular porn/phishing/malware source. I'll keep some of it for you if it's good."

"I really love working with professionals. But what the fuck are YOU doing here?"

"I have NO idea what your code intended to do - but that's the first time I saw RCE and SQLi in the same piece of SHIT! Thanks for saving me the hassle."

"If you think XSS is a feature, maybe you should be cleaning our shitter instead of writing our code?"

"Dude, do I look like I have blue hair, overweight and a tumblr account? If you want someone who'd rather lie to your face than insult you, go see HR or the catholics or something."

"The only reason for me NOT to support you getting fired would be if I was getting paid per bug found!"

"Go fdisk yourself!"

"You know, I doubt the one braincell you have can ping localhost and get a response." (That one's inspired by the BOFH).

"I say we move you to the blockchain. I'd volunteer to do the cutting." (A marketing dweeb suggested to move all our (confidential) customer data to the "blockchain").

"Look, I don't say you suck as a developer, but if you were this competent as a gardener, I'd be the first one to give you a hedgetrimmer and some space and just let evolution do its thing."

"Yeah, go fetch me a unicorn while you're chasing pink elephants."

"Can you please get as high as you were when this time estimate come up? I'd love to see you overdose."

"Fuck you all, I'm a creationist from now on. This guy's so dumb, there's literally no explanation how he could evolve. Sorry Darwin."

"You know, just ignore the bloodstain that I'll put on the wall by banging my head against it once you're gone."

rant.GetType() == typeof(long)

I have voiced my unhappiness to the powers that be regarding having to sit in traffic for over an hour to get to work and an hour to get back home, in the hopes that some sort of resolution and compromise can be reached.

The response basically was, "We've never had anyone work from home before and this is very new to us, so we wouldn't know where to start and how to manage this."

Firstly, from what I've heard along the grapevine, someone has worked from home before. In fact, it was a developer... wouldn't you fucking know!

Secondly, you're the manager... FUCKING MANAGE! Yes this is perhaps "new" territory for the company, but it's certainly nothing new to the world. Or maybe I'm wrong?

How's about, rather than fucking "ummm-ing" and "ahhh-ing" about the working from home being a good idea or not, perhaps try saying, "You know what, let's try something for the next 3 months and see how it goes. We sit down and hash out when and how we are going to communicate regarding the work that needs to be done, and when you will need to come in for meetings and the like." If it doesn't work after 2 weeks, oh well... we tried. And if we're still going strong after month 4, I think we have a winner!

Perhaps it's a generational thing, seeing as management are Baby Boomers and I'm a Millennial? Then again, I could be wrong.

The point is that I see a potential solution to my problem that may actually work and benefit both parties, but they're either to fucking set in their old ass ways and stubborn to allow this. Or perhaps it's a thing of "if we do this for you, we have to do it for everyone", which they don't want to do.

But more importantly, they don't seem to get the whole notion of "a happy employee is a productive employee".

I've been lurking on devrant a while now, I figure it's time to add my first rant.

Little background and setting a frame of reference for the rant: I'm currently a software engineer in the bioinformatics field. I have a computer science background whereas a vast majority of those around me, especially other devs, are people with little to no formal computer background - mostly biology in some form or another. Now, this said, a lot of the other devs are excellent developers, but some are as bad as you could imagine.

I started at a new company in April. About a month after joining a dev who worked there left, and I inherited the pipeline he maintained. Primarily 3 perl scripts (yes, perl, welcome to bioinformatics, especially when it comes to legacy code like is seen in this pipeline) that mostly copied and generated some files and reports in different places. No biggie, until I really dove in.

This dev, which I barely feel he deserves to be called, is a biology major turned computer developer. He was hired at this company and learned to program on the job. That being said, I give him a bit of a pass as I'm sure he did not have had an adequate support structure to teach him any better, but still, some of this is BS.

One final note: not all of the code, especially a lot of the stupid logic, in this pipeline was developed by this other dev. A lot of it he adopted himself. However, he did nothing about it either, so I put fault on him.

Now, let's start.
1. perl - yay bioinformatics
2. Redundant code. Like, you literally copied 200+ lines of code into a function to change 3 lines in that code for a different condition, and added if(condition) {function();} else {existing code;}?? Seriously??
3. Whitesmiths indentation style.. why? Just, why? Fuck off with that. Where did you learn that and why do you insist on using it??
4. Mixing of whitesmiths and more common K&R indentation.
5. Fucked indentation. Code either not indented and even some code indented THE WRONG WAY
6. 10+ indentation levels. This, not "terrible" normally, but imagine this with the last 3 points. Cannot follow the code at freaking all.
7. Stupid logic. Like, for example, check if a string has a comma in it. If it does, split the string on the comma and push everything to an array. If not, just push the string to the array.... You, you know you can just split the string on the comma and push it, right?? If there is no comma it will be an array containing the original string.. Why the fuck did you think you needed to add a condition for that??
8. Functions that are called to set values in global variables, arrays, and hashes.. function has like 5 lines in it and is called in 2 locations. Just keep that code in place!
9. 50+ global variables/hashes/arrays in one of the scripts with no clear way to tell how/when values are set nor what they are used for.
10. Non-descriptive names for everything
11. Next to no comments in the code. What comments there are are barely useful.
12. No documentation

There's more, but this is all I can think to identify right now. All together these issues have made this pipeline the pinnacle of all the garbage that I've had to work on.

Attaching some screenshots of just a tiny fraction of the code to show some of the crap I'm talking about.

"As it turns out, this world isn't all that complicated. It's pretty simple actually. It's all a game, a very simple game. Of course, some will try to make it difficult. But you can handle them, I know it. I know you can!"

There's a lot of truth in that. When you get into the depths of how the world works, things turn out to be pretty simple.

One thing I cannot rationalize though. The human spirit. The desires that it embodies. I've had this question for so long - what makes us humans human?

If for example a future surgeon - able to exchange individual cells between me and you - would do so, at which point do you become me, and the other way around? 50+% exchange? But that'd mean that at least part of me is still "you". In that state, are you truly you?

Not sure what the cellular definition of an individual is, given that we're headed towards a bionic society where synthetic organs will likely become more relevant than the donated parts of me that I've recently applied as a donor for. I wholeheartedly encourage that future, but the philosophical questions that surround it become more relevant.

How about the impact of influencers on the mind? For example, I've seen the term "certified enganeers" become a trend here, which I'm very grateful for. It does raise a question though. If for example I were to die, would the term live on? And if so, is that a part of what makes me "me"? Would a part of me live on in you? Would your spirit be partially me, due to mere influence?

What makes up the human creature anyway? I think of my own body as a mere vessel for my mind, but I can't quite grasp what makes up the mind, and philosophical questions like "if I were to upload my mind to a robot and instruct it to kill me, would that carbon copy become *me*?"

The human nature is such a weird thing.. and technology doesn't make it any simpler. Is it really just a simple game, with simple rules and e.g. a biological program running inside of a biological motor? Or is there more to it?

One thing I learned over the years is that even when you think you can't do something or don't have the strength to do it, you actually can.

People do nothing better than to make excuses for themselves or blame others for the things they did without even considering that they could have done something about it.

The brain is a powerful processor to the point that when you think you're sick constantly your body will react accordingly.

Thing is though. If you don't take the opportunities that present themselves or don't look for them you'll probably get nowhere to the point where it could lead to depression.

Sure enough failures and mistakes happen all the time, ardly anything will go right the first time possibly leading to becoming demotivated and sometimes even depression.

Why? Because you forgot to think "what can I improve the next time"

A co-worker of mine keeps going back to his project he's working on because the boss has something in mind but somehow fails to translate it to him. He never stops to think what the desired functionality is compared to what it should do or look like (UI/UX). Eventually he snaps blaming the boss that he had to change it a couple of times.

This has happened multiple times since I started my Internship to the point where it just starts to irritate me.

Of course it's not always your fault but there are plenty of cases where it is or where you could have prevented it.

Mistakes and failures make you stronger only if you want to learn from them.

Have a good day

!dev

This may be a petty rant, but It's been grinding my gears for a few months now... I fucking hate ads, it's starting to be incredibly ridiculous. You start a video... 2 ads... you watch for 2 minutes, another 2 ads (and no, adblock isn't a solution, that only works on PC, not devices)?!!! You start an App... ads, you listen to music... ads... you go to google... ads, you click a website... ads... you look out of your window... ads... you walk down the street... ads... ads.. ads...
Seriously, what the fuck have we done?!! As a society we fucked up so badly... Look, no matter how many times you offer me an ad for a furniture, I'm not going to buy a fucking furniture on just any random day. You are completely wasting my already limited time... If you don't have any ads to show me, then don't show me ads, fuck you, you fucking piece of shit software... How is it that it used to be enough to click away one static, non-intrusive ad, but now 6-8 15-20 second ads, popups and intrusive, mid-content ads are the norm?! And then a piece of shit like MoviePass DARES, FUCKING DARES, To work on some sort of camera-enabled check that you actually LOOK at the ads?!!!! ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME?! WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE YOU RETARDED PIECE OF BLACK MIRROR SHIT, FUCK OFF WITH THIS BRAINWASHING BULLSHIT, I'M ALLERGIC TO IT, FUCK ALL OF THIS.

I fucking promise that any software I'll make will be either free and open source, or paid only by alternative means, no ads, not ever. I will never fucking add to this retarded bullshit. Never fucking ever will I lower myself on a level where I need to actively waste the time and psyche of thousands or millions of people to get money. Fucking hell.... As if the world doesn't suck enough already, we treat humans as cattle, and It's pissing me off... In the past I used to just delete any app that annoyed me with ads, but what the fuck do I do about youtube since it's the de-facto content source on the internet? And worse, my friends and family watch youtube.. even if I avoid it that doesn't mean the problem is solved... There needs to be an alternative, and paying subscriptions for every single fucking service on the web isn't a solution. Even worse with the current economy... I'd rather eat real food, than buy shit like premium on ShitTube, Fuckify, all the random news website I might read and every app or game I start once every two months... Shit like ad-less premium accounts aren't giving me an alternative, just a way to shoot myself in the foot longterm...

Godbless everyone that releases open source software, apps, tools, websites and such. I hope to god decentralized alternatives to youtube need to happen and not in the web3 way, because that's also retarded...

Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, Shit, Fuck Shit, Piss, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Retards, Fucking absolutely disgusting pieces of shit... ... alright, I got it out of my system, but It's gonna be right back the next time YouTube forces me to look at 20 seconds of something I already skipped 48 times today...

A couple of weeks ago, I got to the second stage of a recruitment process with a relatively big fintech in the crypto space (I know) - all went well and although I did not think much of it at first, with all the information I had gathered I came to realize this might as well be the best opportunity I've had in my pursuit of finding a new job (i.e looking for high technical challenges, unsure of where I see myself in 5 years, wanting to give full-remote work a try, etc.).

Cue to the end of the interview;
"That's great! I really enjoyed speaking with you, your technical background seems excellent so we would like to move to the next stage which is a take-home test to do in your free time.", said the interviewer.

"Wow! Much amaze, well of course! What's it gonna be?", said the naive interviewee.
"I'm sending you the details via email, please send it back in 48 hours, buhbye now", she hangs up.

...

"48 hours?? Right, this should be easy then, probably some online leetcoding platform, as usual.", thought the naive interviewee, who evidently went through this sh*t numerous times already.

A day later I receive the email: this was the whole deal. The take-home test supreme with bacon and cheese. A full-blown project, with tests, a project structure, a docker image, testing and bullet points for bonus points! The assessment was poorly written with lots of typos and overall ambiguity, a few datasets were also provided but bloated with inconsistent comments and trailing whitespace.

What the actual fck??? Am I supposed to sleep deprive myself to death while also working my day job? What are you trying to assess? How much of my life I'm willing to sacrifice for your stupid useless coding challenge? You are not all Google, have some respect, jeez.

I did not get the job.

Two years ago, I developed an security app for Android as a school project. I didn't like teamwork at school (you know, you do all the work and everyone else is getting the same grade you receive, specially if you are the nerd of the class), actually I hated it, so I made it alone.

Its name was "Alex" and was a simple "panic button". You can configure two emergency emails and phone numbers (contacts only, not police) and, if you're in danger, you just have to press the button and the app is gonna send two messages/emails to your contacts: the first one, to tell where are you (GPS, only the name of the place) and that you're in problems. The second one with an audio/photo file of the situation.

Sounds like a great app, and I tested it few times. The reason I didn't continue with this is that I got my first job and I had not time, and that, tree or four months later, the government (of the city) launched a similar app. Less sophisticated, but I think it's still useful: "No estoy sola"(I'm not alone). I haven't tested it cause I don't trust on the authorities, I'd preffer to send my location to a friend through messenger app instead.

I don't know if I should re-work this app (I didn't released it, I just have the beta) or work on something else. I'm afraid that, if I release it, someone could die or get kidnapped because of a bug or something going wrong with the app :c What do you think?

Dealing with other technical professionals who cannot think outside their respective boxes.

Here is an example.

A QA (who is very good at her job) said this...

Her:
“We need to get one customer who is willing to pay us a lot of money to make the features they want!”

Me:
“But you realize we are a SaaS company and that means we need lots of customers and constant growth”

Her:
“No, we need to find a customer who is willing to pay us, like a million, to make the features they want. Then we make them for that customer. Then we do that again.”

Me:
“We sell software to small businesses, none of them have a million dollars to pay us, and even if they did then why wouldn’t they build it themselves?

Her:
“Well, when I worked for my last company this is what we did...”

Me:
“So you worked for a contracting company who built software for individual companies. We are not that type of company. We are a SaaS company.”

Her:
“It’s the same thing”

Me:
~Facepalm~

As a software developer and entrepreneur it frustrates me when everyone think everything is the same.

You’ll here things like...

“All we need is to get lucky with one big hit and then we will ride that wave to success, just like Facebook or Amazon!”

Holy fucking shit balls, how stupid can you be!

FB and AZ run thousands of tests a day to see what works. They do not get “lucky”. They dark launched FB messenger with thousands of messages and then rolled it out to their internal team first, they did not get lucky!

Honestly though, I can’t blame them. Most people just want a good job that pays. They aren’t looking to challenge their assumptions.

Personally I know I will be in situations again where my pride, my assumption, my fears are realized and crushed by the market place and I do not want to live in a world of willful ignorance.

I’d rather get it right than feel good.

our neighbor has very fast Wi-Fi (~200 MBPS) . but, he didn't tell us the password and we don't know where to ask

sis : You said that you are a programmer right?
me : Of course!
sis : So why don't you do your job?
me : Create an app?
sis : No! hack his Wi-Fi
me : *Hacked the Wi-Fi and give her the password*

another day, mom's phone got crazy,

mom: Allen! Come and fix this phone
me : *After looking at the phone*
me : It is the screen saver I installed earlier

but why people think that programmers are "Computer gods" ?

My company claims to have a talent retention problem, which to an extent is true. But then they humble brag about how their salary system works and I am like "Yeah that makes sense." See what they fail to realize is that software engineering isn't as niche (using that term loosely) as the other engineering disciplines they hire. They only adjust salaries based on those of the sector they're in and not the software industry itself. They say "we don't compare ourselves to Microsoft and Google because we're not in the same sphere." I'm like "yeah, but when you have a sw staff that regularly snags you patents and are considered some of the best in the industry, where the hell do you think they're gonna go?"

I guess what I'm saying is I want them to raise their average salary because I'm terrible and I must use the threat of them losing the smart guys if I am ever to get paid more. I see no holes in this plan.

TL; DR: Bringing up quantum computing is going to be the next catchall for everything and I'm already fucking sick of it.

Actual convo i had:

"You should really secure your AWS instance."

"Isnt my SSH key alone a good enough barrier?"

"There are hundreds of thousands of incidents where people either get hacked or commit it to github."

"Well i wont"

"Just start using IP/CIDR based filtering, or i will take your instance down."

"But SSH keys are going to be useless in a couple years due to QUANTUM FUCKING COMPUTING, so why wouldnt IP spoofing get even better?"

"Listen motherfucker, i may actually kill you, because today i dont have time for this. The whole point of IP-based security is that you cant look on Shodan for machines with open SSH ports. You want to talk about quantum computing??!! Lets fucking roll motherfucker. I dont think it will be in the next thousand years that we will even come close to fault-tolerant quantum computing.

And even if it did, there have been vulnerabilities in SSH before. How often do you update your instance? I can see the uptime is 395 days, so probably not fucking often! I bet you "dont have anything important anyways" on there! No stored passwords, no stored keys, no nothing, right (she absolutely did)? If you actually think I'm going to back down on this when i sit in the same room as the dude with the root keys to our account, you can kindly take your keyboard and shove it up your ass.

Christ, I bet that the reason you like quantum computing so much is because then you'll be able to get your deepfakes of miley cyrus easier you perv."

To people who have done tech support:

Shoot me. Do you know what it is like to teach kids to use a mouse? Or even type in a keyboard? They don’t even know how to double click. Gotta call google chrome the circle of colors for them to understand. Some think the video that is giving the instructions is actually them doing it. So when it ends they are like alright done.

FYI: working in an internship currently where we teach kindergarten up until 5th graders from scratch to Minecraft modding. Btw it is an unpaid internship.

Yepp.. The older you get, the faster the time flies by. Remember how long days used to be when you were 10? How much you used to do then? And now? You barely skim through your emails and it's already lunch time.. And soon after that it's already time to go home, go to sleep. And the next day is the same. Round robin, round robin... And when you think that the pooft-you're-gone moment is approaching faster and faster every year, you wonder what are you leaving behind, to remember you by.. A few dev projects that will drown to oblivion a few years after you're out, a few modules in other projects that will live longer but your code lines will soon be overwritten and forgotten in git's history, where noone ever scrolls to. Your own projects you have never released. Your fam who will remember you until their grandchildren - after that older generations are forgotten...

What is it that will keep people saying your name after you're gone? What significant have you given to the life?

WTF, Google?! Get your shit together!! No one wants another GUI disaster makeover which leads us from bad to worse.

Every time I log into g+ or gmail, the whole flippin GUI has changed.. OK, it might be just my taste for simplicity, but I do not think a 'better GUI' should make you feel like an ape trying to code.. :\

If people with programming skills can't use it 'out of the box' & without googling stuff like "where did you hid the new email button", how the f do other people who are IT inept supposed to use it!? OR is it just me?! If it's just me, I'll shut up and love the new GUI.. otherwise: juck!!

#itSucksToBeOnTheOtherSideOfTheCode :\

TL;DR you suck, I suck and everybody sucks, deal with it....

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

Let me let off some steam, since I've had enough of people hating on languages "just because"

Every language has it's drawbacks and quirks, BUT they have their strengths also. Saying "I hate {language}" is just you being and ignorant prick and probably your head is so far up your ass that you look like an ass hat. With that being said, every language is either good or bad depending on the developer writing in it. Let's give you an example:

If I ware to give you a brick and ask you to put a nail in a plank, can you do it? Yes, it will be easier if you do it with a hammer, but you have a brick, so hammer is out of the question. If you hit your thumb while doing it... well... sorry, but it is not the bricks fault - it is YOU!

JavaScript, yes it has a whole lot of problems, but it works, you can do a ton of stuff and does a good job at that, it is evolving through node and typescript (and others, just a personal pref), BUT if you used js when you ware debugging that jquery (1.0) plugin written in the free time of a 13 yo, who copy pasted a bunch from SO, well, it is not js' problem - deal with it. Same goes for PHP, i've been there where you had a single `index.php` with bazillion lines of code, did a bunch of eval and it was called MVC, but it also is evolving.. thing is all languages allow you to do some dumb stuff so YOU have to be responsible to not fuck it up (which you always DO btw, we all do). Difference is PHP/JS roll with it because the assumption is that you know what you are doing, which again - newsflash - you don't.

More or less I would blame that shit on businesses which decided to go with undergrads to save money instead of investing in their product, hell, I am in a major company that does not invest that doesn't care a whole lot about dev /tech stuff and now everybody's mother is an engineer - they care about money, because investors care about money (ROI) and because clean code does not pay the bills, but money does.

If we get all of the good practices and apply them to each language every one of them has it's place, that is why there is no "The Language", even if there was, we STILL ware going to fuck it up and probably it was going to be even worse than where we are now.

Study, improve, rinse and repeat... There are SENIORS and LEADS out there that are about 25-30 and have no fucking clue about the language, because they have stuck up their heads up the ass of frameworks and refuse to take a breath of clean air and consider something different than their dogmatic framework "way" of doing things.. That is the result you are seeing. Let me give you a fresh example to illustrate where I am at atm:

Le me works with ZendFramework 2.3-2.5 (why not, which is PHP5+ running on PHP7 [fancy, eh]), and little me writes a module for said project, and tries to contain it in its own space, i.e not touching anything outside of the folder of the module so it is SELF-CONTAINED (see, practices), during 2-3-4 iterations of code review, I've had to modify 4 different modules with `if (somthing === self::SOMETHING_TYPE)` as requested by my TL, which resulted in me not covering 3 use-cases after the changes and not adding a new event (the fw is event-driven, cuz.. reasons) so I have to use a bunch of ifs in the code, to check a config value and do shit. That is the way of I am asked to do things I hate what I've done and the fact that because of CR I have lost case-coverage, a week of work and the same TL will be on my ass on monday that things are now "perfect".

The biggest things is "we care about convention and code style"... right.... That is not because of the language, not because of me, not because of the framework - it is some dude's opinion that you hate, not the language.

New stuff are better, reinventing the wheel is also good, if it wasn't you would've had a few stone circular things on your car and things ware going to be like that - we need to try and try, that is the only way we actually learn shit.

Until things change in the trade, we will be on the same boat, complaining about the same shit over and over, you and me won't be alive probably but things will not change a bit.

We live in a place where state is considered good, god objects necessary (can you believe it, I've got kudos for using the term 'God Object'... yep, let that sink in). If you really hate something, please, oh god I beg you, show me how you will do it better and I will shake your hand and buy you a beer, but until then, please keep your ass-hurt fanboy opinion to your self, no one gives a shit about what you think, we will die and the world will not notice...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not exactly a dev related rant.

Do you ever get the feeling when you're not working, like today, that you're kinda wasting time (can't find a better way to describe)? I usually work on Sunday at home, running behind insane deadlines, trying to anticipate tasks. Today was different, I woke up to a fresh VS 2017 install, updated my .net core api to 2.0, learnt how to deploy to Azure, made a CI/CD pipeline and then spend some fun time with my 5 month baby. Argued with him when Azure didn't let me make a new subscription. Sat on the sidewalk with him doing absolutely nothing for a solid half hour, only looking the way he admired everything around him and stuff. Took the trash out, did the dishes, helped with the laundry. But yet I feel like tomorrow gonna be a rough day, where everything will blow up 'cause I didn't did anything work related.

I'm starting to think I lost the taste of enjoying myself, enjoying the people around me, my family, parents, friends. I've been spending too much time on autopilot. Wake up, smoke, work, eat, work, smoke, sleep. Repeat.

I do enjoy my job, a little less when it's not dev related, but I do anyway. We are a small company with big contracts and tight deadlines. Always struggling to give our best and advance further, but I can see I'm loosing something while giving 120% of attention to my job.

Anyway, just wanted to get this thing out of my chest. Thank you if you read this far.

What.. the actual... fuuuuuck?!

Browsing through changes on TFS (yeah, yeah boo me for using TFS instead of git if you like, I don't care, most people use/prefer TFS here, so I conform 'to the standards'..)

Anyhow, going through changes, looking for the one where some comment appeared..

'a wild comment appeared'.. tadaaah!

Checked the rest of changes.. Hm.. Someone did a validity check.. that returns the 'false' if not passed.
// OK, great! They are finally testing their shit and fixing stuff..
But apparently then they decided it is OK to do all the shit anyways.. so WTF?!
Why even bother validating it?! Oh yeah, forgot... cuz in case it returned false YOU WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO LET SOME STUFF HAPPEN!! But they weren't assigned with that exact task I guess..

TO DO:
- do the validation algo // fml, not going into how fucked up that was written..but it was horrible!
- do validity check where appropriate/needed
- test validity check and that it doesn't break functionality

+ check if the validation actually logically works?! nope, not on my to do list, not my job..

All done, better not actually do something that requires you to think.. :\

How the fuck that happened?! How can one person be assigned to check if something is stupid/wrong?! and when checking (&confirming) still lets the customer do that shit anyways?! What's the point?! O.O

Daily scrum
Today, the Scrumpy Master was not here, so I leaded the daily scrum meeting,
rephrasing the 3 standards questions a little bit: the results where amazing.
Here my questions in case somebody want to use them:
- What the fuck did you do on Friday?
- What the fuck do you think you are doing today?
- What is your fucking problem?

We managed to keep the meeting very short and after the meeting everybody was sooooo concentrated I couldn't believe it.

Beeep Beeeeeep 7:00 o'clock. Shit. I was dreaming. Must wake up and go to work.
Scrum master will be there too.

I think I just blew my own mind here.

Look at this:

Class SomeClass
{
_call($functionName, $arguments)
{
return call_user_func(array('SomeClass','uselessMethod'), 'method');
}

method($foo)
{
return new Adapter($foo)->execute($this);
}

uselessMethod()
{
return $this->method(__FUNCTION__);

}

}
so __FUNCTION__ resolves to
Caller:

You can run that code, whether you comment out uselessMethod, or not.

Adapter is a function that looks for what class to call depending on a database value
and execute the call.

So api basically uses a chain call to do stuff like this in controllers, here's how
I call the above:

$someObject = (new Class($object))->uselessMethod()->doSomething()->doSomethingElse();

But like, eventually my code matured to where all those methods in the chain call have the same one line return that calls my adapter to find the logic to run.

So, basically, I can now have a class with headless function calls that calls a directory of other classes, that are all defined in a contract somewhere. So as long as those classes
all adhere to the contract, it will never return an error.

I can't think of any reason to do this, other than my setup, and I have a sneaky feeling,
as dirty as this trick is, that there's a bad reason my code has come to being able to do this.

Maybe wrong strategy pattern from the beginning?

I'm sure it'll come to me like 3 days from now..

"Graphics don't matter."

I ranted a while back about gamedev being hard to get into for me, and, today, user @DOSnotCompute posted a similar experience.

I had a couple more thoughts, so thought should post them here (FUCK! It ended up being too fucking long! sorry!)

So I was watching the making of mortal kombat 3 on yt, which was pretty amazing btw because I got to see the actors of the sprites in game which were engraved in my and thousands of others kids minds.

Anyhow, the creators of the series, John Tobias and Ed Boon, were interviewed and what not. And it hit me that while both were the designers, John was the main artist and Ed was the programmer (at least for MK1). Another game that comes to mind Super Meat Boy, and I bet hundreds of others did the same.

And it got me thinking, maybe that's my problem, I just need an artist.

And I think the reason why I never thought of that is because of this idea that graphics don't matter.

"you don't need an artist. You don't need graphics. The most important thing is the gameplay."

What a load of shit.
A lot of people believe that because they got tired of polished AAA games with automatic and predictible gameplay.

People started parrotting this knee jerk of a conclusion since then.

It's dumb. Imagine if Infiminer, one of the games Minecraft was based on, which btw looks terrible, had all the same features Minecraft had.
I would still not touch that shit with a pole.

Graphics ARE important. Games are on the VISUAL medium.
That doesn't mean you're sucking Sony's dick on every AAA release or that every game should be made with UnreUnityCocksReloadedEngine.

Some level of visual craft is required for a game ro be considered such.

(btw, I think most of you guys here get this, not trying to pander, just that I want to make it clear that I'm not accusing this community of being guilty of this)

If a game looks bad (given, bad can be subjective), if it gives the impression that it wasn't seriously made, then you kinda lower your expectations.

People get hyped on games that look good, because it means that the game could be good. Games that look unoriginal or terrible won't get played, wether they're good or not. And I think it's a reasonable reaction.

How many times did I hear things like "Look at x video game from the 90s, the graphics are terrible but it's fun as hell".

That is an absurd statement. The level of production some NES games went through is insane. We're talking millions of dollars for games that today might look primitive.

The graphics weren't shit back then, and even today you could say that they are simpler but also of excellent craftsmanship.

I'm not into creating art, I hate it in fact because you can't quantify the success of produced art.

So, duh, find an artist. Ok, how? This is the part where I have no fucking idea how.

You start spamming shit like "I need an artist" online? I dunno, something for another post I guess.

I guess the most healthy thing I could do is making demos that might look like shit just to get experience so that when I get to find an artist, I have practice already.

!dev && rant

There's one thing that you really shouldn't say to someone who's in crutches, no matter how much your reflexes tell you to. "Are you okay?"
Especially when they're going somewhere, and you can't or don't want to help them do so.

Imagine for a second, you yourself are in crutches and have been limping on one leg for a couple 100 meters to go to where you have to, shopping for food so you don't starve. And then, after those couple hundreds of meters, of course that leg that's been doing double duty for that whole period and took unusually big impacts from jumping up and down onto the ground compared to just walking, you can imagine that it is screaming in agony.

Now imagine someone who comes your way, makes the leg that more than anything wants to sit down somewhere and rest, pause the act of going the way to the beloved place to sit and rest and instead make it take even longer, that person asks you "are you okay?"

OF COURSE I'M OKAY, THAT'S WHY I'M IN FUCKING CRUTCHES!! OF COURSE I'M OKAY, GREAT OBSERVATION SHERLOCK!!!

It's like saying to someone who's so introvert that they haven't opened their mouth even once at a party - likely there because their friends forced them to - "gee, you are silent, aren't you?"

Yes I'm silent, yes I'm introvert!! Why do you point that out? If anything, pretend that I'm not here to begin with!!! Stating that only makes for embarrassment!

Or going back to the leg thing.. this ground my gears more than anything. Every few dozen meters I went and rested on my crutches for a bit, and every hundred or so meters I sat down at whatever I could sit on. And people fucking look judgmentally at you for that apparently. "Look at this guy in crutches, he's sitting down!"

Yeah mate, try limping on one leg for a couple hundred meters and I'll run after you with a whip, looking at you judgmentally every time you even want to *think* about sitting down to rest. Let's see how that goes?

Or rather you fucking judgmental twat, I bet you fat fucking cunt can't even run on 2 legs for a couple hundred meters straight. But let's judge others who are doing such a running exercise for every step they take for wanting to sit and rest, shall we?

No wonder that there's mass shootings every now and then. Such people can make anyone feel fucking murderous!!!

I am the manager of a customer service team of about 10-12 members. Most of the team members are right out of school and this is their first professional job and their ages range from 22-24. I am about 10 years older than all of my employees. We have a great team and great working relationships. They all do great work and we have established a great team culture.

Well, a couple of months ago, I noticed something odd that my team (and other employees in the building) started doing. They would see each other in the hallways or break room and say “quack quack” like a duck. I assumed this was an inside joke and thought nothing of it and wrote it off as playful silliness or thought I perhaps missed a moment in a recent movie or TV show to which the quacks were referring.

Fast forward a few months. I needed to do some printing and our printer is in a room that can be locked by anyone when it is in use (our team often has large volumes of printing they need to do and it helps to be able to sort things in there by yourself, as multiple people can get their pages mixed up and it turns into a mess). The door had been locked the entire day and this was around noon, and the manager I have the key to the door in case someone forgot to unlock it when they left. I walked in, and there were two of my employees on the couch in the copier room having sex. I immediately closed the door and left.

This was last week and as you can imagine things are very awkward between the three of us. I haven’t addressed the situation yet because of a few factors: This was during both of their lunch hours. They were not doing this on the clock (they had both clocked out, I immediately checked). We have an understanding that you can go or do anything on your lunch that you want, as long as you’re back after an hour. Also, as you mentioned in your answer last week to the person who overheard their coworker involved in “adult activities,” these people are adults and old enough to make their own choices.

But that’s not the end of the story. That same day, after my team had left, I was wrapping up and putting a meeting agenda on each of their desks for our meeting the next day. Out in broad daylight on the guys desk (one of the employees I had caught in the printing room) was a piece of paper at the top that said “Duck Club.” Underneath it, it had a list of locations of places in and around the office followed by “points.” 25 points – president’s desk, 10 points – car in the parking lot, 20 points – copier room, etc.

So here is my theory about what is going on (and I think I am right). This “Duck Club” is a club people at work where people get “points” for having sex in these locations around the office. I think that is also where the quacking comes into play. Perhaps this is some weird mating call between members to let them know they want to get some “points” with the other person, and if they quack back, they meet up somewhere to “score.” The two I caught in the copier room I have heard “quacking” before.

I know this is all extremely weird. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to write you because of how weird this seems (plus I was a little embarrassed). I have no idea what to do. As I mentioned above, they weren’t on the clock when this happened, they’re all adults, and technically I broke a rule by entering the copier room when it was locked, and would have never caught them if I had obeyed that rule. The only company rule I can think of that these two broke is using the copier room for other purposes, preventing someone else from using it.

I would love to know your opinion on this. I tend to want to sweep it under the rug because I’m kind of a shy person and would be extremely embarrassed to bring it up.

To long to read. So don’t do it.

I feel disappointed. It’s not about job or stuff. I’m disappointed about world in general. I don’t see my future on this planet anymore.

The world more or less looks like that :

Politics are trying to help you by stealing more money from you. The more you’re lucky the more money you will pay for it.

Media punch you with some family stuff from everywhere, give you young rich and far away, beautiful picture photos of places, people and food that you at most could visit once or twice per year during holidays that are break from work concentration camps.

If you’re lucky you’re rich or got rich or wealthy and infamous so you can walk wherever you want and don’t give a fuck what you wear but again your old friends are not so lucky bastards so you need to find new friends that are probably assholes. At the end most of the days you you’re doing nothing except killing time to meet with people you like during weekends or evenings.

Then there are families and everyone want to tell you that’s important. Family is like herd of assholes, if you’re weak they will sacrifice you and tell that you’re looser behind your back but when you get wealthy they will come back to tell you that when you were young and stupid they played with you so now you have to buy them some stuff or get them a job.

At the end there are people with “I wrote that book” certificate of excellence try to sell you opinions on everything starting from sexual positions ending on how to take a good dump. The problem is that the moment they wrote that book it becomes obsolete. Teachers of useless knowledge from last century that forgot about google or wikipedia.

All of them are playing your emotions, cause impulses and hormones are what makes you weak and people are looking for your weaknesses to take advantage of you. Get your money or get your attention and maybe even both at the same time. Cause views matter you know it. So like and subscribe dumb fucks.

If you’re lucky you find couple of them who aren’t doing that. Who the fuck knows why but this shit happens. It doesn’t matter if they’re family or you met them month ago. Those are only to keep and hardest to find. Unluckily those also can change by other people they meet or when they’re young.

If you can’t find a friend get a dog or cat or whatever animal you like. Their love is unconditional and obvious to read.

Well that’s most of the “I want to be spotted” culture that is all boring as fuck. Personalized ass and glamorous pictures and short movies of everything you don’t need but looks awesome. And as you see it’s still growing with more specialized portals like onlyfans, twitch and tiktok. We all need to look at what everyone else have or want to have cause 99% of time 99% of us are boring and is bored as fuck. Most of us can repeat same small amount set of stories all their life cause we’re not created to entertain.

I don’t feel joy looking at this shit fucked full of shit people arguing who’s dick is bigger. Who can post most dumb thing. I think I need a break but how to break from everything ? How to break from culture of money where to live on your country land you need to pay property tax ?

That’s all fucked up. Life’s fucked up.

Germany is a nice place, but sometimes the bureaucracy is a bit much.
Especially when you try to write them a nice mail that you can't come to their "mandatory" appointment.
Because you're sick, like every damn time during the autumn holidays.
An email to an address where the hostname doesn't even exist. WTF?

Also don't you think that address is a bit too long? Chances for typos are pretty high when you do that, you know?

I call this one the tester than knew too much.

Note: The server the tester is running on has a hard drive that is breaking down...

Tester: Remember the error I talked to you about yesterday?

Me: Yeah, what about it?

Tester: Well the server hasn't recovered yet and I haven't restarted anything...

Me: Well the application itself hasn't crashed so our monitoring application doesn't seem to notice that the service is in a bad state. The error seems only to have brought down certain threads within the application.

Tester: No, I think there is a different issue here and has nothing to do with that error, the application is still doing things.
*tails the log*
Tester: See?

Me: As I said some things are still running and are unaffected by the error.

Tester: NO! It has to be caused by the other error I had a week ago where my file got corrupted. As we said I removed the file, restarted it and it worked again, but had the same problem a day later...

Note: The problem is not related, this time the application is running out of file descriptors

Me: Well... If the problem is the same it would have complained about the file descriptors then aswell, not an I/O error.

Tester: Nope, I think you are wrong!

Me: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

FML

Dual Boot Linux & Windows.

I hardly ever see anyone do it right. And there is just two tricks that make a completely new experience out of it. I am not sharing it with you to be nice, I am sharing because I am curious if you're already doing it.

1. Install on a second hard drive, not a different partition. Learn which button to hold on the boot screen to select the boot drive. You can still chain-load via Grub, but the major advantage, updates of neither OS will fuck up your boot loader. You can update it abso-fucking-lutely risk free. Second advantage, advice 2. becomes trivially easy.

2. Set up a virtual machine. Select as its hard drive the raw disk volume where you have installed your Windows. You can do this with VirtualBox, but QEMU with virtual machine manager make is far easier to set this up in. You can now start Windows under Linux as a virtual machine. You can always start a small application, but the big deal is installing. Start a Steam download, have it installed and ready without switching over. Running windows updates. And when you then have time to play the game, just reboot and you have it already installed.

I feel like many are not aware that you can start a virtual machine of a real hard drive. It's one of those things that improve usability of it enormously. It's something where many will just not think about it because they keep dual booting and virtual machines in two different categories in their brains, but immediately will think it is obvious as soon as they hear about it.

So, who already did this? Raise your hands!

i don't think that i'm having a burnout but i think that i'm maybe not so far away from it... several people, including friends, my therapist and also a colleague, told me they see me at risk of sliding into a real burnout.

i've known this for longer that i have a crappy work life balance. the habit of making work the most important part of my own life. thinking about work even in my private time, when i fall asleep, when i wake up in the night or in the morning. the tendency to think about problems, plans, coworkers, not being able to quit work mentally. the idea that i have to prove to everybody at work that i'm awesome. the feeling that, after a work day, i'm just "waiting" at home for the next day, in idle mode, so i can continue working on a problem (like a bug) that's occupying my whole mind. and at the same time, feeling totally empty after work, having no energy. i've lost interest and quit several hobbies in the last two years that once were important for me. and i think one important reason is that i didn't have any mental energy left to deal with that.

another factor for this development was also the pandemic for sure, because for some time, i had no real social life except for that at work.
but more important is probably that i find my job most of the time really fun and am highly motivated. i have the tendency to say yes to everything and to really commit to and own the problems that are handed to me. (right now, however i feel like there's not much motivation left)
then again there is the feeling that what i do is never good enough, i have little self confidence in my own abilities as a software engineer. there's a big discrepancy between how i myself perceive my work and how other people do (not only at work). on a rational level, i know that what i do is at least "good enough", otherwise i wouldn't have this job, and i wouldn't receive this amount of positive feedback from people. but it's hard to really deeply understand this thing, when there are deep-rooted beliefs like "only perfect is good enough" or "your colleagues will be disappointed and get a negative idea of you (and something bad will happen), if you don't give your best"... and there's also this idea that i have to be this super nerdy person who also codes in their free time, reads IT magazines and stuff, because only then i will fit this stereotype of a software developer, and only then i can be taken seriously and be good enough. no matter if this is fun for me or not.

anyway, right now i'm at a point in life where i'm realizing all this not only rationally, but with full emotional impact... :/ my life feels like it's gone stale and empty. i've lost creativity, warmth and human connection and that hurts a lot.

i'm trying to change my life.
one thing that really helps me right now is to talk with people who have (made) similar experiences. can you relate? if yes, how do / did you address those problems? i would really appreciate to hear your stories...

Working on what you love may be the most dangerous trap i have ever been told.

Why? You may work on what you love, but for a person that you don't. This will be the most thing that you will encounter on your career. I have been programming since i was 11 and my passion was sucked by my jobs.

And that's why all of my other hobbies will ever become a job, no matter how much people think i am good at it, the only reason i am good at my hobbies is because i don't do it for a living.

You can work on what you love, but don't expect expressing yourself at your job.

There is the Entrepreneurship route, where, instead of sucking your own passion, you should be sucking your employees passion, if you are doing it right.

If you're making a game, dont start by thinking about your inventory system. Start by thinking about what you want your player to be able to DO, the cost of those things, and the constraints.

For example, ages of empires didnt have you worrying about unit equipment at all. every villager could do almost any job. while survival games, especially survival horror, like the recent RE remake, severly restrict inventory and stack sizes to make resource managenent more important.

Games like Fallout had list based inventories because lists are cheap, and it allowed a tighter interaction loop. players would loot. go into inventory. close container, onto the next container, keeping the player in the exploration loop longer. neoscav did the opposite *for effect* harkening back to diablo, but taken to the nth degree: *everything*, actions, combat, exploration, character design, all based on an inventory-style grid.
while games like rimworld and dwarf fortress have your inventory represented by zones where items are physically *stored* in stacks on the ground, extending the concept of base management to resource management through physical layout and build optimization.

its important to think about what kind of actions you want players to be able to do, and the kinds of challenges and constraints you want on them at each point of the game and each mechanic they engage in.

other examples, though terrible, include fortnite, where the limitations of competitive play had inventory limited to a resource system and a hotbar. while earlier battle royale and sandboxs games like rust and battleground induced tension by combining loot mechanics and grid inventories with the constant danger of competing players, allowing them to have richer inventory systems at the risk of frusterating players who frequently died while managing their inventory. meanwhile in overwatch, notice how the HUD changes to best represent the abilities of each character.

all in all it is better to stop thinking of inventory systems as a means to an end, and instead as the end representation of desired mechanics, or artificially selected representations for particular effects.

this applies likewise to ui and ux in general. because the design of interface is fundementally about the design of *interactions*, and what you want to enable a user or customer to *do* will ultimately drive those interactions.

So I found this consulting job a while ago thinking that some extra cash while studying would be nice to have.

I meet with the guy, a researcher trying to start a business up, good for him I think, maybe we'll hit it off, continue working, why not? Except he has no clue how to write working code, all he ever did was writing matlab scripts he says, thats why he hired me he says.
Okay, fine, you do your job I do mine.

He hands me the contract, its about comparing two libraries, finding out which one is better suited for his job, cool, plots and graphs everywhere.

Except this is an unpaid job. YOU WHAT?! It's a test job. FINE. At least it'll look good on my resume.

We talk about the paid part where I'm supposed to scale the two libraries, looks good, as expected from an ML engineering perspective. It comes to payment. The dude has no idea how taxes work, says he has a set amount to pay and not a penny more. I explain with examples how taxes are paid, how you get reimbursed for them and so on. Won't budge. Screws me over.

Opens the door for other jobs I think, he'll learn next time I think and take the job.

Fast forward a month, 90% of the job done, he adds a third thing to compare. Gives a github link to a repo with 2 authors, last commit a year ago. There are links to a 404, claiming compiled jars. Fuck.

Not my first rodeo, git clone that shit, make compile, the works. The thing uses libs that ain't in no repo, that would be too easy. Run, error, find lib, remake all the things, rinse repeat.

The scripts they got have hardcoded paths and filenames for 2 year old binaries, remake that shit.

It works, at least I get a prompt now. Try the example files they got, no luck, some missing unlinked binary somewhere, but not a name mentioned. Cross reference the shit outta the libs mentioned on readme, find the missing shit, down it.

Available versions are too new, THE MOLDING NUTCRACKER uses some bug in an old version of the lib.

I give up. Fuck this. This ain't worth the money OR time. Wanker...

I dropped my kid off at preschool and went my way home.

She's 2 so I transport her on a stroller.

While coming back, I came across an old lady sweeping the sidewalk of her house, and it got narrow to pass through because there was a tree next to her.

I carefully slowed down as to not collide with her, and while going through, we noticed each other.

I did a tiny smile as a way of saying "hi" like I usually do to people on the street.

To which she gave back the most innocent and sweet smile I've ever seen a stranger give on the street.

I could honestly feel my heart crack as it happened.

I guess the stroller must have caused her sympathy thus that reaction.

(which is why I like going around with the stroller, because people tend to treat you nicely which feels nice, like butterflies)

I know it might seem like an ordinary story without a punchline, but let me explain that I walk this city everyday.

And even though the people here is very nice compared to other cities I've lived in, it is very rare to get smiled at with such joy.

You might still think that is not a good story. But I can explain its relevance.

As some of you know, I post triggering content on this account, closeted parts of me that I normally hide,

Such as sexual stuff, some people think I'm a degenerate but I like to think I just have normal sexual thoughts that don't affect others in real life AT ALL.

And I'm also very argumentative, again, some people might see it as troll behaviour. On my side though, I just don't like bullshit and call it out when I see it.

But with this post, I'm not trying to be more likable or negate all the weird shit I said. This post is just another closeted part of me, being emotional.

And the reason I hide that is because it is not generally well accepted when a man is sensitive, at least where I'm from.

For example, if a female friend at work had a nice haircut, sometimes I feel the urge to be like "omg girl you look so prettyyyy!!!!".

But if I did that I know what will happen based on DIRECT experience: people will assume I'm gay or weak, and will make fun of that.
Or the actual friend will think I'm hitting on her.

No, fucking thank you, not having that shit.

But even if people accepted that, they just can't conceive I'm also very direct and honest, so when they do get to know me better, they get shocked.

So what do I do? I just hide that. That might change in the future, but I don't have the energy right now to deal with some people's simplemindedness.

I'm not making any sort of political statement, like "people should be treat me correctly or else get fired because of offending my gender".

But I'm not gonna lie, it would feel very nice if I was around more progressive people. I wished I had just just standard male behaviour and thoughts.

I guess some people in progressive cities are more accepting of the whole gender fluid thing, so I wished I lived in one (let me clarify though, I'm not a mindless gender fanatic).

I'm also not perfect and sometimes the line between "I love your haircut" and "I'm into you" blurs the fuck out, so that's on me... I don't know if it's something I can change though...

Hopefully all this shit I'm saying doesn't make me look like a lunatic. Veeeery hopefully.

Though, If you think for real I'm a lunatic or bad person, you can suck donkey dick.

I really don't get all the Musk fans. I mean, sure you can find some value in Tesla or SpaceX, sure you can think theses companies are truly innovating. But why give all the credit to the rich businessman who seems to spent more time promoting himself than really working on science stuff, and not to all the ingeneers and creatives who are really putting some hard work on every day ? All Musk is really doing is running a business. He seems to do that pretty well, agreed, but after all it's "just" that: business. He's not the genius, nor the creative. He has money and invests it well, that's all.
I don't get why so many people give all the credit to him, even here on devrant where it should be logical to find more people supporting the real brains behind the tech.

"He has a vision about the future, he's imaginative..."

- Well that's bullshit.

Once again: he has money, a lot, and a certain skill about how to invest it (and about doing some proper marketing too), which companies to buy, etc. That don't make him such a great visionary about the future of the human being, just a great businessman. I'm sure you can find millions of people around the world with better ideas about the future, but they're not in his position. They're not rich, they're not CEOs, they're mostly unknown.

Stop follow the stream by glorifying businessmen just because medias are talking lot about them. Instead, know where the real talent (and work) is. Give credit to Musk employees, not to him.

Project manager, who i've complained in the past is neglecting critical things that he doesn't want to do, decided today to cancel our weekly planning meeting, to have the below conversation with me 1:1. Its very long, but anyone who has the will to get through it ... please tell me it's not just me. I'm so bewildered and angry.

Side note: His solution to the planning meeting not taking place ... to just not have one and asked everyone to figure it out themselves offline, with no guidance on priorities.

Conversation:

PM: I need to talk to you about some of phrasing you use during collaboration. It's coming across slightly offensive, or angry or something like that.

Me: ok, can you give me an example?

PM: The ticket I opened yesterday, where you closed it with a comment something along the lines of "as discussed several times before, this is an issue with library X, can't be fixed until Y ...".

"As discussed several times" comes across aggressive.

Me: Ok, fair enough, I get quite frustrated when we are under a crunch, working long hours, and I have to keep debugging or responding to the same tickets over and over. I mean, like we do need to solve this problem, I don't think its fair that we just keep ignoring this.

PM: See this is the problem, you never told me.

Me: ... told you what?

PM: That this is a known issue and not to test it.

Me: ..... i'm sorry ..... I did, that was the comment, this is the 4th ticket i've closed about it.

PM: Right but when you sent me this app, you never said "don't test this".

Me: But I told you that, the last 3 times that it won't be in until feature X, which you know is next month.

PM: No, you need to tell me on each internal release what not to test.

Me: But we release multiple times per week internally. Do you really need me to write a big list of "still broken, still broken, still broken, still broken"?

PM: Yes, how else will I know?

Me: This is documented, the last QA contractor we had work for us, wrote a lot of this down. Its in other tickets that are still open, or notes on test cases etc. You were tagged in all of these too. Can you not read those? and not test them unless I say I've fixed them?

PM: No, i'm only filling for QA until we hire a full time. Thats QA's job to read those and maintain those documents.

Me: So you want me to document for you every single release, whats already documented in a different place?

PM: ok we'll come back to this. Speaking of hiring QA. You left a comment on the excel spreadsheet questioning my decision, publicly, thats not ok.

Me: When I asked why my top pick was rejected?

PM: Yes. Its great that you are involved in this, but I have to work closely with this person and I said no, is that not enough?

Me: Well you asked me to participate, reviewing resumes's and interviewing people. And I also have to work extremely close with this person.

PM: Are you doubting my ability to interview or filter people?

Me: ..... well a little bit yeah. You asked me to interview your top pick after you interviewed her and thought she was great. She was very under qualified. And the second resume you picked was missing 50% of the requirements we asked for ... given those two didn't go well, I do think its fair to ask why my top pick was rejected? ... even just to know the reason?

PM: Could you not have asked publicly? face to face?

Me: you tagged me on a google sheet, asking me to review a resume, and rather than tag you back on 2 rows below ... you want me to wait 4 days to ask you at our next face to face? (which you just cancelled for this meeting)

PM: That would have been more appropriate

Me: ..... i'm sorry, i don't want to be rude but thats ridiculous and very nit pick-y. You asked my opinion on one row, I asked yours on another. To say theres anything wrong with that is ridiculous

PM: Well we are going to call another team meeting and discuss all this face to face then, because this isn't working. We need to jump to this other call now, lets leave it here.

Ideas for future weekly question:

- Where will you see yourself in 5 years?
- Do you automate tasks when developing and what kind of automation do you write yourself or use?
- What do you think about hooking up with someone from work?
- What are your thoughts about books in IT?
- How do you make your workplace comfortable?
- How would you change your company if you became the boss today?
- What are your thoughts about the future of computer input devices (kb & mice)?
- What are your prevention measures agains Skynet?
- When will HL3 be released?
- What's the solution to everything?

Last Monday I bought an iPhone as a little music player, and just to see how iOS works or doesn't work.. which arguments against Apple are valid, which aren't etc. And at a price point of €60 for a secondhand SE I figured, why not. And needless to say I've jailbroken it shortly after.

Initially setting up the iPhone when coming from fairly unrestricted Android ended up being quite a chore. I just wanted to use this thing as a music player, so how would you do it..?

Well you first have to set up the phone, iCloud account and whatnot, yada yada... Asks for an email address and flat out rejects your email address if it's got "apple" in it, catch-all email servers be damned I guess. So I chose ishit at my domain instead, much better. Address information for billing.. just bullshit that, give it some nulls. Phone number.. well I guess I could just give it a secondary SIM card's number.

So now the phone has been set up, more or less. To get music on it was quite a maze solving experience in its own right. There's some stuff about it on the Debian and Arch Wikis but it's fairly outdated. From the iPhone itself you can install VLC and use its app directory, which I'll get back to later. Then from e.g. Safari, download any music file.. which it downloads to iCloud.. Think Different I guess. Go to your iCloud and pull it into the iPhone for real this time. Now you can share the file to your VLC app, at which point it initializes a database for that particular app.

The databases / app storage can be considered equivalent to the /data directories for applications in Android, minus /sdcard. There is little to no shared storage between apps, most stuff works through sharing from one app to another.

Now you can connect the iPhone to your computer and see a mount point for your pictures, and one for your documents. In that documents mount point, there are directories for each app, which you can just drag files into. For some reason the AFC protocol just hangs up when you try to delete files from your computer however... Think Different?

Anyway, the music has been put on it. Such features, what a nugget! It's less bad than I thought, but still pretty fucked up.

At that point I was fairly dejected and that didn't get better with an update from iOS 14.1 to iOS 14.3. Turns out that Apple in its nannying galore now turns down the volume to 50% every half an hour or so, "for hearing safety" and "EU regulations" that don't exist. Saying that I was fuming and wanting to smack this piece of shit into the wall would be an understatement. And even among the iSheep, I found very few people that thought this is fine. Though despite all that, there were still some. I have no idea what it would take to make those people finally reconsider.. maybe Tim Cook himself shoving an iPhone up their ass, or maybe they'd be honored that Tim Cook noticed them even then... But I digress.

And then, then it really started to take off because I finally ended up jailbreaking the thing. Many people think that it's only third-party apps, but that is far from true. It is equivalent to rooting, and you do get access to a Unix root account by doing it. The way you do it is usually a bootkit, which in a desktop's ring model would be a negative ring. The access level is extremely high.

So you can root it, great. What use is that in a locked down system where there's nothing available..? Aha, that's where the next thing comes in, 2 actually. Cydia has an OpenSSH server in it, and it just binds to port 22 and supports all of OpenSSH's known goodness. All of it, I'm using ed25519 keys and a CA to log into my phone! Fuck yea boi, what a nugget! This is better than Android even! And it doesn't end there.. there's a second thing it has up its sleeve. This thing has an apt package manager in it, which is easily equivalent to what Termux offers, at the system level! You can install not just common CLI applications, but even graphical apps from Cydia over the network!

Without a jailbreak, I would say that iOS is pretty fucking terrible and if you care about modding, you shouldn't use it. But jailbroken, fufu.. this thing trades many blows with Android in the modding scene. I've said it before, but what a nugget!

I haven't really known what to post. But I've decided not to care about being relevant or care about the like count. I'm a very competitive person so things like like count tend to effect the way I see the quality of a post.

I want devRant to be a place where I can be honest and feel safe even if I don't get the validation I sometimes wish I had. And hey maybe someone will think my opinions or thoughts are interesting.

So let's start with a little about me. I'm a 17 year old kid that loves programming. I work full time as a full stack web developer and I'm really the only web person. The current system is built on WordPress because of fucking course it is. I don't like it but I gotta keep it user friendly for less techy people to manage. No one likes have all minor changes and tweaks having to go through one person when they could do it themselves. So I manage.

I'd say my passion is more backend development but I do love having a pretty UI to display the results.

I've struggled with mental health the past few years but I'm doing much better. Even just last week I had an anxiety attack during a social event. I came here for the community and I do enjoy it, but I'm gonna try to make it an outlet. My best friend went off to university and I don't really have any IRL friends I can just be me around.

I don't have anything special to say. But if you read this thank you for listening to some random kid on the internet. I hope you have a great day.

First company:

- being sat at an office that didn't have chairs with proper back support. It would kill my back every day. Like sitting on a bar stool coding.
- not having access to basic resources (cafeteria, salary bonuses)
- being seriously underpaid ($200 under)
- not having an IT process pipeline (yeah, this is a huge one): no JIRA, no git, no VCS, no continuous integration, etc. I fucking spend 45% of the time fixing coding-unrelated shit.

Second company (very aggravating):

- dumb frontend bitch and privileged colleague who both kept telling me months on end to shut up and who wouldn't listen to my advice on anything, while my advice would actually help the company advance in productive ways. The key here is being told to shut up while stagnating. i.e. dead end job.
- people advancing in the company based on nepotism and favoritism, based on having tits and ass, rather than skills and independence.

- pointlessssssssss meetings where decisions are made solely based on the opinion of Mr. favorite senior dev. The rest just sits there like a bunch of sad saps and yay-nodders. Incompetent PO's who "would like to hear your input" but then when you give it, they completely dismiss you.

- pointlessssssssss monthly meetings with stakeholders, where the dev teams do nothing but clash and act like pussies in front of the PM just to get in his favor, but behind scenes continue to make the same mistakes and telling the CEO everything is fine. Goodness, how can it get more unproductive.

- completely antisocial and nepotistic 'colleagues' who won't even talk to you, let alone smile at you or be friendly. You saying good morning and them pretending you're vapor that doesn't exist. Go go company atmosphere! Especially during lunch, those are the worst times. Imagine sitting at lunch where everyone looks like you killed their dog and the rest is huddled up in little high school groups.
What else? The incessant and pointless smalltalk that makes me want to bang my head against the wall. Talking about dogs, kids, what show was on tv last night. The fuck man, do you have a brain?!

Third company:

- HR bitches who think they are the shit and developers are antisocial, helpless misfits, but they work with computers and they don't even fucking know what a status bar is! The irony!

- forced socializing and stigmatization for the opposite. Imagine coming into a company and you don't say good morning. Should that be a problem? No. Instead, everyone starts dogging on you and hating you just because you didn't smile in their faces and said: hiiiiiiiiiiii how did you sleep? Did you feed your dog? Fuck you.
Elliot (Mr. Robot): "Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a mute button for life?" -boop, boop, boop, boop...- Ahh.. there.. that's much better."

- CEO's sucking up to you but when it comes to salary increase, they say shit like: "Ahhh ya know, it's kinda difficult." Yet another dead end job.

I have seen in a lot of forums (here, Imgur, reddit, LinkedIn etc) that there are a lot of developers without a job.

And most of them live in USA. I have not seen a person who is struggling to find a job in EU or some other place.

Why is this the case? In USA where the demand for developers is very high.

I read a post on LinkedIn: "40 INTERVIEWS and no one HIRED! Yet another friend telling me she can not find good talent. My thinking - If you interviewed 40 people and did not hire someone, then it's time to look in the mirror. The problem is recruiters and hiring managers are looking for the 'PERFECT" candidate. NEWSFLASH! There is no 'perfect' candidate. If you have someone with the right attitude and skill set, and they fit in with the team, why not HIRE them? There are so many qualified individuals still job searching. Yet I see the same jobs re-posted, over and over again, being left vacant for months. Who took a chance on you? Maybe it's time you a took chance on someone."

I don't think it is the "competition" because I see everywhere. I have seen entry-level or JR. open positions that are not filled for months.

It took me 1 month, sending nearly 20 applications every day to find a job in USA.
And the second one I got lucky. I applied in Europe and after some month I got transferred in offices in USA.

I do not know how true this is, but seriously, what's wrong with companies in USA that require the PERFECT candidate. Or is it something else?

My current situation:

Manager: How is Project A coming? Project A is top priority. I would like to see a PR today with fixes to the current tickets.

Me: Project A is priority! Sure!

*after 2hours*

Manager: How is project B coming along? I did not see any PR’s coming in?

Me: I am working on project A as it is priority.

*after 1 hour*

Manager: How is project C coming? There is one ticket pending. We need a fix for it today asap!

Me: Starts project C as project A would take more time. Starts Work on project C.

*after 1 hour*

Boss: How is project A coming? Where is the PR?

Me: As you said you need a fix for project C today, i started working on project C as it has only 1 ticket to be fixed.

Boss: I told you project A is priority, why are you working on project C?

Me: *doesn’t reply*

*after 1 hour*

Boss: There is a ticket pending in project D. Did you make a fix for it?

*This is my usual day at work.

*I am the only developer in my current company. It’s not a software development company.

*Note: I do complete all the work and create PR’s for all “pending” work at the end of the day for all projects and leave for home at around 10pm :)

What do you think? Lol

!rant
So, Rust again.
When I learned that Rust doesn’t support inheritance, only traits (interfaces), I was shocked at first.

Then I tried to remember when the last time was that I have used inheritance in the code that I write (not the code that I use).

And I could remember an instance some months ago. But I also remember that I was very unsatisfied with that design and refactored it to use composition instead. And it was much better.

One of Rust’s properties is that many good practices in other programming languages are enforced rules in Rust.
And in case of inheritance, it seems like Rust decided that composition over inheritance is such a good practice that it should be a rule.

I’m not 100% convinced that there never will be cases where inheritance is better. But I still like this radical idea of forcing the devs to do it "the right way" in the majority of (if not all) cases.

I think many devs will disagree.
What do you think?

The fucking defective Caps Lock on Apple keyboards drives me fucking ballistic!

WHY would they ever think it would be a good idea to introduce a minimum press time for a key?!?

EVERY. FUCKING. TIME. I use the damn thing it inevitably fails and I have to backspace, delete the non-caps text I just entered after HITTING THE FUCKING CAPS LOCK KEY, tap the damn thing again (harder this time) and try again. It usually takes 2 or 3 tries before it actually catches. I'm sorry, but training myself to type slower is not as easy as you think!

Who the fuck thought up this nonsensical bullshit?? And who the fuck is going around accidentally tapping their caps lock key to the point where such a delay would be needed?? Do you not know where your own fingers are??

Seriously, all this does is penalize fast typists and people who actually want to USE the caps lock key for what it was meant for.

I swear to god this one little thing pisses me off SO much. And what's worse is they don't even give you an option to disable it, AND it's bloody fucking impossible to disable yourself even through the terminal.

(Also, typing this rant with so many caps was probably not as cathartic as I was going for!) 😂

So I have been a fly on the "wall" for last couple of months and never signed up, but now here I am!

Rant is about a serious topic - gender gap in tech industry!!
Couple of months ago Stackoverflow announced developer survey results! I was shocked by demographics results! It was disappointing to see biggest gender gap in general tech industry!
I believe tech industry can be the first one to have equal pay for women!

However.... (bad part)
I was going through my twitter feeds and saw this! Many of you have seen this tweet too.

(ohh!fuck I cant attach multiple images here, I should have created Medium post, fuck it!)

"They" continue, quoting from the tweet.
1)"....bias in society is reflected in AI"
2) "However, I do think it is our responsibility as designers/developers/users to be aware of this bias and do our best to correct it."

I want to rant about 2nd one. Some of you may not like it including grammar naziz!
As a developer/programmer I take 2nd one personally! I am currently at denial phase though!
And I have an OCD so gonna make points here!

1) Seriously tell me please, how the fuck you can write gender bias algorithm which can pass a big crazy amount of test suite?

2) Google has done many things for last decade to overcome gender gap related issues. I have met some of the nicest people from Google, and this is really hard for me to believe that google AI or that team has anything to do with the results!

3) Someone suggests use "they" in google translated result, can you fucking imagine how wrong that would be??? If I am developer working on that algo or even in that team and I see this ticket in jira with highest priority where it says, "make all translated results gender neutral using only they" - I would fucking like to die and may be in my next life ask me to do that, when I am a toddler!

4) I am an advocate for equal pay, equal rights and equal opportunities for everyone to "minify" this gender gap in tech, but showing google translate results of a gender natural language to make a point is wrong, it is simply undermining the efforts of something really helpful thing.

5) Moving on to the core point - What can be done to lower down the gender gap? I have seen amazing women who can code/manage far far far better than what I ever could imagine, and they are at really good place and deserve to be there. Are they doing enough to inspire other women to join tech industry?
Collective efforts are very much required. And need to keep in consideration that tech industry is highly competitive roles are also changing rapidly.

6) Many big companies have women at higher positions(CEO, CFO,....) what are their efforts to bring more women in tech industry?
(Some of you may not like this, as this is implying that it isn't only men's job. )

7) Going slightly political here, everyday we see really disappointing news related to women and their rights and health, I strongly believe women don't have to ask for or even have to mention about "equal rights" about anything. Everyone is equal!!!
This is 2017 and still fucked up!

Thats all for today! Heading for breakfast!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I got my first appointment with my first freelance client today as I'm trying to earn some money on the side. She contacted me after the guy before me hasn't delivered in more than 2 months.

Her: So how much do you think its gonna cost me.

Me: Well the minimum rate for a site like this is like €1000. But since you are my first client, I'm willing to do it for €700.

Her: The guy before you only charged €250...

Me: I'm sorry I can't do that. I might get to 500 if I cut some corners, but I can't make any promises.
Inner me: Look where you're 250 has got you... You haven't seen anything in return...

Her: Proceeds to whine about how it's still waaay to much ... And how she will get me more clients etc. (Yeah right...)

Master/Slave
Fuck you guys. Honestly most of the rants i've read concerning python and their abolishme t of sait terms where fucking butthurt. "What virgin suggested this", "people shouldn't be offended, it's just a name" and so on.

I do agree with every one saying a name shouldn't matter (readability is a different story! However parent/child or producer/consumer IMHO preserve that). So why are you fucking offended when it is changed to parent/child or produver/consumer? Does it affect you in any way? You know there's the `sed` command, plus IntelliJ (and most other IDEs) have a quite good support for renaming/refactoring stuff.

By reacting this way, by beeing offended all you do is proving the point. Words can offend people. I personally don't care how it's called. So far I always used master/slave and didn't think twice about it. But then again if someone of my coworkers or friends would feel threatened by these words, I try to avoid them. Naming diesn't matter to me, nor the compiler. So fuck, if it makes people happy or feeling save then lets change it.

What the fuck do you gain by sticking to those terms anyways?

The site I work on is a market where you can buy magnets for dolors, insomniaque, bla bla bla (I don't believe a sec in this).
Just saying that to settle that 80% of our customers are +45 years old. They weren't born with a computer in their hands, and they sometimes manage to make a lot of mess in the site.
We are based in France, and we sell the most in France (no shit) and Switzerland. And this is the third time that a Swiss pass a command, puts all her address in Switzerland EXCEPT for the country (still on France) so she doesn't have to pay the shipping fee. I should do something about that, like a regex when verifying the zip code, but I have more urgent work to do, and the best has to come.
This smartass doesn't know she is the joke, because by saying she is in France, she has to pay the VAT that she wouldn't have if she said she was in Switzerland. She buys in general for around 350 €, so she has ~ 70€ (20%) in VAT, and she would only pay 14€ in shipping fee.
Maybe one day she'll see how dumb she is (my boss already mailed her so she pays attention to it, no change). But I think I would have set the regex by then.

People don't seem to know how to properly do print-debugging, so here's a simple guide:

1. A log of "aaaaaa" or "got here" isn't as helpful as you think when ALL OF THEM ARE THE FUCKING SAME. You put a descriptive label or copy verbatim the conditional statement. This saves time matching statements, allows one to watch multiple branches at once, and allows others to understand and help faster when dragged in to help.
2. When trying to see where code fucks up, before each line, paste said line into a proper print statement for your language. If there's, say, a function call or some shit, have it output something like "functionCall(varA=<varA contents>,varB=<varB contents);" Most normal lines should be like this too, but it's especially helpful for calls and comparisons.
If need be, add return values after if they're not shown in another print statement later.
This allows for a trail of execution AND the line that fucks up will be the last in the log, making finding it easier when dealing with hangs and such.
3. Putting something unique like "DEBUG: " or something in front of all statements ensures you can just search for them to ensure you're not rolling one out to production. It also separates debug output from normal output at a glance, making digging through logs faster.

I am thinking about leaving this platform. To be honest I don't get anything out of it anymore and the only thing keeping me here is the less-rant'ish content like @devNews or the stories.

I am actually a bit disappointed, the quality of devrant really did degrade alot in the last few months. Don't get me wrong but I feel like people have become "normies" over here. I don't mean that in an edgy or degrading way but let me explain. When I started here I had a very high opinion of the people here. Everyone seemed like a passionate / knowledgeable individual from whom you could hear interesting stories or learn. Maybe I just saw it like that because I was still a very inexperienced dev and was looking for a dev community. But nonetheless I think devRant transformed into a place of mediocrity.

Dont get me wrong I wouldn't think of myself as aspiring or generally "better" than anyone else on here, but the content over here got a little stale.

I am not the kind of person who would "rant", in the first place, so I may have a different mindset and to be honest "ranting" has always been a thing I looked down upon. It just does not support my style of thinking. I totally get that people sometimes need to "vent" their feelings but there is nothing productive to gain from ranting, like you ain't not improving your situation by doing it. The more passionate raters over here call people things, I would never even dream about saying to people. Don't worry I'm no sjw or something like it, I don't care if you do it. If it helps you sure, why not. But there is a point where you corner yourself so much that you stop respecting your colleagues because they wrote that shitty code, instead of helping.

Some tech sure is bad, but it is not getting any better by insulting it.

Another thing I use to notice are people, thinking so highly of them selfes / being so close-minded - that they only accept their own views as true. These are the people that I always try to avoid, but that is getting harder and harder as time goes on.

Collectivism and group thinking are very strong on devRant making it really hard to defend a unpopular opinion - I get that devRant is not the kind of platform that would support actual proper arguments/discussions - but I still feels like some people shove opinions down another people's throat with no reasoning behind it.

Arguments on devRant are always won by the person coming up with the most witty response. Having another opinion is always seen as offensive. That's not exactly the definiton of open-mindedness.

Another rather annoying thing are what I call the "non dev, dev's". See: As a developer you should aspire to understand what your doing - I won't get into this too much but one sentencd: How are things like serious "Semicolon memes" a thing? I am as much into memes as the next guy, but debugging 3 hours, just to find out its a typo. I mean come on...

I sure get that devRant is not the kind of place where you would find the people I am looking for, and that's why I am leaving.

My whole post may seem super negative of the platform - and it is to an extend - but I sure also had a good time back in the day - devRant as in "the platform" surely is not at fault, but a forum is only as good as the people on it. Maybe I changed, maybe devRant did. All I know is that it is not for me anymore.

I won't delete my account and I probably will not leave completely, but all I will do is the "once a week" checkout.

I have nothing to play recently so I started playing old games.

Today I launched gta vice city on my old pc. Got more than 200 hours in that game during my childhood. Game from 2002 and I laughed when driving a car. It was so natural and fun. Michael Jackson singing Billy Jean and police chasing my ass when I’m trying to find a bribe in the city. That was fun.

For me most of today’s games can’t compete in gameplay mechanics with that game from 20 years ago.
Maybe we have better graphics but gaming fun got worse.

I think it’s cause most of games are made on commercial engines to save money and game studios focus on graphics cause it’s cheaper than paying software developer.

They focus on games to be competitive between players so ai got worse.

Big studio games became generic like movies, they don’t want you to have fun but they want to give you a story around by delivering lots of content in game, achievements, stars but the gameplay itself is bugged and meh.

They don’t focus on things people want to do but they focus on target groups. Most today’s big title games are meh cause they’re made by people who don’t play them.

They don’t play them cause they don’t have time cause of management that changes requirements cause they asked target groups and that would sell. Well if I play a game I’m not interested in story despite some basic stuff to keep the progress forward, if I wanted a big story I would watch a movie or tv show. I play games to explore, feel the world and have fun. I don’t need a linear deep story for that cause I’m in game so give me good gameplay so I can feel the world.

Most of classic game hits didn’t had tons of text and tons of stuff to do but they somehow wanted you to play more. Cause they were competitive between player and computer, the controls felt natural and while progressing you was eaten by the game mechanics more and more not by the story but by amount of stuff you could do as you progress or difficulty increase or enemies behavior change.

Now we’re getting all at once, mostly pointed and with detailed tutorial what you can do. There’s no explanation there’s no discovery what you can and what you can’t do at start. You get all and you decide to throw game away because the moment you launched it you got everything so you spent money just to get stuff you won’t play cause it’s meh and you go back to cs or other looter shooter to kill people cause you’re pissed off that the game was meh.

Well I’m glad I was a kid in 90s and 2000s cause I could enjoy gaming before it was targeted to broader public and become another shallow mass media industry that don’t give a fuck about gameplay cause they want to tell you so many things, they want you to know them cause they’re so important that they forgot that I can read a book and I came to play game to get a different feeling then reading book.

Modern games are like books filled with small stories and nice graphics where you can open it on every page and read a little piece of shitty crap.

Just take this piece and go to toilet so you can wipe your ass with that story and begin other one, look around, puke and go to toilet to take a dump again. I lost my hope to get something fresh or filled with nice gameplay from gaming industry. It’s dead.

!personal

So, I was diagnosed with congenital nystagmus at an early fucking age. This is complicated for people who've never heard of it before to comprehend, until they notice the eyes of the person in question. Think of it this way: I lack the biological form of optical image stabilization. Because of nystagmus, I can't fucking drive.

Now, let me tell you, it really fucking sucks. I've never had a girlfriend, never been able to get a job, basically never been able to do the type of shit most of you can already fucking do. Pile that on with college, where I don't really fucking know anybody, and it's really fucking easy to see why I've had depression and nearly fucked my GPA over last semester (2.08, yeah it's embarrassing but fuck it).

That out of the way, nystagmus is rare. So rare that any surgeries to fix it aren't guaranteed to fix the problem, and are only marginally better. I have strong skepticism for any optometrist who acts like they perform this surgery every day, because the numbers simply don't back them up. If there's so few who have this issue, then the amount of operations and opportunities to do them are fucking slim.

Today, my mom came over to Indiana from Ohio, and took me to the local Cheddar's (do other countries have those??). We sit down, and she wanted to re-hash this surgery idea. I have made the statement before that these are the only two eyes that I will ever have, and there's no guaranteed ROI on any procedures, and is probably going to fuck me over if shit hits the fan.

Then she tells me there's this doctor in Maryland. I might be geographically challenged (lol), but I'm pretty sure that's over on the east coast. It's forever from here, we'd probably have to take an airliner.

This doctor made some pretty bold fucking claims. Not only was it possible he could fix the nystagmus, but he could help me use a special form of glasses that would enable me to learn to drive. Knowing that R&D on nystagmus was sketchy because of the aforementioned conditions, I had to tell her that I still don't know how I feel about it. Also, if this doctor moves from Maryland to any of the other states, would he still be allowed to do these things?

I told her I don't know how I feel about it. I'm not sure it's worth the money if we follow through and come to find out it's not enough, and I still can't drive. She acts like this stuff is dead simple. I don't think it is. You have perceived benefits, but there have to be caveats. This would be a major change, and I don't know how I feel about following through with it.

You know what really grinds my gears? When people criticize a programming language but uses edge cases and stuff that can be avoided by using the tried and true "don't be an idiot". Take for instance JavaScript, a language I like and a language that has a lot you can criticize. But I feel like a lot of peoples criticism isn't warranted.

What's that? No ints? Use parseInt or Math.floor.

What are you saying? == works in strange ways? Yes, that's what we have === for.

Type coercion is wonky? Think it's weird how string + int works differently than string - int? Wanna string with number + - + - - + - - etc? Don't! Don't add strings and ints, don't subtract strings and ints. You can't in statically typed languages and you aren't supposed to in dynamically typed

Adding arrays and objects, arrays and arrays, objects and objects etc. is inconsistent? Why are you trying to do that?

Adding floats together gives odd results? Now we're getting somewhere! And Mozilla responded to that with a method called toFixed.

Declaring variables with var doesn't always work that well? Use let and const

Then there's this weird attitude that some people I've met have, where they will complain about the module system and how "well you rely on the community for those packages" as if it's a bad thing. And then coming with the "well you don't know what the (open source) packages do internally" as if I (for the most part) give a shit. Then they'll swear by companies like Zend or Microsoft as if they can't just stop supporting the languages they use. Maybe it's just because I like community content more because of video game mods.

Wanna criticize JS, then there's plenty to talk about. Like the built in date object is basically shit. Or how in NodeJS you can have node_modules in your node_modules. Or how classes don't really have the best syntax. Left-Pad. And so on (it's too late for me to be able to remember much more).

Central team: No, your team must be doing something wrong. Our pipeline is super-configurable and works for any situation! You just have to read the docs!

Me: Where are the docs?

Central team: Uhh, well, umm... we'll hook you up with a CI/CD coach!

Me: Okay, cool. In the mean time, can you point me at the repo where all the base scripts are?

Central team: Sure, it's here.

Me, some weeks later: Yeah, uhh, the coach can't seem to figure out how to make our Prod deployment work either.

Central team: That's impossible! It's so easy and completely configurable!

Me: Well, okay... but, here's the thing: your pipeline IS pretty "configurable", in the sense that you look for A LOT of variables...

Central team: See! We told you!

Me: ...none of which are actually documented, so they're just about useless to me...

Central team: But, but the coach...

Me: ...couldn't make heads or taisl of it either despite him literally being ON YOUR TEAM...

Central team: Then your project must just be architected wrong!

Me: Well, we're not perfect, so could be...

Central team: Right!

Me: ...but I think it's far more likely that the scripts... you know, the ACTUAL Python scripts the pipeline executes... while it took me DAYS to get through all your levels of abstraction and indirection and, well, BULLSHIT... it turns out they are incredibly NOT flexible. They do one thing, all the time, basically disregarding any flexibility in the pipeline. So, yeah, I'm thinking this is probably one of this "it's you, not me" deals.

Central team: Waaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!!!

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.

sprint started two weeks ago, it's due today.

yesterday, most tasks for the sprint were done, but was still waiting that whole two weeks for updates on two new tickets, guess they'll be in the next sprint...

project leaders yesterday: oh here are those updates for the sprint! (not to mention the meeting was at 5 PM yesterday, not even the BEGINNING of the work day)

project leaders today: what's the status of the sprint?!

...it's a joke, right? do you think I'm a fucking magician?

its always the same no matter where you go, slowly starting to realize...

tl;dr; adding new feature requests the day before a sprint ends and then having the nerve of asking the "status" of the sprint the following day.

Ok now I'm gonna tell you about my "Databases 2" exam. This is gonna be long.

I'd like to know if DB designers actually have this workflow. I'm gonna "challenge" the reader, but I'm not playing smartass. The mistakes I point out here are MY mistakes.

So, in my uni there's this course, "Databases 2" ("Databases 1" is relational algebra and theoretical stuff), which consist in one exercise: design a SQL database.

We get the description of a system. Almost a two pages pdf. Of course it could be anything. Here I'm going to pretend the project is a YouTube clone (it's one of the practice exercises).

We start designing a ER diagram that describes the system. It must be fucking accurate: e.g. if we describe a "view" as a relationship between the entities User and Video, it MUST have at least another attribute, e.g. the datetime, even if the description doesn't say it. The official reason?

"The ER relationship describes a set of couples. You can not have two elements equal, thus if you don't put any attribute, it means that any user could watch a video only once. So you must put at least something else."

Do you get my point? In this phase we're not even talking about a "database", this is an analysis phase.

Then we describe the type dictionary. So far so good, we just have to specify the type of any attribute.

And now... Constraints.
Oh my god the constraints. We have to describe every fucking constraint of our system. In FIRST ORDER LOGIC. Every entity is a set, and Entity(e) means that an element e belongs to the set Entity. "A user must leave a feedback after he saw a video" becomes like

For all u,v,dv,df,f ( User(u) and Video(v) and View(u, v, dv) and feedback(u, v, f) ) ---> dv < df

provided that dv and df are the datetimes of the view and the feedback creation (it is clear in the exercise, here seems kinda cryptic)

Of course only some of the constraints are explicitly described. This one, for example, was not in the text. If you fail to mention any "hidden" constraint, you lose a lot of points. Same thing if you not describe it correctly.

Now it's time for use cases.
You start with the usual stickman diagram. So far so good.
Then you have to describe their main functions.

In first order logic. Yes.

So, if you got the point, you may think that the following is correct to get "the average amount of feedback values on a single video" (1 to 5, like the old YT).
(let's say that feedback is a relationship with attribute between User and Video

getAv(Video v): int
Let be F = { va | feedback(v, u, va) } for any User u
Let av = (sum forall f in F) / | F |
return av

But nope, there's an error here. Can you spot it (I didn't)?

F is a set. Sets do not have duplicates! So, the F set will lose some feedback values! I can not define that as a simple set!

It has to be a set of couples, like (v, u), where v is the value and u the user; this way we can have duplicate feedback values in our set.

This concludes the analysis phase. Now, the design.

Well we just refactor everything we have done until now. Is-a relations become relationships, many-to-many relationships get an "association entity" between them, nothing new.
We write down on paper every SQL statement to build any table, entity or not. We write down every possible primary key or foreign key. The constraint that are not natively satisfied by SQL and/or foreign keys become triggers, and so on.

This exam is considered the true nightmare at our department. I just love it.

Now my question is, do actually DB designers follow this workflow? Or is this just a bloody hard training in Pai Mei style?

At a previous job, boss & owner of company would waste hours of my time to show me, at his own desk, every small detail of some random feature he had fallen in love with on some random webpage he found, while saying "I don't want to disrupt your plans or anything, this is just something to keep in the back of your minds, as this would be a really nice thing to have, even tho none of the clients have asked for this and I have asked no one else for a second opinion, and I will most likely ask you to remove this feature in the future because I will finally have realized it wasn't that good an idea anyway."

Ok dipshit, what the fuck are we supposed to do with this information? Every week from this moment on you will ask whether we have found the time to implement this feature, even though you are fully aware that our schedule has no room for random, unplanned features and that we are already not able to meet the unreasonable deadline you pulled out of your ass two weeks into a development process that would end up taking 8+ months.

We are already overworked, we already work hours upon hours of unpaid overtime, and yet you still think it reasonable to pull us away from our work every other fucking day to talk about random extra features you want added, but don't want added to the roadmap because you want no delays... Fuck you, fuck your toxic attitude, fuck your meetings where you spend half an hour complaining about features we are still in the process of developing the backend functionality for (on test servers) not having the right font colour for the text, and fuck your legacy desktop software originally written in COBOL that you now want moved to "the cloud".

I would rather be unemployed and live as a hobo on the streets with a "will code for food" sign than work for you ever again.

DO NOT LIE ON YOUR RESUMÉ!

I don't understand why people do this. I understand that some shady recruiters like to "gin up" the occasional resumé, but I'm talking about the people who write that they're familiar with MySQL and can't even write a SELECT, or the people who write that they're familiar with Python and can't describe the differences between v2 and v3.

And the interviews are awkward as *fuck*.

I: "So it says you're good at MySQL, could you answer a few questions about it?"

C: "Uhh... okay"

I (sensing danger): "Why would you add an index to table that already exists?"

C: "I.. don't know"

I (oh jesus I see where this is going): "Okay, we'll skip that. How would you query across a couple of tables?"

C: "Uh...."

I ([internally screaming]): "How about a single query on a single table?"

C: "I don't know that, sorry..."

I (desperately wanting to ask why the FUCK is MySQL on your resumé?): "Thank you for your time, we'll call you."

You almost feel sorry for the guy, but come the fuck on, did you think nobody would check?