The man who runs my IT department. The man who is in charge of all things and people that are technical: IT management software development, infrastructure, training, help desk, system administration​, etc. A man with a staff of fifty plus. If you were to peel back the flesh on this man's head and crack open his skull you would find dung beetles feasting on the feces that power his thoughts and motor functions. Underneath this foul membrane, if you could push past the maggots; the meal worms; his undying love for hourly binges of Johnny Walker Black on any day of the week with a name that contains a vowel; his fascination with shiny objects and his endless internal monologue wondering when they would hatch rainbow ponies that fly; his desire whenever he enters a paint store to open all the cans of paint and taste the different colors; if you could push past all of the vile crap that exists where Thomas Aquinas once theorized there was a soul, you would find a colony of paramecia at the end of their short lives laughing hysterically at how much smarter they were than the host they lived in.

This man was in charge of hiring the Manager of Software Development. The manager I report to. After seven months of ignoring this chore; after interviewing the sum total of four candidates; after making a point to tell myself and a colleague that there was no one qualified to fill this position within our company (an opinion that is both untrue and, when spoken, runs afoul of internal hiring policies) this man hired a soulless cretin with no experience in software development or with running a software development group. A man who regularly confuses web servers and SQL servers. A man who asked me how my previous manager reviewed my work, was told by me that said previous manager read my code, and then replied in his capacity as the manager of software development that "looking at code is a compete waste of time for a manager." A man so without any humanity or reason for being that he will sit silently, creepily, in conference rooms with the lights off waiting for meetings to begin. Meetings he has scheduled. That have no reason for being in the first place. Just like himself.

Shortly before the man in charge offered the Dev Manager job to the simulacrum of human flesh that is my manager, he met with me and others who had been involved in the interview process. When I informed him that hiring someone with no technical knowledge for a very technical position would be a mistake that he would suffer through for years, he replied in reference to his future hire that "his managerial experience makes up for his lack of technical knowledge."

Best. Prank. Ever. Worst prank ever too. Fuck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sooo win has updated itself (in a short 6 hours) and I was wondering what eats my pocket pc's 4 gb ram, so i checked, and turns out system is eating 40-50% of it and its processor ever since the update... *Sigh* Awesome....

(Picture src: tumblr/just-shower-thoughts --> [in reality] r/showerthoughts)

Who am I?

Some of you, because of the hyperbolic, outrageous, trollish, and often self-satirical nature of my posts, might doubt me. Thats completely relatable.

Heres the truth:
I was diagnosed in childhood with ADHD, fucking everyone, every male, these days is diagnosed with that. I was diagnosed bipolar. Hell anyone reading my posts could see that from a mile away. I was diagnosed on the borderline personality spectrum. Yeah, I could see that.

I was tested. They said I was in the 98th percentile for clerical ability, not extraordinary but pretty good, mathematical ability a little higher than that. My SAT was 1491. Not yale material, but I coulda been someone.

Over the years I studied a LOT of politics and read a metric fuckton of books. (40+ books over the course of three years).

I predicted every single presidential election since bush juniors second election. Three supreme court picks. Senatorial elections. Congresional elections. More than that.

I have a better analysis track record than some of the multidecade analysts sitting in the fucking NSA.

No I am not shitting you. No I am not exaggerating.

It's about the only claim to fame I get to legitimately make.

People ask me, "then why aren't you famous?"

How do you know I'm not.

Look I'm gonna tell you my actual name.
My real name is Lawrence B. Lindsey

Okay, I'm bullshitting for fun. But words I have written on alt twitter accounts have legitimately come out of presidential hopeful's mouths. No, this I am *not* bullshitting you about.

Imagine that. A guy who lived in his parents attic for five years, writing words that came out of presidential candidates mouths.

At one time I was about as popular and influential as that fuckboy catturd.

yes, really. No I am not fucking joking.

Under normal conditions I wouldn't talk about this or reveal it, because who the fuck cares? I'm just some dude on the internet, drunk, both on alcohol, and the pseudo-anonymous equivalent of bragging rights.

You know how many women I turned down because I could? You know how fucking drunk I am? They say a drunk man's words are a sober man's thoughts. Well, I'm not usually honest like this because the internet is full of false braggarts, and you tell people the truth and they don't fucking believe you.

I swear, it seems like I made some faustian bargain at some time, and can achieve no fame or lasting wealth in my life--to save my life.

Shit, I was talking to a chinese women who ran a bank in china (yes, really), who advised me to buy into bitcoin early on. Didn't have the money to. Woulda been a fucking millionaire if I did.
*Non-obvious* Ideas that major corporations are now persuing? Yeah those were sitting in my card index since the early 2000s.

I helped two people build and sell businesses. One for me tens of thousands. Another for millions. Yes, really. Got zero, and I mean, *zero* credit for it.

Point is, doesn't matter how famous you are, or coulda been, Doesn't matter the ideas you have, or had.

The world doesn't promote runners-up, or hasbeens, or wannabes, or could-bes.

What matters is execution.

If you're wandering through life, wondering when you're lucky break will be, stop. You have to realize, you make your own luck. Recognize the difference between what you can control, and what you can, and work on promoting your own ideas or business or values, instead of other people's dreams.

And for those wondering, yes I am drunk, and no, I ain't fucking kidding you in anything I wrote here.

The most important lesson I learned is this:
First work on your own success, before you work on the success of others.

p.s.

I give surprisingly good advice for someone who doesn't benchmark well on traditional measures of success. I know, even I was shocked when I looked at the statistics.

I just watched this documentary called "take your pills" and seeing the weird programmer they interviewed I got curious about how many DevRanters use Addy as a coding booster? Would you consider it just a normal performance enhancer like caffeine? Have you tried it?

I've only noticed coffee heads like myself here and I was wondering if some of the people that aren't are against the use of Adderall too.

I'd love to hear some thoughts on the subject.

I was just wondering guys. If all developers speak English.

By speak English I mean easily able to communicate at a basic level because from what I know... all programming language had their base vocabulary in English language.

Just wondering!?

Stakeholder: Is it possible for you to set up the website to automatically resubmit failed online orders? Last time there were failed orders, we tried submitting manually but a lot failed because they were tickets for the previous day.

Product Manager: What are your thoughts, Developer?

Me: This wouldn’t be worth the labor. It’s something that would rarely be used. There are very few orders that fail. I’d be surprised if it was even once a week. The recent bunch of order failures that SH is talking about happened because the ticketing server (separate from the website) couldn’t handle all the requests. Let’s say you had resubmission logic to try 3x before allowing the fail. It wouldn’t work because the server was overwhelmed already. Let’s say you had a background task to check for failures every ten minutes and resubmit those. It might not be helpful because the customer could have already gone to a ticketing window for help with the failed order.

SH: But what if it happens again???

Me: The solution is to make sure the ticketing server can handle the influx of requests. We can coordinate with that team. Wait. Why did you wait until the next day to resubmit orders in the admin panel? A lot of those failures happened when there were many hours left in the business day. For each order failure, an email notification is sent to the sales support email in real time. Who is monitoring that inbox? Someone must be looking at it because the sales support email is listed multiple times on the ticketing website as the technical assistance email.

SH: I know that email notification goes to the engineering team.

Me: My question is not about the engineering team. I asked who is monitoring the sales support inbox.

SH: That email … gets filtered.

Me and Product Manager: 😧🤯🤬

PM: First, you need to stop filtering that email notification. Second, your team needs to come up with a flow to handle failed orders because you told us you don’t have one. After you tried this and there’s still an issue, then we can revisit.

—-
If you’re wondering why I said no, I’m a team of one and I have a bunch of other development tasks on my plate. I’m not automating a manual task that rarely has to be performed.

A friend of my mom asks me transfer some files from her hard disk to her pendrive because I am supposedly *good with computers*.

As an obedient son, I go to her house to do the needful.

I switch on the laptop and plug both right in. At this point, I am wondering if this really my life is for.

Lost in my thoughts, I accidentally format her hard disk. Now I freak out. Seeing no possible way out, I remove both and say her work is done.

I quickly leave the house and never look back. To this day, I have never gone back to her house.

Hello all, I was wondering how some of you guys manage stress on the job? I recently got a new "real" job as a lead php dev working 9-5 in down town Houston. I must say, this "normal" work schedule is kicking my ass. I'm constantly exhausted, stressed out and am now having second thoughts about the position. What should I do?

I'm fairly new (less than a year) to programming and I'm just wondering what everyone's thoughts are about this.

Is taking college math courses necessary to be a good programmer?

I am learning online and I'm worried I won't be a great programmer without all the math. The last course I took was Trig :/

Also add any suggestions you have. Thanks all!

Was reading something about delusional disorder, and it got a bit scary cuz it made me question myself. Now, I tell you why.

I have a bad memory when it comes to trivial stuff. And I am, by occupation and therefore on a daily basis, creative and imaginative. Having pretty strong imagination means that I often have to ask myself "did that really happen or did I imagine it?" Which, given anxiety, I imagine all types of scenarios before they happen. (Parallel universes got nothing on me 😎)

So, now I'm wondering, where is the line between imagination and delusion, and how can you say what's real and what's not, be it offline (distorted memory) or online (schizophrenia).

One idea could be that video recording could help confirm, but we read emotions and vibe in real-time, and often those can't be recorded.

... Idk. Maybe I'm overthinking it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thank you for reading my half-baked thoughts!

There’s a lot of talk about contributions to open source now, and I was wondering what are some of your incentives to contribute?

In the past, the only times I have contributed to projects is when it’s my friend’s or I’m fixing the bugs for that project because the codebase I’m working on uses it. I am selfish right, so why would I go and search for platforms to contribute on when I don’t even know the creators themselves or where it’s used? I suppose if the project was used for altruistic means in some way, I’d be more inclined. Frankly though, I’m too lazy to contribute now, and I’m also super busy to consider it usually. What are your thoughts?

Deep thoughts and wondering if any IT sectors will meet the same fate.

If everyone in the job market would be paid the same salary.
What job you would've chosen which is not programming?

What are the symptoms of a broken openssh server?

I completely lost access with connection reset by peer, however, earlier today I kept having my session auto disconnect on only one server, the only way I could gain access is to remove and then install openssh again

But on this particular server, I have not even changed ssh port, why did it get broken?

I'm trying to get into Full stack web development, coming from 1.5 years of Android development. During my studies tried out Backbone with Node once and played with Angular, hated it though.

As this is already some time ago, I was wondering which Tech Stack you would consider being

a) Beginner friendly
b) also ready for use in business?

I recently learnt Kotlin and am quite happy with it, I'd like to go deeper on that. Also, the company I'm hoping to work for talked about Drop Wizard, Spring, Vue, Angular and React.

Curious to hear your thoughts, Thank you :)

So I'm thinking about trying arch linux finally :) I've always heard the installation process was complex but I'm wondering if it's gotten easier or maybe it's just all hype? I'm very used to ubuntu and debian based installations. What are your guys thoughts on this?

Hey I have a career dilemma, was wondering if anyone experienced that and if anyone could give a tip on how to resolve it maybe.

TL;DR: I'm a Front End dev, who wants to become an expert in everything but obviously can't. What do I do? How do I choose what to learn?

Longer version. I started with Front End. Now i'm doing alright with Vue, React, bit of Angular, and other related to the stack tech. Then I started learning python because of a project I was doing (personal client). Didn't go far with this one. I still find it interesting esp. in the machine learning context, which I also want to do. Now I'm studying .NET, because of a project I'm currently doing at a company (full time, I'm doing ReactJS front end there tho). And I'm also studying for GCP exam, because I wanna know how to deploy solutions to the cloud. But one also needs to secure them, so I'm looking at some courses on Cybrary, in a search for appropriate courses.

I feel overwhelmed and unproductive. I feel like i need to specialize just in one field with some general knowledge about other areas. So I feel like I have to select what I do/learn carefully.

Any thoughts? How did you plan your career? What kind of goals did and do you set for yourself? Are you happy with those now once you achieve them?

I'd love to hear some stories. :)

Hi All,

I am currently doing a degree through the Open University. it's a BSc (Hons) in Computing and IT (Software) which is the closest they offer to a full on software engineering degree.

Anyway, I'm not having any second thoughts about it or anything like that, but I was wondering if a degree is going to make that much difference when it comes to applying for jobs when I'm already employed as a developer.

Hey everyone, just wondering how to learn about Grammar.

No I don't mean English grammar.

In particular, I'm looking at PlyPlus grammar. Any thoughts for learning material?

Not sure what I should put this under but I just had an app idea. I've tried journaling but can never keep going for more than a few days but if I have like a conversation with someone one like "how was your day?" or I start an internal dialogue, I can go on for a while and just feels natural.

So I'm thinking what would be good is if I had a virtual chat buddy/psych like a continuous QA but but also smarter then cyberduck and can save the whole chat. So it basically is/can become a journal or even a blog post.

Wondering if there's something like that already or some chatbot could help?

Think I heard something before that Facebook may have one but I think it's a huge ML program that needs to be trained on a lot of data.

Any your thoughts on this idea?

Shower thoughts: i wondering something silly, for example address 0xf006 points to address 0xf003 which has value of 0x0000 how did it know if it is a 0 or a NULL

So going to university in about 1 year, and ive been wondering, if I'm going into computer science or software engineering (my top 2 programs of choice), what laptop specs would u recommend? I'm currently running a computer with 8gb DDR3 RAM and a 5 year old Intel Pentium, integrated graphics, needless to say I think an upgrade would benefit. Thoughts?

what do you all think about a game jam but instead of having 24hrs+ you only get 5 hours? I've been wondering how this would be seen and whether this a good idea, so I came here to see your thoughts

So I work in a school as a network manager and general admin, but it is commonly known I am a programmer too. Anywho, I got asked by a member of staff to find a way to add all teachers to the classrooms (we use Google classroom) and I wrote down what he asked. I spent my evening at home working on it and got it 50% done and finished at work the next day. This member of staff comes in and was happy, so I read back what he asked me for and he turns around and says "Oh, I wanted you to add all classrooms to one account, didn't I say that" I tried to explain he didn't but he chocked it up to me not listening. I even showed him the piece of paper on which I wrote down what he wanted but no, it turned into a shouting match and I told him to leave. I finished the script but I'm wondering if I should actually give it to him. What's your thoughts?

So.. wondering what people's thoughts are on this.

So I started working for a company late last year, so far I've done four projects (one was a test), the contract and hourly rate was sorted out and all happy. However, in the three months I've worked there the terms of payment has been changed two times (both times within 30 days).

First (originally) was being paid for x amount of hours any hours over that moves on to an hourly rate.

Second change moved over to a fixed rate per month.

And currently I'm now just on an hourly rate.

The justification for the change in terms was "the current terms isn't working out for us" - as far as I'm aware no-one elses terms have changed. However the quickness of the term changes here do concern me.

Now I do have some personal issues (disability for one) as well as other issues so I don't do things faster than other other devs, however, I get the job done and I stick to deadlines (and yes the company is aware of my personal issues).

In terms of current projects I'm only doing tweaks to current projects so my hours at the moment per week are slow (I have been asked about new projects) but I've heard nothing whatsoever on start dates etc.

Just an FYI the current work done, I've had no issues whatsoever.

So I would like some thoughts on what you'll do if you were in this situation as personally I can think of two reasons but I would rather see what other people think here.

I'm working on my own smarthome project (how rare nowdays...:) ). I'm using microsoft's git repo. I'm not make my project open source, not because I'm a douchebag, but because I'm a very bad coder. My biggest fear is not the fact, that it would be commented as wtf is this code, but receiving pull requests from pros and I wouldn't even understand their code.
This is my "training" project (python, flask, apscheduler, sqlalchemy, bootstrap2, mqtt, micropython)
I'm thinking to make it public without accepting external pulls, just for me to learn more.
I'm just wondering your thoughts on this.
Thoughts?

Random thoughts...
Just implemented policy-based authorization in dotnet core, long story short to lock an endpoint to a certain policy I just add: [Authorization(Policy = "NAME")]
on top of function/controller declaration

Was wondering how it is done in other languages, like NodeJs, Java, Kotlin ...etc

So one of my rants got ++ more than 30, I was wondering like how long does it take to get those laptop stickers ? Bcz I have seen rants saying either they haven't received it or got after a year or so..
I would love to hear your thoughts about it ..

Co own a service with another team.

Service is something me or my team have hardly worked on. Other team have far more knowledge on it. There is no active development that we do on it so no opportunity to really learn on it.

Some months back was involved in migrating the tests of this service to run on another system. I was unsuccessful and asked this other team a lot for help. This was just migrating, nothing to make you more familiar with code etc but just seeing the config and wondering what to change. The CID team then said we could temporarily add this service to use old system for builds.

Now get request from CID team they're diagnosing the issue for the service and that if they need help if we'd be able to help. I said other team better as they understand better. Manager of other team then replies with big message tagging my manager and PO and frankly says why the fuck am I forwarding this to other team, we should learn the service too as co owned. While I get their point, shouldn't stop assisting another team for the sake of knowledge transfer, should have other dedicated sessions for that.

Would be open to hear thoughts, is she in the right here? Frankly we already own loads of other stuff and never have time to look at this service that somehow the team owns

Alright so I have a question, hopefully this is the right platform to ask. As an entry level software developer I have trouble knowing my value. So I was wondering what an entry level developer is expected to do on their first job straight out of college. What responsibilities do they or should they have. And what kind of work are they expected to do? For example should they be building applications from start to finish or more smaller tasked work or bug fixes. Thoughts?

Whatever be the current trend on Linked-In, at the end of the day the product development life cycle remains quite the same.

Still, as developers which general domains in software do you think would flourish in the near future?

My picks (not in order) -
>> Cyber security : automation, both offensive and defensive
>> Block chain : trustable data platforms
>> Applied AI : a few key models, applied to all niches, bettering existing UX
>> IOT : wearables, embeddables, smart appliances
>> AR : Navigation prompts, real time info about real life objects
>> VR : Immerse entertainment. (Metaverse 🤮)
>> Quantum computing : first gen costly commercial releases, new algos

What would you add or subtract from this?

What would you choose between 'clean code but just completed half of the tasks' or 'messy code but completed all of the tasks' ?

Is Snake Case named after Python or is Python named after Snake Case?
🤔🤔

Looking to play around with Xamarin - probably a 2d game - wondering what graphics library to start on. I have done some projects before with jmonkey (open GL for java).

Cocosharp looks to be unmaintained. Monosharp has some advocates at my workplace. Or there is a port of Google's skia. Any thoughts?

Anyone here using openSUSE as their main flavor? I'm spinning up an instance in AWS to test out now and wondering if there's anyone that might have some insights/opinions to openSUSE.

Like, Do you like it? Is it stable for you? Any weird quirks or issues that you've run into while using it?

Thank you in advance for stopping by and sharing your thoughts! I really appreciate the feedback =)

Hey there! So, I'm kind of stuck in my own thoughts right now. I've got this goal of becoming really good at DSA, Maths, and computer networks in just one year, while also finding time to do some web development and open-source projects. But here's the problem - I'm just an average person when it comes to those first three things. I don't even know where to start or what to do, and whenever I try to focus on one thing, I end up questioning myself and feeling frustrated. So, I was wondering if anyone could lend a hand and offer me some advice or support to help me reach my goal.