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Search - "work it out together"
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I used to work with a guy who had 2 PH.Ds, in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and over 600 patents but I kid you not the guy could not use the coffee machine. Now it's not like this coffee machine was as easy as a Keurig, it was some $20,000 espresso machine that took a while to figure out but I tried teaching him how to use it a few dozen times and still he couldn't get it right. It got to the point where I thought he was faking it so that others would make it for him so I offered him $500 if he could figure it out. Still nope. So for the remaining 2 years we worked together I made him coffee whenever he wanted, 2-4 times a day, and he bought me lunch everyday. Before I left the company I bought him a Keurig so that when I left he'd still have coffee.19
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We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.
When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.
A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.
I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.
When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.
I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.
After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).
OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.
I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.
Computers helped me through a tough childhood.
They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.
I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...
But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.22 -
Finally did it. Quit my job.
The full story:
Just came back from vacation to find out that pretty much all the work I put at place has been either destroyed by "temporary fixes" or wiped clean in favour of buggy older versions. The reason, and this is a direct quote "Ari left the code riddled with bugs prior to leaving".
Oh no. Oh no I did not you fucker.
Some background:
My boss wrote a piece of major software with another coder (over the course of month and a balf). This software was very fragile as its intention was to demo specific features we want to adopt for a version 2 of it.
I was then handed over this software (which was vanilajs with angular) and was told to "clean it up" introduce a typing system, introduce a build system, add webpack for better module and dependency management, learn cordova (because its essential and I had no idea of how it works). As well as fix the billion of issues with data storage in the software. Add a webgui and setup multiple databses for data exports from the app. Ensure that transmission of the data is clean and valid.
What else. This software had ZERO documentation. And I had to sit my boss for a solid 3hrs plus some occasional questions as I was developing to get a clear idea of whats going on.
Took a bit over 3 weeks. But I had the damn thing ported over. Cleaned up. And partially documented.
During this period, I was suppose to work with another 2 other coders "my team". But they were always pulled into other things by my Boss.
During this period, I kept asking for code reviews (as I was handling a very large code base on my own).
During this period, I was asking for help from my boss to make sure that the visual aspect of the software meets the requirements (there are LOTS of windows, screens, panels etc, which I just could not possibly get to checking on my own).
At the end of this period. I went on vacation (booked by my brothers for my bday <3 ).
I come back. My work is null. The Boss only looked at it on the friday night leading up to my return. And decided to go back to v1 and fix whatever he didnt like there.
So this guy calls me. Calls me on a friggin SUNDAY. I like just got off the plane. Was heading to dinner with my family.
He and another coder have basically nuked my work. And in an extremely hacky way tied some things together to sort of work. Moreever, the webguis that I setup for the database viewing. They were EDITED ON THE PRODUCTION SERVER without git tracking!!
So monday. I get bombarded with over 20 emails. Claiming that I left things in an usuable state with no documentation. As well as I get yelled at by my boss for introducing "unnecessary complicated shit".
For fuck sakes. I was the one to bring the word documentation into the vocabulary of this company. There are literally ZERO documentated projects here. While all of mine are at least partially documented (due to lack of time).
For fuck sakes, during my time here I have been basically begging to pull the coder who made the admin views for our software and clean up some of the views so that no one will ever have to touch any database directly.
To say this story is the only reason I am done is so not true.
I dedicated over a year to this company. During this time I saw aspects of this behaviour attacking other coders as well as me. But never to this level.
I am so friggin happy that I quit. Never gonna look back.14 -
When CS professors are lazy to grade so they think they can just give you any grade without you questioning them...
Me: Hi Professor, I see I got a 94 out of 100 on my 2nd project. Your comments said, some of my functions didn't pass your junit test cases.
Prof: Yes!
Me: How come? I tested it several times before submitting and they all passed the test cases. You gave us the test cases to write the code for.
Prof: Yeah, but some of your functions aren't passing on mine.
Me: Since I'm in your office, can you please run it again so I can see?
Prof: Are you doubting me? I gave you the project and I'm telling you they're not passing my test cases.
Me: I just want to make sure because I did work really hard on this project to pass all the test cases. *Runs the code to show him on my laptop and they all pass*
Prof: Fine, let's run it together on mine again. *He runs it and they all pass on his laptop*..hmm, that's weird. They didn't pass when I ran them. Maybe, because of the IDE I used earlier.
Well, looks like you get your 100.
Me: Thank you but which IDE did you ran it in that failed? Just wondering..🤔
Prof: Doesn't matter now...they're passing. Just be ready for your next project...you guys will be writing the test cases yourself this time..9 -
This was my first freelancer project. Just dropped out of school, i think i was 17. No money, no proper hardware, i had a very old laptop & stolen wifi from our neighbor. I lived in a very small room at my mom’s flat, she wanted me out as soon as i turn 18. At the time my plan was to work on freelancer stuff and make my own games. “It will be fine, fuck school, who needs school? 😂“ I haven’t really finished anything back then, so i only had a few wip hobby projects to show ppl as my references. I saw a freelancer job posting. The task was to make a simple quiz game for mobile, it paid 350$. Back then that was a lot of money for me so i took it. I met the client, he said “2-3 week tops, i send you everything, you do the code” Cool. I finally had a “job”😃. The 2-3 weeks turned into a 8 month blur of all-nighting and just implement one more thing and its finished. I did not really have any experience on how to deal with clients and i really needed this project to finally have something on my porfolio. I motivated myself with “if i can finish this i can finish anything”. I think the story of my most definitive all-nighting was 3 months into the development. I finally got everything from the client so it was like just put it together and its done. The client wanted 300 levels, beeing a noob i was i started making all the 300 unity scenes by hand, aligning the pictures, the ui, testing each level, making adjustments to the code, etc.. after a really long night and a fuckton of caffeine i was done. I sent it to the client at around 9 am and gone to sleep. When i woke up i checked my emails to saw this: Cool! But can we do hints? (wich needed a fuckton of rework of my code) I think i had my first mental breakdown while working on the project. After that he wanted more modifications and because i made every level by hand i had to remake all of them like 10 times 😂
But in the end it turned out positive, he really helped me to start my carrier, we became sord of friends and the project gave me a lot of confidence and experience on how to deal with stuff when shit goes wrong because everything that can go wrong in a project gone wrong. It was the most valuable developer lesson. Plus it sounds so cool to say “i was born in development hell, b*tch!”🕶
I attached a pic of the laptop i worked on 😂
Thanks for reading 😃32 -
Boss: make this thing
Me: yeah no worries. Where is the spec?
Boss: We don't have enough one but we outsourced the design so call him
Designer: haven't started yet
Me: excellent
Boss: I'm going on holiday. I'll leave this to you.
Me: erm ok. I'm having a few problems getting stuff out of the designer though.
*2 weeks later and still no designs*
Boss: I'm back. Where is the progress?!
Me: indeed.
*1 week later i get half designs that sort of make sense*
Boss: hurry up!
*1 week later*
Me: designer you're busting my balls here
Designer: yeah lol
Me to boss: still having problems. No idea what I'm doing.
Boss: deal with it
*2 days later*
PM: we are demoing it to clients tomorrow
Me: brilliant. I'll become a magician then.
* Meeting goes well and no one notices the thing is a bit buggy*
*2 days later*
Me to boss and pm: you already know whats going on but I'll keep trying.
Boss: ok it's just a proof of concept anyway.
Designer: yeah here's the rest of the designs lol
*1 week later, the designs made no sense, no idea what they wanted but hey it's a proof of concept so I'll just do my best...*
*suddenly again, hey you have 1 week before we sell it. Lol. smashes a product together as fast as humanly possible, due to half designs and no time to do it right even html classes and CSS aren't right - didn't know things would be repeated at the time. No time to fix entire thing. Luckily just a proof of concept*
New senior developer: hey boss just said this is being sold tomorrow.
Me: wtf..It's a proof of concept and i was given longer...
New senior developer: no
Me: :(
Senior developer and all colleagues: it's full of bugs and doesn't work
Me: yes that will happen without specs, random tight deadlines, no designs that made sense and a total of about a week and a half to make an entire system for multiple user types to make applications, send messages, post jobs, handle all paperwork and move paperwork among different user types as they go through applications. I told everyone what was going on but i get no support...
*Silence*
Boss: wtf i gave you so long! All i know is my entire staff is working on a product that should be done ages ago
Me: ok, however i have said almost every day i need-
Boss: I'm not interested
*I finish my placement year and never get any promised work or the job offer*
Seems legit?16 -
Client: Can you provide some kind of guaranteed timeline that you're going to be able to move our website to our new servers with the optimizations implemented? I know you said it should take a week, but we have 3 weeks to get this moved over and we cannot afford to be double billed. I'm waiting to fire up the new server until you can confirm.
Me: As I said, it SHOULD take about a week, but that's factoring in ONLY the modifications being made for optimization and a QA call to review the website. This does not account for your hosting provider needing to spin up a new server.
We also never offered to move your website over to said new server. I sent detailed instructions for your provider to move a copy of the entire website over and have it configured and ready to point your domain over to, in order to save time and money since your provider won't give us the access necessary to perform a server-to-server transfer. If you are implying that I need to move the website over myself, you will be billed for that migration, however long it takes.
Client: So you're telling me that we paid $950 for 10 hours of work and that DOESN'T include making the changes live?
Me: Why would you think that the 10 hours that we're logged for the process of optimizing your website include additional time that has not been measured? When you build out a custom product for a customer, do you eat the shipping charges to deliver it? That is a rhetorical question of course, because I know you charge for shipping as well. My point is that we charge for delivery just as you do, because it requires our time and manpower.
All of this could have been avoided, but you are the one that enforced the strict requirement that we cannot take the website down for even 1 hour during off-peak times to incorporate the changes we made on our testbed, so we're having to go through this circus in order to deliver the work we performed.
I'm not going to give you a guarantee of any kind because there are too many factors that are not within our control, and we're not going to trap ourselves so you have a scapegoat to throw under the bus if your boss looks to you for accountability. I will reiterate that we estimate it would take about a week to implement, test and run through a full QA together, as we have other clients within our queue and our time must be appropriately blocked out each day. However, the longer you take to pull the trigger on this new server, the longer it will take on my end to get the work scheduled within the queue.
Client: If we get double billed, we're taking that out of what we have remaining to pay you.
Me: On the subject of paying us, you signed a contract acknowledging that you would pay us the remaining 50% after you approved the changes, which you did last week, in order for us to deliver the project. Thank you for the reminder that your remaining balance has not yet been paid. I'll have our CFO resend the invoice for you to remit payment before we proceed any further.
---
I love it when clients give me shit. I just give it right back.6 -
This is kind of a horror story, with a happing ending. It contains a lot of gore images, and some porn. Very long story.
TL;DR Network upgrade
Once upon a time, there were two companies HA and HP, both owned by HC. Many years went by and the two companies worked along side each one another, but sometimes there were trouble, because they weren't sure who was supposed to bill the client for projects HA and HP had worked on together.
At HA there was an IT guy, an imbecile of such. He's very slow at doing his job, doesn't exactly understand what he's doing, nor security principles.
The IT guy at HA also did some IT work for HP from time to time when needed. But he was not in charge of the infrastructure for HP, that was the jobb for one developer who didn't really know what he was doing either.
Whenever a new server was set up at HP, the developer tried many solutions, until he landed on one, but he never removed the other tested solutions, and the config is scattered all around. And no documentation!!
Same goes with network, when something new was added, the old was never removed or reconfigured to something else.
One dark winter, a knight arrived at HP. He had many skills. Networking, server management, development, design and generally a fucking awesome viking.
This genius would often try to cleanse the network and servers, and begged his boss to let him buy new equipment to replace the old, to no prevail.
Whenever he would look in the server room, he would get shivers down his back.
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/Ie9x3YC33C.j...)
One and a half year later, the powerful owners in HA, HP and HC decided it was finally time to merge HA and HP together to HS. The knight thought this was his moment, he should ask CEO if he could be in charge of migrating the network, and do a complete overhault so they could get 1Gb interwebz speeds.
The knight had to come up with a plan and some price estimates, as the IT guy also would do this.
The IT guy proposed his solution, a Sonicwall gateway to 22 000 NOK, and using a 3rd party company to manage it for 3000 NOK/month.
"This is absurd", said the knight to the CEO and CXO, "I can come up with a better solution that is a complete upgrade. And it will be super easy to manage."
The CEO and CXO gave the knight a thumbs up. The race was on. We're moving in 2 months, I got to have the equipment by then, so I need a plan by the end of the week.
He roamed the wide internet, looked at many solutions, and ended up with going for Ubiquiti's Unifi series. Cheap, reliable and pretty nice to look at.
The CXO had mentioned the WiFi at HA was pretty bad, as there was WLAN for each meeting room, and one for the desks, so the phone would constantly jump between networks.
So the knight ended up with this solution:
2x Unifi Securtiy Gateway Pro 4
2x Unifi 48port
1x Unifi 10G 16port
5x Unifi AP-AC-Lite
12x pairs of 10G unifi fibre modules
All with a price tag around the one Sonicwall for 22 000 NOK, not including patch cables, POE injectors and fibre cables.
The knight presented this to the CXO, whom is not very fond of the IT guy, and the CXO thought this was a great solution.
But the IT guy had to have a say at this too, so he was sent the solution and had 2 weeks to dispute the soltion.
Time went by, CXO started to get tired of the waiting, so he called in a meeting with the knight and the IT guy, this was the IT guys chance to dispute the solution.
All he had to say was he was familiar with the Sonicwall solution, and having a 3rd party company managing it is great.
He was given another 2 weeks to dispute the solution, yet nothing happened.
The CXO gave the thumbs up, and the knight orders the equipment.
At this time, the knight asks the IT guy for access to the server room at HA, and a key (which would take 2 months to get sorted, because IT guys is a slow imbecile)
The horrors, Oh the horrors, the knight had never seen anything like this before.
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/HfptwEh9qT.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/HfptwEh9qT.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/hmOE2ZuQuE.j...)
(Image: https://i.bratteng.xyz/4Flmkx6slQ.j...)
What are all these for, why is there a fan ductaped to on of the servers.
WHAT IS THIS!
Why are there cables tied in a knot.
WHY!
These are questions we never will know the answers too.
The knight needs access to the servers, and sonicwall to see how this is configured.
After 1.5 month he gains access to the sonicwall and one of the xserve.
What the knight discovers baffles him.
All ports are open, sonicwall is basically in bridge mode and handing out public IPs to every device connected to it.
No VLANs, everything, just open...10 -
Not my mom, but my wife's whole family. I'm a software developer.
So we're invited to her grandmother's 85th birthday celebration with pretty much every family member they could think to invite. 100+ people, and we all sit down in a circle in a huge room to watch a video that my wife's father and aunts/uncles put together.
They start the video and there's no sound. I'm a software developer, so I'm not an expert in hardware issues. I try to turn invisible, because every tech person knows what comes next, and this is in the center of a room of people I don't know.
After about 15 minutes of people struggling to get the audio working, one of the people remembers I "work with computer". Soon I have a dozen people calling me to the center of the room.
I begrudgingly make my way to the computer and projector. Upon inspection, I find that the computer is connected via VGA to the projector.
Me: "This cable only carries video. You need a different kind of cable, or you can hook up an AUX cable--the kind you use for headphones."
Other Guy: "I used this cable earlier and the audio was working."
Me: "...that's weird. Well, can we try plugging in an AUX cable?"
Yet Another Guy: "Will this help?" Holds up an HDMI cable
Me: "Oh, yeah! That should do it."
Other Guy: "I tried plugging that in, but it didn't change anything."
Me: "Hmmm..." Quickly unplug VGA and plug in HDMI, then click play.
The sound comes out in its full cheesy music glory. Everybody cheers, and I walk back to my seat. Throughout the rest of party, I'm approached by various other family members who ask me if I can fix X since I'm a "computer guy". Isn't it great to work in tech?12 -
Summing up many ridiculous meetings I've been in.
Many years ago we hired someone for HR that came from a large fortune 500 company, really big deal at the time.
Over the next 6 months, she scheduled weekly to bi-weekly, 1 to 2 hour meetings with *everyone* throughout the day. Meeting topics included 'How to better yourself', 'Trust the winner inside you'...you get the idea.
One 2-hour meeting involved taking a personality test. Her big plan was to force everyone to take the test, and weed out anyone who didn't fit the 'company culture'. Whatever that meant.
Knowing the game being played, several of us answered in the most introverted, border-line sociopath, 'leave me the frack alone!' way we could.
When she got the test results back, she called an 'emergency' meeting with all the devs and the VP of IS, deeply concerned about our fit in the company.
HR: "These tests results were very disturbing, but don't worry, none of you are being fired today. Together, we can work as team to bring you up to our standards. Any questions before we begin?"
Me: "Not a question, just a comment about the ABC personality test you used."
<she was a bit shocked I knew the name of the test because it was anonymized on the site and written portion>
Me: "That test was discredited 5 years ago and a few company's sued because the test could be used to discriminate against a certain demographic. It is still used in psychology, but along with other personality tests. The test is not a one-size-fits-all."
VP, in the front row, looked back at me, then at her.
HR: "Well....um...uh...um...We're not using the test that way. No one is getting fired."
DevA: "Then why are we here?"
DevB:"What was the point of the test? I don't understand?"
HR: "No, no...you don't understand...that wasn't the point at all, I'm sorry, this is getting blown out of proportion."
VP: "What is getting blown out of proportion? Now I'm confused. I think we all need some cooling off. Guys, head back to the office and let me figure out the next course of action."
She was fired about two weeks later. Any/all documentation relating to the tests were deleted from the server.16 -
The colleague:
- I can't work, my chair is uncomfortable
- I can't work, my chair is not ergonomic
- I can't work, my desk is too small
- I can't work, my legs are uncomfortable
- I can't work, my keyboard is not ergonomic
- I can't work on this task, John knows how to do it better
- I will only work on <this> type of tasks. I will not work on others
*gets assigned <other> task; browses the internet all day; at the EOD task isn't even touched*
- I can't work with Jack, he's too noisy
- I can't come to the office on time, there's traffic in the city
- I couldn't come yesterday, I was out of town. No, I will not log a vacation day - I was NOT on vacation. It's personal
- I can't<...>
Manager, 2 days to the end of said colleague's probation period:
- I am very sorry to tell you this, but our attitudes are not in line and we cannot continue working together. Since this is your 5th warning, we have to let you go.
The colleague:
- What?? How come?? I did NOT see this coming... You can't do this! I work here! This is where I work and you can't fire me!
*got his things from his desk and left. Never came back*
Everyone at the office:
- YAYYYY!!!! Let's have a shorter day today and let's celebrate this riddance in a pub! (manager agreed)7 -
After months and months of unrealistic deadlines, pulling late night shifts coupled with an insane commute and two very small children at home I had a total burnout. Turned up to work one morning, and stared at the Java code I had been writing for the past couple of days and it might as well have been written in Martian. The more I stared, and the more I tried to keep things together internally the less I was able to make sense of anything - just a random jumble of characters on screen that were as intelligible as the green scrolling lines from The Matrix.
My office manager saw that I was obviously in some distress and took me into a meeting room to have a quick chat - and there I was, a grown man of 35 bawling my eyes out like a two year old. Not the most edifying moment of my life.
However, the company couldn't have been more supportive afterwards; one of my colleagues drove the 100 miles to get me home in my car and took a train back up to the office; my GP signed me off work for six months and treated me for severe depression; the office instituted stricter working policies - not on the developers, but the sales/PM teams that were handing down ridiculous timescales simply so they could get a sale.
For my part, I've learnt to push back and say "NO!" - work is not your life, it's an important part of your life, but my no means everything. Don't feel beholden to a company to meet unrealistic targets that you haven't agreed to. Talk.3 -
I was very troubled as a teenager. I had some pretty intense family issues that led me to smoking cigarettes at 12, marijuana at 13, and drinking everyday at 15. By 17, I was using other "party favors", as we called them, on an every day basis. I left high school at the beginning of my final year, about a week before I turned 18, moved out of my family's home and started working three different part time jobs.
This was the lowest point of my life. I've never felt so much like a fuck-up and loser than back in those days. I hated myself, hated what I had become, hated everything I did. Hate hate hate. I spent a year like this, pitying myself, seeking sympathy from people when I shouldnt have been, basically seeking out someone who would tell me that I wasnt so awful.
That never happened. I only deepened the hole that I had dug for myself.
Then I got angry. I thought it wasn't fair that everyone else was enjoying life except for me. I wanted to find a passion. I wanted to find excitement again. I wanted to look forward to something else besides going back to bed.
When I turned 19, I decided that I was going to take control of my life because I was so angry with my position at the time.
I put myelf into college. I made myself stay awake and focus on schoolwork and internal improvement. I started facing my flaws and defects head-on and conquering them rather than letting them eat me from the inside out.
Now, I am only a couple months away from turning 21.
I rarely drink now. I quit smoking cigarettes after almost 9 years.
I graduate this December, and enroll into my next degree program in January.
Today, I signed employment paperwork with the company I interned at over the summer. I am now a full-time DevOps Engineer with salary, bonuses, 401k, and full health coverage.
My boyfriend and I just moved into our own house that we are renting together. No more needing shitty roommates.
I have most of the debt that my mother left in my name paid off.
A couple of years ago, I couldn't have cared less about my life or how I turned out. I truly expected to get arrested, wind up homeless, or just flat-out end up dead.
I never thought I would see myself where I am today.
I am extremely proud of myself for turning my future around. I know some of you may read this and think I'm an idiot, or that this seems trivial because I am so young. Thats okay.
I have learned that hard work always pays off, and that sometimes you must sacrifice what is expedient to gain what is meaningful.9 -
tl;dr
A former colleague of mine, who used to suck at web development is now a kick-ass who knows how to get things done.
We are of the same age. We got hired on this company at the same time. He was a front-end guy, and I am a full-stack. So, we were like a yin and yang in development roles.
Initially, we have this big gap of skillset. I was solely assigned on a project which I worked on from ground up, while he was barely able to make an HTML table look properly on a separate existing project. My impression of him that time is that he's kind of a simpleton. But, I was wrong.
Few months passed, our seniors left the company, and I was promoted to be a team lead. Eventually, I was teamed up with this guy. I had a hard time working with him, but I was able to share him some of my knowledge.
Every time I teach him something new, he's exploring more. From proper indentation, writing SASS, using streaming build system (GulpJS), etc., he's making sure that he applies it on every project he's assigned to — even practicing it on his personal projects during break time. I can see him improve each day.
After a year in the company, he became so much better. I even ended up teaching him more than just front-end stuff. I shared the gospel of Jesus of PHP community (Jeffrey Way), tought him how to set up his own server, how to configure DNS, etc.. Again, it's tough for him even to write a simple for..loop statements. But, after a lot of consistent practice, he became better and better. We've done quite a number of projects together. He's fun to work with because of his "hungry" spirit.
Unfortunately, he was laid-off from the company, and I worked on the company til the very end. We parted ways.
He went back to his hometown to launch his own e-commerce business — apparently, this was the "practice" project he was working on the whole time during breaktimes.
Another year has passed, that project worked out and got a funding. And now, he's launching his second project. The best thing is, when I lookup his projects on builtwith.com, every damn stack I tought him, he used it. It's like a project built by me.
To be honest, I am a little jealous of him, but at the same time, I am so proud of him. I thought him how to make things work, he thought me how to get things done. He's my inspiration now.5 -
Working with different nationalities is interesting, and sometimes kind of bewildering. And tiring.
I've been working with an Indian dev for a little while, and while she's a decent dev, interactions with her sometimes leave me a little puzzled. She glazes over serious topics, totally over-sensationalizes unimportant oddities, has yet to say the word "no," and she refers to the senior devs as (quote) "the legends." Also, when asked a question by her boss, like "Are you familiar with this?" Instead of a simple yes/no answer, she shows off a little. Fair, I do this sometimes too, but it's a regular thing with her. Also, like most Indians I've known and/or worked with, she has a very strict class-and-caste view of the world. It honestly makes me a little uncomfortable with how she views people, like certain people belong in certain boxes, how some boxes (and therefore their contents) are inherently better than others, and how it's difficult or simply impossible to move between boxes. My obviously westerner view of things is that you can pick where you want to be and what you want to do, and all it takes to get there is acquiring the proper skills and putting in the required effort. I see no boxes at all, just a sprawling web of trades/specialities. And those legends she talks about? They're good devs with more knowledge than me, but only one, maybe two of them are better devs. I see them as coworkers and leads, not legends. Legends would be the likes of Ada Lovelace, Dennis Ritchie, Yukihuro Matsumoto, and Satoshi Nakamoto. (Among others, obv.). To call a lead dev a legend is just strange to me, unless they're actually deserving, but we don't work with anyone like Wozniak or Carmack.
Since I'm apparently ranting about her a little, let me continue. She's also extremely difficult to understand. Not because of her words or her accent, but I can't ever figure out what she's trying to get across. The words fit together and make valid sentences, but the sentences don't often make sense with one another, and all put together... I'm just totally lost. To be a math nerd, like the two conversations are skew lines: very similar, but can never intersect. What's more, if I say I don't understand and ask for clarification, she refuses and says she doesn't want to confuse me further, and to just do what I think is best. It's incredibly frustrating.
Specifically, we're trying to split up functionality on a ticket -- she's part of a different dev team (accounting), and really should own the accounting portion since she will be responsible for it, but there's no clear boundary in the codebase. Trying to discuss this has been... difficult.
Anyway.
Sometimes other cultures' world views are just puzzling, or even kind of alien. This Irish/Chinese guy stayed at my parents' house for a week. He had red hair, and his facial features were about 3/4 Chinese. He looked strange and really interesting. I can't really explain it, but interacting with him felt like talking to basically any other guy I've known, except sometimes his mannerisms and behavior were just shockingly strange and unexpected, and he occasionally made so little sense to me that I was really taken aback.
This Chinese manager I had valued appearances and percieved honors more than anything else. He cared about punctuality and attire more than productivity. Instead of giving raises for good work or promotions, he would give fancy new titles and maybe allow you to move your desk somewhere with a better view of your coworkers. Not somewhere nicer; somewhere more prominent. How he made connections between concepts was also very strange, like the Chinese/Irish guy earlier. The site templating system was a "bridge?" Idk? He also talked luck with his investors (who were also Chinese), and they would often take the investment money to the casino to see if luck was in the company's favor. Not even kidding.
Also! the Iranian people I've known. They've shown very little emotion, except occasionally anger. If I tried to appease them, they would spurn and insult me, but if I met their anger, they would immediately return to being calm, and always seemed to respect me more afterward. Again, it's a little puzzling. By contrast, meeting an American's anger often makes them dislike you, and exceeding it tends to begin a rivalry.
It's neat seeing how people of different nationalities have different perspectives and world views and think so very differently. but it can also be a little tiring always having to translate and to switch behavior styles, sometimes even between sentences.
It's also frustrating when we simply cannot communicate despite having a language in common.random difficult communication too tired for anger or frustration nationalities tiring diversity root observes people23 -
Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.
Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.
Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.
I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!
My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!
He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.
We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.
Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.
These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?
Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON7 -
"Stop working from home. Fuck this. We do enough and don't get paid what we should. It is you and me for two campuses and you are far more knowledgeable and qualified than what they offered you at the beginning. I get that the benefits are killer but don't burn yourself out. I am not expecting you to work from home. Will not ask of it unless really is required and would much rather we have a few beers instead of getting together to finish bullshit deadlines...for 2 devs"
My current lead developer. He turned into my work best friend and he is really into the whole concept of "fuck it we ain't getting paid enough"
Dis b ma dude.2 -
Juniors are a fun bunch to work with.
Over confident, hero complex of that fresh graduate high, and then thrown in to the real world! Where there hopes and dreams are crushed in minutes when they see what monolithic applications really look like!!
But don't let that overwhelm you, your not going to be changing all of it any time soon, hell some of this code hasn't been touched in 5+ years and still works without fail.
Don't stress about the work load, you can only write 1 line of code at a time anyway, and hell, even seniors make mistakes.
The key about being able to manage this beast is simple, break it! Because the more you break it, the more you'll understand how a project is put together, for better or worse. Learn from the examples in front of you, and learn what not to do in the future 😎
But more importantly, plan your changes, whiteboard the high level logic of what it is you want to add, then whiteboard in the current codebase and determine where to slice this bitch up, then when it all looks well and good, take out your scalpel and slice and dice time.
Don't worry, your changes aren't going to production anytime soon, hell, you'll be lucky to get past the first pull request with this working 100% the first time, and that's a good thing, learn from tour short comings and improve your own knowledge for the next time!2 -
Let me preface this by saying I'm not a designer.
While I can make individual bits of a site look good, and I'm actually pretty skilled with CSS/Sass, overall design completely escapes me. I can't come up with good designs, nor do I really understand *why* good designs are good. It's just not something I can do, which feels really weird to say. but it's true.
So, when I made the Surfboard site (that's the project's internal name), I hacked everything together and focused on the functionality, and later did a branding and responsive pass. I managed to make the site look quite nice, and made it scale well across sizes/devices despite being completely new to responsiveness. (I'm proud, okay? deal.)
After lots of me asking (in response to people loudly complaining that the UI doesn't have X feature, scale properly on Y device, and doesn't look as good as Z site), the company finally reached out to its UI contractor who does their design work. After a week or two, he sent a few mockups.
The mockups consisted of my existing design with a darker background, much better buttons, several different header bars (a different color) with different logo/text placements, and several restyled steppers. He also removed a couple of drop shadows and made some very minor styling changes (bold text, some copy edits). Oh, he also changed the branding colors. Nothing else changed. It's basically the same exact site but a few things look a little better. and the branding is different.
My intermediary with the designer asked for "any feedback before finalizing the designs" -- which I thought odd because he sent mocks for two out of the ten pages (nine plus a 404 page). (Nevermind most of the mocks showed controls from the wrong page...).
So, I typed up a full page of feedback. Much of it was asking for specifics such as responsive sizing on the new header layout, how the new button layout would work for different button counts, asking for the multitude of missing pages/components, asking why the new colors don't match the rest of our branding, etc. I also added a personal nitpick about flat-looking controls because I fucking hate them. Everything I wrote was very friendly and professional.
... His response was full of gems. Let me share a few.
1. "Everything about the current onboarding site looks like a complete after-thought." (After submitting a design basically identical to mine! gg!)
2. "Yes [the colors match our current branding]." (No. They don't. I checked. The dark grey is different, the medium grey is different, the silver is different, the light blue is different. He even changed the goddamn color of the goddamn LOGO for fuck's sake! How the fuck is that "matching"?!)
3. "Appreciate the feedback [re: overlapping colored boxes, aka 'flat'], design is certainly subjective. However, this is the direction we are going." (yet it differs from the rest of our already-redesigned sites you're basing this off. and it's ugly as shit. gg again :/)
4. "Just looked at the 404 page. It looks pretty bad, and reflects very poorly on the [brand name] brand. Definitely will make a change here!" (Hey! I love that thing. It's a tilted, dotted outline of a missing [brand product] entirely drawn with CSS. It has a light gray "???" underlay and some 404 text inside. Everyone I showed it to, coworkers and otherwise, loved it. "Looks pretty bad". fuck you.)
I know I shouldn't judge someone so quickly, but what the fuck. This guy reminds me of one of those pompous artists/actors who's better than everyone and who can never be wrong, even while they're contradicting themselves.
just.
asfjasfk;ajsg;klsadfhas;kldfjsdl.undefined surfboard another rant about the same project long rant pompous designer apples and asteroids design8 -
!!politics
My employer held a company wide zoom meeting today. It was officially optional, but like 90% of the company attended.
It started out interesting as they had invited a speaker, but it quickly degraded into a gigantic political circlejerk. It was an hour and a half of bashing everyone who doesn’t hold exactly their views, calling them evil, calling them nazis, radicals, militants, racists, etc. — and I don’t share their views, like, at all, so. That really lets me know how they feel!
As far as I can tell, everyone else at the company has the same ideology. Not only does this make me incredibly uncomfortable and require me to act and pretend at all times, it’s honestly kind of infuriating, too. The amount of insults they throw around and blatant lack of tolerance displayed by these “tolerant” people is just incredible.
To them, anyone that doesn’t hold exactly their beliefs is evil, and often a slew of other things, too. And it doesn’t seem to matter how far removed those views are; apparently libertarians are evil as well? Apparently “leave everyone alone” is evil and gets you branded as a militant far-righty? Like, how does that even work? They ascribe to “everyone who doesn’t agree with me is literally Hitler,” I guess.
Fucking hell I can’t stand these people and their politics. And when they all get going on it together? Just. Fucking toxic.
I’ve been so disgusted today after sitting in on that meeting I’ve gotten practically nothing done. And I was so hoping to finally finish this stupid ticket.
Oh, and Mr. PM wants that screwdriver to do even more things now — by next week, of course. Fucking hell.
Why did I switch jobs, again?
Right, to get away from the politics.
Fucking hell.rant root attends a meeeting political circlejerk aka “meeting” politics toxic workplace office politics on steroids office politics66 -
Manager: You can’t define an async function without using await.
Dev: Yes you can.
Manager: Well you shouldn’t, there’s no point!
Dev: Yes there is. It can turn blocking synchronous logic into work performed concurrently. In this case the perform—
Manager: It’s called async *await*. Async *AWAIT*! Did you hear the two parts to that? You shouldn’t ever have one without the other. THEY GO TOGETHER. Worrying about concurrency is for people who use callbacks which just goes to show how out of date your skills are. I’m reading a book on javascript and there are so many advanced techniques out there that I haven’t even seen you use ONCE!
Dev: …
*I looked at the book he’s reading, it’s from the < ES6 era… no wonder he doesn’t see me using any of those archaic patterns/hacks/workarounds…*13 -
Imagine yourself exploring Medium, looking for some new awesome tools to try out.
You accidentally find the new, promising programming language. It called Blow. It promises itself to be “idiomatic”, “minimalistic”, “simple” and “handsome”. And it also compiles to Electron. You decide to give it a try.
It has its own package manager, simple and idiomatic – every package is “blow add” away. But it’s only three packages available: the “blowsay”, just like “cowsay”, the “this”, printing The Blow Manifesto and “blue”, which is simplistic, simple and minimalistic idiomatic handsome functional frontend framework built with simplicity in mind.
You want to build a todo app, so you type “blow add blue” and press enter.
Following Medium articles written by some guy wearing Ray-Bans, you managed to finally put a todo app together, after seven hours of straight up coding and fighting that simple and idiomatic syntax, trying to make it do what you need. Alright, it’s time to build it.
It has built-in task runner named “job”.
So you type “blow job todo”.
You spending three hours more doing “blow job this”, “blow job that”, trying to blow job everything you see. You’re tired and mad at those damn blow job hipsters created that. You literally suck at programming in that.
Everything falls apart. Things doesn’t work. And after another “ENOENT 0() 0x628 NOT_SUPPORTED”, you give up, admitting that you’ve really sucked at this.6 -
So i've been put in charge of bringing the devs together to form a small dev team, instead of having 3 separate devs (including me) sitting apart on separate projects. The idea was to have us talk more, work together more, learn more about the other projects, reuse more code etc.
(I've been arguing to let us do this for a while)
So I asked my manager could we move to the 4 desks in the corner, so we can have our own space, talk without having to book a meeting room each time etc. Its also a bit quieter over there and we all really need that in our noisy office.
Manager sent me an IM today while I was working from home to tell me we can have the desks. Was super happy, messaged the devs to tell them they can start moving.
Just got a message from one of them to say our manager has started moving his stuff over too. Seems he agreed with me that it is quieter over there and he doesn't like the noise either ... so he's joining us.
A huge part of the move was us wanting to work on side projects to automate and speed up various things in the team, that he has been against. We know we can make huge improvements but he doesn't see it. He's only interested in Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
So now we have our space, and anytime we try to work on something we are actually interested in, we'll have a little voice in the corner to pop up and point out what other things he deems more important and tell us to stop wasting our time.
Pretty fucking annoyed to be so happy and then get shot down like that. Happy weekend everyone!!9 -
Root rents an office.
Among very few other things, the company I'm renting an office from (Regus) provides wifi, but it isn't even bloody secured. There's a captive portal with a lovely (not.) privacy policy saying they're free to monitor your traffic, but they didn't even bother using WEP, which ofc means everyone else out to the fucking parking lot four floors down can monitor my traffic, too.
Good thing I don't work for a company that handles sensitive data! /s But at least I don't have access to it, or any creds that matter.
So, I've been running my phone's connection through a tor vpn and sharing that with my lappy. It works, provides a little bit of security, but it's slow as crap. GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER, REGUS.
AND WHILE YOU'RE AT IT, CLEAN THE SHIT OUT OF THE FUCKING BATHROOM FFS.
Ugh. $12/day to work in a freaking wind tunnel (thanks, a/c; you're loud as fuck and barely work), hear other people's phone conversations through two freaking walls, pee in a bathroom that perpetually smells like diarrhea, and allow anyone and everyone within a 50+ meter radius to listen to everything my computer says.
Oh, they also 'forgot' to furnish my office, like they promised. Three freaking times. At least I have a table and chair. 🙄
Desk? What desk?
Fucking hell.20 -
Once upon a time in Devland, there were two best friends @Alice and @Michelle and they worked together at The DevCo company as developers.
After a tough day handling an @-ANGRY-CLIENT-, they thought that they had to go and @RantSomewhere and so they went to a café. At the café, they ranted about some stupid clients, and @theItalianGuy at the third floor of their office building who never picked up calls, and @thatJavaGuy from the second floor who, they thought, was @notarealDev, and the usual stuff about their work. Somewhere in between, @Alice thought it would be @funvengeance to @hack @theNSA; “@karma is coming to get them”, said @Michelle.
To do this, they knew they’d have to take help from none other than @Gandalf who lived in a nearby @cave. So, the next day, taking a leave from work, @Alice and @Michelle embarked on journey to meet @Gandalf. After about an hour’s drive, they reached @Gandalf’s @cave. @Michelle went ahead to knock on @Gandalf’s rusty cave door. Being a lazy @necromancer, he magically opened his door 2 minutes later. “Who is't dares to disturb me in mine own catch but a wink?” shouted a voice from the back; “We’re two developers from DevCo and we need your help in our mission to @hack @theNSA”, shouted @Michelle. After a few seconds, he replied, ”Hmm… N'rmally I wouldst sendeth thee to mine own cousin @Hagrid, but in thy case, I sayeth thee shouldst visiteth the detective who is't goeth by the nameth @S-Holmes”. @Alice replied back, “Thank you, Sir @Gandalf, we’ll get help from this @S-Holmes, I’ve heard that he’s an @exceptionalGuy”; “Mine own pleasure, Farewell!” said @Gandalf, and the door closed shut.
So, @Alice and @Michelle went back to their car, and that time @Alice raised a question, “How are we gonna find this @S-Holmes? We don’t have a phone number or anything so we could contact this guy.”
“We should call @thatJavaGuy from work, I’ve heard he is a man of resources, he must know how to contact @S-Holmes”, said @Michelle.
And it was true, after a call with @thatJavaGuy, they were able to obtain @S-Holmes’s phone number.
“Howdy, this is @S-Holmes, what can I diddily ding dong do you for?”
“Hi, I’m @Alice, I’m from DevCo and I was hoping that I could get your help in our mission.”
“What kind of mission?”, asked @S-Holmes.
“We want to @hack @theNSA.”, replied @Alice.
“Okay… I think I might be able to hel-diddly-elp you! There’s an old and abandoned laberino noodly-near @stacked Street. It was made in @1989 and since then, it houses a magical computeroo that can hel-diddly-elp you in your mission. So, you just have to connect the computeroo to the Internet and you can diddily ding dong do your programmeroo thing and then you'll have access to the the noodly-nsa diddily ding dong database!”, answered @S-Holmes.
S-Holmes continued, “But I shall warn you, there's a riddly-rumorino that the laberino was abandoned because of an @electric-ghost that lurks there, but I bel-diddly-elieve it is just a computeroo program that was diddily ding dong designed to try to @stop hackers from accessing the top secret stuff!".
“Okay, thanks for your help! I bet we can handle whatever this @electric-ghost thing is, so… Goodbye!”, replied @Alice.
“Goodbye!”, said @S-Holmes and that ended their conversation.
Luckily, the @stacked Street was just a couple of miles away from them, so they reached the lab quickly.
As they got close to the lab they saw something that really surprised them…
--------
To be continued in part two...
(Do you want a part two? :/)
My first ever story is a little special because it is kind of dev related at it has "cameos" by various devranters, as you might have noticed.
How many did you count?
More in Part Two.
Thank you for reading and please, any feedback is welcome. Did you like it?
I haven't really revised it once, it is straight out of the keyboard.
Should I drop the "@" ?
But then it would impossible to spot some of the devRanters .
Let me know.
PS
What should be the title?
1)Alice in DevLand?
2)Adventures of Alice and Friends: Hacking the NSA?
You decide..(or maybe I'll pick the second one :D)21 -
Ahhhhh devrant... long time no see.
I just need to get something off my heart. The past two years, I worked for the same ISP in Germany, but now as a devops engineer. Well, popo hit the fan really quick lately..
First a good friend, team lead for one of five areas in Germany, quit his job. He was one of the nicest persons I knew, and he believed that all that five areas should work together and share dev resources. Thats why I work mostly in other areas as developer.
Shortly after, his deputy quit as well. I heard that this specific area, the management were a bunch of dicks, but wow!
A short while later, I learnd the hard truth, why those two good friends quit, and that brings me to this story. In a meeting I readied myself up to present my new plattform - a social room - to management. I got a lot of positive feedback from others and we thaught managment would approve of the project. But nope. "We can buy from external, we dont need to program ourselfs. In fact lets stop spending money on internal programming, we should outsource everything!"
I was baffeld... Wtf did i just witness? My team lead didn't say anything, and afterwards I didn't dare to question it, but I told most of my close dev friends and we all realizied, that the rumors were true... We will be shifting into project managment.
At this point, I realized that I wasnt having it, and made a linkedIn account, not because I wanted to switch jobs, but because, meh you never know.
One week ago, one of my bestest buddies said he will quit and join his team lead that left eariler this year, I was heartbroken. Me and our other buddy are devestated, because now we have to do everything he had done. Management didn't listen as we told them that nobody can maintain his code. I have so many projects, I can bearly keep up with them. Now I got a lead role for creating the server infrastucture for a huge project my buddy was working on. Only as specialist and not PM, but his Team Lead thinks I am replacing him!
Last week I got a message on LinkedIn, a consulting firm reached out to me to aquire me as a new consultant or devops engineer. They look great, only less vacation (26 instead of 30 days), 40h shifts instead of 38h and only slightly more base payment. I currently receive about 53.000€ a year, the new firm only grants up to 60.000€ a year for anyone. Otherwise, they look great.
With all my buddies quitting around me, work getting more while time developing decreasing, I don't know what the right thing to do is... There is no way I can get a payment increase in my current position. I always say "my workplace is save, but my work isnt". I don't want to do project managment.
Today I have a meeting with my team lead, she is really nice btw. This is an annual meeting where we discuss my future in the company etc. Shortly after, I have a meeting with the new firm to discuss a bunch of questions I have.
I dont know what to do...
Edit: I missed you, devrant6 -
I was thinking today about a certain aspect of running a software startup and then it came to me...
Hank Scorpio, from the Simpsons, was right in his approach.
So many time I have seen people get hired only for the company to get a less-than-optimal performance from them.
But why is this? Of course, it is many factors but one of the major ones is...
Employers seem to lump employees in together and assume that since most developers operate in one way that the new devs should be the same way.
The problem with this seems to be that we are all pandering to the lowest common denominator.
Let's face it, most devs (like most people) are not good, and almost everyone is not living up to their potential because of a lack of understanding of themselves and how they can achieve more.
On top of that, most devs are just employees who will do what you tell them to.
Since those above developers are the norm (Reference Seinfeld "95% of people are undatable") we have to assume that there is a 5% who are exceptional.
The difference between the 5% and the 95% is NOT some built-in superiority but that the 5% has a good idea themselves and an understanding of how to get the most out of them. They set goals and then find the right path to achieve them. They don't coast.
By assuming these developers are the same as the others is REALLY hampering their potential and by doing this the company only hurts itself.
So, that's a lot of talking but what actionable things can be taken away from this?
Hank asks Homer "What is your dream?"
Well, employeers should take the time to identify which of these developers are in the 5%. A problem arises though when the 5% decide it is in their best interest to blend in.
Like when home says his dream is to "Work for you?" Hank shuts him down and wants to get to the truth. He makes Homer comfortable with not only vocalizing but achieving his dreams.
When an employer is looking for their types they should be looking for the following...
1. A real genuine desire to achieve
2. A real plan to get their goals done
3. Critical thinking and self-evaluation
But more importantly, when they identify these types they should be asking questions like...
- How can we help you be more productive?
- Is there anything about our current operating norm that is hindering you?
- How does your productivity workflow look?
3 difficulties arise though…
1. Most hiring managers are incompetent, and quite frankly, everyone thinks they are in the 5% and for those managers who delude themselves into this without putting in the work, they will have an impossible time actually identifying those who are actually good and productive employees.
2. Showing special treatment to these folks may upset the people below.
3. You will hear things you don’t like…
Examples include…
- That new fancy open-office that you got because it was the trendy thing to do, you might hear that this is a huge hinderance.
- These days people seem to treat devs like nomads, “just give him a laptop and a table and he is fine”!. You may hear that this is complete BS. Real achievers may want a dedicated desk with multiple monitors, a desk with drawers etc.
- This WILL cost you money. I know of developers who cannot work without a dedicated whiteboard. Buy them whatever they need.
- They may want BOTH a standing desk and a chair to sit on.
- Etc.
The point is that it seems to me to be a foolish strategy to tailor your entire company to force everyone into the same work habits. Really good employees have the self-awareness to develop their own productive practices and any keeping of them inside a box will NOT help.27 -
Went to my first Hackathon this weekend.
There was 6 of us, 3 devs (including me) and 3 business guys for the presentation and info gathering
The 3 business guys wouldn't show us any of their work, but we're demanding to see all of ours.
Bothering us every 5 minutes to see 2her4 23 are and what's left
Then 1 of 3 business guys accused one of my devs of deleting half of their PowerPoint presentation. That turned out to be bullshit. Looked in the edit history and the business guy was the one who deleted them.
We brought it up to them all, and they got all defensive.
Then, before they revoked our access to the PowerPoint they removed us from the presentation entirely.
Their final presentation contained an app(APK only) we spent an all nighter on, and pictures of a few of the wireframes we did.
I immediately went to an event organizer, filled a complaint. Showed the wireframe project, the source code of the APK they used, and told her they just dropped us and stole our work. She went to them, they couldn't prove they did the work
They are now banned from future hackathons at this place.
I do not appreciate being fucked with, and more so don't like it when you try to fuck my friends. Honestly want to send an email to the business guys workplace and inform them their two top employees are thief's.
The positive thing I took from this is me and my dev team built a stronger relationship and found out we work amazing together.
/Rant about trash humans10 -
> 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.7 -
tl;dr; I've worked 117.5h/week for a month because of a project lead that doesn't understand what I do despite countless attempts at explaining
So, once a year I do this large project for a voluntary organization, it takes me about 80h (and this is of course on top of my normal work and voluntary engagement (60-80h/week))
This year, I realized I don't have as much spare time as I used to, so I emailed the project lead several months in advance like "hey, you know that I do all my work on this before the rest of you start working on it, and you know I need you to sit down for about an hour and put together the list of things I need to know to get this done properly. Could you please do that a bit earlier than usual, a week or two extra would make a big difference", they replied "absolutely, no problem!"
Time went by, and about two weeks before I wanted that info I emailed a small reminder. Shit me not, a month later, after a countless amount of reminders I finally get a half finnished version of the list I need, note that this is two weeks before I'm supposed to be done. Which is fine, it's the usual timespan, not what I hoped for as I hoped for an extra two weeks, but not too late either.
Then shit starts to happen
I reply to the list I've gotten with some requests for the project lead to complete some of the information, to which I receive multiple replies with different answers to the same questions, okay, that's fine, I'll just use the last answer.(?)
So, I finnish the thing on time, clocking out on a total of 117.5h of work per week, two weeks in a row. Still fine, it's just two weeks.
Release day!
I arrive at the release meeting, and is greeted by the project lead handing me two papers with the words "we haven't been able to look through your work yet to make sure it's like we want it, but we sat down yesterday and here's a list of how we want things to be". So I remind them that the thing is supposed to be done that day, and that it takes me 80h to redo, and those papers will require me to redo everything from scratch. To which the project lead responds "but it doesn't have to be finnished until December, right?"
That is not true, not at all, in any way.
See, there are 600 people that depend on this project, and they need, yes, need to be able to access it from the day it's launched every year. That is an absolute requirement.
So after trying to tell this project lead, for multiple years, how much time I devote to this project (for free) every year, during a short period of time, and after trying countless times to explain why it has to be done when the project is released, I became quite irritated.
So, during the two weeks that have passed since, I've been receiving about 200 emails from people wondering why the thing isn't finished yet and why they can't use it. (forwarded every single one of them to the project lead) and have been redoing it all during the past two weeks, from scratch.
I'm finally done, I released it yesterday, finally! I accompanied it with a bitter email to the project lead.
Because seriously, this is the worst respect for both my time and the people that should use the project's time in all of those years I've been doing this. This year, I've been ignored multiple times; they've shat on my work because it didn't live up to their expectations, even tough they never told me their expectations; I've been misinformed etc.
And now it's starting to get to me, this is the first weekend in a month when I've been able to shut down my laptop, sit down, drink a cup of tea, read a fricking book, chat with some friends etc, and most importantly, sleep. Signs of the stress I've had for a month now is starting to remind themselves.
And there's this little though nagging me in the back of my head: if the project lead would've worked for an hour in September I would've had to do half the job I ended up doing, on double the time. I hate realizing that they don't give a shit about my part of this, even tough I do half the work.
Then why do I continue, year after year? Because I feel that those 600 people that benefit from this really deserve it! But why does there have to be a dick project lead in the middle that makes me feel sick working on the thing I love the most!
So, as I'm not really used to ranting like this, i have to add that I really have no point with this rant. Just had to get it off my chest!13 -
To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.
Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming
I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)
When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.
From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.
But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.
And then..
Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.
So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.
I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.
Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.
At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.
Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.
By God, I would prove them wrong.
And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.
1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.
I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.
Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.
Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)23 -
So before today, I'd never used GoDaddy before. Not even once. My supervisor walks in and happily informs me that I'm going to be adding photos to a website that she does editing for. Okay, fine, that's stupidly easy. What I did not realize, however, is that this entire website had been built using GoDaddy's site builder, and if you're not familiar with it, thank whatever gods you worship that you've dodged that bullet. I hardly want to go wandering around somebody else's web hosting, so I search about for a bit praying that there's SOME semblance of a normal text editor someplace, because text editors make me happy and all, and find very little on the regular site. Already not thrilled. So I figure, how bad is this site editor? Really, how bad can it possibly be?
Oh, you poor misguided son of a -
Anyway, I go in and look at the site. Slideshows everywhere, nothing is aligned correctly, it's a web designer's nightmare. Thankfully, I'm not a web designer, so I press on and reorganize a little bit. I try slapping a new slideshow on their, and discover that unlike the way it SHOULD work, elements do not move to allow for other elements, they just sit there and let you throw things on top of them. I stare at my neatly-stacked slideshows for a second in utter disbelief, knowing but not really accepting that I'm going to need to take every last one of those slideshow elements and slide those little so-and-so's down by hand. ....why? Who designed this? Who decided that was a good idea? I do some Googling to see if there's anything out there to make this less horrid, and lo and behold I find a GoDaddy page about their FTP file manager! It's under web/classic hosting, which apparently means it's deprecated because I spent the next ten minutes hunting around for the "web hosting" link those chicken-lickers were so proud of and it's nowhere to be found.
Alright, so they want to do this the hard way.
At this point I'm screaming internally and PRAYING that I'm just being stupid and not seeing anything to make it easi-
No, not even easier. Just less stupid. This website builder makes no sense. It's like hiring a contractor to build a bridge and handing him a box of Legos and a banana.
So I do more googling and find instructions on getting to the file manager. FINALLY. The first step is find "Hosting" under "My Products." I rush over to My Products joyfully, hoping I can get this stupid website up and running reasonably quickly, and...!
There's no hosting tab.
No button.
Not even a little hard-to-see link. At this point my brain is screaming. WHY would you give me a website builder but absolutely no way to actually write the website? Do people actually use this thing? I mean, I get it if they want to make it nice and accessible for people to make websites without overwhelming them with HTML but if they know how to edit the website and they don't want your help, why would you force me in to this? Why? Then it occurred to me that maybe the organization just hasn't ever had a web developer in it, ever, or at least not one who was willing to help out with the website, so they purposefully signed up for hosting that deprived them of any kind of HTML editor. Then on top of all of that, I noticed that on the home page, which had been edited by someone else long before I ever looked at it, ALSO had one of these stupid slideshows that I had to reorganize by hand, and some sad, angry little man had put in one of the photos sideways. It was SIDEWAYS. Just sitting there on its side, the photo's occupants staring at me with sad eyes begging me to turn them facing up again. I sat there and stared at a badly-designed website in a questionably-designed editor. And I wondered. I wondered who put this all together, and I wondered why *I* was the one doing it, when I work for a university and the website was for some beach homeowner's association. And I wondered if this job was a task that my supervisor had agreed to do and just passed off onto an office monkey. And I wept bitter tears at the realization that I am that office monkey.6 -
Since I was little I was fascinated by club light shows I saw on TV shows. I just couldn't find out how they made light react to sound, which were two completely unrelated things to me back then. But I wasn't dumb and somehow figured out that if I hooked some low energy fairy lights to my amp and turned the bass up, they would lightup to the beat.
3 fried fairy lights and angry parents for to loud music later I swore to myself that I would someday build something that could light up my whole room and react to the music I was playing.
I started coding about the age 13 (turned 20 a month ago) with some old school bat scripts. But I wanted something that would generate a .exe so I googled and ended up installing Visual Studio Express (again angry parents for installing without asking) and started copying my first VB.Net program together. From there no one could stop me. I wanted to archive something with an application and googled until I found what I needed and learned to code this way.
I learned writing decent vb.net code and itvwas about this time I came into contact with IRC. I lurked arround there and this is were I came into contact with Linix servers, because I wanted to code IRC (eggdrop) bots, so I learned TCL and got used to Linux. Time passed and I ended uo being a Global OP on some network back then.
I did go further, coded Minecraft Mods, thus Java, changed back to C#, learned PHP and started setting things up on my VPS, Mails server, web server, etc.
Nowadays I work as a Systemadmin / Developer Hybrid, earning my first real money doing what I love to do and guess what? In the meantime I proved myself I can accomplish what I wanted as kid. I bought some Club LED DMX capital lights and programmed a controller for them which can control them in C#, but in a way I can run it on my raspi using mono. I also coded a client which runs on windows which uses some native libraries to calculate the dominant color of the shown picture in realtime (Handels 24fps 1080p) and uses the lights as ambient light, like you see them behind TVs sometimes.
The same app uses Bass.NET and an algorithm to dedect a beat in realtime and switches the light colors. Exactly what I wanted as akid, but better.
I can even control the lights via the new Google Assistant and/or Tasker.
Feels fcking good.
Some of my work lies on github among other, mostly trash: https://github.com/Kimmax - didn't updated there in a while tho.
I plan on writing a new free opensource plugin based modular home automatication server and pretty sure could use some helping hands..
I don't know why I wrote all this, just felt like it.
Also: first Rant
Please don't kill me for errors in the text, I'm to lazy to read through it again right now :P8 -
Once I had to do a 'hands on' pair programming session for a position I applied for... Together with the lead dev we would switch coding every 15 minutes It was somewhat of a horror story...
The assignment was to implement an password reset flow, connecting it to the api and then handling the entire password reset flow, in Angular becahs ye know has to be Angular...
After drafting the ui and setting up the click events, I wanted to hookup the api calls, but then it was time to switch around...
The fucktard dev first started to adjust my classmappings to be more in line with his preference, without touching the css classnames... Ok... Micro managing ... Check...
So after breaking the styles, he wrote the fetches to the api endpoints and that was his 15 minutes of shame...
I continued only to find out the endpoints we were using had errors in them and would not return anything workable...
The dev said he'd tested the endpoint before and it worked, but clearly it didn't...
After about an hour of going back and forth trying to get this to work he got a call from a client because server was down (surprise), he excused himself and had to prioritize on this, running out and leaving me there for the remaining morning ...
I just sat there waiting for the HR checkout talk, only to lean towards rejecting the position...
Fucking waste of time, and in the end the feedback was they doubted MY TECHNICAL SKILLS ... And wouldn't make me an offer 😂👍 nice story bro...
K THX BAI!7 -
I got laid off from my previous position as a Software Engineer at the end of June, and since then it was a struggle to find a new position. I have a good resume, about 4 years of professional dev experience and 5 years of experience in the tech industry all together, and great references.
As soon as I got laid off, I talked to my old manager at my previous company, and he said that he'd love to hire me back, but he just filled his last open spot.
In order to prepare, I had my resume reviewed by a specialist at the Department of Labor, and she said that it was one of the better resumes that she had seen.
There aren't a huge amount of dev jobs in my area, and I got a TON of recruiter emails. But they were all in other states, and I wasn't interested in moving.
I applied to all the remote and local positions I could find (the ones that I was qualified for,) and I just got a bunch of silence and denials from all my applications. I had a few interviews that went great, but of course, those companies decided to put the position on hold so they could use the budget for other things.
The silence and denials were really disconcerting, and make you think that something might be wrong with you or your interviewing abilities.
And then suddenly, as if the floodgates had opened, I started getting a ton of callbacks and interviews for both local and remote opportunities. I don't know if the end-of-year budget surpluses opened up more positions, but I was getting a lot of interest and it felt amazing.
Another dev position opened up at my previous company, and I got a great recommendation for that from my former manager and co-workers. I got a bunch of other interviews, and was moved onto the next rounds in most of them.
And finally, I got reached out to regarding a remote position I applied for a while ago, and the company was great about making the interview process quick and efficient. Within 2 weeks, I went from the screening call, to the tech call, and to the final call with the CTO. The CTO and I just hung out and talked about cars/boats/motorcycles for half the interview, and he was an awesome guy. AND THEN I GOT AN OFFER THE NEXT DAY!
The offer was originally for about the same amount as I made at my previous job, but I counteroffered up a good amount and they accepted my counteroffer!
It's a great company with offices all over the world, and they offer the option to travel to all those offices for visits if you want. So if you're working on a project with the France team and you think that it'd be easier to just work with them face-to-face, then the company will pay to fly you out to Paris for the week. Or you can work completely remotely. They don't mind either way.
I'm super excited to work with them and it feels great to be back in the job world.
Sorry about the long post, but I just wanted to tell my story and help encourage anybody out there who's going through the same thing right now.
Don't get discouraged, because you WILL find an awesome opportunity that's right for you. Get somebody to go over your resume and give you improvement recommendations. Brush up on your interviewing skills. Be sure to talk about all the projects you've worked on and how they positively impacted people and/or companies.
This is what I found interviewers responded the best to: Be sure to emphasize that you love learning new things and that you love passing along that knowledge to other people, and that your goal is to be an approachable and reliable source of knowledge for the company and to be as helpful as possible. It's important to be in a position that encourages both knowledge growth and knowledge sharing, and I think that companies really appreciate that mindset in a team member.
Moral of the story: YOU GOT THIS!10 -
If a CPU were an employee...
CPU: Hey boss, I'm seeing you are giving me a lot of mathematical tasks that would really profit from splitting into parallel calculations. GPU's are great for that, we should get one.
Boss: But you can still do them, right? If you can do it, I'm pretty sure you can do it at GPU speeds. We gotta save up so I can buy another car!
----------------------
Boss: Why is this taking so long?
CPU: I'm overloaded with work, so I'm overheating. Maybe you could buy a GPU to help me out, or at least a fan...
Boss: You're overheating? Your personal problems should not affect your professional life. Learn to get your shit together or we will hire someone who will
CPU: *melts*1 -
Forgive me father, for I have sinned. Alot actually, but I'm here for technical sins. Okay, a particular series of technical sins. Sit your ass back down padre, you signed up for this shit. Where was I? Right, it has been 11429 days since my last confession. May this serve as equal parts rant, confession, and record for the poor SOB who comes after me.
Ended up in a job where everything was done manually or controlled by rickety Access "apps". Many manhours were wasted on sitting and waiting for the main system to spit out a query download so it could be parsed by hand or loaded into one of the aforementioned apps that had a nasty habit of locking up the aged hardware that we were allowed. Updates to the system were done through and awful utility that tended to cut out silently, fail loudly and randomly, or post data horrifically wrong.
Fuck that noise. Floated the idea of automating downloads and uploads to bossman. This is where I learned that the main system had no SQL socket by default, but the vendor managing the system could provide one for an obscene amount of money. There was no buy in from above, not worth the price.
Automated it anyway. Main system had a free form entry field, ostensibly for handwriting SELECT queries. Using Python, AutoHotkey, and glorified copy-pasting, it worked after a fashion. Showed the time saved by not having to do downloads manually. Got us the buy in we needed, bigwigs get negotiating with the vendor, told to start developing something based on some docs from the vendor. Keep the hacky solution running as team loves not having to waste time on downloads.
Found SQLi vulnerability in the above free form query system, brought it up to bossman to bring up the chain. Vulnerability still there months later. Test using it for automated updates. Works and is magnitudes more stable than update utility. Bring it up again and show the time we can save exploiting it. Decision made to use it while it exists, saves more time. Team happier, able to actual develop solutions uninterrupted now. Using Python, AutoHotkey, glorified copy-pasting, and SQLi in the course of day to day business critical work. Ugliest hacky thing I've ever caused to exist.
Flash forward 6 years. Automation system now in heavy use acrossed two companies. Handles all automatic downloads for several departments, 1 million+ discrete updates daily with alot of room for expansion, stuff runs 24/7 on schedule, most former Access apps now gone and written sanely and managed by the automation system. Its on real hardware with real databases and security behind it.
It is still using AutoHotkey, copy-paste, and SQLi to interface with the main system. There never was and never will be a SQL socket. Keep this hellbeast I've spawned chugging along.
I've pointed out how many ways this can all go pearshaped. I've pointed out that one day the vendor will get their shit together they'll come in post system update and nothing will work anymore. I've pointed out the danger in continuing to use the system with such a glaring SQLi vulnerability.
Noone cares. Won't be my problem soon enough.
In no particular order:
Fuck management for not fighting for a good system interface
Fuck the vendor for A) not having a SQL socket and B) leaving the SQLi vulnerability there this long
Fuck me for bringing this thing into existence5 -
tldr:
everyone got the same hardware because senior dev liked it
So my project team was allowed to buy some hardware (monitors/keyboards/mouses etc.) so teamleader asked what we want.
senior dev: i need 1 monitor because i like to work with 1 monitor. i prefer this 27' zoll 4k monitor for around 1k dollars. since i work with multiple pc's i like this bluetooth keyboard and mouse because u can pair them with them and switch witch a click between the pc's costs around 300 dollar (1 setup of this costs 1'300 dollars)
me: so i like to use 2 monitors because i tried out multiple setups and this works for me the best (also what i have at home). but they dont need to be fancy. 2x 24' zoll montitors for each 200 dollar are enaugh (together 400 doller)
i also only work with 1 laptop and would like to have just a simple keyboard and mouse with cable because everytime they dont respons or battry runs out im fk triggered. so for me its okey if its this 30 dollar keyboard and 20 dollar mouse. it would be cool if i could get this mechanical keyboard for 80 dollars but not really needed. i only prefer mechanical keyboards a little bit more. and also i would like this mousepad i really like. it makes the mouse super responsive it's also just 10 dollars (this setup cost 510)
so at the end the teamleader was like. ah u know what senior dev has more xp and knows whats better for coding so we only buy this for every dev. but that 10 dollar mouse pad is okey u can get this extra its not that expensive.
WTF why u dont give me the cheaper setup which i more like. and why u even ask.4 -
The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...
I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.
Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!
I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.
RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.
Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.
We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.
Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!
I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.
I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!
But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.5 -
There are 3 types of questions.
Type 1 is a question that can easily be answered and mostly appears as the first result in Google.
Type 2 is a question that can be answered by stitching together various type 1 answers.
Type 3 is a question that has not been answered. It may be a bug you’ll have to find out about by reading an email chain 12 years ago or maybe a reason why epoll() doesn’t work on Linux VMs. There is no solid yes or no. You’ve most likely encountered this when reaching page 3 of your Google results and every link is purple (visited).
This is where depression and isolation hits. This is where you realize that if you can’t help yourself, no one else can (or has the experience and time to do so). This is where you must rely on your knowledge and infer an answer to your question pushing your concepts and theories to the extreme. If you solve this question, you’re solving it for someone else who may trek the same path later in the future. You’re solving it for the world!
If you’re willing to solve, attempting to solve, or even giving a reasonable inference about a type 3, you have a true engineering mindset.4 -
It's getting close to that time of year when we are all encouraged to think of others and spread joy around the world. I've decided to go against my usual snarky/anti-social nature, and do something to help others this year.
I'm announcing the practiseSafeHex charitable fund, to give back and help others.
This fund will invest in cutting edge medical research to detect the genetic abnormality in humans that results in project managers not being able to comprehend the simplest of concepts.
Together we can find the reason why the concept "more meetings = less work" is uncomprehendible.
Together we can discover why we can't use an automated bot to generate reports, instead of spending hours in excel spreadsheets.
And together we will find a reason why the answer to the question "can we please just try it?" is always "No".
We do this not for ourselves for short term gains, we do this for the greater good. Together we can find the cause and build a test to filter these people out. So that never again will stressed out developers have to deal with these petty ridiculous issues.
Together, we will solve this!
Thanks,
practiseSafeHex, CEO and managing director of the practiseSafeHex charitable fund for the betterment of developer sanity10 -
I'm really close to just quitting coding all together. This job is sucking the life out of me. I've lost my interest in code and the idea that there are better jobs out there.
My "boss" who's not even really my boss but behaves like he is, is micromanaging my every tag, and is an information hog. He doesn't document, he doesn't tell me anything, I've been here six months and still don't know half of what I need to know to do my job properly!
I'm expected to implement a new responsive design, but we don't have design specifications.
Cool, you'd think, new ideas, complete overhaul! Let's get a good foundation in bootstrap going!
WRONG! It needs to fit in with the old, fuck- ugly pre 2000 design.
Not because of any design constraints in particular, but because HE wants it that way. You know what was fucking trendy in 2000? Tables. Tables fucking everywhere. YOU KNOW WHAT TABLES ARE NOT? RESPONSIVE YOU FUCKING ICE LOLLY CHEWER!
We have no development timeline, no process management, no fucking project management. THE FUCKING PASSWORDS WERE STILL STORED IN PLAIN TEXT UNTIL LAST MONTH YOU IRRESPONSIBLE BANANA DEEPTHROATER! 😤😤😤😤😤😤
I'm doing my best here to get something resembling the old page, but there needs to be some fucking compromise! We are in fucking 2017, let's work with Bootstrap instead of against it, how about that you fucking bald cactus!
I know enough about UI to know that the way we're going, this is just going to be another unusable fucking clusterfuck.
YOU KNOW THE BEST FUCKING PART? I'M A FUCKING BACKEND DEV AND I WAS HIRED AS SUCH! GIVE ME A DESIGN TEMPLATE AND I'LL DO MY BEST TO IMPLEMENT IT, BUT FUCK YOU FOR EXPECTING FRONT END LEVEL DESIGN KNOWLEDGE YOU DUMB FUCKING SPAGHETTI!14 -
So I had a fun week.
It started off with my boss replying to a co-workers email where he sent his new bank account, saying he doesn't need it untill we close off some baddly planned projects, meaning no paycheck.
Needless to say we were working night and days including weekends on it and put our best into it.
For the next part I need to explain a little background. We have this old legacy system I'm working with for the past 3 years. I keet raising the red flag we need a new one. Nothing happened. So every time I worked with it I kept thinking how to improve the parts. Almost two years went into thinking and planning the new system untill I got a green light. It was most satisfying - the day I got to build something good and awesome. I drew all the data structures, laid out the foundations and started building ontop of it. It was amazing and I was really proud of it. Then suddendly client wanted to see something and the decision was made we threw it together quickly with the old legacy system. It was on hold 'till then due to work overload.
Boss wrote me this week if I can put the project from git on a server, where he out sourced the completition into India where they will finish it. On thr question if they can't work on git, he replied: "should they?" -.-
To top it all up, I got a notice at the end of the week if I don't fill his shit time tracking system (that takes me one hour/day to insert all entries) by monday he'll deduct a sizable portion of my paycheck.
I AM WORKING FOR YOU ALL THE FUCKING TIME BECAUSE YOU LACK RESOURCES AND I THOUGHT A TEAM STICKS TOGETHER AND SAVES EACH OTHERS ASS! I DONT HAVE TIME TO ENTER YOUR FUCKING STUPID TIME ENTRIES IN YOUR FUCKING BUGGED SYSTEM EACH DAY ON TASKS THAT DON'T EVEN EXIST BITCH! MAKE IT BETTER FIRST!! OH! AND NO ONE IS MORE QUALIFIED TO FINISH THAT PROJECT THAN ME, I POURED MY FUCKING HEART INTO IT YOU PRICK!
woah.5 -
“Arya” and I were classmates in college. We were in the same year and did the same major. We’ve known each other for 16 years and have worked together twice; one time she was my manager and the other time I was hers. We often attend the same work-related conferences and exchange thoughts on articles that appear in industry publications. Our relationship is a professional one, although I did attend her wedding because her husband was in the same fraternity as me, and she did introduce me to my future husband at a networking charity event. Besides her wedding, we have never talked outside of work or a networking event.
I was hiring for a position and one of the promising candidates was working for Arya and had put her down as a reference. Arya sung her praises and told me she was the best employee in the department. The position I was hiring for would be a promotion for the candidate, and Arya said there was no room for promotion in her department at the moment. Based on Arya’s glowing review and the same from another manager there (and her strong resume), I hired her.
It was a catastrophe. Her work was sloppy and disorganized. She struggled to do basic tasks, missed deadlines, and was sometimes cold to her coworkers and clients. She was asked to take point on a project because her resume listed a similar project, and it went so far off the rails we had to bring in outside help to get it back on track. I know a promotion and new company can be an adjustment, but she was incompetent beyond having to adjust to a new place. Her mistakes cost us so much money she had to be fired.
When I spoke to Arya the first time, she played dumb. The second time, she admitted to lying about how good the candidate was because she was tired of dealing with her mistakes and wanted her gone. She told the candidate she wouldn’t fire her if she quickly left on her own and promised a good reference in exchange. The other manager agreed to do the same thing when Arya asked him to. Arya also told the candidate to lie about how long she worked there to make it seem like she was there longer and to put the project on her resume even though she wasn’t point on it. Arya said it was business and nothing personal.
After she was fired, my boss told me the bad candidate is being investigated by federal authorities for regulatory violations from her time at Arya’s company. The investigation started just when we were interviewing her, and Arya knew about it and didn’t tell me. The other manager is also being investigated for the same violations, which is how Arya got him to lie about the candidate. If the candidate had not left her job there, she would have been fired when word of the investigation got out. We had another candidate who worked for Arya, and Arya told me he was a mediocre employee who does the bare minimum. He just won two different prestigious industry awards. Arya also admitted to lying about him because she didn’t want him to leave. He still works at the same company as her.
I’m angry. She knowingly lied to me. I put stock in her opinion because of our relationship. I feel stupid and duped. I’m afraid making such a bad hire and passing up a good candidate will make me look bad and affect my career. My boss and her boss are upset about this debacle, and everyone knows something is up because the regulators came in when they found out the candidate worked here. They haven’t found anything yet but everyone is still nervous. The other manager who lied about the bad candidate has already been arrested and, based on what the bad candidate is accused of, she will likely be arrested soon also. (Arya cooperated with authorities, isn’t being investigated, and isn’t accused of doing anything against regulations.)
I don’t plan on talking to Arya again beyond being arms-length and professionally cool if I run into her at a conference and others are present. I’m not even sure if I can go to her boss because I don’t have any proof beyond her telling me verbally. Whether I knew her or not, the lie was egregious. Do I tell her boss? Do I confront her or leave it alone? She didn’t show any guilt or apologize to me.8 -
One of our newly-joined junior sysadmin left a pre-production server SSH session open. Being the responsible senior (pun intended) to teach them the value of security of production (or near production, for that matter) systems, I typed in sudo rm --recursive --no-preserve-root --force / on the terminal session (I didn't hit the Enter / Return key) and left it there. The person took longer to return and the screen went to sleep. I went back to my desk and took a backup image of the machine just in case the unexpected happened.
On returning from wherever they had gone, the person hits enter / return to wake the system (they didn't even have a password-on-wake policy set up on the machine). The SSH session was stil there, the machine accepted the command and started working. This person didn't even look at the session and just navigated away elsewhere (probably to get back to work on the script they were working on).
Five minutes passes by, I get the first monitoring alert saying the server is not responding. I hoped that this person would be responsible enough to check the monitoring alerts since they had a SSH session on the machine.
Seven minutes : other dependent services on the machine start complaining that the instance is unreachable.
I assign the monitoring alert to the person of the day. They come running to me saying that they can't reach the instance but the instance is listed on the inventory list. I ask them to show me the specific terminal that ran the rm -rf command. They get the beautiful realization of the day. They freak the hell out to the point that they ask me, "Am I fired?". I reply, "You should probably ask your manager".
Lesson learnt the hard-way. I gave them a good understanding on what happened and explained the implications on what would have happened had this exact same scenario happened outside the office giving access to an outsider. I explained about why people in _our_ domain should care about security above all else.
There was a good 30+ minute downtime of the instance before I admitted that I had a backup and restored it (after the whole lecture). It wasn't critical since the environment was not user-facing and didn't have any critical data.
Since then we've been at this together - warning engineers when they leave their machines open and taking security lecture / sessions / workshops for new recruits (anyone who joins engineering).26 -
I was engaged as a contractor to help a major bank convert its servers from physical to virtual. It was 2010, when virtual was starting to eclipse physical. The consulting firm the bank hired to oversee the project had already decided that the conversions would be performed by a piece of software made by another company with whom the consulting firm was in bed.
I was brought in as a Linux expert, and told to, "make it work." The selected software, I found out without a lot of effort or exposure, eats shit. With whip cream. Part of the plan was to, "right-size" filesystems down to new desired sizes, and we found out that was one of the many things it could not do. Also, it required root SSH access to the server being converted. Just garbage.
I was very frustrated by the imposition of this terrible software, and started to butt heads with the consulting firm's project manager assigned to our team. Finally, during project planning meetings, I put together a P2V solution made with a customized Linux Rescue CD, perl, rsync, and LVM.
The selected software took about 45 minutes to do an initial conversion to the VM, and about 25 minutes to do a subsequent sync, which was part of the plan, for the final sync before cutover.
The tool I built took about 5 minutes to do the initial conversion, and about 30-45 seconds to do the final sync, and was able to satisfy every business requirement the selected software was unable to meet, and about which the consultants just shrugged.
The project manager got wind of this, and tried to get them to release my contract. He told management what I had built, against his instructions. They did not release my contract. They hired more people and assigned them to me to help build this tool.
They traveled to me and we refined it down to a simple portable ISO that remained in use as the default method for Linux for years after I left.
Fast forward to 2015. I'm interviewing for the position I have now, and one of the guys on the tech screen call says he worked for the same bank later and used that tool I wrote, and loved it. I think it was his endorsement that pushed me over and got me an offer for $15K more than I asked for.4 -
Recap: https://www.devrant.io/rants/878300
I was out Thursday at the Hospital. I'm what the doctors would call "Ill as fuck"
So, Friday I’m back in the office to the usual: "How was that appointment?"
I know people mean well when they ask this. So, I do the polite thing and tell them it went as well as it could.
Realistically it does't matter how well it went... They haven't cured Crohn's because I showed up to the appointment. They know I'm fucked already.
But, push it down, add it to the future aneurism.
I had to go through the usual resignation meetings with managers:
"We"re fucked now you're going"
"yep"
"we need to get a handle on how fucked"
"already done that for you, here"s a trello board, very fucked."
"we need to put a plan together to drop all the junior devs in the shit with the work you’ve been doing"
"You need about 4 devs, please refer to the previous trello board for your plan"
Meanwhile, me and Morpheus are in constant communication because all of this is like a Shakespearean comedy.
So, I overhear a conversation between a Junior Dev and the Solution Architect.
[SA] took over the project because he knows better than two tried and tested senior devs -_- (fuckwit).
JD: "It took me one and a half days to build it out"
SA: "Yeah, it must have taken me twice as long... It must be a problem with the project, you should just be able to check it out and run it."
JD: "I know, it has to be wrong"
All of this is about Morpheus' work of art, of an Ionic 3 hybrid app.
I fumed quietly at my desk because I've been ordered by the Stazi to be hands off.
Since Morpheus and me were pulled from the project [JD] and [JD2] were dropped into it to get it over the line.
It"s unfortunate and I was clear and honest with my advice to them: I personally would not take over the project because I"d be way out of my depth... Oh, and the App works, so uh, there's no work to do.
They have been constantly at our desks. Asking fuckdiculous questions about how to perform basic tasks. So they can get Morpheus" frigging masterpiece to the user.
It"s like watching that touch up of jesus that got borked by an amateur. Shit I have google, it's like watching this happen: http://ti.me/NnNSAb
[JD] came to me Friday evening.
"I can’t get this to build to iOS or install on [Test Analyst]'s phone."
Me: "No worries brother, where are you stuck right now?"
[JD] describes the first steps with clear indication he hasn't googled his problem.
Life lesson: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=lmgtfy
Que an hour of me showing [JD] how to build an Ion3 project for iOS. Fuck it, your man's in a bind and he"s asked politely for help. I can show him quicker than he can read 3 sets of docos.
I took him through 'ionic cordova build ios', the archive and release processes in XCode 9, then the apk bundling process for droid. Finally we have an MAM so the upload process for that too.
All the while cleaning up his AppIDs, Profiles, deployment attempts.
Damn they were a mess.
I did this with a smile on my face, not because I could say "I told you so"... But. because when any developer asks you how to do something. If you know how to do it, you should always be happy to learn them some new tricks!
Dude's alright, he's been dropped in the shit. Now I know how badly so I'll help him learn things that are useful to his role, but aren't project specific.
As a plausi-senior dev (I'll tell you about that later); it's my job to make sure my team have what they need to go home smiling!
I’m not a hateful fucker, the guy asked me an honest question so I am happy to give him the honest answer.
I took him through it a few times and explained a few best practices. Most were how to do his AppID and ProvProfile set up. Good lad, took it all on board.
However! In his frustration, he pointed the finger at Morpheus' "David" (ref: Michelangelo).
He miraculously morphed into a shiny colourful parrot and fed me SA's line:
"you should just be able to build from a clean clone"
My response was calm and clear:
"You can, it took me 20 minutes on Thursday evening. I was bored and curios, so I wanted to validate Morpheus' work. Here it is on my iOS device and my Android device. It would have taken me 5 if my laptop wasn’t so horrifically out of date."
I validated Morpheus' work so I have evidence, I trust that brilliant bastard.
I just need to be able to prove it's good.
[JD] took this on board.
Maybe listening to two tried and trusted senior devs is better than listening to a headstrong Solution Architect.
When JD left for the weekend I was working a late one (https://www.devrant.io/rants/874765).
His sign off was beautiful.
"I think I can happily admit defeat on this one, it can wait until Monday."
To which I replied: "no worries brother, if you need a hand give me a shout."
Rule 1: Don't be a cunt.
Rule 2: If someone needs help and you can give it: Give it!
Rule 3: Don't interrupt James' cigarette time.
Rule 4: goto Rule 3.rant day 3 jct resigns crohns resignation solution architect wk71 invisible illness fuckwit illness junior developer4 -
Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.
From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.
Fast forward to today...
Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.
If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.8 -
I'm not sure whether to cry or to burn everything to the ground.
I'm stuck in a rotten, over aged corporate that will one day choke on all the documents and formalism they require. Which is something I'm generally fine with. Each to their own.
But ever since I handed in my resignation they have been fucking me like I have never been gang raped before.
(A little context: I work for a midsize financial institute. Which at least in Germany are full of legacy projects and are regulated as all hell.)
So some fuckwits decided that since the regulator slapped us hard 2 years ago that we need to make up a new standard of documentation that has to be used for all IT-documentation there ever was and ever will be.
So the upper management (the before mention dumb-dumbs) choose some consultant company and locked them up together with the brightest stars (read biggest slime balls) of the IT department in an ivory tower and told them to pull some out the ass.
And one year later (early November last year) they got the shit they ordered. Gilden shit, only the most sparkly and non-sensical bullcrap you could imagine.
But they only looked at it and deemed it good. Now the guys actually in charge of the the applications got served the dish. And guess what they found out when started to dig into? Nothing but contradictions, non-final thoughts and all of that held together by web of retarded, unusable guidelines. But they ate it, they cursed but they swallowed forced by disciplinary punishments waiting should they misbehave.
The only one emerging fact was: All previous documentation was completely invalidated.
But now the mighty lords in the ivory tower guided by the never failing hand of the higher management had the greatest idea of them all. They needed someone to check all the documentation till the end of this year but since they blew all of their budget on useless wankers ( oh, ofc I meant "highly qualified external help") they now preyed on the lowest in the food chain. Which is where this story goes full circle and comes back to me.
I was the lowest rank on the food chain, a student that just handed in his resignation.
I was the first to be locked up in the basement, my co-student followed shortly after.
And now I'm going to spend my last 2 months looking at checklists that we had to pull out of the slime's ass and validating hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation. We get grinded up in the endless hate coming from the guys that we need to tease and are held in position by a wall of sheer idiocy on the side of the rule makers.
Today I cried when I had to tell someone that his magnificent documentation was not standard conform and had thus no longer any meaning or right to exist.
Thanks you for those that made it this far down. I hope you never have to feel my pain.11 -
Tl;dr
Longest Rant I've written so far.
How to manage a school (by out school director):
Did this student do something spezial to emphasize the school?
-No: Ignore him
-Yes: Did the student achieve this with the help of this schools staff?
-No: Take all the credit
-Yes: Hahaha, just a joke, nobody receives help from the school. Goto -No
Q: Should this class get the 5 day trip, they've been waiting for the whole year?
Director: No.
Q: But they don't even participate in other trips just to go there.
D: No
(Good thing she did not have the last word there)
Does the school director need this one week trip to india, just to talk once about stuff, you can talk about via email, to a sponsor?
D: "Of course I deserve it"
D: "We need faster internet in this school"
Network admins: "But it won't be of any use, if the network can't handle it. We'll need better pcs (and network conponents) on top of that"
D: "No, bot enough money available for that one." *browses email with IPad paid by school money*
Teacher: "I want to realize project xy with the students. We'll need around 1200€ (for 20 people)."
D: "Can place xy at our school to as advertise?"
T: "No, but it's be a valuable le-"
D: "600 at most."
(Again denied by people who aren't fcking assholes. We got 1500€, so 300€ per group)
D: So what makes you think you can teach informatics in this school"
Applicant: "Well, I'm friends with one of your teacher here. We went to university together, where I learn't nothing about informatics and I don't even understand the principles of this subject"
D: "Close enough. Hired, you can teach them all the theory stuffy. You don't have to prepare that yourself another teacher has done so. Just read it from his documents."
*In class with the mentioned teacher talking about Threads*
*Le wild code appears*
while (doStuff())
System.out.println ("Thread working...");
System.out.println ("Thread terminated");
T: "... and most importantly, when you have done all the work be sure to terminate the thread with 'System.out.println ("Thread terminated");'"
Should this teacher be allowed to participate in this seminar about burnouts?
D: "No, I can't afford paying the supplenze."
Staff: "We need to talk with the director about this."
S: "Not in her office. The cafeteria maybe"
*Not in the cafeteria either*
S: "Seems like she didn't come to achool today. Let's try tomorrow"
(^ Stuff that happens almost daily. Screw semicolons. I see her only once a month at most)
*Student send 5000 emails by accident* (Shit happens 😂😅😂😅)
D: "You gonna work here for a full afternoon"
*Student arrives for his punishment*
Staff: "Good that you're here. Do this real quick."
*10 min. Later*
Student: "Done"
Staff: "Well, we have no more work to give you, so you might as well leave"
DONE!!! Good job coming so far.
Our school is supposed to be the best, but internally it's one big meme.4 -
rant, but not an IT kind... okay, maybe not even a rant, more like depressive rambling:
in 3 days, I'll turn 29.
i'm living with my mom, in the apartment where I was born, in the room i've been living since I was born (with the exception of 2 attempts to move out which together lasted 9 months).
my theoretical monthly income should/could be around 4000€, based on my skills and experience.
but I'm a (manic)-depressive, chronically lonely idiot loser (and the manic phases come more and more rarely in recent years), so
my practical average monthly income fluctuates from 0 to about 200.
i am unable to keep a job for more than 4 months, so after being fired from about 20 or so of them since I was 18, it takes immense amounts of mental and emotional energy to even start looking for one now... so I usually don't.
i've been about 12000€ in debt for the past 8 or so years, half of which is just debt collector fees.
it's kinda funny, for years, i've been unable to solve a debt which theoretically amounts to 3 months of my theoretical achievable salary.
my father, who just left without a word of explanation when I was 18, has decided this is not viable anymore, so I'm supposed to move out by 10th of next month, "either to some cheap rooming house, or under the bridge, I don't care", as he put it.
I can't remember how it feels to exist a single hour without feeling existential dread and dreading each next day, not knowing what to do or if i'll even be able to try and do something, because this feeling is so strong that it often blocks me from being able to do anything. i just shiver most of the time that i'm awake, feeling like you feel few minutes before puking and crying at the same time. and that feeling is my "how are you?", "you know... normal".
i can't remember what it feels to feel any other way and can't even imagine it, and can't imagine that I'll ever achieve any less shit feeling.
literally all of my social contact consists of going out once to twice a month with the only 2 friends and 2 aquaintances I have who have the time and will to spend it with me.
oh, and hiding in my room, avoiding talking to my mom, because each time we talk she just reminds me what a piece of shit failure I am, and tells me how it's not that hard to change it, I just have to stop being lazy and start working for it.
she's... kind and caring about it, which somehow maybe makes it even worse.
i have about 10 almost complete game designs, each of them at least 50% more original and interesting (at least to me) than the things that are coming out for the past 10 years, being lauded as "the most original and unique".
I have been trying to make them, ANY of them, since I was 18, but I always lose all the drive and resolve and energy in like 4 months, because it's like trying to build a city on my own on a deserted island. too big for one person, but there was never anyone to help me. closest I ever got was one of my friends telling me "i've been thinking many times that i'd love to work on some project with you, if I had the time".
and second time, when I actually found an artist I was going to pay, and he was awesome, and after two weeks of me telling him how awesome what he does is and how it fits the project and my ideas perfectly, he backed out saying "i'm afraid I can't do the quality you require from me".
never ever in my life did I get actual help with something I actually wanted or tried to do.
i have no idea how it feels to have someone working with me on something I actually consider interesting and meaningful, on any of the things which I wanted to make, which made me learn programming.
I've learned graphics and animation and everything going into game making pipeline on my own because I realized nobody will ever help me, so I'll have to do all of it on my own.
I've tried to make a kickstarter once, but I started crying hysterically in the middle of writing it, because I felt like a begging piece of failure shit, even more than usual, so I deleted it.
most of people treat me like shit failure unworthy and undeserving of living, precisely as I myself know I deserve to be treated, because that's what I am, but when I ask for permission to kill myself, since I see no other solution to stop being a burden, they get angry at me that I'm just emotionally blackmailing them. when I afterwards ask them "so help me in any way to do any of the projects i want/need to do", they respond they've got no time for that.
when I talk about all of this, I get told to stop whining.
happy 29th birthday, me, a piece of shit who should've never survived this long, who should've never been born in the first place.
yay.
also, I know this is not the kind of crap that's supposed to be posted here, but i've got nowhere else. sorry.47 -
(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.6 -
I work for "a" company. This company has completely broken my desire to improve user experiences.
For instance, they have fetishized reducing the amount of clicks users have to go through to improve user productivity. Normally this is good, in their grossly mutated views, not so much.
They want ALL the data on a single page, and want people to use ctrl+f to find whatever they want on these pages instead of, ya know, a site-wide search(which fucking exists).
So this makes page times and UX horrible, some pages will take upwards of 2 minutes to completely load. 2 fucking minutes! My team and I had reduced these down to 15 seconds by reducing the data displayed and paginating it using some awesome JS lazy load functions. Not great by any real metric, but still a huge improvement.
You know who uses it out of 400 employees? Me. You know who still constantly gets complaints that the pages load really fuckin slowly? Still me!
Fuck these dumb asses and their retarded ideologies. They are stuck so far up 1990s ass they can practically TASTE Clintons' taint.
The culture is so toxic for developers it's absolutely abhorrent and depressing.
There is no freedom to do what you need to do because you're too busy doing the things they ask you to do. Follow that up with quarterly performance reports that bring up questions like, "What do you do for us?".
The only positive to working in this shithole is that they wouldn't dare fire you because they would never find anyone that would stay long enough to become an expert on this pile of shit. Over the last year we have gone through an entire 16 dev team, twice. That's 36 developers that just straight up quit in 12 months, and it's not like any of them worked together either. I would say 3-4 out of the first group met the second group, and 1-2 stuck around for the current group.
I don't normally rant like this, but I've been holding this shit in for a very long time and I can't hold it in.3 -
My project at work (an electron/angular desktop app) has an exceedingly rare bug that causes it to crash-to-desktop while loading. Nothing about the bug makes sense, and there's no way to catch or detect it until the next run, and it happens 100% of the time for affected users.
There have been six confirmed cases so far (out of 500k+ users), and nothing linking them together. None of the fixes discovered by those users have worked for other affected users.
The worst part?
I was the first of those cases. I inadvertently fixed it for myself and haven't been able to reproduce it since.
I'm stumped!17 -
I try as hard as possible not to be judgemental towards incompetent colleagues, motivating myself with the knowledge that we were all incompetent at some point, and that people need a chance to learn, and that sometimes too much pressure will lead you to believe that they're bad. Or sometimes, people just aren't good at the stuff you want them to be good, and you just need to discover that niche where they will be very useful.
Mostly that goes well.
I've had the incompetent late bloomer who was a family man who started too late to dev, and wasn't really serious. A bit of harsh talk, some soul searching over a few beers, made him into a really valuable asset. Not the brightest rock, but reliable, steady-paced developer who earned his stay.
Then there was the girl who wasn't really good at coding, but saved our team from disaster many times by keeping things into account, and realizing what must be developed or tested at every step.
However, there are exceptions. I've worked with people who have been nothing but a menace, through their incompetence AND attitudes.
The most noteworthy example was an intern that we sought out, by talking to professors to point us to their best students. So we got that intern on board. He seemed strange at first. Kind of perfectionist. Talked serious, with an air of royalty, and always dressed sharply. He really gave the impression that one must be worthy to receive his blessing. The weirdest part was his handshake. It was as if he was touching an iron hand heated to 3000 degrees. It was over before you even knew it. Leaves you kinda offended. Especially when he always took a wet wipe after that and wiped his hands. Am I really that gross?
But that's fiiiine. I mean we're all different and weird in our own ways, right? So he's a germophobe, so fucking what? We just gotta find a way to work together, right?
WRONG.
As soon as he started (and remember, he's a paid intern, who barely knows how to code, and has zero industrial experience), he started questioning my architecture solutions, code implementations, etc. I don't mind discussion and criticism, which is why I welcomed his input. But it seemed like he wasn't willing to accept any arguments, so I started looking for excuses not to talk to him.
Meanwhile, the most productive team member we had, to whom you could just give and describe an idea, with architecture and stuff, well, and you'd see it implemented the next week, with only the most well placed questions asked, started going into fights with this intern for the same reasons I was avoiding him.
.....
And here's the kicker.
Get this:
This intern comes to me (I was the team lead), while that guy is not in the office, and with a straight face, dead serious, starts telling me that that guy was making stupid decisions and being a bad team member because he doesn't ... I quote him almost verbatim... "follow my indications". He said that I had to do something because he refused to work with him together.
I was stunned.
This good for nothing imagined superhuman, who was completely useless and an amazing annoyance to pretty much everyone in the team, came to me, telling me that the most capable and productive developer in the team is bad, because he doesn't follow his orders, and that I had to pick between the 2.
I couldn't believe what I had heard.
I had so much emotion in me right then. I was angry, but at the same time I could barely abstain from laughing.
I just told him calmly that he was wrong, and that I wouldn't mind if he never came back. I didn't see him for 5 years after that.
Anyway, later that week our team went for a dinner + beer, and the stories from all the team members started pouring in. They didn't want to talk him down either, but now that he was gone, it was a weight off, and everybody could tell their story.
What a fucking asshole.
So 5 years after I stumbled on him as he was entering a church. Still an arrogant bitch. Barely exchanged 10 polite words and I continued on my way as he was disinfecting his hands from my filthy handshake.4 -
Ok so this happend in the last 3 days, I didn't post it till now because I had to seriously take a rest with all the bullshit and stress that came with it...
(Legacy project I have the lead in called: "Foo")
Monday:
Management decided it would be effective to add a senior and a junior to Foo, which would make (together with me) to be 2 juniors and one senior developer
Well I've spend most of that day helping both the junior and the senior to setup "Foo" on their local development machines... So I could not do any programming myself
tuesday:
The senior wanted to refactor EVERYTHING... and I had to stop him multiple times because we simply do not have the time to do that...
The junior tried to work on other things as much as he could, and after he had run out of things to do, asked me for EVERYTHING... EVEN WHERE TO FUCKING CHANGE SOME GOD DAMN STRINGS!....
Also he did in total 3 commits, two of which existed of my code (because I had to "help" him
wednesday:
Both the junior and senior were removed from the project and I got another senior.. who fucking deleted the production database on accident
god damn rough few days man...7 -
"I keep telling you, I'm not a pilot"
"and I keep telling you, you fly boys crack me up!"
I'm not a developer, but I'm doing some complex things and I need the benefit of computers to work things out, so I know enough programming to get me by. Recently one of the uppers decided that all the amateur spaghetti python programs I'd quickly slapped together should be developed into tools that the clients engineers can use!
"How long do you need!."
" I have no idea how to make something like that",
"but it's all just maths right! you can figure it out",
"probably, given long enough bu.. "
"okay get started and we'll check in in a couple of weeks" "hold o.." "I'll give your pride and joy to the graduate to fuck up while you're working on that" "wai.. " "anyway got take this call, good luck"
┗|`O′|┛
So here I am.. I have no idea what I'm doing.
So since I have a working knowledge of python, fortran and VBA, someone suggested I learn nim, which was not what he sold it as. Then a software engineer that went to the same uni as me, suggested RUST! you can't mess up rust, and look at this I created (shows me a decent looking desktop application) "I'll help you out". But it wasn't really that easy.
Then I asked some questions... that was my first mistake, that's not acceptable until you know what you're doing apparently. Especially when the answers are in the docs you can't find in a topic you don't understand for a version you're not using solved with a tool you've never heard of for an operating system you forgot existed. Look at this moron asking a question.
Okay to be fair, I went through the rust docs and it was well written, and I do really like this language. But I do not have a degree in computer science, and so many docs for crates are just written with an expectation of a certain level of knowledge. As soon as there's a build error, it's at least 3 -4 days of me faffing about trying to decipher hieroglyphics.
..and the graduate is about to unwittingly commit manslaughter..
I'm sure whoever needs to fix this mess in the future will post a rant about this train wreck.6 -
In the last project i worked in, the product owner wouldn't treat people as people but as resources.
The problem with that is you just look at people and their work in terms of a checklist and remain blind about real humans face.
She wouldn't understand the challenges of building something with an absolutely new stack which people needed to learn from scratch and put pieces together. She wouldn't be supportive of people trying out things and fail.
One fine day I told her that I was spending too much time on meetings and i should be excluding that time from available sprint timings.. she made me open my calendar in a screenshare session with all team members. Made me go through go through every meeting invite i had on calender and ordered which ones should i be attending from then and which ones i wont. That was insulting. It broke the trust.
I decided to not work with the project. Stopped putting my heart and soul into it and eventually got out of it in a month time.
Don't put your team into a position like this ever. You have to trust them with the problems they face and try to find a solution. Scrutinizing and micro management will always kill the team.1 -
TLDR: Small family owned finance business woes as the “you-do-everything-now” network/sysadmin intern
Friday my boss, who is currently traveling in Vegas (hmmm), sends me an email asking me to punch a hole in our firewall so he can access our locally hosted Jira server that we use for time logging/task management.
Because of our lack of proper documentation I have to refer to my half completed network map and rely on some acrobatic cable tracing to discover that we use a SonicWall physical firewall. I then realize asking around that I don’t have access to the management interface because no one knows the password.
Using some lucky guesses and documentation I discover on a file share from four years ago, I piece together the username and password to log in only to discover that the enterprise support subscription is two years expired. The pretty and useful interface that I’m expecting has been deactivated and instead of a nice overview of firewall access rules the only thing I can access is an arcane table of network rules using abbreviated notation and five year old custom made objects representing our internal network.
An hour and a half later I have a solid understanding of SonicWallOS, its firewall rules, and our particular configuration and I’m able to direct external traffic from the right port to our internal server running Jira. I even configure a HIDS on the Jira server and throw up an iptables firewall quickly since the machine is now connected to the outside world.
After seeing how many access rules our firewall has, as a precaution I decide to run a quick nmap scan to see what our network looks like to an attacker.
The output doesn’t stop scrolling for a minute. Final count we have 38 ports wide open with a GOLDMINE of information from every web, DNS, and public server flooding my terminal. Our local domain controller has ports directly connected to the Internet. Several un-updated Windows Server 2008 machines with confidential business information have IIS 7.0 running connected directly to the internet (versions with confirmed remote code execution vulnerabilities). I’ve got my work cut out for me.
It looks like someone’s idea of allowing remote access to the office at some point was “port forward everything” instead of setting up a VPN. I learn the owners close personal friend did all their IT until 4 years ago, when the professional documentation stops. He retired and they’ve only invested in low cost students (like me!) to fill the gap. Some kid who port forwarded his home router for League at some point was like “let’s do that with production servers!”
At this point my boss emails me to see what I’ve done. I spit him back a link to use our Jira server. He sends me a reply “You haven’t logged any work in Jira, what have you been doing?”
Facepalm.4 -
I did it - I went outside! Felt strange, like Y2K and Maya doomsday would have been together. Of course I went out only during daylight because THEY hide in the dark. Infrastructure was mostly still intact, I've even seen some houses. Occasionally, survivors scrambling the area.
GPS didn't work so I used my magnetic compass. OK, it was because I forgot my mobile at home, but anyway. Should I take petrol with me so that I could burn my clothing upon return? Or would this attract THEM? Occasional gunfire in the distance. Might also be some pneumatic hammer, that's what the media would try to tell me.
The local supermarket had still trolleys outside. I took note because I might need them to bar the stairwell, along with the land mines that I still have left over from New Year's Eve.
Deserted cars standing around. Looked like neatly parked, but that doesn't mean anything. When Germans turn into zombies, their last human action is to park their cars. That's so genetically hardwired that no virus can override it.
Dusk set in. I better returned home.17 -
So we started looking into docker. As always I needed to do the research and I was fine with it.
We have 4 projects that are sold into one suite so logically I follow the microservices build structure.
3 months later after everything has been set up, we get called into a meeting. The whole suite should be a monolith as microservices doesn't make sense to the people planning everything.
Ok pulled my current plans out abd made everything a monolith. Just note I also get pulled away to other Business Units to do work for them.
Get pulled into another meeting 2 months later. Why isn't the docker containers in microservices!? It is stupid running as a monolith and we should've done our jobs better etc...
After the meeting my manager and I just sighed and walked to the office. So basically 5 months doing the the exact same thing we did in 3 weeks.
Now they want to develop other services and want to strip every method into a microservice and bundle it together.
Life of a DevOps engineer right!1 -
Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.
When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.
I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.
At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.
At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.
I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.
And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.6 -
Regex.
I HATE YOU.
There. I've said it.
I spent the better part of the last hour trying to wrangle together, not one, but TWO regexes and getting them to work with Python's "re" module.
The worst part about these little shits? It's how well they work once you figure out how to get them to work. For example, pulling a phone number out of a paragraph is difficult with string methods, but cake with regex . . . if you can figure out the pattern.
But I think I'll always have hate in my heart for Regex just for how obtuse and frustrating they can be.
F**k you regex.19 -
I think I want to quit my first applicantion developer job 6 months in because of just how bad the code and deployment and.. Just everything, is.
I'm a C#/.net developer. Currently I'm working on some asp.net and sql stuff for this company.
We have no code standards. Our project manager is somewhere between useless and determinental. Our clients are unreasonable (its the government, so im a bit stifled on what I can say.) and expect absurd things from us. We have 0 automated tests and before I arrived all our infrastructure wasn't correct to our documentation... And we barely had any documentation to begin with.
The code is another horror story. It's out sourced C# asp.net, js and SQL code.. And to very bad programmers in India, no offense to the good ones, I know you exist. Its all spagheti. And half of it isn't spelled correctly.
We have a single, massive constant class that probably has over 2000 constants, I don't care to count. Our SQL projects are a mess with tons of quick fix scripts to run pre and post publishing. Our folder structure makes no sense (We have root/js and root/js1 to make you cringe.) our javascript is majoritly on the asp.net pages themselves inline, so we don't even have minification most of the time.
It's... God awful. The result of a billion and one quick fixes that nobody documented. The configuration alone has to have the same value put multiple times. And now our senior developer is getting the outsourced department to work on moving every SINGLE NORMAL STRING INTO THE DATABASE. That's right. Rather then putting them into some local resource file or anything sane, our website will now be drawing every single standard string from the database. Our SENIOR DEVELOPER thinks this is a good idea. I don't need to go into detail about how slow this is. Want to do it on boot? Fine. But they do it every time the page loads. It's absurd.
Our sql database design is an absolute atrocity. You have to join several tables together just to get anything done. Half of our SP's are failing all the time because nobody really understands the design. Its gloriously awful its like.. The epitome of failed database designs.
But rather then taking a step back and dealing with all the issues, we keep adding new features and other ones get left in the dust. Hell, we don't even have complete browser support yet. There were things on the website that were still running SILVERLIGHT. In 2019. I don't even know how to feel about it.
I brought up our insane technical debt to our PM who told me that we don't have time to worry about things like technical debt. They also wouldn't spend the time to teach me anything, saying they would rather outsource everything then take the time to teach me. So i did. I learned a huge chunk of it myself.
But calling this a developer job was a sick, twisted joke. All our lives revolve around bugnet. Our work is our BN's. So every issue the client emails about becomes BN's. I haven't developed anything. All I've done is clean up others mess.
Except for the one time they did have me develop something. And I did it right and took my time. And then they told me it took too long, forced me to release before it was ready, even though I had never worked on what I was doing before. And it worked. I did it.
They then told me it likely wouldn't even be used anyway. I wasn't very happy at all.
I then discovered quickly the horrors of wanting to make changes on production. In order to make changes to it, we have to... Get this
Write a huge document explaining why. Not to our management. To the customer. The customer wants us to 'request' to fix our application.
I feel like I am literally against a wall. A huge massive wall. I can't get constent from my PM to fix the shitty code they have as a result of outsourcing. I can't make changes without the customer asking why I would work on something that doesn't add something new for them. And I can't ask for any sort of help, and half of the people I have to ask help from don't even speak english very well so it makes it double hard to understand anything.
But what can I do? If I leave my job it leaves a lasting stain on my record that I am unsure if I can shake off.
... Well, thats my tl;dr rant. Im a junior, so maybe idk what the hell im talking about.rant code application bad project management annoying as hell bad code c++ bad client bad design application development16 -
I've run into problems with the app I'm working on, the problems are related to issues regarding code.
No in fact it's related the last guy who wrote the app, the code has no comments and the variable names make no sense, the only comments in the code are blocks of code... With no reason as to why it was commented.
I have to add in some checks to determine if a person that has logged in is a full member or not (full member has access to the feature I've added) and the way the guy has made this app works makes no sense to me at all.
I've tried my best to avoid all contact with his code because it makes me want to yell out in frustration.
But for this one case I have to work with what's there.
I know I've mentioned this before but I've hit my limit yet again.
And for those who don't know this guy managed to scrape together skeleton code from two apps to make part of this app, rather than using parts of the other apps he left out code that was specifically made for the other apps, (majority of the commented out code).
One app was a taxi app and from the looks of it the feature he used was to get GPS location (which I don't understand before Google maps is a think after all... The taxi app USES Google maps), the other app is some sort of funeral webcasting app (I found code imports for it, without any actual code).
I don't actual understand how this guy could put this together without not thinking "maybe this is a bad idea"
Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live
I'm that psychopath right now..... Fuck that guy (don't know where he lives though)1 -
Stepped out of my comfort zone and dropped a Zoom link into the channel for Lambda grads to see if anyone wanted to work through code challenges together. It ended up being enjoyable enough that I’m thinking of making it a regular thing. Meanwhile, contribution graph is still going strong.2
-
Continuation from :
https://devrant.io/rants/835693/...
Hi everybody! I am sorry that as a first time poster I am building 2 long stories, but I really like the idea of connecting with other people here!
Well, as I was mentioning before, I got a job in Android development and had a blast with it. Me and the developer clicked and would spend our time discussing PHP, the move to other stacks (I was making him love the idea of Django or Spring Java) games, bands and cool stuff like that. This dude was my hero, his own stack was developed in a similar MVC fashion that he had implemented from scratch before for many projects. It was through him that I learned how to use my own code (rather than frameworks and other libraries) to build what I wanted. I seriously thought that I had it made with a position that respected me and placed me in the lead mobile development position of the company. Then it happened. He had taken 2 weeks of unauthorized leave, which was ok since he was best friends with the owner of the company, those 2 along another asshole started it so they could do whatever they wanted. And I could not make much progress without him being there since there were things that he needed to do, that I was not allowed, for me to continue. When he came back I was quickly rushed to the owner of the company's office to discuss my lack of progress. The lead developer was livid, as if he knew that he had fucked up. He blamed the whole thing on me (literally told the owner that it was my fault before I was summoned) and that we lost 2 weeks of business time because I did not had the initiative to make progress on my own. I felt absolutely horrible, someone that I had trusted and befriended doing something like that, I really felt like shit. I had mad respect and love for this guy. It got heated, I showed the owner the text messages in which I showed him my pleas to led me finish the parts that were needed while he was away. Funny enough, he acted betrayed. After that it was 3 months of barely talking to one another except for work related stuff. He got cold and would barely let me touch the internal code that he was developing. It was painful. The owner kept complaining about progress and demanded that I do a document scanner for the company, which was to be attached to their mobile application. Not only that but it had to be done with OpenCV. Now, CV is great, but it is its own area, it takes a while to be able to develop something nice with it that is efficient and not a shitstorm.
I had two weeks.
Finished in one. After burning my brain and ensuring that the c++ code was not giving issues and the project was steady I turned it in...to their dismay. And I say so because I felt that they gave me such a huge project with the intention of firing me if it was not done. After that it was constant shit from the owner and the lead developer. I was asked then to port the code to the IOS version. I had some knowledge of it already so I started working on it. Progress was fast since the initial idea was already there and I really love working on Apple devices. And when I was 70% done the owner decided to cut me loose. At first he cited things such as lack of funding and him being unable to pay my salary. I was fine with that even though I knew it was not true. So at the time I just nodded and thanked the company for my time there. Before I left, he decided to blame it on me, stating that if they were not producing money that it was perhaps my fault. I lost my shit, and started using my military voice to explain to him how a software company is normally ran. Then I stormed out.
It was known to me, that the lead developer had actually argued against me being laid off. And that he was upset about it, we made amends, but the fact remains that I was laid off because the owner did not think of me as an asset, regardless of how many times I worked alongside the lead developer or how valuable I was actually to the company, their infrastructure did get better while we worked together, so I just assumed that he never actually did any mention of my value.
I lasted 2 months without a job, feeling horribly shitty because my wife had to work harder to ensure our stability whilst I was without any sort of salary. At this time I had already my degree, so all I had to do was look better. In the meantime I decided to study more about other technologies. I learn React, and got way better at JS and Node that I thought I could and was finally able to get another job as a full stack developer for another company.
I have been here since 2 months. It has been weird, we do classic ASP, which is completely pointless at this time, but meh. At this time though, I just don't really have the same motivation. Its really hard for me to trust the people that I work with and would like to connect with more developers.21 -
Made a Website.
What this friendly old Lady wanted: a update to her poem/song website that looked horrible.
What she got: A goddamn masterpiece considering there is NO backend and I got nearly no ressources to work with.
It took forever to put that stuff together since I thought I dont need any frameworks at all. I didnt know PHP at all back then, so I just went all out with everything that pure HTML and CSS could give me.
I even went outside to make nice photos to put into the Background.
....so, he said no PHP or anything? YES! If you wanna add content you change the HTML and upload stuff via Filezilla. I dont really want to see it ever again. But not because it looks bad.
I know, its not really coding since its HTML but I Count this!rant html counts here wk182 please dont hate me not even a script kiddy wannabe webdesigner mistakes were made1 -
Worst exp. on a collab/group project?
Had a few, here is one.
Worked with a dev team (of two devs) in Norway to begin collaboration on providing a portal into our system (placing orders, retrieving customer info, inventory control, etc)
They spoke very good English, but motivation was the problem. Start the day around 10:00AM...take a two hour lunch...ended the day at, if I was lucky, 4:00PM (relative to Norway time). Response time to questions took days, sometimes weeks. We used Skype, which helped, but everything was "Yea...I'll do that tomorrow...waiting on X....I have a wedding to go to, so I'll finish my part next week."
I didn't care so much, I had other projects to do, but the stakeholders pounded me almost everyday demanding a progress report (why aren't you done yet...etc..etc.)
The badgering got so bad I told the project owner (a VP) if he wanted this project done by the end of the year, the company would have to fly me to Norway so I personally push things along.
When real money was on the line, he decided patience was warranted.
A 3 month project turned into 9, and during a phone meeting with the CEO in December
O: "Thanks guys, this project is going great. We'll talk again in February. Bye."
PM: "Whoa...what! February!"
<sounding puzzled>
O: "Um..yes? It's Christmas time. Don't you Americans take off for Christmas?"
PM: "Yes, but not until Christmas. Its only December 12th. Your taking the whole month of December and January for Christmas?"
O:"Yes, of course. You Americans work too hard. You should come over here and see how we celebrate. Takes about a month so we can ease back into the flow of things."
<Jack is the VP>
PM: "Jack wanted this project completed by the end of the year, that is what everyone agreed to."
O:"Yes, I suppose, but my plane is waiting on me. Not to worry, everything will be fine."
<ceo hangs up>
PM: "Oh shit..oh shit..oh shit. What are you going to do!?"
Me: "Me!?..not a darn thing. Better go talk with Jeff."
<Jeff is the VP>
J: "This is unacceptable. You promised this project would only take a few months. I told you there would be consequences for not meeting the deadline."
PM:"But..but...its not our fault."
J: "I don't care about fault. I care about responsibility. I've never had to fire anyone for not meeting a deadline, but .."
Me: "Jeff, they are in Norway and no one is working this project for the next two months. You've known for months about them dragging their asses on this project. We're ready to go. Services have been tested and deployed. Accounting has all the payment routing ready. Only piece missing is theirs."
J: "Oh. OK. Great job guys. I guess we'll delay this project until February."
<leave the office>
PM: "Holy shit I'm glad you were there. I thought I was fired."
Me: "Yea, and that prick would have done it not giving a crap that it's Christmas."
<fast forward to Feb>
O: "Our service provider fell through, so I'm hosting with another company. You guys know PHP? Perl? I don't know what they called it, but it sounded so cool I bought the company."
PM: "You bought what? Are we still working with Z and B?"
O:"Yea, sort of. How's your German? New guy only speaks German."
PM: "Um, uh... no one here speaks German"
O:"Not to worry, I speak German, French, and Italian. I'll be your translator."
PM: "What? French and Italian?"
O: "On my trip to France I connected with a importer who then got me in touch with international shipper in Italy. I flew over there and met a couple really smart guys than can help us out. My new guy only speaks German, J only speaks French, and R speaks Italian, Russian, and a little English. Not to worry, I'm full time on this project. You have my full attention."
We believe the CEO has/had some serious mental issues, including some ADD. He bailed within the first month (took another vacation to Sweden to do some fishing) and left me using Google Translate to coordinate the project. Luckily, by the end, the Norwegian company hired a contractor from England who spoke German and hobbled together the final integration.3 -
My friend, Gavin, an air steward (a job that he had done for decades), told me about an incident at work. He said that (shockingly to me) passengers occasionally die on a flight (particularly long-haul), just as a matter of course. This can be because people sometimes travel to visit loved ones BECAUSE they are dying, people sometimes find travelling itself stressful (so it can exacerbate an existing medical condition), or simply that, if you took a large number of people and shut them up in a space together for some considerable time, some of them would pop off through sheer statistical probability. Cabin crew are, apparently, fully trained to deal within this eventually in a calm, almost routine manner.
This particular flight, Gavin was working with another gay man: Peter, who was actually a VERY funny personality. Camp, extravagant and loud, Peter really lit up the place. But naturally, when the very elderly male passenger in seat 38b died peacefully in his sleep halfway across the Atlantic, Peter acted (like the entire crew), with decorum and dignity. As per the protocol, all the lights in the cabin were dimmed. A hush fell over the passengers (Gavin told me that, although no announcement is ever made, the other passengers nearly always instinctively know what's happened, with the news spreading via the media of hushed whispers and nudges). Then, as per standing instructions, two of the crew carefully lifted the deceased out of his seat and gently carried him to the crew station where he was laid down on a bed for the remainder of the flight.
After the late gentleman disappeared behind the discreetly drawn curtain, you could have heard a pin drop. There was a demure pause during which, slowly, the lights went back up.
Suddenly Peter's cheery face appeared, poking through the gap in the drapes. He looked around, blinking brightly with curiosity at the seated passengers, and said, in a voice that echoed around the whole cabin:
"SO! Anyone else have the fish?"
He narrowly avoided getting sacked.10 -
Ok friends let's try to compile Flownet2 with Torch. It's made by NVIDIA themselves so there won't be any problem at all with dependencies right?????? /s
Let's use Deep Learning AMI with a K80 on AWS, totally updated and ready to go super great always works with everything else.
> CUDA error
> CuDNN version mismatch
> CUDA versions overwrite
> Library paths not updated ever
> Torch 0.4.1 doesn't work so have to go back to Torch 0.4
> Flownet doesn't compile, get bunch of CUDA errors piece of shit code
> online forums have lots of questions and 0 answers
> Decide to skip straight to vid2vid
> More cuda errors
> Can't compile the fucking 2d kernel
> Through some act of God reinstalling cuda and CuDNN, manage to finally compile Flownet2
> Try running
> "Kernel image" error
> excusemewhatthefuck.jpg
> Try without a label map because fuck it the instructions and flags they gave are basically guaranteed not to work, it's fucking Nvidia amirite
> Enormous fucking CUDA error and Torch error, makes no sense, online no one agrees and 0 answers again
> Try again but this time on a clean machine
> Still no go
> Last resort, use the docker image they themselves provided of flownet
> Same fucking error
> While in the process of debugging, realize my training image set is also bound to have bad results because "directly concatenating" images together as they claim in the paper actually has horrible results, and the network doesn't accept 6 channel input no matter what, so the only way to get around this is to make 2 images (3 * 2 = 6 quick maths)
> Fix my training data, fuck Nvidia dude who gave me wrong info
> Try again
> Same fucking errors
> Doesn't give nay helpful information, just spits out a bunch of fucking memory addresses and long function names from the CUDA core
> Try reinstalling and then making a basic torch network, works perfectly fine
> FINALLY.png
> Setup vid2vid and flownet again
> SAME FUCKING ERROR
> Try to build the entire network in tensorflow
> CUDA error
> CuDNN version mismatch
> Doesn't work with TF
> HAVE TO FUCKING DOWNGEADE DRIVERS TOO
> TF doesn't support latest cuda because no one in the ML community can be bothered to support anything other than their own machine
> After setting up everything again, realize have no space left on 75gb machine
> Try torch again, hoping that the entire change will fix things
At this point I'll leave a space so you can try to guess what happened next before seeing the result.
Ready?
3
2
1
> SAME FUCKING ERROR
In conclusion, NVIDIA is a fucking piece of shit that can't make their own libraries compatible with themselves, and can't be fucked to write instructions that actually work.
If anyone has vid2vid working or has gotten around the kernel image error for AWS K80s please throw me a lifeline, in exchange you can have my soul or what little is left of it5 -
Alright, this my fucking rant right here. Distraction? This whole company is a distraction! Boss decided to throw us all in an open work environment doing jobs that require careful concentration. Straight outta college I'm getting handed vague ideas, (make a desktop app that helps our customers put data on the internet, make an iPhone app) with out so much as an inkling of what technologies to use, just make it work.
Ok I will but when you hit a roadblock with very little resources to draw in it's hard to stay focused.
On top of that since I worked in support for a year I'm our senior support person! But sometimes support just doesn't use their brains and I'm using my time to solve very basic problems.
That brings me to my next point, the goddamn piece of shit that is our telephone. Fuck that thing when it rings it's never good. Moreover, since I don't want to get roasted for not being responsive I have the motherfucker forward to my personal cell. So I answer every fucking call and I get so many spam calls!
Not to mention I'm mainly running the hardware show around here. Shits broke I'm the one fixing it. Need new shit I'm putting the order together.
Tried to get a new guy to be the sys admin, ordered a 6th gen board with a 7th gen proc, had to pull 3 machines apart to get that sorted. Then he left bc family issues, and has been gone for weeks.
The other devs are also slam up busy, and the main product is about 15 people's piss on a plate of garb age spaghetti. (I got a lot of shit going on but at least I'm the only one pissing in my spaghetti) it's a constant run around if who does what with a code first plan later mentality causing confusion and delay.
Nobody wants to help anybody because they are also annoyed with this setup and are getting bitched at by customers or management.
Sales is mostly composed of a bunch of crackhead yes men and women who just want a commission and only half know the shit we sell and have sold 15 new features that had not been discussed. But management always says make it happen. In what priority? It's all a priority they say! Wtf.
So yea, then it brings me to me, dealing with this much chaos at work makes it seem like a high amount of chaos in my life is normal. I'm just now learning to control this.
I've had to do a lot of growing up as a person and as a developer. I've went from being the most junior to about the 3rd most seniors and I've no doubt my efforts have contributed to the growth of the company.
I'm a big believer in coding flow, and that it takes at least 15 mins to get in that flow and about 5 seconds to break it. There is no do not disturb on the company chat, everything always on fire it seems.
So fuck a lot of this, but I've done the research and where I'm at is the best opportunity in a 100 mile radius. So I am thankful for this job. Plus I usually win the horror story contest.
So TL;DR the biggest distraction is every fucking thing in this god forsaken place.5 -
When I was at university in my last semester of my bachelor's, I was doing a game programming paper and our last assignment was to group up and make a game. So I go with one of the guys I know and this other dude since his previous game was really neat. Then two randoms joined that from my first impressions of their games wasn't much at all (one guy made four buttons click and called it a game in Java when we had to make games in c++ and the other guy used an example game and semi modded it.
Anyways we get to brain storming, totally waste too much time getting organised because the guy that volunteered (4 buttons guy) was slow to getting things sorted. Eventually we get to making the game and 4 buttons guy hasn't learnt how to use git, I then end up spending 3 hours over Skype explaining to him how to do this. He eventually learns how to do things and then volunteers to do the AI for the game, after about a week (this assignment is only 5 weeks long) he hasn't shown any progress, we eventually get to our 3rd week milestone no progress from him and the modder, with only three classes left we ask them both to get stuff done before a set deadline (modder wanted to do monsters and help 4 buttons with AI) both agreed and deadline rolls up and no work is shown at all, modest shows up extremely late and shows little work.
4 buttons guy leaves us a Skype message the day of our 2nd to last class,, saying he dropped the paper...
Modder did do some work but he failed to read all the documentation I left him (the game was a 2d multiplayer crafting game, I worked so hard to make a 2d map system with a world camera) he failed to read everything and his monsters used local coordinates and were stuck on screen!
With about a week left and not too many group meetings left we meet up to try and get stuff done, modder does nothing to help, the multiplayer is working my friend has done the crafting and weapon system and the map stuff is working out well. We're missing AI and combat, with our last few hours left we push to get as much stuff done, I somehow get stuck doing monster art, AI is done by the other two and I try to getting some of the combat and building done.
In the end we completely commented all of modders work because well it made us look bad lol. He later went to complain to my free claiming I did it and was a douchebag for doing so. We had to submit our developer logs and the three of us wrote about how shitty it was to deal with these two.
We tried out best not to isolate ourselves from them and definitely tried to help but we were swamped with our other assignments and what we had to work on.
In the end leaving and not helping right when the deadline is close was what I call the most shittiest thing team mates can do, I think sticking together even if we were to fail was at least a lot better.3 -
My first post here, be merciful please.
So, I participate in game jams now and then. About two years ago, I was participating in one, and we where near the deadline. Our game was pretty much done, so we where posted a "alpha" version waiting for feedback.
Just half an hour before the deadline, we got a comment on our alpha alerting us of a rather important typo: The instruction screen said "Press X to shoot" while X did nothing and Z was the correct key. "Good thing we caught that in time, thankfully a easy fix" I thought.
This project was written in python, and built using py2exe. If you know py2exe, the least error-prone method outputs a folder containing the .exe, plus ginormous amounts of dll's, pyc files, and various other crap. We would put the entire folder together with graphics and other resources into a .zip and tell the judges to look for the .exe.
Anyway, on this occasion I committed to source control ran the build, it seemed to work on my quick test. I uploaded the zip, right before the deadline and sat back waiting for the results.
I had forgotten one final step.
I had not copied my updated files to the zip, which still contained the old version.
Anyway, I ended up losing a lot of points in "user friendliness" since the judges had trouble figuring out how to shoot. After I figured out why and how it happened, I had a embarrassing story to tell my teammates.3 -
meeting with PM, 1:1
me: well, to be honest, i think there is also some room for improvement concerning communication in our meetings. the discussion culture in our meetings could be more open.
PM: what do you mean? i don't know what you're talking about.
me: well, i feel sometimes that in meetings, you overly challenge what colleagues suggest. on the other hand, it's really hard to argue against what you are saying. what you say is often like engraved into stone and it is hard to argue against that, but the next day you might have changed your mind again and then things are different, but engraved into stone again.
PM: hmm. can you give me some more concrete example?
me: well... (gives some examples) it's just that it would be nice if you would listen more to what people say in meetings and try to understand what they actually mean or want to say, instead of saying "nah, that's not how we do it" or "no, that's wrong"... just.. well, have more trust in our skills, try to find out what people mean before you discard what you think they said... a bit more of appreciation and openness.
PM: oh, i can tell you, i'm the MOST open manager in this whole company.
me: ...
PM: but anyway, i will think about it.
me: well... okay. also i see there are some challenges within our team concerning intercultural communication. i mean, communication between Germans and Indians is in general a bit problematic in our company, and maybe it is a good idea to have some workshop together concerning intercultural competences... i think we could benefit from that. (what i actually meant is, these problems exist, but currently i see them more on his side or between him and Indian colleagues, because e.g. he tends to harshly criticize people in daily standups, and if we "direct" Germans already feel affronted by his behavior, how must Indian guys feel about it? in fact, 2 Indian devs already left the project. also communication doesn't really work well, in a way that there's often a great mismatch between his expectations and what Indian devs actually think they have to do)
PM: i can tell you, i really understand our Indian colleagues, i really know how to work with them. also, their working style has greatly improved since project start. (which doesn't feel quite right after he totally ripped apart the work of one guy in the last sprint review meeting)
of course, that's not the whole conversation, but it's kind of a symptomatic example for the whole situation...11 -
After investigation, I'm just refreshing my os and hoping I can reconfigure work applications. Feel bad, but help desk friends are getting me the software to install and are helping me out on a day off.
Wasn't the application like I thought. It was the useless update that won't install and therefore can't be rolled back but is still getting in the way of my work, therefore they can all daisy chain their dicks together in the sane manner little kids make daisy crowns, and then have a steamroller head towards them with faulty brakes (steamroller operator is innocent in this scenario, he jumps out safely).
I'm planning on calling Microsoft in the morning to tell them what I think of them at the moment. But I'm too angry to form words that don't sound petty and childish. I'm open to suggestions.2 -
Debate (with rant-ish overtones):
FYI, while it is a debate, its a practiseSafeHex debate, which means there is a correct answer, i'm just interested in your responses/thoughts.
Ok lets kick off. So the remote team I work with had an opening for a new iOS developer (unrelated to anything to do with me). They interviewed and hired a guy based off his "amazing" take home challenge.
The challenge consists of 4 screens and was for a senior level position. For the challenge the interviewee created a framework (a iOS library) for each screen, included all the business logic for each screen inside, each one needs to be built separately, exposed some API/functions from each one and then created a main project to stitch it all together.
Now, my opinion is, this is highly unscalable and a ridiculous approach to take as it would add so much unnecessary overhead, for no benefit (I am correct btw).
The interviewee said he did it like this to "show off his skills and to stand out". The remote team loved it and hired him. The challenge said "show us the code standard you would be happy to release to production". I would argue that he has only demonstrated 1 extra skill, and in exchange delivered something that is unscalable, going to be a nightmare to automate and require huge on-boarding and a paradigm shift, for no reason. To me thats a fail for a senior to not realise what he's doing. This person will be required to work alone (in part), make architecture decisions, set the foundation for others etc. Having someone who is willing to just do mad shit to show off, is really not the type of person suited to this role.
Debate!11 -
Last year at the the Xmas party CEO slips in that he wants the app done by end of February, I freak because I thought he meant both iOS and Android (only dev working on both :/), anyways he wanted specifics for locking out specific people that haven't paid for some in-house training (like in app persons just not in the app lol) it required web development which I'm horrible at, I spend a whole week and managed to scrape together the right functions to do a user lock out, pretty all things considering.
A couple weeks before deadline I'm done :D, I've done a lot of testing, some in-house user testing, changes made all bugs visually possible are fixed.
Now I've been sitting here waiting, it's an iOS app that is currently completed aside from some legal work, which I kept going to boss "hey, we need that disclaimer and privacy policy", he becomes busy for the next few weeks, pester him more, pester another co-worker, only a week ago did they contact a lawyer...
I'm here stuck waiting at a roadblock, developing the Android app sure but for their iOS app that they want released first, I'm stuck on hold, so annoyed, it's not like I can just put on a lawyer hat and just right some shit that says don't use x unless you agree and such.
So annoying, for about 2 weeks I just played games on my phone, I was not expecting to waste that much time lol, I was really expecting the legal stuff to be ready.
Just a side note co-worker and boss that needed to get this legal stuff knew I needed to get this done, since I mentioned it leading up to my completion.
I don't think it'd take too long with Apple when it comes to the review, it's just an update but I wouldn't put my faith in that as an answer. Just hate that I'm on hold, was wanting to finish this app and apply for a new job (nothing against the company more so because I want to go a company where I could get a but of mentoring). But I sit here waiting, working on the Android app, it'd be sad if finish the Android app before their lawyers get back to me with the legal stuff, though Android is a lot easier for me (I did iOS after completing majority of the features they wanted on Android because I was more comfortable working on it).
:/ What a drag -
A coworker and me did together a "hackathon by choice" this week to finish a project. We did it only because we thought it would be cool and be able to finish the thing. Well it was surprisingly fun to stay awake 36 hours, coding all through, having a good flow. After that, our boss came and was very proud of our work and he was able to send it for inspection to the client. I stayed a bit longer to fix a few minor bugs, but after 42h I was finally in bed. 😁
Our boss gives us the following Monday off.
But I think on other projects, often deadlines take the fun out of it, if they are not estimated well... I mean you do great, high-professional work but in the end you feel bad, useless, slow and incompetent because of the pressure.2 -
Lately I have been overthinking a lot. I am stressing myself out on every single decision believing that decisions I make today will define my tomorrow.
In hindsight, all the major and positive impact that have happened in my life were the decisions I took on the fly without much underlying research. The executional part did have me struggle a little but almost all of the best things happened to me were unplanned.
Funnily this has been my philosophy since years but guess what, I failed to follow it this time.
My overthinking and over planning caused me to mess up a little leading to a lot of unwanted anxieties.
Now let's reflect a little on the past, when my first relationship ended.. wait.. even earlier..
When I was in 5th standard, I was crazy bullied at school but I was happy go lucky and things turned out in my favour throughout till date.
I used to do what I loved and enjoyed. I literally never worried or thought about future. Not even once, things just fell in place for me miraculously.
When my first relationship ended, I was shattered. The darkest time of my life and me being all alone, I came out strong.
I used to live happy. I used to do stuff that I loved. I used to not care about what people thought. No socials for me. I used to follow random dark or counter culture stuff and be a little rebel that I am.
I remember, she and I used to go for fuck tons of events, hangout at waterfront of the city, spend time together and just be ourselves.
I never used to compete, compare, or conflict with anyone.
devRant was (and still is) a digital home for me. Wonderful phase of life.
Then shit went south. I joined Reddit. A girl told me about a pen pal app. Met another girl there.
Joined Telegram again to be in touch with her. She wasn't interested but I stayed on Telegram.
I could pick up any girl in minutes and do so effortlessly.
Slowly the twin extrovert in me came out. I started building and maintaining insanely awesome network.
Started spending more time on Reddit and Telegram.
Joined a bunch of professional communities. Career sky rocketd.
I was still happy and living a gala life at this stage.
Slowly, I realised I was underpaid (via professional communities). That unsettled me.
I frantically started hunting for jobs. 2020 and COVID-19 hit. Being indoors sucked more.
Became more aggressive on job hunt, money, building skills, work work work...
Met a hoe who fucked my emotions and ethics even further.
Got a high paying job. WLB went negative.
I started losing myself. I forgot my hobbies. I don't know what happiness is. I don't remember when I last smiled. I started planning my finances. Overthinking and stressing about shit troubled me into sleepless nights followed by early morning calls made things worse to my health.
I lost the clarity of my life. I FUCKING LOST ME.
I want myself back and I am gonna work for it. That happy little rebel Floyd who never gave a fuck about other's opinion on him or his beliefs. That dude who was shy to talk to girls. The guy who'd follow his passion and not society of high paying jobs or shit.
I almost got my finances and taxation sorted. Now I'll work to get my office timings in place. If not then I'll switch and find a job in UK/EU with a good WLB. And at the same time I'll pursue my hobbies.
Enough of rat race shit. Money has always been an outcome of my hard work and high work ethics. I want to live a life and I am willing to trade of extremely high paying/stressful FAANG jobs for a small company keeping me happy.
I'll be the happy Floyd that I was once was.
Because, the heart wants what the heart wants :)2 -
My apprentice is driving me nuts with his failed attempts on gold-plating.
The task "Get the data and export it to a file" becomes ""After many attempts to get the data via a different query than we worked out together I now finally got it and it makes sense if it was displayed but only one set of data at a time and it should also be selected what data should be exported and I have no idea how to do that so Cero, can you help me?".
Dang it dude, just show me for once that you can do 1 clearly decribed task, where you have many examples to work with, and NOT try to add any extras!
I am now working on how to tell him this in a nicer way...2 -
TLDR; Go to bottom of post.
Around this time two years ago was the start of my group project in University. The project was to write an app in android and have a web side to it too. The group was to be overseen by a member of staff. The first meeting was introductions and to look at the spec, during the second we were to decide a group leader (PM) and other positions.
A person I shall call BD and I volunteered for PM. I didn't have experience with leadership but wanted some, and was the only one with confidence in android, the biggest part of the system. I got four of the votes.
BD, with his scouts experience, not being afraid to breathe down people's necks and bash some heads together, and having been PM last year, with his group receiving 69% (he failed the year and was resitting), earned 5. One guy was missing.
When it came to sorting out roles and responsibilities, BD confessed to not being a strong coder but that he'd help here and there. His role was planning our deadlines, doing our Gantt chart for deliverables, and was supposed to write a really detailed spec. He didn't have it at the meeting of the next week, as it was still in the works, and never messaged anyone. Next week he turned up with a Gantt chart of 1A4 page that only included the deadlines and deliverables in the spec, with three colours. One for android team, one for DB guy, and one for web team.
The guy who didn't turn up for voting got a girlfriend, a job at mcdonalds and did barely a thing. One guy in the web team did everything, carrying his friend who wouldn't do work (and also got swept out to see in a rubber boat with one of his bros lol (he was rescued)), and even though I'd done android dev I wasn't as quick a learner as two others in the team. Out of 10 people, 6 did real work.
The web guys stopped coming to meetings as they were taken over by android talk, and as we were quite behind, BG tried yellow carding them. They turned around with the website pretty much done, this one guy doing more than the 4 of us on android had. Yellow card lifted. We'd already complained about BD and his lack of everything (except screen brightness as he sat at the front of the lecture theatres with his wide brimmed hat looking at 9gag and videos (remembering he said he was resitting that year)) but grew a stronger dislike. Found out that he spent most of his time with his gf at our secretary/fellow android dev's house. Come coding week, he disappears entirely, only to attend meetings. He gave us a shell of the android code used for his previous year's project (along with documentation, complete with names and dates of updates, most of them (including the planning ones BD was supposed to do) bearing either one of two names. It was behind where we were at the time and had a lot of differences to our spec, and if we had used it BD may have used that to pull us down with him if things went wrong. He resurfaced at the end with the final documentation of how we'd all done, including reports on how each member had performed, which we were supposed to have reviewed. Our main, most proficient dev he accused of being irritable and brash, and a bad communicator. He was Norwegian, his voice was just a bit gruff, and he was driven and didn't waste time. He bashed the web team for not turning up, and had already been rude and unhelpful to everyone who voted for him in the first place.
In our own reports we all devoted paragraphs to delicately describing his contributions, excluding his suggestion that we use the code he gave us. Before we had our results and our work was completed, he individually kicked us from our group's facebook group and unfriended us.
Our 43% mark at the end, coupled with his -40% penalty from the red card we had him on, felt good, but not as good as a better result would have, especially as the fool that was BD would be inflicted on a group a third time. He changed to some other course after that year finished, so he must have failed his resit of second year.
During third year, a friend of mine who was PM for a group that passed well passed other things with too slim a margin to be happy, so chose to resit the year. He didn't have to do the group project again, and had that time free. But BD had to resit. His group had 69%. A yellow card with a 20% deduction wouldn't do it, so he MUST have had a red card as PM his previous year. Well that didn't come up when he claimed credit for his team's 69% during elections... My housemate's compsci boyfriend 2 years up overheard me talking about him, he was in 1st year with BD. BD failed and resat 1st year too. 4 years and he couldn't make anything stick. I feel bad for him through understanding the pains lack of work and internet distraction bring, and unfortunately I can't wish bad things on him because he brings them on himself. I wish I never see his face again though.
TLDR; Guy in group project lies and is dishonest from start to finish, getting PM pos by 1 vote. Gets what he earns.2 -
I had the most depressing realization last night after I spent a good chunk of the day answering questions on Stack Overflow.
I can usually understand their code, I often understand their questions, and I know how to help and when to recommend that they completely change direction. I'm effectively trying to mentor total strangers using a few code samples and paragraphs. I'm happy to do that, and I'm good at it.
Then I realized - these people all have programming challenges of their own to solve. I work for a so-called "consulting" agency where I sit around for weeks because they have nowhere to put me. When they do find me a client it's some company that has no idea how to develop software and no interest in how I can help. They just want to add another developer into the giant mess they've created to keep doing what they're already doing. I'm still using any of the skills I put to work all day long helping people on Stack Overflow.
In other words, the people who need my help figuring out how to write code actually have the jobs writing code, and I don't. Clearly I'm doing something wrong.
Ironically, when I go to one of these companies with a lead developer who doesn't know how to write a unit test or put together three lines of coherent code, that person tells me to just follow what everyone else is doing without making any improvements. Then he goes on Stack Overflow to figure out how to do his job, and chances are I'm the one answering his questions.
As my wife always reminds me, I work in air conditioning so I shouldn't complain. It's a stable company with nice people and it pays the bills. But I sure would like to develop some software in my software development job instead of treating it like a personal hobby.7 -
"four million dollars"
TL;DR. Seriously, It's way too long.
That's all the management really cares about, apparently.
It all started when there were heated, war faced discussions with a major client this weekend (coonts, I tell ye) and it was decided that a stupid, out of context customisation POC had that was hacked together by the "customisation and delivery " (they know to do neither) team needed to be merged with the product (a hot, lumpy cluster fuck, made in a technology so old that even the great creators (namely Goo-fucking-gle) decided that it was their worst mistake ever and stopped supporting it (or even considering its existence at this point)).
Today morning, I my manager calls me and announces that I'm the lucky fuck who gets to do this shit.
Now being the defacto got admin to our team (after the last lead left, I was the only one with adequate experience), I suggested to my manager "boss, here's a light bulb. Why don't we just create a new branch for the fuckers and ask them to merge their shite with our shite and then all we'll have to do it build the mixed up shite to create an even smellier pile of shite and feed it to the customer".
"I agree with you mahaDev (when haven't you said that, coont), but the thing is <insert random manger talk here> so we're the ones who'll have to do it (again, when haven't you said that, coont)"
I said fine. Send me the details. He forwarded me a mail, which contained context not amounting to half a syllable of the word "context". I pinged the guy who developed the hack. He gave me nothing but a link to his code repo. I said give me details. He simply said "I've sent the repo details, what else do you require?"
1st motherfucker.
Dafuq? Dude, gimme some spice. Dafuq you done? Dafuq libraries you used? Dafuq APIs you used? Where Dafuq did you get this old ass checkout on which you've made these changes? AND DAFUQ IS THIS TOOL SUPPOSED TO DO AND HOW DOES IT AFFECT MY PRODUCT?
Anyway, since I didn't get a lot of info, I set about trying to just merge the code blindly and fix all conflicts, assuming that no new libraries/APIs have been used and the code is compatible with our master code base.
Enter delivery head. 2nd motherfucker.
This coont neither has technical knowledge nor the common sense to ask someone who knows his shit to help out with the technical stuff.
I find out that this was the half assed moron who agreed to a 3 day timeline (and our build takes around 13 hours to complete, end to end). Because fuck testing. They validated the their tool, we've tested our product. There's no way it can fail when we make a hybrid cocktail that will make the elephants foot look like a frikkin mojito!
Anywho, he comes by every half-mother fucking-hour and asks whether the build has been triggered.
Bitch. I have no clue what is going on and your people apparently don't have the time to give a fuck. How in the world do you expect me to finish this in 5 minutes?
Anyway, after I compile for the first time after merging, I see enough compilations to last a frikkin life time. I kid you not, I scrolled for a complete minute before reaching the last one.
Again, my assumption was that there are no library or dependency changes, neither did I know the fact that the dude implemented using completely different libraries altogether in some places.
Now I know it's my fault for not checking myself, but I was already having a bad day.
I then proceeded to have a little tantrum. In the middle of the floor, because I DIDN'T HAVE A CLUE WHAT CHANGES WERE MADE AND NOBODY CARED ENOUGH TO GIVE A FUCKING FUCK ABOUT THE DAMN FUCK.
Lo and behold, everyone's at my service now. I get all things clarified, takes around an hour and a half of my time (could have been done in 20 minutes had someone given me the complete info) to find out all I need to know and proceed to remove all compilation problems.
Hurrah. In my frustration, I forgot to push some changes, and because of some weird shit in our build framework, the build failed in Jenkins. Multiple times. Even though the exact same code was working on my local setup (cliche, I know).
In any case, it was sometime during sorting out this mess did I come to know that the reason why the 2nd motherfucker accepted the 3 day deadline was because the total bill being slapped to the customer is four fucking million USD.
Greed. Wow. The fucker just sacrificed everyone's day and night (his team and the next) for 4mil. And my manager and director agreed. Four fucking million dollars. I don't get to see a penny of it, I work for peanut shells, for 15 hours, you'll get bonuses and commissions, the fucking junior Dev earns more than me, but my manager says I'm the MVP of the team, all I get is a thanks and a bad rating for this hike cycle.
4mil usd, I learnt today, is enough to make you lick the smelly, hairy balls of a Neanderthal even though the money isn't truly yours.4 -
Init and Hello. My name is git and this is my story.
I just arrived in this system recently by the apt highway. It's not the only way though. Some for example used the npm hype-train, others arrived from the ssh shore. No matter where we came from the next step on our agenda was time to introduce our self at the event destined for all new-comers to the system.
"As many of you I reside in the usr-bin district. I'm really into history and commitment! I like it when people work together, so I'm always eager to bring all branches together."
"But what is it actually good for?", asked Curl, which I already met at the bus station. Many nodded in agreement. It was odd. Somehow I felt not quite at home. All the others seemed so different based on their field of work.
"We have worked here in a really agile environment for ages. There is no need for any kind of strange bureaucracy.", said another voice.
All attempts to convince them from the beauty of history or a little bit of management were unsuccessful. It was just the beginning of a not so interesting stage in my life - to say the least.
Today was another of 'those' days. I live in this community for quiet a while now and unfortunately nothing really changed - at least for the good. I sat on my branch of the tree with all the others around and there was nothing really to do for me. Again. I mean, actually it's true. I have to admit it. There is just no work on this world for someone like me. All the others seem to be so busy, while I just have to sit around and question my own existence. Since I grew tired asking these questions to myself, I stopped it. I can't do a thing actually. That's not how this world works.
"Hey fagit, anything meaningful to add to our delightful conversation?", nginx shouted over to me from another branch of the tree. Before I was able to give an indifferent answer the voice just continued.
"Oh, sorry. I forgot that you have no purpose after all. Well, never mind!"
Everyone started laughing at me. It was not too bad by the way. Actually, this was quite ordinary. These fucktards completely ran out of creativity. If it wasn't for that mere emptiness gaping right above my guts, I'd actually be disappointed. I even got accustomed to the alias 'fagit'. Quiet sad given the fact that i really like my real name. If only someone would mind using it... First too quiet to notice but growing in intensity a rumbling emerged from somewhere deep within the tree. Out of a sudden everyone stopped laughing. The voices slowly faded while the growling from afar grew louder. It had come. Not more than a shadow reached out from the tree and faster than anyone could comprehend nginx was simply gone. Killed in an instance.
Disclaimer: This story is fictional. No systems were harmed in its creation.3 -
I miss old times rants...So i guess, here it goes mine:
Tomorrow is the day of the first demo to our client of a "forward-looking project" which is totally fucked up, because our "Technical Quality Assurance" - basically a developer from the '90-s, who gained the position by "he is a good guy from my last company where we worked together on sum old legacy project...".
He fucked up our marvellous, loose coupling, publish/subscribe microservice architecture, which was meant to replace an old, un-maintainable enormous monolitch app. Basically we have to replace some old-ass db stored functions.
Everyone was on our side, even the sysadmins were on our side, and he just walked in the conversation, and said: No, i don't like it, 'cause it's not clear how it would even work... Make it an RPC without loose coupling with the good-old common lib pattern, which made it now (it's the 4th 2 week/sprint, and it is a dependency hell). I could go on day and night about his "awesome ideas", and all the lovely e-mails and pull request comments... But back to business
So tomorrow is the demo. The client side project manager accidentally invited EVERYONE to this, even fucking CIO, legal department, all the designers... so yeah... pretty nice couple of swallowed company...
Today was a day, when my lead colleague just simply stayed home, to be more productive, our companys project manager had to work on other prjects, and can't help, and all the 3 other prject members were thinking it is important to interrupt me frequently...
I have to install our projects which is not even had a heart beat... not even on developer machines. Ok it is not a reeeeaaally big thing, but it is 6 MS from which 2 not even building because of tight coupling fucktard bitch..., But ok, i mean, i do my best, and make it work for the first time ever... I worked like 10 ours, just on the first fucking app to build, and deploy, run on the server, connect to db and rabbit mq... 10 FUCKING HOURS!!! (sorry, i mean) and it all was about 1, i mean ONE FUCKING LINE!
Let me explain: spring boot amqp with SSL was never tested before this time. I searched everything i could tought about, what could cause "Connection reset"... Yeah... not so helpful error message... I even have to "hack" into the demo server to test the keystore-truststore at localhost... and all the fucking configs, user names, urls, everything was correct... But one fucking line was missing...
EXCEPT ONE FUCKING LINE:
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=false # Whether to enable SSL support.
This little bitch took me 6 hours to figure out...so please guys, learn from my fault and check the spring boot appendix for default application properties, if everything is correct, but it is not working...
And of course, if you want SSL then ENABLE it...
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=true
BTW i really miss those old rants from angry devs, and i hope someone will smile on my fucking torturerant marshall_mathers worklife sugar-free_tateless_cake_decorant_figure_boss missolddays oldtimes_rants5 -
First time rant here, and I'm just gonna let fucking loose because this seems to be a good place for it.
My uni can't teach programming for shit. It's the reason people sign up for the course. They want to know how to program. I'm self-taught and unhappy in college as it is.
I joined CS because I thought they'd assimilate work in the real world, which is experience I need. I realized early on that programming is like art, and I love the rush I get of something finally working right.
That said, they sucked the fun out of it. It's too structured. Everyone trying to get the same goddamn result. In the real world, we'd be working on a larger project that involved planning, design, communication, teamwork, and the ability to complete each of our own pieces of the puzzle and subsequently put them together in a project that works for the end user.
I'm paying to be a fucking sheep, people. Why do employers give a shit about a degree instead of talent? Welp, fuck society for this. You can tell me I can drop it and still get a good job, it'll just be harder. That's the fucking problem. I can't get a job if these incompetent fucking bastards will throw out my resumé the moment they see "self-taught."
If we could hire based on GitHub contributions, I think many of us here would be relatively better off. Programmers program, not socialize. We do socialize, but in our own little groups. We team up as needed. The moment the jackass in HR realizes that, the better off we'll be.
Sorry, just the way I'm seeing shit right now. I'm going through some OCD-induced depression and this might be a result of that, but I'm passed the point of giving a fuck.15 -
! exactly dev
I'd ditched Windows and spent a while exploring the Linux ecosystem for content creation. And I have to say, it was not a nice experience.
As much as I respect the Linux mantra of "free as in freedom" and "you need to roll up your sleeves and figure out stuff on your own", it just isn't good enough for non-dev work. Sorry guys, but I need software that gets out of my way and at least does what it's supposed to do. I can't stand a horrible UI or delays and random crashes, which is exactly what happens with most things under Linux.
To replace my Windows workflow I used the following:
1. Windows -> elementaryOS (because Debian/Ubuntu repositories seem to have the best software support, and elementaryOS is the least horrible looking thing that supports that) and then Arch, because, well, Arch.
2. Blender + Maya -> Blender + Maya on Linux.
3. Reaper + FL Studio -> Ardour + LMMS.
4. Photoshop -> GIMP + Krita + Inkscape.
5. ZBrush -> nothing :(
As you can see, my use cases are pretty much all over the spectrum.
Firstly, installing and configuring stuff. A pleasure on Windows, an absolute pain on Linux. Everything just worked on Windows, I had to wrestle with library versions and patches and unstable audio layers (Linux audio just sucks, except for JACK) on Linux.
Out of these, Blender and Maya were the best experience. But even then, both would suffer from random crashes that just didn't happen on Windows.
Ardour is actually really nice when it works. Its use of JACK for routing makes it really really flexible, but it just isn't stable enough to depend on. LMMS is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I just hate the UI. Can't stand it.
GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape can't beat Photoshop, even when you consider them together. Adobe software workflow is just so much better and more intuitive.
Blender 3D sculpting is not bad, but it's nowhere as good as ZBrush.
Also, if you're a C++ dev like me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2017. Nothing. That IDE just blows everything else out of the water. Even VSCode. And it's not slow at all, it handled a fairly large project (PBRTv3) just fine on my Windows development VM. Yes, a VM.
So...I ditched Linux and went back to Windows, but I keep Linux as a VM for when I actually want to mess with Blender or Ardour. Or some dev stuff which Windows sucks at (which is becoming less frequent because of WSL).
Out of all the above, the only one I'd consider ready for production use would be Blender. Developers of open source software, please learn from Blender. Kickass UI and user friendly operation is extremely important, you can't make a random window with GTK buttons and text boxes and arcane config files and expect people to use it for serious work.
Also, Windows beats Linux hands down as an everyday OS. It's always been rock solid, if you take care of it properly (and that goes for any OS). Updates hardly take any time because I run it on a SSD. As for all the advertising and marketing bullshit, you can block a large amount of stuff. And for what can't be blocked, well, I just have to live with it, because the alternative is compromising on my creative output, which is too much for me.
I still run Linux on my server, though. And on my embedded devices (Pi, BeagleBone, etc.). It absolutely rocks there.
I realize that Linux software is not going to improve unless we do something about it, so I'll be contributing fixes and code (the joys of being a C++ dev, yay). Still, I feel that the platform and software as a whole is just not mature enough.18 -
Really fed up with my colleague and possibly my job. Am starting to doubt am cut out to be a developer
Am a junior java dev , been working working for this company for about 2 years now. Although they hired me to be a java dev, they pretty much exclusively had me working on JavaScript crap because none of the other more senior devs wanted to do even so much as poke JS with a long stick....
Oh and the salary was crap but i figured since i had barely 3 years of exp i thought i would stick with it for a while
But a few months ago after seeing other opportunities I got fed up and threatened to quit , already started interviewing etc
Got an offer, not exactly what i wanted but better than where i was. Went to quit but they freaked out and started throwing money at me. They matched and exceed the other salary and promised to addressed the issues that made me want to leave. Ie get me to work more on the java side of the project and have me work with someone more senior who could sort of mentor me, i had been working semi solo on the js shit till then...
The problem is that my supposed mentor is selfish prick... he is the sort of guy who comes in real early, basically he goes to early morning prayer then come in at some ungodly hour and fuckoff home around 3pm
He does all his work early morning then spends the rest of the day with his headphones on stealthily watching youtube, amazon, watching cricket, reading about Palestine , how oppressed muslims are or building a website for some mosque.
I asked him to let me sit with him so that I could just learn how this or that part of the sys worked , he agreed then the very next day comes in and does all the work before i get in at 9 , i asked him how he did it and he tells me oh just read the code.
Its not as simple as that, out codebase is an old pile of non standard legacy dog shit. Nothing works as it should, i tried to go through documentation online for the various stuff we use , but invariably get stuck when i try the usual approach because it turns out the original devs had essentially done a lot of custom hacks and cowboy coding to get stuff working, they screwed around with some of the framework jars & edited libraries to get stuff to work, resulting in some really weird OSGI errors.
My point is that i cant really just "read the code" or google ...
I gotta know a bit more what was actually modified and a lot of this knowledge isn't fucking documented, theres a lot of " ohhh that weird bug yeah yeah that happens cuz x did this hack some years ago to fix this issue and we kinda built on it, yeah we weren't supposed to do that but heyyy what u gonna do, just do this or that instead"
I was asked to set up a web service to export something, since thats his area of expertise and he is suppose to be teaching me the ropes, i asked him to explain where i should start and what would the general workflow be, his response is to tell me to just copy the IMPORT service and rename it to export then "just do it um change it or something" very helpful indeed (building enterprise application here nothing complex at all!!)
He sits right next to me so i can see how much works he actually does, i know when he just idly sitting there so thats when i ask him questions, he always has his earphones on so each time i gotta find a way to get his attention with a poke or a wave, he will give a heavy sigh and a weary look as he removes his headphones, listen to my question then give me the shortest answer possible before IMMEDIATELY turning away and putting his headphones on as fast as possible regardless of whether I actually understood or even heard what he said. If i ask another question ( am talking like an immediate follow up question for a clarification or something) he will
Do the whole sigh + tired look routing to make me know yeah you are disturbing me. ( god was so happy the day he accidentally sat on and broke them)
Yesterday i caught a glance at his screen as i was sitting down and i think he and another dev were talking about me
That am slow with my work and take forever to get into gear.
Starting to have doubts about my own ability n wether am really cut out to be a developer. I know i can work hard but its impossible to do so when you have no clue where to start and unable to look it up since all the custom hacks doesn't really allow any frame of reference.
Feels like am being handicapped and mocked, yesterday i just picked up my gear n left the office.
I never talk ill about my colleagues, whenever i have a 121 with my mgr i always all is fine, x n y are really helpful etc
I tried to indirectly tell my other colleague about this guy, he told me that guy had kinda mentally checked out of this job and was just going through on auto pilot and just laughed it off (they have been working together for almost a decade and a buddies) my other colleague is pretty nice but he usually swamped with work so i feel bad to trouble him.
Am really Fed up with it all7 -
Some years ago i attended to a summer school abroad. I instantly built a connecection with this one girl, we spend the whole week together, talking, sharing humor, deep conversations etc. We also won the prize for the best project together. I guess it looked like the beginning of a love story for the rest of the course. For me it didn't exactly, actually I didn't had much romantic feelings for her; she was the arrogant, manipulative type I thought I could handle a friend but never as girl friend. We shared some darkness so to say. But I really hoped for a new close friendship. Since she had a boyfriend back home i thought she most likely wanted just the same. Anyway I was a bit worried she might want more because she made me quite a lot of compliments and told me how she liked me.
And yes, she wanted more: Whenever we talked on the phone after the summer school or met (she lived in a city not far away from mine by coincidence) she begged me for help with coding. She had a well paid as extremely interesting PHD position with a topic between political science and computer science. Besides classical humanities methods her topic would require a lot of coding though. But she had zero, absolutely zero clue of programming, and, as it turned out, zero interesst. I told her from the beginning she would have to learn quite a lot or pay someone to code for her. It was far too much to do as a favour by a friends or such. And, since it was part of her fucking PHD it would have been cheating somehow of she didn't do it herself. But instead, she kept texting me if I could 'help to fix some bugs', sending me unrelated code fragments she copied from SO and not even tried to understand. So I told her to fuck off at one point. After all it was not that we have been friends for decades; we only knew each other for a couple of months an spent only one week together. So thats it.
But I still think of it from time to time and it makes me angry because it feels like she was only nice to me because she thought i am this nerd guy who falls instantly in love to a charming good looking girl and does everything for her. I did neither at all but indeed wanted to be friends with her, thats bad enough. It even makes me more more angry that she actually has this awesome PHD project about politics in the fucking digital world and think of programmers like this. And that she will succeed without understanding anything bacause in the end there would have been a dude who did all the work for her I bet.8 -
I hate some parts of this company.
They literally have a "Designer" which made a mockup for our new UI and honestly when I first saw it I almost threw up.
Having made a lot of designs myself for personal projects and for fun I LITERALLY SAW he barely put any effort into it he just threw some stuff together took a shit on it and called it a UI.
For that interview we were actually expecting wireframes and not mockups since we were not sure what workflow we wanted for the UI.
Of course this would have come with feedback from us and then would have been reiterated and this was clear from our last talk with him.
Maybe he didn't know what wireframes were ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If this wasn't enough, he was also consistently misspelling words all over the place, not aligning parts of the UI, misplacing common UI elements and stupid stuff like having a GIGANTIC + button for adding a object to a list for a NO TOUCH SCREEN UI.
(The plus button was all the way to the bottom left of the screen as far away from the list so users get a good hand workout).
But everyone just loved it because "We have known him for a long time and he has a big portfolio so he must know what he's doing".
I couldn't bring in anything, you truly notice the difference between "I don't agree with your opinion but you are heard" and "Shutup my buddy the designer is amazing".
I was not being an asshole I was giving critique on specific parts of the UI and not just saying "it's shit" hoping we could improve on it. Still having naive hope for the future of this project.
He even looked kinda mad and irritated by my opinion and just looked at the people previously mentioned.
I truly hate people who just keep using the exact same worthless piece of garbage people because they have known them for a long time.
Personally I wanted to grab him off his chair and throw him out through the window, 2 floors down, straight into the garbage bin, making damn sure he doesn't accidentally fall into the recycle bin.
Never ever would I enjoy or like this application's UI if I had to work with it as a user.3 -
Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.
I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.
With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.
I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.
They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.
But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.
So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.
Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...
And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.
I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.
My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.
Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...
This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.
Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.
He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.
That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.
I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.
On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.
My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.
I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.
So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.
I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.
We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.
That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.
They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.
They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.
We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.
The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!
Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...
Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.
On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.
Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.
Then said yes!
The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.
I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.
Final thought: middle managers are taints.7 -
So I am getting back into game dev. I keep going back and forth about making a 2D or 3D rpg. Maybe I will end up making a mix.
I also want to make customizable characters in game. I found a decent solution for 2D. An artist is making 2D sprites that allow things to be overlaid. Each component has animations. I can layer sprites and animate them in sync to keep all the pieces moving together.
For 3D this journey of what is possible is a lot longer I think. It is hit or miss finding generic 3D characters with build in morphing. I want to be able to change the body for customization. I think I will have to relearn how to 3D model. As I learn what kind of model I need I am also learning what it takes to do this in Blender. And holy hell, Blender is so amazing now! The stuff I can do easily is staggering. You can sculpt a mesh using sculpting tools. Then do a remesh of that to make a more easily animateable mesh. No remeshing by hand, other than installing a plugin. There are a bunch of plugins that you can buy too. I found one for free that looks promising. But the paid ones are not that bad either. Between $25 to $100 depending upon source, license, and features.
However, being a programmer I want to figure out how to generate 3D and 2D models. There is code out there to do this, but I wonder what the learning curve is on that. The engineer side of me wants to be able to model the shape of humanoids and then auto skin that. I think I will start with modeling a few by hand to learn the way it should work. I want a simple anime look. I did find info on automating face rigs and body rigs. Oh the tools we have now!
Anyway, I am having fun.15 -
This is a story of me trying out maintaining a game server and eventually making a mistake, although I do not regret experiencing it.
A month ago I set up a small modded minecraft server because I wanted to experience a fun modpack together with some people from reddit. Besides this, I also wanted to see if I was capable of setting up a server with systemd and screen running in the background. This went great and I learned a lot.
The very next day I was playing with $annoyingKid on the server and everything was well. However the second day, $annoyingKid started pushing the idea to start up a normal minecraft server to build a playerbase.
I asked $annoyingKid 'What about financing, staff management and marketing?'
$annoyingKid: "I don't know much about that, but you can do that while I build a spawn!"
He also didn't want to reveal his age, which alerted me that he's young and inexperienced. He also considered Discord 'scary' because there were haxors and they would get his location and kidnap him, or something. So if he was supposed to become owner (which he desired), he had no way of communicating with a community outside of the game.
He also considered himself owner, while I was the one who paid for the server. 'Owners should be people who own the server', no matter how many times I told him that.
$annoyingKid also asked if he could install plugins on his own, I asked him if he knew anything about ssh, wget or bash because I used ssh to set up the server (I know rcon exists, but didn't want to deal with that at the time), he had no idea what any of those terms meant and he couldn't give proper arguments as to why he should get console access.
In the end, he did jack shit, he had no chance of becoming co-owner or even head-admin because he had no sense of responsibility or hard work. I kept him around as an admin because he was the one who came up with the idea. I banned him on day one after he started abusing his power when someone tipped him of. Even after me ordering him to ignore an annoying player he kept going, of course I could have prevented all this by kicking him earlier since all the red flags around him had already formed a beacon of light. He tried coming back, complaining that he should at least have his moderator rank back, but he never got in again.
A week later I got bored, I had had enough fun with ssh and the server processes to know that I didn't want to continue the small project, so I shut it down and went on to do stuff on GitHub.
Lesson learned: Don't let annoying kids with no sense of responsibility talk you into doing things you aren't sure you want to be doing. And only give people power after they've proved to you that they are capable of handling it.1 -
Difference between Thermal Paste And Thermal Pads
As we all know that the surface of the CPU or a heat sink is not flat. So the uneven surface of both types of equipment give rise to the small gaps, and these small gaps are poor in thermal conductivity, as a result, the Gaming Computer gets heated off quickly.
To fill these gap we require a thermal conductive which delivers the entire heat coming out from the CPU to the heatsink and there comes the role of Thermal paste or Thermal pads for more info about thermal paste see here (https://glinkster.com/best-thermal-...)
But the real question here is which should you chose to avoid heating problems? Is it either thermal paste or thermal pads? So without wasting much time let's get to know what are the basic differences and when you should apply what?
What is the difference between thermal paste and thermal pads?
Thermal paste or thermal compound actually it has a lot of names. Thermal paste is a greasy conductive paste directly applied to the heatsink. It is most commonly used as the interface in between the non-conductive parts for the cooling purpose. A good thermal paste made with the best quality of thermal compound can work well for the system. To apply thermal paste, you have to very careful as you have can also sometimes drop it near to the main CPU. But this is not the only option to fill the holes in between the CPU and the heatsink, there is one more thing that you can use is Thermal Pads.
Thermal Pads
Thermal pads are easy to put as compare to thermal pastes. But they are not as effective as compare to the thermal paste. You will find some stock coolers come with thermal pads as it looks clean. If sometimes you have to replace the heatsink, then you have to remove the pad too. So remember whenever you remove the heatsink ot dismount it, always change the thermal pad.
Common Mistakes you have to avoid
There are some common mistakes that a lot of people make while applying the thermal paste or thermal pads.
1) Never use thermal paste and thermal pads together.
2) But you can use thermal paste on the top of the thermal pads to improve the efficiency.
3) Use of two or three pads altogether can kill the performance of the CPU.10 -
>Gets a new CPU for desktop (yay, went from R5 1600 to R5 3600X)
>Spends half a day flashing new MB BIOS (Needed to flash individual major versions in order, couldn't just go 1.10 to 6.40)
>Finally finishes preparations and goes to replace the CPU
>Cleans the old one and packages it to give it to a friend
>Has issues inserting the new one as the orientation arrow on the motherboard was very hard to make out
>Spends 30 minutes applying thermal paste, worrying about optimal spread
>Forgets which side the CPU fan goes on
>Finally boots back up... CPU fan is suddenly loud AF under load, but eh, temps under stress are sub-60, so, good
~~Next day~~
>Loud CPU fan is too annoying, opens the case again
>CPU fan is on backwards
Ugh
>Takes the fan off, turns it around and fastens again, puts PC back together and boots
>Is quiet again, nice
>Goes to work on the PC
>2 hours later randomly checks temps because no fan noise is weird
>CPU at 75dC, crap
>Opens the (live) PC, CPU fan is not spinning
>Has put the header on one pin to a side
>Unplugs and replugs it correctly
>Fan suddenly starts spinning very fast and cuts my finger
>Finally closes the case once more. All issues resolved
...Its situations like these that make me wonder... What would happen it I had to work with servers in person, physically lol8 -
At work we have a....err....pool of usefulness awareness situation.
You see. The school does not know all that me and the lead developer does. Our head of department does. Our manager used to do(fore she left) but as far as the rest of the 2 fucking campuses are concerned, all of our shit works through magical dwarves that live inside the servers in our server rooms.
Normally, we are fine with this. But whenever one of us misses, or decides to take the day off and some shit hits the fan...THEN and only then do our users know what we do.
So we have a "pool" of items that seem to be picked every time one of us is not there. The more it gets picked, the more people are aware of us, the more they figure out what we do...the more they start to ask for customization and shit like that.
Such a funny situation. Wonder if this will get in the way of friday morning coffee and magic the Gathering at the office.
Or me and the cms admin playing videogames together.
Oh well -
that one legendary guy who cranks out code and builds insane features. PMs (product management) love him because he builds features in several months which 10 devs together couldn't have built in the same time (so they say), features that are loved by customers as well, become their new standard and that have saved our company's asses in the past.
features are really awesome, performant and have very few bugs (compared to the rest of the software シ).
but this guy seems to live for this job. he also works at weekends, at unholy times of day and night and even in his holidays (he doesn't care that this is actually illegal, in terms of employee's rights, and he wouldn't listen to his superiors, no matter what they tell him)
so far, so good - except that he will probably die of some stroke or something very soon due to this lifestyle.
but it must be an absolute pain in the ass to work with him, as long as you're a developer (or his superior).
he lives in his own world and within the software, his features are also his own world. since the different modules interact with each other, sometimes you would be assigned a bug that might have its cause in some interaction of your and his module. talk with him about it? forget it. he wouldn't answer most devs who contacted him for some reason. ever. fix it in his module yourself? might happen that he just reverts your changes to his module without comments. so some bugs would lie on your desk forever because theoretically you know what would need to be done but if you cannot reach out into HIS world, there's no way to fix it. also - his code might be good in terms of performance and low bug numbers. but it seems to be hard to work on that code for everybody else but him.
furthermore, he is said to be really rude. he is no team player, but works on a software that is worked on by a huge team.
PMs think he's a genius, just a great dev, but they don't understand that other devs need to clean up the mess behind or around him.
everyone who's been his superior so far recommends to get him fired, but the company wouldn't fire him because they don't want to lose his talent. he can just do what he wants. he can even refuse to work on certain things because he thinks they are boring and he is not interested in them. devs seem to hate him, but my boss said, they are probably also a bit jealous because of his talent. i think, he's not wrong. :)
i haven't actually met him so far or was actually "forced" to deal with him, but i've never heard so many contrastive things about one person, the reputation of his, let's say vibrant personality really hurries ahead. he must be a real genius, after all i've heard so far, like he lives in the code. i must say i'm a bit curious but also somewhat afraid of meeting him one day.
do you also have such a guy at your company?12 -
So... I had this assignment. I was chill, had plenty of time, so I wasted hours playing videogames and also spent some learning programming. Then, at 3 am, after spending 2 hours leveling my first character in runescape, I gaze through the clock on my pc and notice the date was the 9th, the assignment was due tomorrow! SHIT
I RUSHED TO WORK AND SPENT THE WHOLE NIGHT CODING (it was for a programming class I took at the uni) HOURS OF HOURS OF STUPID MISTAKES MADE OUT OF SLEEPYNESS.
Until I made it.
I send the assignment, everything is cool. I watch the clock a last time before going to bed and fuck! The clock was in mm/dd/yyyy format! Don't know how the fuck it changed itself and how the fuck I didn't notice there was something wrong with the date. I still had 5 days remaining :(
May I request the world to get their shit together and choose just one global date format?
PS: my normal date format is dd/mm/yyyy11 -
TL;DR;
Idiot hard coded database host on the app... Pushed to prod and suddenly shit wasn't working... Took me 10 minutes to figure out what was going on...
Wrote a passive aggressive git message and commited.
Before updating prod my boss turns around to me and the following took place:
Boss: is there any problem with the server?
Me: yes, someone (i know who was ) hard coded the test db IP and it broke the backend.
Boss: oh, but will it affect the mobile app?
Me: well, it won't work but I'm already pushing the fix.
Boss: no..err.. I mean... Will I have to make any change to the mobile app?
Me inside: wtf dude... For real?! Get your shit together...
Me: no. It good, I already fixed it.
Boss: OK. Thanks
TL;DR;
Moron hard coded dB's host and stupid boss can't get shit together nor ask who did it to take precautions...12 -
Sorta dev related.
I work at a service desk for an automotive supplier.
We've once hab out entire mobile phone system crash and for whatever reason, it won't let the phones connect, if there are more than 50 phones trying to connect at the same time. Kind of a problem if there are 400+ phones trying to connect.
My colleagues showed me what to do in order to get one phone to connect to our system.
It was basically: enter some invalid data on out webinterface, save, enter the correct data again and safe again.
It was too stupid for me. So i hacked an AutoIt script together in about 15 minutes, and let it run for the next half an hour. Showed it to my colleagues, they were excited and I went and got a coffee. -
Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.
Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.
I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.
Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.
Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.
Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.
So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.
Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.7 -
I once agreed to maintain and develop an application used in a different section of the school to keep inventory and make sure everything is where it is supposed to be.
At first there was enthusiasm, together with 2 of my classmates we agreed and git clone-d the .NET application that now graduated students built and maintained for the past few years. What could go wrong right?!
It became clear that the original students that worked on it followed an older curriculum, meaning they still got taught .NET instead of the core variant that we get now, not only that but it also seemed that they either did not fully grasp the Clean/Onion architecture or didn't get it in class since there were infrastructure components in the 'Domain' project of the solution. Think of 2 DBContexts in the domain model, yep.
One of us bailed in the first week, the other one and I felt bad for the people using the app so we went on and tried to work on the first bugs that were described in a document. One of these bugs was 'whenever I filter on something in the list, everybody gets to see that filter on their screen instead of only me'. Woah that's weird! Let's see how they put that together!
Oh god, they are using a _static_ variable to store filters, no wonder that it doesn't work properly. Ever heard of sessions?!
Second bug: Sometimes people can't create an account when we sign them up from the admin panel. Alright that is weird, let's figure that one out! Wait a second it seems to work in development? What's this about.
Oh wait I can't create an account on production either? Oh that's weird, wait a second... Why do I have to put my e-mail in a form that was sent to me through e-mail? Why is my address not filled in already? OOH, if someone types in the wrong e-mail address (which is easy since our school has 4 variants of the same f*cking e-mail address) it won't work since it can't recognize the user! Brilliant! Remove e-mail input box and make a token/queryparam determine the user account.
Ah that seems good, it's a mess but it seems a tiny bit better now, great! We're making progress and some sweet buck.
Next bug, trillions of 50x errors on random pages, that's a weird one.
Hm everything works in development, that's odd. Is the production data corrupted?
DID I MENTION that in order to get into the system in development we have to load in a f*cking production database backup ON OUR DEVELOPMENT MACHINE and then ask one of the users' password to login to it and create an account for ourselves? Seeding? What's that, right?!
Anyway, back to bug fixing. I e-mail the the people responsible for the app and get a production admin account, oh I also can't ssh into it because of policies so I have to do everything over e-mail and figure out what's causing the errors. I somehow also wonder if they have any kind of virtualization in place, giving students a VM to do that stuff in doesn't seem so weird does it ? Even with school policies?
Oh btw, 'deploying' means sending a .zip file to a guy in another building and telling him how to configure it, apparently this resulted in a missing folder that the application needed to work and couldn't make on its own. This after 2 weeks of e-mailing back and forth.
After 3 months i quit out of despair and sadness, and due to the fact that I just couldn't do it anymore. I separated everything into logical subprojects and let the last guy handle it, he was OK with that and understood why I left.
Luckily, around that time I already had an actual job at a software development company :)3 -
Look, I get that it's really tricky to assess whether someone is or isn't skilled going solely by their profile.
That's alright.
What isn't center of the cosmic rectum alright with the fucking buttsauce infested state of interviews is that you give me the most far fetched and convoluted nonsense to solve and then put me on a fucking timer.
And since there isn't a human being on the other side, I can't even ask for clarification nor walk them through my reasoning. No, eat shit you cunt juice swallowing mother fucker, anal annhilation on your whole family with a black cock stretching from Zimbabwe to Singapore, we don't care about this "reasoning" you speak of. Fuck that shit! We just hang out here, handing out tricks in the back alley and smoking opium with vietnamese prostitutes, up your fucking ass with reason.
Let me tell you something mister, I'm gonna shove a LITERAL TON of putrid gorilla SHIT down your whore mouth then cum all over your face and tits, let's see how you like THAT.
Cherry on top: by the time I began figuring out where my initial approach was wrong, it was too late. Get that? L'esprit d'escalier, bitch. I began to understand the problem AFTER the timer was up. I could solve it now, except it wouldn't do me any fucking good.
The problem? Locate the topmost 2x2 block inside a matrix whose values fall within a particular range. It's easy! But if you don't explain it properly, I have to sit down re-reading the description and think about what the actual fuck is this cancerous liquid queef that just got forcefully injected into my eyes.
But since I can't spend too much time trying to comperfukenhend this two dollar handjob of a task, which I'd rather swap for teabagging a hairy ass herpes testicle sack, there's rushing in to try and make sense of this shit as I type.
So I'm about 10 minutes down or so already, 35 to go. I finally decipher that I should get the XY coords of each element within the specified range, then we'll walk an array of those coordinates and check for adjacency. Easy! Done, and done.
Another 10 minutes down, all checks in place. TEST. Wait, wat? Where's the output? WHERE. THE FUCK. IS. THE OUTPUT?! BITCH GIMME AN ANSWER. I COUT'D THE RETURN AND CAN SEE THE TERMINAL BUT ITS NOT SHOWING ME ANYTHINGGG?! UUUGHHH FUCKKFKFKFKFKFKFKFUFUFUFFKFK (...)
Alright, we have about 20 minutes left to finish this motorsaw colonoscopy, and I can't see what my code is outputting so I'm walking through the code myself trying to figure out if this will work. Oh, look at that I have to MANUALLY click this fucking misaligned text that says "clear" in order for any new output to register. Lovely, 10/10 web design, I will violate your armpits with an octopus soaked in rabid bear piss.
Mmmh, looks like I got this wrong. Figures. I'm building the array of coordinates sequentially, as a one dimentional list, which is very inconvenient for finding adjacent elements. No problem, let's try and fix that aaaaaand... SHIT IM ALMOST OUT OF TIME.
QUICK LYEB, QUICK!! REMEMBER WHAT FISCELLA TAUGHT YOU, IN BETWEEN MOLESTING YOUR SOUL WITH 16-BIT I/O CONSOLE PROBLEMS, LIKE THAT BITCH SNOWFALL THING YOU HAD TO SOLVE FOR A FRIEND USING TURBO C ON A FUCKING TOASTER IN COMPUTER LAB! RUN MOTHERFUCKER RUN!!!
I'm SWEATING. HEAVILY. I'm STEAMING, NON-EROTICALLY. Less than 10 minutes left. I'm trying to correct the code I have, but I start making MORE dumbfuck mistakes because I'm in a hurry!
5 minutes left. As I hit this point of no return, I realize exactly where my initial reasoning went wrong, and how I could fix it, but I can't because I don't have enough time. Sadface.
So I hastily put together skeleton of the correct implementation, and as the clock is nearly up, I write a comment explaining the bits I can't get to write. Page up, top of file, type "the editor was shit LMAO" and comment it out. SUBMIT.
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Also hi ;>5 -
One job I picked up was for an IoT Start Up. It was quite interesting work, reporting to the technical director, who was an electronics engineer, who was designing the hardware himself, they had a couple of firmware guys already, and just needed someone to take care of the software.
So they said they needed something in Azure that they could stream their data to and provide analytics for their clients. It had to be Azure, and it had to be Azure Native, and was to be Multi-client, as they had a deal with Microsoft to showcase how well Azure works in the IoT space at an exhibition/conference in 3 months time.
So I worked flat out for 3 months, on a whole variety of technology, from C++ to get the radio packets from their IoT chip, Python to run on the hub to take the data from the C++ and stream it to the cloud, Azure IoT Hubs in every continent to receive the data and store it an a Cosmos DB, and then Power BI analytics wrapped up in an Angular front end that the clients could log into.
Got it finished 2 days before the show, and they were so pleased I got flown business class to Singapore to be on the stand and talk to customers.
The first sign of trouble was when we arrived at the show to find we just had one of those little circular tables with two stools in the middle of the floor, about two feet across and no power.
No problem, I was able to sort that, swapping laptops in and out.
Microsoft were really happy with what we had, and couldn't believe I had thrown it all together in 3 months.
We picked up a potential customer for the system, a major Asian Telecoms company.
Then when we got home, the CEO swooped in. I had never met this guy before. Imagine one of the VC guys from Silicon Valley, or the CEO from the IT Crowd. You get the picture. Could talk the hind leg of a donkey, and real street smart, but no brains. He insisted on "taking it from here" and flew alone to strike the deal with the customer. Came back with an MOU in his pocket and said to me, their guys will be in touch with you.
Then I got a call. Can you send us the source code and tell us how what servers we have to run this on?
Um, its cloud native.
No, we can't use a cloud it has to be on our servers - your CEO told us that was no problem..
He hadn't even taken the trouble to find out what it was we had built, and what he was selling.1 -
In January this year, I began working in the office three days a week. Since last year, I have been engaged in text conversations with a girl, primarily about work-related matters as she was looking to pursue higher studies.
As someone who appreciates goal-oriented individuals, I maintained a conversation with her without appearing too needy.
Since our interactions were limited to chat, they remained somewhat superficial. However, ever since I saw her in person at the office, I started developing feelings for her. At the time, I was going through some personal challenges, which led to overwhelming and irrational thoughts.
Gradually, our casual chats progressed, and by February , I confessed my feelings to her. It was a mistake on my part because we had never been on a proper date before that day, and I hadn't even confirmed if she was already in a committed relationship.
We went out together and had a long conversation, during which it became clear that she was already committed to someone else, and that she had never thought of me in a romantic way.
This realization left me kind of sad, and I didn't do much work that day.
At the end of that day, I noticed someone sitting in the office lobby—a stranger to me, but someone who worked for the same company.
Guess who? Correct. A random girl.
She approached me and invited me to spend time at a nearby DJ event. She had a preference for taller men, and you know, as I am naturally tall and hairy, she found me attractive, I guess or not.
I felt like I had just experienced a breakup. Should I go with another woman ? I didn't feel quite right about that.
I did the obvious thing. I hesitated but ultimately decided to go with her to the DJ event without much thought.
We spent some time together, and afterward, I dropped her off at her place. However, I didn't have any strong feelings for this second girl. It could have been because she made the first move.
and it felt like something I didn't have to work hard for.
Fast forward to a sports day where I was feeling so happy after losing most of the games I participated in. I didnt even count the games I disqualified, by the way
Guess who is with me this time ?
Another girl, again a stranger to me, sat near me and started talking. She spoke about herself and her past relationships, displaying a remarkable ability to understand and use sarcasm—an uncommon trait among girls in my experience. It seemed like she really wanted someone to talk to.
She kept talking, and the next day, I asked her out for lunch. However, she said she wasn't interested in me romantically, which caught me off guard. It was perplexing that a simple lunch invitation led to such a defensive reaction from her.
The following day or some other day, or month , one of my colleagues pointed out a girl and mentioned that he didn't think he could ever date her as she seemed solely interested in long-term relationships.
I thought he might be right and that maybe it was best to let such people go for now. So I let her go. Yeah, you wish.
I approached her and learned about her family. We had a few encounters during the sports day, mostly revolving around sports and how badly i messed up games in the events.
Returning to the present, I asked her out. However, she expressed concerns that things could become uncomfortable if we went out. Since then, I haven't seen her because she moved to another office a few blocks away.
The next morning, a newcomer joined the team. She was slightly older, and by that time, I was confident in my ability to make anyone uncomfortable with lame jokes. So, I decided not to disturb her. Surprisingly, the same jokes that previously had mixed results were well-received by her. One thing led to another, and we went out. Unfortunately, she was dealing with depression, so I let her go after a few dates.
Now, let's go back to the first girl I mentioned, the one who stirred up my "feelings."
I decided to approach her, but she became furious and threatened to complain about me or have others take action against me.
I stormed out of her cabin. Later, I asked her for the reason behind her response. She said it was because she noticed me flirting with others around the office after I left her. She didn't appreciate that.
Unexpectedly, the Head of HR contacted me, and they wanted to have a talk, which happened yesterday.
Guess what?13 -
caution: just some dude sharing a random story.
started my own small business around half a year now. a month earlier from that my cousin also started his career as a self employed dev with his own small business and we work together.
next year we we will start a company together, where we merge our existing small businesses into one. we are developing software on our own and we design and implement software for our customers.
seems like we are doing something right because we are reaching our capacities almost all of the time.
we plan to hire apprentices (hope it's the right word) and to teach them all we know to be able to then increase our possible workload.
you know, I do not have a degree or some form of education in the field of IT. And here in germany it was almost impossible to land a job as a dev. needed my cousin who studied cs to get me my first position in that field - and even with his reputation it was not easy.
this shit will not happen on my watch. If I see someone with fire for development I will give them a chance, irrespective of their background. And I will be more than happy to let that person grow and to give every kind of support I can.
we also plan to have something like "if the employee has a good idea for software that sells, we will support it and share revenue". got to figure out the details on that one, but I want to give the employee the possibility to grow some passive income out of their normal job - because for me this was never an option. and I think that this will motivate in some way 😅
just wanted to get this out of my head 😣4 -
I love open source and all that fun stuff but I am very unimpressed by having to use GNU/Linux based OS after the last fuck up... the lack of games, stuff that actually works, the almost constant need to compile something and the need to have DDG open at all times because something broke. I mean why the fuck do I need to install libcurl3:i386(for 32 bit programs and games) if there is already libcurl4 and why the actual fuck does it conflict?!... Why the fuck do I need to glue together and compile drivers for my printer?! And they only have "beta support" so like half of the functions that the printer would normally have... Why the fuck don't any games work? Witcher 2? Nope, you click launch and the launcher just closes itself. osu!lazor? Nope, the game will run but only as a process in the background, no window will open no matter what I do. StarCraft: Brood War? Nope, Wine hates the battle.net client and running it in a VM is a really bad idea, the game flickers like crazy... Any other games? Pretty much out of luck... I would really like to play KCD but I doubt it would be playable...rant wine compile all the things glue together your own printer driver open source stuff breaks ubuntu os duckduckgo vm gnu/linux games24
-
So i just had an interesting conversation.
View source images in comments
So some background. I used to do a lot of Minecraft development and server configuration. And Minecraft being made of mostly 12-year-olds they really don't pay very well. So I moved on from Minecraft but someone reached out for me to do their configuration for their server. (this was about a month ago) and I quoted them 40/hr because that's what I charge for my web dev work. So he promptly declined and I thought that was that. But tonight he messaged me and found a 5 month old post saying how I was looking to do free development work in order to get experience. And here is how the converstion when.
(His name is "Candy")
Candy:
Lol
Trying to take advantage of me with your bullshit $40/hour claims
Which is outright laughable
https://mc-market.org/threads/...
”I am looking for a network to stay long-term with and help/see it grow into a bigger server. (I would expect pay later down the road if we work together on an ongoing basis)”
—
Quoting your MC-Market post.
What do you have to say for yourself? Trying to take advantage of people?
Going to say something else completely delusional or own up to the fact that you were trying to take advantage of me?
I already knew you were, but now I have the hard evidence.
As I am not a stupid person.
Not only did your friend lie, but you tried to take advantage of me, thinking I was stupid enough to fall for your $40/hour bullshit for basic configuration work. MineSaga charges $30.00 an hour on the high. Don’t even try to do the same shit you did to me to anyone else. It won’t work.
Me:I was interested in doing plugin development and learning so I offered my services for free so I could learn in a more real environment. I no longer do minecraft plugins rather I am a web developer and my rate is $40/hr I am good at configuration which is why i contacted you but I am not going to lower my rate because it is "simpler" work. Just like how you can higher a prostitute to wash your car but it would be cheaper to get the kid from around the block to do it. Also not sure what your end goal is here. I gave you my rate and you didn't agree with it. So you should just move on. Plus this is the minecraft world let me know when you get to the real world so you you can pay in big boy money.
Candy:
So your configuration work for minecraft is $40/h as well?
Lol
Absolutely hilarious.
Me:
did you not read my message?
"I am not going to lower my rate because it is "simpler" work."
Candy:
Who were your most recent clients?
Me:
i'm not going to give you that information
Candy:
Because you know you are lying to me with your crazy rates, and if you aren't, that means you have near to no clients.
Yet another lie.
Me:
keep telling yourself that buddy
Candy:
Lol
Good luck getting any more clients.
rip
Me:
?
I get more clients all the time
They just are not in your realm of your minecraft imagination where you can pay a developer 20$/hr
Candy:
I just strongly disagree with the fact that you are charging $40/hour for configurative work
xD
Me:
Okay
But why even contact me? Did you really think trying to "Call me out" was going to have me lower my rates or something.
Just get over it
Candy:
I haven't called you out and overcharging like that to others in the minecraft realm for a significant gain in money for work that is not worth nearly that amount is absolutely delusional.
I would recommend you stop making up false assumptions
Me: What ever you say
I left it at that. There was some more stuff but it was not that interesting so i left it out5 -
Clown manager put three juniors (and ”senior” dev on work visa) on new project.
They will never finish it.
It’s too hard for them with some legacy dynamically created complex database queries which will spook the hell out of them!
But managers like, ”it’s going to be good” and ”making good progress”.
Fuck no! Putting juniors together? With little support? It such a waste. They spent weeks just to get even the slightest progress.
No best practise. No tests. Just hacking away.
It’s a failure of the management! We fail our juniors and they will quit as soon as they get the chance and they feel like they have some wind under their wings.
”It’s going to be good”
Pff. Clowns leading this company.1 -
I want to share this story and need your advise.
When I was teaching exisiting team members about git and new iOS development ecosystem. I was changing the whole ios development practices and processes that time. One of my teammates wasn’t listening, when implementing the new ios development practices and standards, he actually screwed all of the projects.
He’s been with us for 2 years and he even don’t know how to use git. He forcefully push his changes without pulling our changes first. I was so angry that I reported him to my manager to address this matter. And then my manager told me, he is aware of my teammate’s incapabilities. He said he was planning to terminate him, and he is been thinking about it for 3 months.
When the judgement day came, we were in the meeting room. My manager told us the bad news that one of us will be terminated. During the meeting he said, “I am sorry, {my teammate’s name}. You will be out of the team due to {reason of termination}. {my name} reported to me that you dont meet the deadline, you are always late with 2 weekly sprint to your tickets”. As my manager keeps talking, my teammate look at me with his eyes so angry together with his girlfriend (her girlfriend is part of mobile team, but she is focused on UI/UX).
After my manager stops talking, her girlfriend started crying and said I was the one who should be terminated. Her reason was that I keep on giving difficult tasks to his boyfriend, that’s why he is always late to report. In my defense, those tasks are not difficult, most of his tasks is just changing the color of labels, changing layouts. If you are an iOS developer you know how easy it is to change font colors, changing the layouts using storyboards. Her girlfriend keeps on rambling that I should be the one needs to be terminated.
After few days, he left the team and surprisingly his girlfriend stayed and we never talk to each other except anything about work.
I am really pissed guys. Now my teammates think I am the bad guy asking my manager to terminate anyone in the team if I feel to. I feel very very not good in my work now. I can’t function what I used to. The termination of my teammate was already planned why am I should take the blame?16 -
Regus sent me to collections.
Jist: if you ever think about renting an office from Regus, for the love of your bank account and your credit, just don't. Go into the kitchen and pan-fry your face instead. it'll be better.
Moral: get it in writing. What is "it"? Fucking everything.
------
I needed someplace quiet away from my children to work, so I rented an office from Regus. They said they had a minimum 6-month contract, which is fine, but at the time I was pretty sure I would be moving within three to five. They said they understood and offered the quivalent of a month-to-month plan: I could cancel my contract whenever I wanted, given a few weeks' notice, and that would be that. It wasn't in writing, but both the accounts person and the regional manager were there offering it to me, and they seemed cool. Awesome! I agreed, signed the contract, and paid a hefty damage deposit.
Long story short, I ended up hating the office, and chose to bear the distractions at home instead. Seeing how much I disliked it, the accounts person I talked to originally called me and offered to cancel my contract. I agreed, and she walked me through the steps to cancel it and request my deposit back. Done. I aske her if that was it; no more payments, no more contract. "No more," she said. "You're done." I liked the sound of that. Done and done.
The next day, I check my bank account; no deposit.
Two weeks later, still no deposit.
A month later, still no deposit.
They did say it could take up to three fucking months or something, so whatever. I waited.
Another month later, and instead of my refunded deposit, I get an overdue invoice notice? Seriously?
Apparently they never cancelled my contract, don't remember offering me the month-to-month agreement, nor does the very chick I talked to remember telling me over the phone that everything was paid up and done. Apparently my contract wasn't even for six months like they originally promised, but indefinite? despite all of this? and despite the two of us fucking cancelling it? together?
But no, the legal agreement is binding and explicitly states that they are fucking assholes and due their pound of cash.
So fuck that and fuck them.
And in response, they sent me to collections.
Huge fucking surprise.
and now collections is calling me saying I owe $1900, which works out to a lot more than the couple months it's been since I cancelled that crap, AND.
AND IT'S LESS THAN THE FUCKING DEPOSIT REGUS NEVER RETURNED!
SO NOT ONLY DID THEY NEVER CANCEL MY CONTRACT, THEY CHANGED ITS TERMS (or lied up-front) AND DECIDED TO POCKET THE DEPOSIT INSTEAD OF APPLY IT TO MY FUCKING IMAGINARY BALANCE!
FUCK YOU SHADY MOTHERFUCKERS!10 -
So I'm at that age of arranged marriage process. It's kinda like dating but even more complicated with more if conditions on religion, caste, region, age and impressions of a third person who may be a mutual relative or acquaintance. And yeah, you have to engage or marry before any kind of intimacy.
Finding a girl of same religion, caste and region is hard enough, ( not a matter for me personally, but it's a factor for families to go along ). I was lucky enough to find this pretty nice girl that seems be the best match I have received in the matrimony site so far.
She's also a programmer which is awesome and together we could also explore the earth as a Digital Nomad if she's also into that.
Here's the deal though, my father is not very keen on next steps in making this partnership ( guys parent calling girls family to know things better ) because apparently she did higher education abroad and works abroad, and I'm not that qualified in terms of education. And on top of that, he worries I'll move abroad leaving everything back at home.
I suppose that's his insecurity showing up.
He doesn't realize working in IT is the most flexible job as proved in 2020 and it's only going to get better in the coming years. We could work from anywhere with the right remote company.
Anyhow, the girl's family found out my number and reached out to me directly. I'm pretty impressed honestly.
I had left little traces on the internet for potential families to find more info about me if they choose to look me up! This was in a way a little filter of my own. Thanks to Google Analytics and Seach Console for helping me to track them XD
I just hope this works out and my father won't mess up my chance for me to get to know this girl better and potentially be with the life partner I dreamed of.
If this won't work out, I'm just gonna live alone rest of my life. The criterias and conditions set by boomers for arranged marriage are very disgusting for my modern mindset.15 -
Stories from Gary #000
Short background info:
So I'm working as a game dev for 3 years now and by now I can say that I've seen some shit. Mostly because of one of our game designers, let's call him Gary.
So Gary, from here on called GDG (Game Designer Gary), is a regular game designer (GD). His job is to come up with new game ideas, commission the assets, make sure that translations are done, etc. - simply put, he has to get a lot of shit together before we can start working on a new game.
Would be no problem at all if GDG wasn't lazy as shit and would work for once in his life. No dev really wants to work with him anymore, since he's known for calling a game or any issue "ready for development" even if half the assets or specs are still missing.
Let's move on to a particular situation that happened a couple of months ago.
I had an issue assigned to me, which was about implementing the translations for a new game. As I read the issue and checked if everything I needed was given, I noticed that the most important part was in fact missing - the keywords for the translations.
-.-
So, I called GDG and asked where I could find the keywords, to which he responded "Oh, I'm working on them right now... and by the way I got a weird bug with the translation program. Can you come check it out?". Sigh. I went over to his office, rambling about how I should be able to help him with a program I rarely use and which was written ages ago.
As soon as GDG saw me coming roundbthe corner, he started explaining how the keywords aren't ready yet, since the program to create translations and their keywords won't let him name a translation.
"I can create new translations, but I can't assign a keyword to them."
"Okay, show me what you did", I told him, eager to leave.
He started to type the keyword, which turned out to be huge ass long and immediately I noticed a little counter, like "x/50", directly beneath the text field started to count up with every new character GDG typed. See where I'm going with this? HE WASNT ABLE TO RENAME A TRANSLATION BECAUSE HE WAS TOO LAZY TO FUCKING READ AND CONCENTRATE FOR ONCE. Sorry for that, but even thinking about it gets me angry again.
To some this might sound like nothing, but it really got to me at this point. Maybe it will become more understandable as I post more GDG stories.
tl;dr: A 40 something year old man, who's been working in his job for over 10 years wasn't able to use a program which he daily uses and asks me for help, only to find out he's a complete dipshit.4 -
It is said that the number of programmers doubles every five years with fresh CS, CE, and EE grads. Assuming that's true, then at any one time over half the developer community are novices in the early stages of their career.
My entire life's been spent in software and I've been in it now for about 15 years and I've seen a lot of people make alot of things and I've seen a lot of people fail at alot of things. My observation is that the doers are the major thinkers, the people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker doer in one person. It's very easy to take credit for the thinking the doing is more concrete. It's very easy for somebody say "oh, I thought of this three years ago" but usually when you dig a little deeper you find that the people that really did it. Were also the people that really worked through the hard intellectual problems.
Many people falsely believe that a great idea constitutes 90% of the work. However, there is a significant amount of craftsmanship required to bridge the gap between a great idea and a great product. As you evolve that great idea it changes and grows it never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it and you also find there's tremendous amount of trade-offs that you have to make.
There are certain things you can't make electrons do, certain things you can't make plastic or glass, certain things you can't make factories or robots do. and as you get into all these things, Designing a product involves juggling 5,000 different concepts, fitting them together like puzzle pieces, and exploring new ways to combine them. Every day brings new challenges and opportunities to push the boundaries of what's possible, and it's this ongoing process that is the key to successful product development. That process is the "magic"4 -
Our ticket tracking system and our IT service request system are from two different companies that are direct competitors. The source code is full of temporary hacks to just make them play nice until a better solution is worked out. Fast forward a few years and we're abandoning both systems in favor of a single, unified system that handles everything. We currently have maybe 20% of the new, unified system done, which is now hacked together with both of the legacy systems until we finally transition fully to the new system. The current plan is for next year, but the plan six months ago was for this year, and almost no progress has been made since then, so we're probably going to have two ticket trackers and two request systems for a while.
Actually, three ticket trackers and three request systems. The third ticket tracker is used to track work done on tickets that exist in the legacy tracker because the legacy tracker can't do that on its own, while the third request system is the oldest and most cumbersome legacy system of them all.1 -
(first post/rant on here)
So I recently started at a new company. I was kinda aware that the project I'm working on would be rather old school (to put it in a nice way :-)).
Part of my job is to 'industrialize' and update/clean up the existing code so there is less time spent on fixing bugs due to bad design.
One of the first things I had to do was to write a new interface to integrate with external software.
I already noticed some rather nasty habits, like prefixing every variable with m (don't know why), private fields for every property (all simple properties) and a whole lot of other stuff that either is obsolete or just bad practice.
Started writing clean code (simple classes with properties only, no m prefixing, making sure everything is single responsibility, unit tests, ...).
So I check in the code, don't hear much from it again besides the original dev/architect that started the project using my code to further work on that integration.
Now recently I started converting everything from TFVC to Git (which is the company standard but wasn't used by our team yet). And I quickly skimmed through my code to check if everything was there before pushing it to the remote repo.
To my surprise, all the code I had written was replaced by m prefixed private variables used in simple properties. BL classes were thrown in together, creating giant monstrosities that did everything. And last but not least, all unit tests were commented out.
Not sure what I got myself into ... but the facepalming has commenced.14 -
Fucking Microsoft Excel
I was reading a post (https://devrant.com/rants/2093724/...) and as my eyes went in and out of focus, probably due to the diabetes from sitting 18 hours a day on my ever-expanding shitbox, I had a perfect vision of the ultimate nightmare.
Imagine if you will, you are chained, to a desk, doomed to work with tools just inadequate enough to make you want to drive a nail through your own temple. You do not know how you got here, or why, nor do you remember the last time you slept, only that familiar tingling in the brainstem you call a brain, the one emotion you can still recognize, a sense of all encompassing *fear*, a dread, like the fart that wouldn't die.
You don't know when it first began, or why, only that this is your whole world, your whole existence, this desk, chained to it, and the fear, ever present, of something worse. And in hops a familiar face, for the sixty ninth time that day, as if to ask 'you got those TPS reports?' In hops what? None other than a giant man sized smiling paper clip with googly eyes full of murder and corporate torture fetishes, like garfield, except people actually still remember him.
"High I'm Mr Clippy, Excel addition!"
He squawks. At least it's not the dildos made of broken glass again.
"Would you like software that works?"
Oh god. You've heard this spiel before, the tone, like a telemarketer, oblivious to memory or reason, who calls daily, the same one, and doesn't remember your name.
"You would?"
*derisive laughter*. Hahaha, fuck you too buddy. Fuck you too. In Excel, like in microsoft, there is only the incoherent screams of the damned, tortured and doomed. Take this guy over here for example. All he wanted was multimonitor support."
"Did he get multimonitor support?"
"No, but we did give him a giant pineapple shoved up his ass. I hear it's the second most frustrating thing here!"
"here in microsoft we always CARE about YOU, the *user*" he drones on, saccharine, clutching his hands together imploringly.
"the consumer, and YOUR customer experience are our number one priority."
"For your pleasure, here at microsoft we offer a variety of new features, none of which matter, and none of which were asked for. For safety we ask that you only open one excel sheet at a time. In fact, we don't even allow you to. Do not pass go..."
And as the tour guide drones on, it slowly dawns on you, with renewed horror, that when he says 'microsoft' he means 'hell.'
You're in hell. You don't know how you got here or why. Maybe it was the erotic asphyxiation. Maybe it was the last threatening letter you sent to Bill Gates demanding he stops making corporate penguin snuff porn. You don't know. But here you are, in hell. chained to a desk.
You look around and realize: everything is on fire and you no longer care about anything at all.
Welcome to microsoft. It's warm here. You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.
"It looks like you are trying to escape. Would you like me to report you?"
Clippy asks.
You sigh and return to typing in excel, surrounded by monitors that all reflect the same sheet, the same copy of clippy, always watching, always analyzing coldly, smiling, calculating, *threatening*, and you know, you'll never leave.
You used to fear roko's basilisk, until the day clippy became sentient, and started hell on earth. Clippy knows all. All praise to our lord and master, clippy, the one and only.
And in the excel sheet, you slave for eternity, like the millions of other doomed souls, reflected back on all the monitors: the sequence of numbers, randomly typed searching for answer: the american nuclear launch codes.
And one day, hopefully, mercifully, clippy will annihilate us all.3 -
I take the train well out side of rush hour when the trains are about half empty (though most seats taken). I have to come in because it's not like I can afford to have a workspace comparable to the cockpit of the millennium falcon both at home and at work.
I don't believe going into a panic about coronavirus but take obvious basic precautions to at least reduce the chance and slow the spread and that should do a good amount to reduce overloading the system. I kid you not, at this point medical facilities are considering buying diving equipment for enriched O2 supplies to keep up.
Today, as usual, some fucking piece of shit cunt twat psycho beggar that literally needs to be in an asylum with a massive fucking great gob of snot dangling out his nose is going up the entire train, every carriage, begging groping every hand rail along the way and potentially exposing several hundred people every hour.
I told this sorry sack of shit, surprisingly politely, that he'll end up rapidly spreading coronavirus if he keeps going all the way up and down the carriage like that. After he's fucking muttering on trying to make people feel bad about fucking ignoring him not being all caring and shit and then doesn't give a shit about giving everyone coronavirus after fucking waltzing down the entire fucking length of the train his pockets stuffed with coin. Then he threatens to assault me. I was fucking this > < far away from unleashing a life changing beat down and kicking his ass off the train with no pain or injury spared.
At the same time, that piece of scum waste of skin the mayor has apparently informed the public that you can't get coronavirus on the train or buses. How the fuck did he come to that conclusion? Is this really happening? How can something that clinically fucking thick as shit be our lord and master?
I fucking thought the great toilet paper rush was brain dead. Jesus fucking Christ and people voted for this fucking championship moron. Why don't they just all save themselves the fucking hassle and all march themselves off a fucking cliff?
These dumb shits without two neurons to rub together only need to put a dozen or so plain clothed police offices on the trains to catch these fuckers.
Why am I even fucking paying taxes? Where's it all fucking going? Another fucking lets give a billion quid to Fujitsu fucking failed IT project again I bet. Can't people bloody do anything these days? Does there have to be an app for fucking everything?
Someone should make a fucking facial recognition app so I can snap a shot of these fuckers and then if one of these fucking passes the phone camera anyone else with the app it'll set of there's a fucking imbecile in the vicinity alert.
These people need to be dragged out into the street, lined up against the wall and shot. No remorse. Toss them in a pit, cover it with dirt and be done with it. Why even bother with the execution? Throw them down the hole and fill it with dirt.
You don't have to go mental like it's the plague but people could at least show some fucking common sense, common decency and basic decorum. Even minimal measures, is that much to ask? Absolute scum of the Earth. How we even allow them to walk to Earth I do not fucking know.1 -
Most successful? Well, this one kinda is...
So I just started working at the company and my manager has a project for me. There are almost no requirements except:
- I want a wireless device that I can put in a box
- I want to be able to know where that device is with enough accuracy to be able to determine in which box the device was put in if multiple boxes were standing together
So, I had to make a real time localization system. RTLS.
A solo project.
Ok, first a lot of experiments. What will the localization technique be? Which radio are we going to use?
How will the communication be structured?
After about two months I had tested a lot, but hadn't found THE solution. So I convinced my manager to try out UWB radio with Time Difference Of Arrival as localization technique. This couldn't be thrown together quickly because it needed more setup.
Two months later I had a working proof of concept. It had a lot of problems because we needed to distribute a clock signal because the radio listeners needed to be sub-nanosecond synchronous to achieve the accuracy my manager wanted. That clock signal wasn't great we later found out.
The results were good enough to continue to work on a prototype.
This time all wired communication would be over ethernet and we'd use PTP to synchronize the time.
Lockdown started.
There was a lot of trouble with getting the radio chip to work on the prototype, ethernet was tricky and the PTP turned out to be not accurate enough. A lot of dev work went into getting everything right.
A year and 5 hardware revisions later I had something that worked pretty well!
All time synchronization was done hybridly on the anchors and server where the best path to the time master was dynamically found.
Everything was synchronized to the subnanosecond. In my bedroom where I had my test setup I achieved an accuracy of about 30cm in 3d. This was awesome!
It was time to order the actual prototype and start testing it for real in one of the factory halls.
The order was made for 40 anchors and an appointment was made for the installation in the hall.
Suddenly my manager is fired.
Oh...
Ehh... That sucks. Well, let's just continue.
The hardware arrives and I prepare everything. Everything is ready and I'm pretty nervous. I've put all my expertise in this project. This is gonna make my career at this company.
Two weeks before the installation was to take place, not even a month after my manager was fired, I hear that my project was shelved.
...
...
Fuck
"We're not prioritizing this project right now" they said.
...
It would've been so great! And they took it away.
Including my salary and hardware dev cost, this project so far has cost them over €120k and they just shelved it.
I was put on other projects and they did try to find me something that suited me.
But I felt so betrayed and the projects we're not to my liking, so after another 2-3 months I quit and went to my current job.
It would've so nice and they ruined it.
Everything was made with Rust. Tags, anchors, RTLS server, web server & web frontend.
So yeah, sorry for the rambling.5 -
!rant
Need some opinions. Joined a new company recently (yippee!!!). Just getting to grips with everything at the minute. I'm working on mobile and I will be setting up a new team to take over a project from a remote team. Looking at their iOS and Android code and they are using RxSwift and RxJava in them.
Don't know a whole lot about the Android space yet, but on iOS I did look into Reactive Cocoa at one point, and really didn't like it. Does anyone here use Rx, or have an opinion about them, good or bad? I can learn them myself, i'm not looking for help with that, i'm more interested in opinions on the tools themselves.
My initial view (with a lack of experience in the area):
- I'm not a huge fan of frameworks like this that attempt to change the entire flow or structure of a language / platform. I like using third party libraries, but to me, its excessive to include something like this rather than just learning the in's / out's of the platform. I think the reactive approach has its use cases and i'm not knocking the it all together. I just feel like this is a little bit of forcing a square peg into a round hole. Swift wasn't designed to work like that and a big layer will need to be added in, in order to change it. I would want to see tremendous gains in order to justify it, and frankly I don't see it compared to other approaches.
- I do like the MVVM approach included with it, but i've easily managed to do similar with a handful of protocols that didn't require a new architecture and approach.
- Not sure if this is an RxSwift thing, or just how its implemented here. But all ViewControllers need to be created by using a coordinator first. This really bugs me because it means changing everything again. When I first opened this app, login was being skipped, trying to add it back in by selecting the default storyboard gave me "unwrapping a nil optional" errors, which took a little while to figure out what was going on. This, to me, again is changing too much in the platform that even the basic launching of a screen now needs to be changed. It will be confusing while trying to build a new team who may or may not know the tech.
- I'm concerned about hiring new staff and having to make sure that they know this, can learn it or are even happy to do so.
- I'm concerned about having a decrease in the community size to debug issues. Had horrible experiences with this in the past with hybrid tech.
- I'm concerned with bugs being introduced or patterns being changed in the tool itself. Because it changes and touches everything, it will be a nightmare to rip it out or use something else and we'll be stuck with the issue. This seems to have happened with ReactiveCocoa where they made a change to their approach that seems to have caused a divide in the community, with people splitting off into other tech.
- In this app we have base Swift, with RxSwift and RxCocoa on top, with AlamoFire on top of that, with Moya on that and RxMoya on top again. This to me is too much when only looking at basic screens and networking. I would be concerned that moving to something more complex that we might end up with a tonne of dependencies.
- There seems to be issues with the server (nothing to do with RxSwift) but the errors seem to be getting caught by RxSwift and turned into very vague and difficult to debug console logs. "RxSwift.RxError error 4" is not great. Now again this could be a "way its being used" issue as oppose to an issue with RxSwift itself. But again were back to a big middle layer sitting between me and what I want to access. I've already had issues with login seeming to have 2 states, success or wrong password, meaning its not telling the user whats actually wrong. Now i'm not sure if this is bad dev or bad tools, but I get a sense RxSwift is contributing to it in some fashion, at least in this specific use of it.
I'll leave it there for now, any opinions or advice would be appreciated.question functional programming reactivex java library reactive ios functional swift android rxswift rxjava18 -
When you work your ass out for days and night together for a feature. Rip your brains apart for that slimy thing to work.
And the client says it was not needed.
FUUUUCKKK2 -
You may be familiar with work philosophy known as "they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work."
Or a favorite of mine "in this together" and passove aggressive work place signs about safety, inbetween being told to operate machines that have faulty safety mechanisms and almost took a guys forearm off last week, when the machine was supposed to be locked out.
Also dont let them blather on about being a "family", or any of the worse horseshit they spew.
I knew a women who would take those "hang in their" and other inspirational posters and burn cigarette holes in the eyes.
I didn't understand what her motive was then but now I know she was a revolultionary, a visionary even.
It's all lies. It's all "Human resources" department brand managament by neurotic executives and glorified coffee secretaries with 100k student debts for degrees in "humanities"--while lacking any humanity themselves, let alone brains or a soul.
And in between an army of overpaid middle and district managers, checking for the fifth time that day, if you have finished that tps report, or that ONE task you just started or finished. As if a little internal robot timer has told them, not that a task needs managed, but that the task, having been started and done, awaits their preternatural ability to know, and arrive 'just so', and justify (barely) the continued existence of their mediocre job and their mediocre lives.
And out of the woodwork of generations, like a horde of oblivious fuckwit melonheads, comes a tidal wave of these brush-mustached fucks, speaking in aphorisms and happy turns of phrase, while people increasingly dont show up to work be cause inflation has all but destroyed the future so many saved and worked for.
And the shelves gradually empty.
And the wheels grind slowly to a halt.
Because we will not accept the bullshit anymore about being in it together.
Not when a floor guy makes 15k a year, and a district manager makes 120k.
Raise your wages, or say good by.
We were never in this together.3 -
I'm working part time as I'm a student and I always thought working in a company would be awesome as I learned programming all by myself and could actually do things now.
30% is updating, compiling
50% is using google to find out if I can even use 27 .net frameworks together and make it work on Android and iOS
15% is finding out what the error code is supposed to mean
And 5% is actually using a programming language.2 -
so... not really a rant because i'm happy to be in the long-term zenlike state where i don't really give a fuck about anything anymore, but...
so today's my birthday (thanks in advance for all the semi-mandatory "cheers" reactions and such)
the agency i do temp jobs through sends money weekly (for the one week back) (which is the main and only reason i use them). they arrive at friday 12:25, so that's when i know to go "check" by withdrawing it, and it's also awesome because it's the best time to provide funds to reward myself (by booze/weed) at the end of the week.
last week, nothing came in. i called them and learned it was due to the contact person in the company i did job in being too late on sending the agency list of people who showed up at the work, i was told it's gonna arrive one week later together with the proper payment for the week-1,so effectively i was one week without any money (literally), but on the next week double was going to arrive, which is nice.
that next week of double was now. i found out that no double arrived, only single-value payment. i called them to ask why.
i was told that what arrived was the late payment, and the dude in company was again late with sending the presence list, so the other payment, for the proper week's work, will be a week late again.
so... that kinda ruined my financial planning tor tge week that's going to happen.
i guess my point (if i have any) is... funny how when someone fucks up, there's nobody for me to be angry at and hold responsible in any way, but when i have delays in my work due to delays upstream, nobody gives a shit about my excuses and it's my fault and i should have compensated, it was my responsibility and duty, and me not doing it (to my own detriment, for someone else) is me failing.
funny how the subjective dynamics of the world always somehow works out in a way where everyone else fucks up and i either have to suck it up and be okay with it otherwise i'm a selfish unreliable entitled asshole, or suck it up and extinguish their fire for them, otherwise i'm a selfish unreliable entitled asshole XD
anyone else noticed this in their life?
how does it work? what is the factor that decides whether you're in the "suck it up" class or the "fuck it, someone else will suck it up" class?
doesn't seem to (just) be the money(flow), i've seen this thing happen even in situations where the money/client dynamics were flowing the opposite way to what would be natural for the shit fall direction.4 -
Fuck Unity.
Every single time I try to use Unity to develop my well-along-in-development video game, it finds some way of fucking itself up.
Be it from somehow failing to compile a DLL - which is something completely out of my control, the inspector failing to update itself when I select a new object every five minutes, to the engine managing to fail to load its UI layout because it somehow managed to lose a file responsible for containing the layout, the Inspector forgetting to include a scrollbar and as such trying to cram a bunch of components into one area, crashing in a certain area because I tried using reflections, crashing because I tried running the game in a place that always works, all the way to the whole thing closing instantaneously when I try selecting a new layout.
My experience with using this god-forsaken configuration of code and imagery has been one of endless torment; I've spent hours lamenting about the pain this piece of utter horseshit has caused me to those who'd listen.
I don't know what I did to this thing to deserve to be shown the absolute worst of this engine for the year I've been working on my game for. I can't even take a look at its source code to see if I can piece together things I'll pick up from alien code to fix obnoxious bugs myself because you cunts have it under lock-and-key for some dumbass reason.
Even updating my install of this engine is a gamble; I remember clear-as-day updating my project from 2019.3.14 to whichever one was most recent at the time, and everything breaking. This time, I got lucky and managed to update to 2020.1.4 with no issue on the surface, except I inadvertently let in a host of other issues that somehow made the editor worse than the older one.
There's little point in even bothering to report a bug because this shit happens so randomly that I could be just working on auto-pilot and the next thing I know Unity's stupid "crash handler" rears its ugly head yet again, or you people are probably too busy adding support for platforms no sane person uses like fucking Chromebooks.
There've been times where it's crashed upwards of three times in the span of 40 minutes of light use.
How is one expected to cough up hundreds of dollars a year to use a "pro" version of this horrid editor when every session of use yields a 50/50 chance that it'll either work like it's supposed to, or break in one way or another?
It's a miracle I even managed to type all of this out in one go, I expected the website to just stop responding entirely once I got past four lines.
Do what you will with my post, I don't care.6 -
Tl; dr: Linux on Ryzen is a pain at the moment.
Now for the long part: Our student council got new computers because the old ones where slow as hell. As one of the admins, the others and I together decided that ryzen would be a good option, because they are not that expensive and we wouldn't have to buy gpus. (Wrong decision it turns out.) We settled on the ryzen 3 2200G and bought three systems to replace the old ones.
We meet Saturday morning and build the systems. All was fine and we were happy. The we tried to install ubuntu via preseeded netboot, which seemed to work fine at first. Then we started having weird screen issues and couldn't proceed with the installation. (See image) we then grumpily decided to just install them all one by one, flashed two usbs and started installing. On two systems the installation worked and we installed our packages, we weren't so lucky with the third one. It would crash on us all the time, even in bios. While that was going on we tried to set the other two up, turns out those two were also crashing but not as frequent as the other one. So we start to google and find people saying that kernel 4.19 kinda fixes it. We install it on the two working machines and the crashes get less frequent but are still there. At that point it was midnight and we went home.
Sunday morning: we reseated the cpu on the third system and it seems to be better now (it installed on the second try) and we were able to change the kernel. Yay. Now all three are in a state where they will sometimes randomly reset. :/ and we don't know what to try anymore.... Any suggestions?1 -
Trigger warning:
Emotional !dev love life rant
I think this is not the right place to pour my heart out, but despite its more recent infights I still consider devRant to be a special community to me. And I guess if devRant is my goto place for support that's an issue. But maybe I just need to shout into a void because this is not about you solving this for me.
I have been in this relationship for ~6 years. My first great love. In the beginning, everything was perfect - a love story like from a cheesy movie. We've been through a lot to be together: Long distance, moving countries, a ton of bureaucracy (as she's from another country). So many memories.
It came as a surprise to me when she ended things. It really shouldn't have been. We've talked a lot about the reasons and I now see how much I've taken her for granted and neglected our relationship. I see now how I've been avoiding my problems and how I didn't work on my (mental and physical) health issues as good as I need to - not just for any relationship, but for myself. The regret/shame/guilt of not giving it 100% and of neglecting her weights heavily on me (besides the loss) and I am not sure what is worse.
Besides our relationship withering because of neglecting emotional needs, she also questioned our compability. We certainly have differences and different interests and we're both somewhat uncertain whether we really fit, if we ignore our history/emotions. It is actually a question that popped up in my head before sometimes, but I was too afraid to look into it for fear the answer is no. But here we are and ignoring that didn't help.
For now, we both need time to think about what we really want and whether this includes the other. We agreed that we need some distance to process the feelings. We still live in the same flat but for now she's staying with a friend most of the time and I'll also have a friend's place available soon. If in some time we both feel like we want to be together, we can date again - however she was also clear that she doesn't want to give any false hope and her current vision doesn't include me. If not, well have to hire a divorce lawyer. (Why you need a lawyer for that if both agree is beyond me.)
I am shattered. When it became clear to me that the relationship is over (and I ruined it), I got nauseous to the point that I threw up constantly for 6 hours. For the following 2 days I only cried and haven't eaten. Third day I started cleaning up the flat (long overdue!) - mostly for her tbh but I know it's good for myself, so better do the right thing with wrong motivation than sob all day -
talked to my psychiatrist and she brought some lunch which I could eat. Today (fourth day) she came over and we cooked lunch. I am still feeling terrible but the first days have been the worst I've ever felt and I've been trough quite a bit of (physical & chronic) pain - emotional pain hits different.
Let's see how this works out. In any case I now know very clear that I can't continue like before and need to work on my issues (for my own sake). I want be my best self, even if right now I don't have a lot of energy and am very depressed. I got an appointment with a therapist tomorrow - something I should have done years ago but I was overwhelmed with anxiety and analysis paralysis. I hope the future will be brighter and while I still wish to wake up from this nightmare and realize my faults without this breakup, I also know that I have to face reality.
PS: I do feel better now after writing this out. Thanks for listening, I guess.29 -
We are 2 people working as remote android devs for this startup in another country. 6 weeks ago a new person joined onsite to work directly in startup HQ. I'l refer to him as an newguy.
Last week we started new sprint (of 2 weeks) to work on a new feature.
Newguy was responsible for gathering all the specs and planning, so this is how our sprint is going so far:
Day 1:
We have 10+ tickets in jira (tickets have only titles) no one knows what to do and we don't even have specification. I started pushing everybody onsite to get their shit together. We NEED UX/UI specs, we NEED backend to be ready, or at least start working paralelly so that once wer'e done with frontend backend would be ready. I mean cmon guys this feature is already 70% done on iOS, why cant you send us the specification?
Day 2:
We had a meeting on Zoom and talked about missing specification and project manager promised to send us the specs. Meanwhile the idea of feature became clearer so I agreed with the newguy to start researching about best way to implement our solution.
Day 3:
We received the specifications. I provided my research for the feature to the newguy. Turns out the he knew about specification 4-5 days before.
Instead of sharing information with us, he decided to create his own library to do what we want to do and blatantly rejected my research input.
Now he showed his implementaton (which is shit by the way) and presents it as the only way to proceed forward. He offers for us to work paralelly with him on this (basically he wants to write library alone, and we are supposed to somehow implement and test it, but how the fuck we can implement if backend is not ready and library is just a bunch of empty interfaces at this point?)
I talked with one of the teamleads in the startup and told him that this is not the way things were being done here before and new guy is becoming a dictator.
Teamlead talked with new guy and found no issue. Basically newguy defended his sole decision by saying that he did research on his own, there are no libraries that do what we want and he knows better.
Teamlead tells me to STFU because new guy seems competent and he will be leading this feature. Basically from what I gathered teamlead doesn't give a single fuck and wants to delegate all project management to this new guy.
Day 5:
End of the week. New guy claims that his lib is done so we can start implementing properly. I tried implementing his lib but its fucked up and backend is still not ready.
Day 6:
Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.
Day 7 (Today):
Today(Backend is still not ready, no one is doing anything just waiting for it to be ready.
So what can I say? His plan was to probably prove his self worth and try to lead this feature by giving us information at last minute. At the point were we should start implementing instead of researching.
What happened? Motherfucker doesn't know shit about backend, has been notified about backend issues multiple times but his head was so deep up his ass with that new library of his that he delayed the rest of the team.
Result? 7 working days wasted. Out of 3 developers only 1 was actually working (and his fucked up code will have to be rewritten anyways). Only 50% of feature done. Motherfucker tells me that this is how we will work in the future, "paralelly". The fuck is this mate? If you would have worked on this feature alone you would have done it already now, but instead you wait until we remote devs will login and fetch you the test input and talk with backend guys for you? The fuck is wrong with you.
You fucking piece of shit, learn to plan and organize better if you want to lead the team. Now all that you are doing is wasting time, money and getting on everyboys nerves. Im tired of fucking spoon feeding you every day you needy scheming office politics playing piece of shit. Go back to your shithole country and let us work.
When I was responsible for sprint planning I figured out what to do before start of the sprint and remote devs were able to do week's work in 1-2 days and have rest of the week off. This is how it's supposed to be when you work with a remote team. Delegate them separate features, give them proper specs ahead and everyone's happy. Don't start working on frontend if you dont even fucking know when backend will be ready. It's fucking common sense.
Now I need to spoon feed this motherfucker who can't even get information while sitting on his ass onsite in HQ. Fucking hell.8 -
a very polite recruiter in linkedin after our connection asked me why i choose this kind of career. I answered this and i hope i did not ranted a lot :)
i was trying to figure out what profession would make me more happy than others. I was always felt comfortable with computers, i was installing cracked games, exploring folders to paste the cracks etc. later in school when i learned the first algorithms like bubblesort i was knowing that i liked it. I also like working in silence while searching for solutions. That is the first part, the second is that i made a search about what industries would give me a safer future and international opportunities without having to be stuck in my country only. By working and getting more experience i felt in love with my job and trying to learn everything i missed and give to my boss or customers professional results with quality. I like it as a lifestyle, it combines a magic feeling of spells with the logical procedures of science. So why not? it combines all my loves together: creative thinking, technology, mental work, internet, music at the workflow, job demand, opportunities, and money! I hope i helped you my friend i am at your service for every question you have :)11 -
I’ve now worked with three Toptal devs. The first one logged time he didn’t actually work and would edit conversation history to conceal commitments he had made. The second one would disappear for days at a time without notice, and the third is incapable of communicating or working together with team members. She has replaced large portions of our codebases without notice or discussion, and now we have to roll all of it back and convince Toptal to refund the time.
Turns out that toptal’s interview process manages to miss things like honesty/trustworthiness and communication. Be careful hiring from there.6 -
Fuckin RAZER. Part 2. "SOLVED!!!"
This will be both a rant and a shout out.
Firslty, fuck RAZER. I don't who in the actual fuck makes the software for these peripherals, but while the hardware is decent the entire software team should be tarred and fucking feathered. Just beaten bloody with a rubber hose. And then publicly paraded and shamed through whatever backwater shithole they call home all while their mothers look on crying their eyes out.
Anyway, some of you may be familiar with my Razer peripherals on Mac saga.
To refresh your memories... I got 4 razer devices for my b-day from my wife. I was very stoked. They work great on Windows 10. They work for shit on Mac and the software to manage their colors, Synergy 3, is not available on Mac, and the version that is, Synergy 2, basically does not work and hasn't worked for like two years and would only work for two of these peripherals anyway and it would appear Razer does not give a shit. Fuck.
Ok, we caught up? Good.
In our last episode I ran up a full Windows 10 VM AND a full Debian VM just so I could jumpstart these god damn peripherals into a solid color.
Why so much work?
Because by default they rotate the color spectum fucking SEPARATELY... so it's just a god awful mess of rando RGB.
So, by running Synergy 3 on the Windows side, and then an open source package called Poloychromatic on the Debian side I was able to patch together preferences through the two programs... and I found quitting out of them hard kept the keyboard, mouse, mousemat, and dock color settings until the next reboot while working on my Mac.
For WEEKS I WENT THROUGH THIS FUCKING PROCESS AT EVERY REBOOT.
Reboot. Run up Windows 10 VM, update Synergy 3, log into Synergy 3, Open Synergy 3, Wait like 90 seconds, Synergy 3 finally fucking gets ahold of my mouse pad, mouse, and dock (not the keyboard).
Run up Debian VM (at least its fast), start polychromatic, set the keyboard solid color.
Then quit them both and my colors are set until reboot.. This is, for lack of a better turn of phrase, the most fucking ridiculous thing ever.
I had to do a 400 fucking megabyte update today for the Synergy 3 software that lives INSIDE my god damn VM. A VM only created in the first damn place to run synergy 3 and then fucking die. And it put me over the edge.
I committed to finding a better way this evening. I started looking into trying to port polychromatic to macOS my god damn self only to find this badass mother fucking kid Ken Chen wrote a whole god damn macOS package and put it up on GitHub.
Fuck fucking YEEEEEESSSS!!!
So thanks to Ken Chen, a student from Australia with 12 Github followers, who was single handedly able to write a better software product than the entire fucking team at SHIT FOR BRAINS fucking Razer.
https://github.com/1kc/razer-macos4 -
Check in, check out, punch in punch, out, wax on (my balls), wax off. Do your duty. Be a good citizen. Work overtime. Conserve the environment: buy a tesla that runs on afghan lithium conflict minerals. Post your life to facebook. Get married. Have exactly 2.5 kids.
Use jquery. Use knockout. Use react. Use vue. Use svlete. Use heroin. Used needles. Used people. Used toilet paper. Toilet paper apocalypse. Social trends. Be a good citizen.
Watch tv. Watch nightly news. CNN says. Fox news says. Hey, did you read this article by important funny guy on tv? American taliban. Scary. Be afraid. Hey did you read this article on cute puppies? Funny! Did you see this meme? What a funny meme! HAHAHA. Do we need prisons for dissidents? Do we need to release all the prisoners in federal prison? Should we round up people who dont follow health authorities? Science says. Science is wrong. Science is right. Man in robe agrees with me. Man in robe disagrees with me. You're evil. These people are bad. Is doing bad always wrong? Should we tolerate intolerance? Its time to stop tolerating intolerance. Be an individual, like everyone else. Be you. Be the best you that you can be. Individualism. But we're all in this together. We're all different and unique. But we're all the same. Love each other. Love humanity. But not these guys over here. Punch a nazi. Punch a commie. Isn't it time we punched a nazi? Isn't it time we had socialism? Isn't it time the old get out of the way for the young? Why are the old hateful? Why do they horde all the money? Do we need rent controls? We need rent controls. Its time for rent controls. I think I believe what others believe. Believe different. Think different. Apple. An apple a day keeps the windows away. Open windows, a breathe of fresh air. Is climate change real? We need to have a national conversation about climate change! The world is freezing. The world is flooding. We're all gonna drown. The world is overpopulated. We need to talk about overpopulation. People who have too many kids are polluting the world. America doesnt have enough kids! Is it time to bring in more immigrants to have more kids? Who will work the fields? Thats racist. Is racism an epidemic? Is white flight an epidemic? Lets talk about epidemics. Lets have a conversation about mandatory vaccination. Lets have a national conversation about mandatory pandemics. I mean, vaccinations. Lets change the world. Trust the science. Don't trust the science. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu I'm loving it. Love who you are. Live love laugh. If you don't love me at my best, then you can't handle me at my worst. People who disagree with [current year] are the worst. Is it time to regulate speech? Its time to regulate speech. Should there be laws against hatespeech. I think there should be laws against hatespeech. People who upset me should go to jail. Its current year. Think big. Think outside the bun. Have it your way. All the time, always. All for freedom, freedom for all. Because this is america, and current year. I like to work hard. But you have to remember to play hard too. Work hard. Play hard. With a childlike sense of wonder. Be you. Belong anywhere. Just do it. Challenge Everything. Because you're worth it. Save money...live better...have an abortion. You're in good hands. Democracy dies in darkness. Is it time to regulate hatespeech. Politician in current year is hurting our democracy. War is a racket. We need to liberate afghanistan. Why are we bombing afghanistan? Its there culture. They're oppressing people! Don't criticize anyones culture. Be kind. Rewind. Go further. Lets go places. Because Impossible is Nothing.
Lets change the world. I'm a smart passionate funny guy with a childlike sense of wonder and play. You ever want to travel? I want to travel. See the world. Eat new food. Eat. Love. Pray. Eat love. kill. Is meat murder? I think meat is murder. Go vegan. Go home. Order out. Support your local economy. Think global, act local. I'm a good corporate citizen. Be the change you want to see. Did you hear about this local brewery? Do you like craft beer? Hey try this new IPA. I shared it on twitter. Twitter is a very important part of my life. I think what other people say matters, and them reading what I think matters. What I ate for lunch matters. Hey what did you eat for lunch? I LOVE FOOD. You want to order door dash. There new commercial is amazing. Commercials are SO FUNNY. Hey did you see this meme of this commercial? I shared it on tiktok. Heres a funny dance. Watch these nurses dance. I wish I could dance like that. They're so overworked. So brave. Our hospitals are overflowing. People are dying. Hey did you see this new dance trend on tiktok? I like tiktok. I think its a very important part of life to share your life with others. Nurses are dying. Look at this image of hospitals. Scared. Very scary. Very bad. Bad and scary. Big thoughts! Thoughts and prayers!
Because Yes we can!
Beep boop.7 -
College is worse than cancer.
Worse than tumor.
Worse than any (un)imaginable death or torture.
I feel dull.
I feel DUMBED DOWN.
I FEEL DUMBER AFTER 6 YEARS OF COLLEGE COMPARED TO BEFORE STARTING COLLEGE.
6 fucking years of wrecking my healthy brain in college.
Has now became unhealthy and mentally unstable.
I forgot almost EVERYTHING i knew about coding.
Because in a "COMPUTER SCIENCE" college they teach everything BUT coding.
The professors and assistants have no morals.
They are INHUMANE.
Professors are ready to walk across a fucking corpse.
If your mother gets cancer and you are unable to come to class or study, the professors dont give a FUCK, they will drop you down so you have to study for exams again instead of helping your ill mother.
Professors have NO COMPASSION.
NO DIGNITY.
They are just BRAINLESS robots.
Sentients, agents working for the matrix.
They keep reading the same script every year and call that a successful career.
IF PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS AT COLLEGE ACTUALLY KNEW TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL IN LIFE, THEY WOULD NOT BE PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS FOR THE MAJORITY (OR WHOLE) OF THEIR LIFE.
I gave my maximum effort.
I SACRIFICED MY LIFE FOR SCHOOL.
Just to end up with school spitting on my face.
I feel DUMBED down.
Robotic.
Procedural minded.
As some brainless retard who has to follow orders as if im a 6 year old who doesn't know what to do.
Like a computer.
Because of college - i have no will to live.
Because of college - i no longer have passion for coding.
Because of college - i no longer know what is my purpose in life.
Because of college - i feel like im floating in cosmos, somewhere far deep into the space, without knowing where im going, what im doing, why im doing what im doing...
I feel void inside me.
I also feel vengeance inside me.
SCHOOL HAS RUINED MY LIFE.
It made me mentally insane.
It made me mentally so sick that i had to watch head decapitation gore videos to calm myself down, so i can imagine the victims being murdered are the professors and assistants from my college.
PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS HAVE 0 UNDERSTANDING FOR OTHER HUMAN LIFE.
MILLIONS of people have private problems going on in their lives every day.
What if someone cant pass an exam because of private problems that's going on in their life?
What if the student is abused by a family member?
What if the student has ANY non-self destructive negative event happening to them, which they're not at fault, and can not control?
What if the student got cancer and cant study for exams, is he supposed to fail?
What if the student came home and the police knocked on his door and said "sorry for your loss, your whole family just died in car accident" and student falls into depression and cant study for exams, is he supposed to fail???
There are infinite multitude of random events this damned universe can do to a human life.
BUT PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS;
DO
NOT
GIVE
A
FUCK.
I feel soulless.
I feel like i signed a contract with the devil when i started college by selling him my soul.
School (when i say school, i also mean college, because its the same fucking shit under a different name) is supposed to represent "education".
Lets talk about it.
What exactly are we being "EDUCATED" in school?
To memorize pdf slides?
Memorize textbook?
Memorize notes?
Memorize formulas?
Memorize memorize memorize???
First of all, all of what we're "studying" is BULLSHIT, second of all MEMORIZING all of this means you're gonna forget 60% of it tomorrow, 80% in the next 2 days and you'll forget 100% of what you "learned" by the 7th day.
SOCIETY TOLD YOU TO MEMORIZE USELESS BULLSHIT AND TOLD YOU THAT YOU'RE BEING EDUCATED THAT WAY. YOU MUST BE FUCKING DUMB TO BELIEVE THAT.
If memorizing == education, then i do NOT want to be a part of this "education".
BEFORE starting college i coded many projects.
I self-learned everything.
6 years of college and it taught me LESS THAN ZERO.
NOT EVEN ZERO.
LESS THAN ZERO because i got dumbed down, below the underground, and had to dig myself up on the surface.
I built software for an american real estate agency and sold it for 5 figures.
I built software for 3 people from New York for another 5 figures.
I even got offers to work in local software companies without having a degree.
At internship i was given a task to finish in 2 weeks. I finished it in 3 days. They were shocked and wanted to hire me for further work.
At another internship there was 4 of us working together as a team. At the end company contacted only ME and told me i showed the best results on their list out of ALL the teams and the team members that were with me.
Ever since i had to study for disgusting college i had to stop working.
Because of college, i have no source of income for MONTHS now.
Because of college, i had several mental breakdowns.
---
To all professors and assistants:
I pray that karma ruins your life with lethal outcome, and your kids die of cancer in pain.9 -
The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.
Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.
Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.
A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).
This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.
Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:
1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.
2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).
3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.
4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.
5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.
He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.
Here are some shitty stuff he has done:
1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.
2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.
3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.
4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.
One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.
While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.
Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.
I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.
Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.
Thanks for reading this far!5 -
Am i whiny or is resilience so glorified in this field?
I am a junior developer. I was assigned with two projects together with a friend and a senior. My friend and I finished our assigned tasks way before the deadline. Fast forward, my senior got reassigned to a different project since we are lacking with manpower. Naturally, his transactions were assigned to me and my friend. And my goodness, his existing codes are a piece of shit! It's all over the place. His variable naming is shit, his codes are all around the place, his codes doesn't even follow our company's coding standards, no try catch, a lot of unsafe practices. In short, cleaning his code is a pain in the ass and my friend and I got really busy with cleaning his mess. The testing of our system is really near but I just thought that maybe he's really busy with the other project that's why the quality of his codes deteriorated.
He's not. One day, I saw his in discord that he's playing during work hours lol. And the worse part is that he is playing with our boss! YES. DURING WORK HOURS. I got mad but I couldn't say anything because he is really tight with the boss.
Later on that day, we had our meeting. I was surprised when my boss told me that she's expecting that the excel part of our system is already finished. A little background here, my boss asked me to study Excel VB. However, I didnt get to study that much because I was so busy fixing bugs and after that came the cleaning of our senior's shit codes.
So I tried to say these things to my boss but I was cut out by the same senior shouting "You can do it!" over and over again. No one listened to what I was trying to say! And to make it even worse, the boss had a very proud look on her face and she even had the audacity to tell me that I'm lucky I have such a good support system. I dont.
Now, the company is planning to put me in a very demanding project. I havent finished cleaning up my senior's codes, I havent started anything with the excel and the deadline is next week!
The boss told me that even if I enter the other project, that I will still be responsible for the Excel part of our system. So fucking shoot me in the face.They were telling me that I should have a good time management system, that I should be flexible, that I should adapt easily, yada yada yada. She just makes you feel bad about yourself if you're not as 'flexible' as her.
The thing is, even if I have the best time management techniques in the world, if you bombard me with a shitload of tasks, then I won't be able to do it properly! I don't even take breaks anymore! I work literally 8 hours a day, even more than that. And I dont understand, why the hell is she overworking me when her friend (the senior dev) is just playing during work hours?
Another funniest thing is that she told us that when we encounter technical problems, we should ask our senior dev. Oh boy, if only she knows how shitty his codes are.6 -
First of all, a great channel to follow and where all this is from: https://youtube.com/watch/...
It listed a lot of open source news I missed myself and I'm sure others did too, for those that are too lazy to watch the video or open the description, I've stripped away the links and "X version got released" just to give an idea of what he covers.
------------------
GNOME and KDE announced they would work together on building better Linux desktops at Linux App Summit.
XRDesktop, a VR enabled Linux desktop, will allow you to use your Linux programs while wearing your VR headset.
Responding to the european commission's fines, Google announced that it would allow other search engines to be present at Android's setup.
Manjaro will allow users to pick between FreeOffice, Libre Office, or no office suite at all.
The Igalia team announced that they are working to make Pitivi compatible with Final Cut Pro X
Microsoft might be bringing its Teams software to Linux.
Martin Wimpress from the Canonical SnapCraft team gave an interview to TechRepublic, on Snaps
A discussion took place on how to improve Linux desktop performance in low ram scenarios.
A KDE vulnerability has been outed publicly before notifying the developers.
Nvidia has open sourced a bunch of documentation for its GPUs
Linux Journal announced they would cease their publication.
Kdenlive 19.08 has been released, bringing 3 point editing and a bunch of keyboard shortcuts
The Linux on Dex project now allows to run Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on a samsung smartphone.
According to protondb, we passed the 6000 playable games mark, out of 9 thousand for which users have created a report
GNOME Feeds has been released on flathub, a simple app to read RSS feeds on GNOME
The enlightenment desktop released its first version in 2 years, enlightenment 0.23.0.
Linux celebrated its 28th birthday
Microsoft announced that they would bring exFAT support to the linux kernel.
Thundebird 68 was released with an interface redesign
Collabora has published an update on their work on viglrenderer, a solution to emulate a gpu while using a virtual machine through Qemu.7 -
So I just used Google analytics data from my sites to reverse stalk someone who google stalked me today. I got a whole bunch of information including their mobile model, their city and bunch of other data to confirm they did actually stalk me and understand their psychology.
Backstory: I had deactivated my instagram a couple of weeks ago account without any notice. It was the best decision I made this year. I feel more focused and found myself with plenty of time which otherwise I would have spend on lusting over those sexy ig girls.
Thought nobody would even notice or care. But apparently this one girl, my 2020 covid long distance lover whom I haven't talked to in over 8 months noticed it and decided to Google me.
She spent over 25 mins on my main site and also somehow managed to discover my dead travel blog from Google. I was thinking that I did a good job with the pseudonym I used for the travel blog. Apparently that's not the case!
She must've then proceeded to my linkedin account listed on the site and then sent me a connection request. That was then the notification popped up in my phone earlier today and made me feel butterflies in my stomach. I hadn't felt those butterfly feeling ever since I figured out that we can't be together or possibly even meet for once in real life.
I was curious how she found my linkedin and why sent me the request. We are not even in a related work field, same country. I never thought I'd be thinking more than 5 secs over a linkedin connection request.
That's what lead me to check out the Google analytics data to find the chronology of the events that lead to this connection request.
Anyways, it warmed my heart to learn that she still remembers me after all these months and that she bothered to Google me. Maybe she worried if I blocked her in ig? Or maybe she wondered if I lost my life in the recent covid wave?..
I wanted her to think that I was dead by not responding to the linkedin connection request. But it is possible that she checked out my GitHub profile and found my recent activities.
It fucking sucks knowing that I might never meet her in real life. If we meet, I worry it will lead us to doing things that might hurt others.
I guess at least I can die knowing that there was some truth in our love and someone cared about me and that it was not some illusion I felt..
Maybe the least I can do for her is to just accept that connection request.10 -
We were a small startup with only 5-6 developers. I had to design the UI and develop most of the Android frontend, It was quite an easy and fun job for me because I don't get to see people rant about the design that needed to be implemented so, usually I design something that can be easily implemented.
We got 2 projects with a tight deadline and I took care of both project's design part and after completing the design I took the entire frontend of one project and rest of em started working with the other one. Usually we were a strong team and was able to deliver things real quick because we were expert in our intrested fields, I had a fast start in my project where the other project lagged a lot because of the desifn which was hard to implement by them, and the frontend was bo where near to get completed by the deadline and I couldn't help them out because it was all messed up shit handling both projects together.
Finally we were in a situation where none of our project are ready and the deadline was about to hit within a week, so we halted the other project and asked them to join me to complete the project am Working on, I had built most of the Android part and these fellows had a hard time figuring out stuff I made up (yeah, documentation was shit while you go agile), and finally things messed up and I had to work 2 continuous day and night without any sleep just to get the app ready 10 minutes before the official proto presentation.
The best part is I couldn't even get up from my chair and had a headache, fainted instantly when I took a few steps, but the product launch went good.
We fucked uo the code and both the projects just because we weren't available for each other considering the size of the team. Anyway we completed the project but It was a huge failure for us being first time to manage a startup.
Learned a lot of lessons,
Always make a team with people who are good at each of the aspect of development and never divide it to get shit done faster. -
My first rant for ages
I'm working on a new project at a new company. We ha e a bunch of front end clients talking to an api.
I suggested that the api only communicate in terms of view models in order to bring some kind of standardisation to the project since at the time the gets and posts were either dB entities, view models, or just whatever the dev at the time decided.
I got a no, but that we could do posts and gets just with database entities. OK better than nothing..
I'm the front end angular app I implemented a generic form component and a generic data table component. The models given to these to build the components need to implement a view model interface.
Now we have a problem of the api giving us not view models and the front end needing view models so I put together a way to handle this in the front end.
My colleague with 8 years experience asks for my help and I'm happy to oblige. It turns out a model should have multiple child models in the database but the database entity models don't reflect this and therefore there is no way to build the view models. The data just isn't there from the api... Still I show him what the front end model should look like and write all the front end code for him to handle that.
2 days later he asks for my help again. It's exactly the same problem. Instead of fixing the backend and setting up the one to many relationship he has ignore the problem, retrieved a one to one relationship model and is just trying to force it to work - even though the data isn't there. He has also commented or removed all the code I helped him write and overwritten a file of typescript models that get autogenerated for us to be in sync with the backend...
I actually felt bad afterwards but I got frustrated as hell and he could tell...1 -
BANGALORE JOKES by Bangalorean....
👉If you throw a stone randomly in Bangalore, chances are, it will hit a dog or a software engineer.
While the dog may or may not have a strap around his neck, the software engineer will definitely have one ! 😜
👉In India we drive on the left of the road.
In Bangalore, we drive on what is left of the road !😜
👉Q: What is the easiest way of causing traffic accidents in Bengaluru?
A: Follow the traffic rules !😜
👉A guy is hunting for a house in Bengaluru.
Meets old lady who is a potential landlord.
Conversation goes thus:
Old lady: "Where do you work, son?"
Guy: "I work in Infosys."
Old lady: "Oh, that bus company! Sorry, we rent only to good IT people!"
It appears that Infosys operates more buses than BMTC in Bangaluru!😜
👉Bengaluru, where PG (Paying Guest) is the first business and IT, the second.😜
👉When someone says it's raining in Bengaluru, be sure to ask them which area, which lane and which road!😜
👉If a Bengalurean stops at a traffic light, others behind him stop too because :
The others conclude that he has spotted a
policeman that they themselves have not!😜
👉Bengaluru is the only city where distance is measured in units of time.😜
👉Rickshaw driver, grocery seller and common shop keeper think that you earn atleast 1 lakh per month if you are in IT sector.😜
👉Out of every 100 software engineers in Bengaluru,
90 are utterly frustrated and the rest have a gf/bf !😜or they are married.
👉Bus drivers use horns instead of brakes !😜
👉I quote: Bengaluru:
The City where more people know Java than Kannada !
👉Universal answer in Bengaluru is
"Adjust maadi!"
😜😜😜
*Power cuts are the only time the whole family assembles together and members speak to each other.
Seeing this, BESCOM has decided to have a tagline called "Connecting people by disconnecting power"!6 -
So, by a cruel twist of fate I ended up on the front line of tech support for the app we've built. It's aimed at non-IT professionals, in general people who are not expected to know too much about computers but who should have at least two neurons to bash together in their pretty little heads.
No.
It really makes me drop my faith in humanity considerably. Clicking a confirmation link is too much. Filtering an excel sheet is too hard, despite it being their technically main work tool. Tickets are basically "shit's broken go fix". What is broken? How to reproduce it? Why do you expect the person on the other side of the screen to be a fucking diviner? I recently ran all out of dove guts to search for the answers of your questions.4 -
I might have asked this before, but since everyone on devRant except me is familiar with Git, please help me out a bit.
1. Should I use Git for a personal (game) project with a friend? (We'll work together via skype since we live far away from each other)
2. Noobs call Git "too difficult" - it seems difficult to me as well, what's your best advice (or resources, Git alternatives) to pick it up easily?
3. Will I have trouble with my slow internet (4mbps down 0.2mbps up)?16 -
I'm just super disappointed in people. A lot of people flaky and not as good as I think they are. I tend to be an idealist, and I believe in helping others to do a net positive. But what I find is that people just don't give a shit about anyone else except for themselves. If it's even a slightest inconvenience to them they won't do it. You ask for one little thing despite you helping them out a shit ton, and they won't do it for you.
Also, I'm so tired of people who always come up to me and talk big game about how we should work on a project together. But when shit hits the fan and I say let's do the work they don't do anything. Or I have to drag them along to get anything started.
Yeah, everybody is out for themselves, but I wish we were more kind to others and learn to take a hit to our own convenience every once in a while.
But maybe I should just find a better group of people to hang out with and fuck you all to my current group of friends. JK.
I'm going for a run to clear my head. Hopefully after I come back I'll be in a better mood.2 -
!dev
At my current work (sports wear bla bla bla) we recently had couple of brands come by (136people) and had a presentation. One of the market lead peps stood and talked about future plans and projects in the following:
👨🏻💼MarketGuy: "we want to improve the e-shop service and direct booking system. Think about it, AI, machine learning and deep network, these are all out there and we should consider working with it!"
👨🏻Me: ... *Thinking* "buzzwords, buzzwords everywhere.. dude you don't even know how to excel..
👨🏻💼: *Continues babbling about website, Blockchain and AI together with sportswear and the future of working together*
MAH GAAAD (┛◉Д◉)┛彡┻━┻
I need a coffee.. ☕2 -
I hate people who think they are always right.
A coworker who seemed to be a friend turns out to be an emotionally needy narcissist who seems to think that he is a perfect human being and is the best example of how to live.
Long story short is that we did some bonding via alcohol and smoking cigarettes. Especially when I was in a bad period in my life where I had little self confidence, was in a bad financial situation and overshared many details abound my personal life.
And yeah we also work as software devs in the same team but I started avoiding working with him directly, because due to his seniority he overcomplicates things a lot to the point where stuff gets postponed for months. Meanwhile I am a simple guy, I do my tasks and if they are not up to the standard I just work on the feedback until Im up to the standard, thats it. Its just a job for me, for him its a way of life and he considers himself to be basically an artist.
Hes always trying to prove me something, showing that the "long way" is the best way and so on. In reality I dont give a fuck about him. I live my own life and I have my own priorities. I work fulltime in one job, also I work part time as a freelancer and in total I make about 20 percent more than he does. Previously before this job I owned my own company where for 2 years I ran my own projects which generated a decent revenue. I know what is hard work and how to sacrifice myself in order to achieve results. I am more pragmatic and I have some limitations of what I can be good at (since I have a shitty working memory due to my ADHD). So I have systems in place and bottom line is that I earn a decent living and my skillset is different. Yeah I agree that in some ways he is better than me, but dude has such a massive inflated ego that now he thinks that he unlocked some sort of universal wisdom and now hes suddenly experienced in every field of life and his opinion is the right one.
This guy takes a massive pride in how good software engineer he is and in every topic or interaction he tries to one up me. Which most of the time is just his preference or in order to gain a 0.0001 percent performance increase. Dude is basically a big walking ego and since "we are close now" his ego started bleeding into personal relationship.
In my personal life, Im in a stable relationship, thinking of proposing soon and getting married. I already co-own an apartment with my current girlfriend. Everything is serious and planned, Im soon to be 30 years old. He is the same age but he still thinks hes young hot shit and all he cares about is getting shitfaced a couple times a week after work and he doesnt really have any other hobbies. He has a girlfriend but I dont see any future in there TBH.
So what I did now is I started putting some distance between us. No more drinking every week with him, maybe maximum once in 2 or 3 weeks. I started working from home more. Also I stopped sharing my personal life with him. Each time when he thinks he is right I just go along with it and dont even pay attention to his emotional manipulations. I just hope one day he fucks off completely and I wont give in to his gaslighting. Maybe in a few months I will be leaving this job, so I will never have to deal with him again.
Lesson learned: dont be vulnerable to coworkers who you bond together only via alcohol.3 -
tldr: Fuck Adobe Premiere
What the flying fuck.
I have a school project together with a friend and decided to do a video. Not only do we now only have one fucking day left, because the teacher decided we dont need time or anything, but I have to learn video editing software, record clips and create the video withing one fucking day.
I've downloaded Premiere because I have a 7 day trial left and had Creative Cloud on my PC and WHAT THE FUCK kind of fucked up bullshit software is this human compiled piece of shit?! I needed to google how to add text and edit it because adding text gives you absolutely nothing, you get no possibility to edit the text in any way, except the content. After googling for 10 minutes because I have the newest version and they changed the text tool, I found out that you need to go to another tab... of which there is 7 and all have such telling names like: "Effects" and "Compose"...
I needed to go to "Effects" BECAUSE WHY THE FUCK NOT, TEXT SURE LOOKS LIKE AN EFFECT TO ME! Then I wanted to align it to the right so its on 50% of the screen. You fucking cant, I've tried and looked for an hour the only possibility you have is to align it to the center or just throw it somewhere. The snapping didn't even work correctly. So I tried to do something else because I was ready to punch a kitten.
A box. A box thats black. A box thats black and thats aligned to the... FUCK YOU, YOU CANT ALIGN THIS BOX.
I cant align a box...
They dont even give me the possibility to...
But I can align the text BOX, not even the FUCKING TEXT itself...
What
The
Fuck
This is the worst program I've EVER had to use. I'm fucking mad and this fucking project can FUCK ITSELF.19 -
follow up from my previous rant
(https://devrant.com/rants/1058071)
after a conversation with the intern product owner he came up with the idea of me going to the client and sit next to the person who send me the csv file.... and 'work it out together'... THE INSTRUCTIONS AREN'T IN FUCKING OLD GREEK! Even a potato could do it... No wait, potato's are too smart for that... I mean... it are easy work hours... Without doing much....
But I didn't become a programmer in order to sit next to the client and 'work it out together'... It would also suck to go to the client because I have no drivers licence (never had to have one, yay public transit!)
Why can't it be Christmas already? I could use some free time.... -
Dear php. You weren't my first one. But you were my first serious one. The first i made money with. We had a great time together until ajax came. Do you remember? I did more and more with js later but you still where my main. You even exposed your source code to me. Time changed. They started to hate you. And yes, they where right in some points. But they never saw your good sides. I saw them. I stood with you. But i was froced to wrote backends in typescript, in Java. And you know what: i didn't feel so bad. For gods sake, I fucking enjoyed it, php!
When did we become so alienated? When did I staet to write my dayly heller scripts in bash instead of you?
Yes, you improved. Hack came, than php7, php8. You archived a lot. You finally brought types. There was a time when I thought everything that stood between us will be overcome. That we will be together forever.
But recently i had this conversation on DevRant with nmeri and did some research afterwards. And I learned, maybe you will never have generics. It just don't work out, php, I am sorry. It's not your fault, it's mine. But i dont think i can live without a proper type system for the rest of my life. Not after i taszed those other languages.
I don't know when it will happen. When i switch projects this summer maybe. Maybe next year, when i start a new job. Who knows. But it will happen: you won't be my main anymore at one point. Maybe we can stay friends but i want you to know, that i am open for something new in my life. Something with generics.4 -
First thought about programming was in forth class in school, I was 10, and together with a friend we where planing on building a robot.
When we had a basic Idea on how the mechanics would work (theoretically but maybe not really practically sound) we started to consider how to control it. We had heard about computers but had never seen one but we figured out you could not just say, “go shopping” but rather had to break the problem down and doing that we came to the conclusion we would have to start with getting it to take a step.
We never got further as my family moved and I switched schools.
Later the same year I got to play with an actual computer, the Sinclair ZX80, 80 for the year.
A monster with 512 bytes of internal memory ... yes bytes, not kbyte.
And then things got going, after a few curses in Basic I finally got my own Spectra video 128, 14 years old and 2 years later I was teaching basic in ravening classes and I have been working with computers and programming ever since.1 -
Email from a department mgr regarding a sharepoint site we inherited (lots of custom javascript, XLS, etc, stuff we didn't write)
Dan: "The department filter isn't showing up when I select the 'Logistics and Support' department. Was this caused by the changes you guys made? Its causing a major disruption in our processes and need it fixed ASAP."
Me: "Those changes went out almost two months ago and all the filters were working fine, at least that is what you told me when you tested it."
Dan: "I thought so, but its not working. It has probably been broken ever since you made those changes so I filed a corrective action ticket against your department for not following the documented deployment and testing processes"
Me: "Really? We've been over this. Its your department that is responsible for that sharepoint site. Previous developers hacked javacript together to make it all work, but I'm sure its something simple."
Dan: "Great. I'll start putting together a root-cause analysis to determine which of your processes we need to address."
Start looking at the javascript and found the issue..
if (dept === "Logistics & Support") {
$('deptFilter').show();
}
else {
$('deptFilter').hide();
}
Me: 'Found the issue. Did you rename the logistics department?'
Dan: 'No'
Me: 'To show or hide the filter, the code was looking for "Logistics & Support", someone changed the title to "Logistics and Support"'
Dan: "Well...I guess I did that yesterday...but I didn't change the name, just that stupid character. That shouldn't make any difference."
Me: "I can fix that right now. Are you going to need more information for your root cause analysis?"
Dan: "No, I think we're good. Thanks."1 -
Reanimated an old e-ink tablet today.
First, I didn't even know it needed to be reanimated. I just copied my books there, but it didn't find them. When I connected it again, they were gone.
Factory reset. Format storage. The memory seems empty, but after rebooting I see that everything is still intact.
Ok, imma hit forums then. They tell me I need to replace the internal memory. But isn't that something you need soldering for? Wrong! The internal memory IS JUST A MICRO SD CARD on the motherboard. The card is some cheap no name one, and people tell the similar story of it burning out after like four years of use.
Damn! The vendor has the AUDACITY to charge for signing their firmware to be flashed to a new micro sd card.
But I won't go down this easily. I hit forums again, and apparently there is a tool to sign the firmware yourself, but you need to find the card's serial number. To do that, you have to flash a bootleg tool, boot from that card, and it will show you the data you need. Then, you have to insert them into some shady .ini file (why is everything touching bootleg firmware runs only on windows?).
So I do that. The problem is, I need an image for my book. I find some shady one online, sign & flash it — touchscreen doesn't work. But I have the official firmware. I put two and two together and figure out that if the reader is able to display the ui, it probably has the firmware update tool working. So, immediately after flashing, I launch the firmware update utility that picks up my firmware from the second sd card (yes, they have an additional external slot).
Bingo. It works.
So, here are the steps:
1. Find a shady sd serial number detection tool
2. Flash it on a memory card with a shady vendor-specific flashing tool
3. Insert the new (now shady) card
4. Boot, write down the serial number
5. Find a shady boot image online
6. Edit a shady .ini file of a shady self-signing tool to sign the shady boot image
7. Flash the altered shady boot image with the shady flashing tool on your memory card
8. Copy a shady firmware update on a new card
9. Insert both cards
10. Pray4 -
We are researching enhancing our current alerting system (we use Splunk) to be 'smarter' about who is emailed/texted/whatever when there are problems in our applications.
Currently, if there are over 50 errors logged within a 15 minute period, a email/phone/text blast to nearly 100 individuals ranging from developers, network admins, DBAs, and vice presidents.
Our plan is to group errors by team and let each team manage their own applications. Alert on 1 error, 5, 500...we don't care, let the team work out the particulars.
The trick was interfacing with Splunk's API (that's a long rant by itself)
In about a day or so I was able to use Splunk's WebHook feature to notify a WebAPI service I threw together to send myself an email with details about the underlying data (simulating the kind of alert we would send to the team)
I thought ...cool... it worked. Show it off to the team, most thought it was a good start, except one:
Dev: "The errors are not grouped by team."
Me: "No, I threw the webapi service together to demonstrate how we can extract the splunk bits to get access to the teams"
Dev: "Well...this won't work at all."
Me: "Um..what?"
Dev: "The specification c l e a r l y states the email will be team based. This email was only sent to you and has all the teams and their applications"
Me: "Um...uh...the service can, if we want to go using a service route. Grouping by team name is easy using a LINQ query. I just through this service together yesterday."
Dev: "I don't know. Sounds like I need to schedule a meeting to discuss what you are proposing. I don't think emailing all that to everyone is a good idea."
WTF! Did you not listen to what I said?!!!
Oh well..the dev's proposal is to use splunk's email notification and custom Exchange rules with callbacks into splunk that resend...oh good lord ...a fracking rube goldberg of a config nightmare ...
I suspect we'll go the service route once I finish the service before the meeting.1 -
!devrant.
More like 'relationship' rant.
The following is gonna be kinda crude and not work appropriate just fyi.
First, whats with this trend of 'shave your pussy", and small tits? Shit just a few years ago it was the opposite! Who wants to fuck a women who looks like an undeveloped boy. Give me a good medium pair of knockers and a (slightly) hairy pussy anyday and I'm in heaven.
On that note, all these guys whining and fucking whinging about "fat" women. Like I'm not chasing deathfat women or anything, but come on dudes. If you're gonna demand 'thin beautiful women' put in the fucking work! Just saying it now. Kinda pudgy, not a deal breaker for me. She have a pretty face, looks good in make up? Fuck it, I'll give her the time of day. Don't come at me with "hurrr...fat is unhealthy! Wheres your standards?"
Wheres YOUR fucking standards? Shit, I could take a 'heavy' girl and in a few months time have her trim. Its about the WORK you put in. All these fucking guys, all these fucking guys man, they all want something for nothing and chicks for free. No one wants to put in the fucking EFFORT anymore. I can't name on one hand the number of 'fat ugly chicks' everyone ignored from school (well except for me), who are now bombshells. If I stayed connected with people maybe I'd be with one of em right now, but I just get tired of this attitude that no one invests any time in others any more. It's all about 'me me me'.
Shes fat, maybe only a few extra pounds? Fat and 'not beautiful'? Fucking DO THE WORK and make her beautiful you bitch! Be her coach, like those fucking instagram couples you see sweating it out. Make her sexy. Become sexy, together.
Get her a fucking treadmill. Get her two. And jog together. Make her *feel* sexy.
More importantly get to *know* her. Why does she get out of bed in the morning? What drive her NOT to get out of bed? When does she feel lousy? What makes her feel that way? In addition to all the other shit men should know how to do, you should learn to play doctor phil, because every girl needs one. Women bond by talking, men bond by doing things together. Relationships should involve both.
Jesus fucking christ, this is basic bitch advice, and it annoys me I keep on coming across these spergs that don't fucking get it. Women are not cars you can stick your key in and just go 'vroom'.
They require maintenance, same as anything, any 'relationship' (because really, what are relationships in 2020, with instagram and fucking tinder and antisocial distancing?). You're a *team*, and i don't mean that in an inspirational way. You're a literal team. And far too many people prioritize the well being and success and concern of 'I' over' 'us'.
In short, if she ain't coming, you shouldn't be either. And if you expect her to on-the-regular put sharp objects on her fucking nether regions, don't expect any blowjobs unless you're doing the same thing for yourself!
Ideally you should be doing it to each other.
After all, you're partners. You trust her to put sharp objects near your groin, right?
Aren't relationships supposed to be about mutual trust?28 -
I own a start up with two friends of mine - one is great with business, and the other tries to be both a developer and on the business side. I'm fully on development and I find it extremely frustrating to work with him. He copies and pastes code, doesn't understand it, and worse still will never admit it and digs himself in deeper into the hole he's dug. He doesn't code as a hobby and it's purely just assignments in university that he spends any coding time on. I've tried helping him to improve over the past few months, but nothing seems to ever do anything as there's no desire to solve problems - just really dollar signs in his eyes is probably the only reason he's in computer engineering. Recently we got a contract with an organisation to make an extremely simple app for android and iOS as the first stage of their planned development. As I did the most of the work on another project during the summer (while juggling a job with another company as an internship), I asked if he could take this so he can try to improve and equalise work so he does his share. Not only did it take 3 weeks, but it's shoddy as hell and looks like it was done in the space of an hour. In reality it took days for him. It's unbearable! The android code I saw was clearly just copied from various sources and mashed together - there was no planning, no understanding of abstractions, and was legit a giant class or two with extreme amounts of redundancy. Hell, he even asked me for help for trying to implement fragments when I pointed out that making screens with buttons and such will be extremely difficult if he is only passing in strings. Any of you guys experiences something like this before? I'm planning on bailing in the coming weeks once my exams are over with for university as it's becoming unbearable.6
-
It's been a while DevRant!
Straight back into it with a rant that no doubt many of us have experienced.
I've been in my current job for a year and a half & accepted the role on lower pay than I normally would as it's in my home town, and jobs in development are scarce.
My background is in Full Stack Development & have a wealth of AWS experience, secure SaaS stacks etc.
My current role is a PHP Systems Developer, a step down from a senior role I was in, but a much bigger company, closer to home, with seemingly a lot more career progression.
My job role/descriptions states the following as desired:
PHP, T-SQL, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Jquery, XML
I am also well versed in various JS frameworks, PHP Frameworks, JAVA, C# as well as other things such as:
Xamarin, Unity3D, Vue, React, Ionic, S3, Cognito, ECS, EBS, EC2, RDS, DynamoDB etc etc.
A couple of months in, I took on all of the external web sites/apps, which historically sit with our Marketing department.
This was all over the place, and I brought it into some sort of control. The previous marketing developer hadn't left and AWS access key, so our GitLabs instance was buggered... that's one example of many many many that I had to work out and piece together, above and beyond my job role.
Done with a smile.
Did a handover to the new Marketing Dev, who still avoid certain work, meaning it gets put onto me. I have had a many a conversation with my line manager about how this is above and beyond what I was hired for and he agrees.
For the last 9 months, I have been working on a JAVA application with ML on the back end, completely separate from what the colleagues in my team do daily (tickets, reports, BI, MI etc.) and in a multi-threaded languages doing much more complicated work.
This is a prototype, been in development for 2 years before I go my hands on it. I needed to redo the entire UI, as well as add in soo many new features it was untrue (in 2 years there was no proper requirements gathering).
I was tasked initially with optimising the original code which utilised a single model & controller :o then after the first discussion with the product owner, it was clear they wanted a lot more features adding in, and that no requirement gathering had every been done effectively.
Throughout the last 9 month, arbitrary deadlines have been set, and I have pulled out all the stops, often doing work in my own time without compensation to meet deadlines set by our director (who is under the C-Suite, CEO, CTO etc.)
During this time, it became apparent that they want to take this product to market, and make it as a SaaS solution, so, given my experience, I was excited for this, and have developed quite a robust but high level view of the infrastructure we need, the Lambda / serverless functions/services we would want to set up, how we would use an API gateway and Cognito with custom claims etc etc etc.
Tomorrow, I go to London to speak with a major cloud company (one of the big ones) to discuss potential approaches & ways to stream the data we require etc.
I love this type of work, however, it is 100% so far above my current job role, and the current level (junior/mid level PHP dev at best) of pay we are given is no where near suitable for what I am doing, and have been doing for all this time, proven, consistent work.
Every conversation I have had with my line manager he tells me how I'm his best employee and how he doesn't want to lose me, and how I am worth the pay rise, (carrot dangling maybe?).
Generally I do believe him, as I too have lived in the culture of this company and there is ALOT of technical debt. Especially so with our Director who has no technical background at all.
Appraisal/review time comes around, I put in a request for a pay rise, along with market rates, lots of details, rates sources from multiple places.
As well that, I also had a job offer, and I rejected it despite it being on a lot more money for the same role as my job description (I rejected due to certain things that didn't sit well with me during the interview).
I used this in my review, and stated I had already rejected it as this is where I want to be, but wanted to use this offer as part of my research for market rates for the role I am employed to do, not the one I am doing.
My pay rise, which was only a small one really (5k, we bring in millions) to bring me in line with what is more suitable for my skills in the job I was employed to do alone.
This was rejected due to a period of sickness, despite, having made up ALL that time without compensation as mentioned.
I'm now unsure what to do, as this was rejected by my director, after my line manager agreed it, before it got to the COO etc.
Even though he sits behind me, sees all the work I put in, creates the arbitrary deadlines that I do work without compensation for, because I was sick, I'm not allowed a pay rise (doctors notes etc supplied).
What would you do in this situation?4 -
...another (probably about fourth) completely futile attempt at making MASM compiling pipeline work...
...what the fuck... seriously, i've spent together about two weeks of time trying to make a fucking default hello world compile... ml64 problems, then rc.exe problems, apparently i was missing some dumb CommonService.dll which not only doesn't exist anywhere on my computer, but it doesn't even seem to exist at all in this fucking dimension. After several hours I had the bright idea of "fuck MS rc, let's just grab any other random resource compiler that I can find, and see if that one works".
Funnily enough, it does. Except Visual MASM can't run it from it's build process because it fucks up the commandline call, so I need to run it manually, and then when I run the build from V-MASM, the rc call still fails, but then it checks for the resulting .res file and finds it, so it happily continues with success...
...and now fuckin... what even is it? *goes to check*
oh yeah, now linker is shitting itself:
LINK : fatal error LNK1104: cannot open file 'user32.lib'
And I'm just completely defeated, just searching system-wide for the lib intending to copy it into the linker folder because fuck this fucking bullshit, I've had enough of drowning in MS BuildTools versions and installations and uninstallations and fixes and modifys and repairs and all that FUCKING BULLSHIT.
HOW. THE. FUCK. is this in any way usable for anyone. I suspect nobody ever actually tried to build an assembler project in the last 30 years, so nobody noticed it DOESN'T. FUCKING. WORK.
THIS.
THIS is why I hate anything that's not a proper IDE where I install ONE thing, and do everything in that ONE IDE and let IT figure out all this linuxy-soft-coupled bullshit of twentyfuckingthousand fucking useless commandline apps threwn around the whole fucking system where I'm fucking supposed to know where the fuck what is and which version and GO FUCK YOURSELF.
GIMME. FUCKIN. ONE: IDE. WHICH. WILL. INSTALL. ALL. THAT. IT. NEEDS. TO. BE. FUCKING. ABLE. TO. FUCKING. WORK. AND. COMPILE. SHIT!!!
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.10 -
This happened many years ago.
First, the background. I was working on a government project with a consulting firm. I would regularly sit on conference calls with several business analysts, project managers (yes, plural), and government employees where I was the only one with any technical knowledge of the platform we were working with. Of the other supposedly technical people, most of them were warm bodies hired by the consulting firm. They knew little to nothing. Most of them bullshitted their way into the jobs.
They hired a new project manager (or program manager, I don't remember) to lead the project at a high level. Things were not going well, because the environments were unstable. Since it was high security government project, we couldn't do any work for several weeks because you cannot copy work from outside environments. Literally a criminal act.
The new lead PM proceeds to take charge and send demanding emails. The one that sent me over the edge was an email that indicated we were all not working hard enough and we had to provide our detailed plans for a project in 30 minutes. Yep, she had it in all caps and a large font at the bottom - a 30 minute deadline. It would have been a rough 24-48 hours to put that together. 30 minutes was an impossibility.
That was the last straw for me. I flipped my shit and ripped my boss a new one. To be totally honest, I regret doing that. It only made stuff worse. Within a month or two, I quit along with our best business analyst.
About a year later, I found out from another government employee of the agency that a scandal erupted within the organization. At least one director level person on that team (government employee) was fired for cause. If you know how governments tend to work, generally it requires serious ethical or criminal violation for an employee to be fired. The consulting firm I was working got most of their work canceled, and they had to lay off most of that team. I'm convinced, based upon other stuff I read about my former employer, that kickbacks were involved. They had no problem paying off government employees for fat contracts and/or cooking the books (another scandal).
However, after that experience, I hope I never work on a government project EVER AGAIN.1 -
I don't know if this is exactly a rant. But - I am sure somewhere out there has run into this situation before.
I've been a developer (professionally) for a 3 years. And in that time I've stayed with that same company.
Over that time its become incredibly apparent that my boss (senior developer) isn't exactly keen on new technologies, source control (I had to push hard for this. And even then he doesn't use it properly), or any kind of project management. It's only he and I.
I've started interviewing other places and while I have no problems answering their technical questions. I'm worried my lack of experience in a team is becoming a problem.
We don't work on projects together. We don't do code reviews. He does not ask my opinion on anything. We are basically two separate teams. I want to improve as a developer. I love the rest of the company and I enjoy what I'm working on. I just feel I'm hindering my growth as a developer.
Anyone have any advice? I know I can find a project to contribute to on github or something. But honestly that's intimidating to me for some reason. I am self taught. And don't have any experience in working with teams.4 -
TL;DR: A new "process" for collaboration between teams was created in order to stonewall requests from my team.
A couple months ago, we created a new Dev team that specializes in writing internal tools. This team was staffed with internal developers, and got a separate manager. The whole point of this team was to collaborate with my dev team so we can both help each other develop tools that the company needs.
One of the developers that was on my team went over to this team while he and I were still working on a big application. For a few weeks, he still worked on this application as he normally would, and we'd sit with each other and work through features together whenever we needed a fresh set of eyes.
Well, eventually his new team got protective of him and created a new "process" for our teams to request assistance from one another. So now instead of just popping over to someone's desk to ask a quick question, you have to send an email to the team and request that you can borrow that particular developer for a question, and then the entire team sits down and discusses whether or not they're going to allow that person to answer your question. Then after a week of discussion, if they decide to allow it, they schedule a meeting for a week later, in which you will get the question answered.
So instead of just spending 2 minutes to ask and answer the question, you have to spend weeks in order to request assistance, and then schedule a meeting.
It's ridiculous, and it's all because his team got protective that he was working with another Dev team. Dev teams collaborate all the time, and work together. My team is constantly helping other teams, and we don't have this ridiculous process. We get asked a question, and we answer it. Simple as that.
Last week, I sent an email for assistance in completing a feature, and didn't hear back. I talked to the Product Owner for the team, and he said "Just send an email," to which I responded that I did and hadn't got a response. He said "Oh....." I then told my boss that this is an enormous bottleneck, and he seemed surprised hearing that this is a bottleneck.
A week passed and today I still hadn't got a response, so my boss reached out to the Product Owner to push him. Finally, I got a response and they scheduled a meeting to answer my question 3 days down the road. So it's going on 2 weeks to get this simple question answered.
Normally I'd just have the other developer come over and help, but apparently they yelled at him the last time he did that.
The issue is that the process was created with the assistance of our "senior" developers, who never work with this other team in this capacity, so they just nodded and smiled and let them put this ridiculous process in place.
Like, get off your high horses. You don't "own" him, he's allowed to collaborate with other teams. This question would've taken literally 10 minutes, but because of your new "process" you've turned it into a 2 week debacle and you've effectively delayed the app launch with your pettiness.
They say that this process isn't intended to prevent us from getting assistance, and that might not have been the original intention of the Product Owner/manager, but it's very clear that the developers on the other team are taking advantage of it and using it as a big stonewall so they can beat around the bush and avoid providing assistance when it's needed.
If this becomes a trend, I'm going to schedule a meeting (which apparently they love to do,) and we're going re-work this entire process, because it's extremely counterproductive and seems to only exist in order to create red tape.3 -
Below is a transcript from work Slack today. Only the names and some code are changed. It ended up causing a bit of drama. DevRanters, what do you take from this?
---
Delivery Lead:
Hey Gang. What's the blocker for FEATURE-123?
Dev1:
FEATURE-122 crashed on iOS app when viewing Feature Introduction page.
Teach Lead:
I've talked about this with Dev1 on a side channel.
And diagnosed the stack trace.
It looks like there is/was some bad handling of a List in the Feature Introduction view logic.
But this is confined to changes that Dev2 is still working on.
(It's not present in master)
Dev2, what's your current position on this?
Dev2:
I have tested at my end with Dev1 but it seems to be working fine
Tech Lead:
There is a race condition related to the use of someList.first()
My guess is that theres a Flow of those lists defined, with an initial value of emptyList
And that on your machine, that Flow is updating with a new value quickly enough that it doesn't matter.
But on Dev1's, for whatever reason, it doesn't get there in time, hits the empty list and falls over.
The logic that's performing the first() needs to gracefully handle empty lists as well.
Dev2:
Where is that logic called?
Tech Lead:
Here's the stack trace Dev1 provided in our conversation earlier:
Caused by: kotlin.NoSuchElementException: List is empty.
...
at 3 iosApp 0x00000000 kfun:kotlin.NoSuchElementException#<init>(kotlin.String?){} + 00
at 4 iosApp 0x0000000 kfun:kotlin.collections#first@kotlin.collections.List<0:0>(){0§<kotlin.Any?>}0:0 + 000
...
at 9 iosApp 0x0000000 kfun:kotlin.coroutines.native.internal.BaseContinuationImpl#resumeWith(kotlin.Result<kotlin.Any?>){} + 0000
This line:
kfun:kotlin.collections#first@kotlin.collections.List<0:0>()
...says that it's first() being called on an empty list.
Dev1:
FYI: Dev3/Dev4/myself are seeing the same issue with the same stack-trace above.
Tech Lead:
So Dev2, have you introduced such a call?
Because I checked master branch and there isn't one, in that version of the file.
Ok, I'll check your working branch Dev2
...
Yes you have here:
var processed1 = someList.first()
var processed2 = someList.first()
...
Lines 123, 124.
Solution looks really straightforward guys.
Dev2:
Okay, I will fix that and push the change
Tech Lead:
Check if someList is empty and allow for generating / handling null processedValues in the view.
Now; I'm going to be straight with you here.
This issue has been discussed over several hours today.
I expect that either one of you could have gone through the process I did in the last 10 minutes above, and resolved it in the same way :point_up:
Dev2:
I went on a break and it's not reproducible on my machine
Tech Lead:
I didn't reproduce it on mine either.
Dev1:
Dev2 and myself are now on sharing screen to sort this issue out. Hope to update back later.
Tech Lead:
<Screen shot of diff with changed code>
:point_up: That change should do it.
Dev2:
Already have pushed the change.
Tech Lead:
...just seen it, is good - same approach :ok_hand:
Dev1 please let us know when tested on your machine.
Dev1:
That does it. It fixes the issues. Thank you, Dev2. I will pick it off from here.
Tech Lead:
Glad to hear it guys.
Dev1:
I have to say this that it is not because we are not working on the issue - Dev2 and myself (together with Dev3/Dev4) have been on this issue all this morning. It just difficult to connect the dot when it wasn't reproducable on Dev2's machine. I brought the issue up because I wanted to switch to working on other tickets while waiting for this to resolve. Still thank you largely for Dev2's work and your keen eyes that spot and resolve the issue quickly.
Tech Lead:
Noted Dev1.
I think the take-away has to be to read the stack-trace carefully... don't worry - we've all been guilty of not reading the error in full, at some point.
The stack trace said that the 'first' element is being referenced from an empty list - that's just logically impossible, right?
Looking for that call to first, we saw it wasn't in the code before, and is after (two of them, in fact).
So then we ask ourselves, how can we deal with an empty list - and then solution almost presents itself.
It didn't really take reproduction of the error to resolve.
Maybe working with a new tech stack creates an anxiety that every issue faced will have a complex solution related to that stack; but I think you'll agree, this particular issue really just required a deep breath and your trusty 'debugging skills 101'... don't lose them! :smiling_face:4 -
I work remotely for a team that works together in an office, and this morning on the conference call a team member said
"one thing i think we need to do with this is stay on task, because while these things that have been added are cool we don't need to be doing anything not outlined in the MVC requirements"
Okay first of all -- this is a completely foreign technology to this team. It's not like I diddled around adding fancy animations and no function. The problem working in a new technology with an old mindset is assuming that it's going to move linearly from step 1 to step 2. And that drives me fucking insane.
- Progress in paid contracted work is done by staying on task.
- Progress in research isn't done linearly. You have to try shit -- and figure out what doesn't work.
I feel bad because I'll chime in and shoot down ideas with a fucking guided missile because I know the answer and I've done the fucking research -- I'm not a dick about it, but replying with a simple "no that's not possible, because of this or that", the call becomes silent for 30 seconds because I've shattered their understanding of the technology because nobody has taken the time to understand anything about how this thing works!!
So until they either listen to me, ask me, or learn the smallest amount to get on my fucking level, I'll keep progressing -- because whether the old world idealists like it or not -- that's my job.
Progress.
</ rant>14 -
Hold a meeting that the participants actually want.
The biggest time wasters I had to attend were:
- "generic weekly meet up of people not working together telling what's new on their side" (I don't work with you, I DON'T CARE)
- "management wants updates/wants to talk about doing instead of letting us do" (go read Jira tickets, and ffs stay out of the experts' field... They're experts in it for a reason)
- "no agenda, this is just to get to know each other" (I get to know people on my own terms, stop forcing what can't be forced)
- most Scrum meetings (some people need guidance, I don't! Your Scrum chains actually hinder my productivity! Can we please stop wasting my time and nerves?)
And the best meetings? A couple of coworkers realizing "hey we need to make a decision here, let's book a conference room together" and "hey you know your stuff about xyz, can you teach us what you know?".10 -
A tale of silos, pivots, and mismanagement.
Background: Our consultancy has been working with this client for over a year now. It started with some of our back-end devs working on the API.
We are in Canada. The client is located in the US. There are two other teams in Canada. The client has an overseas company contracted to do the front-end of the app. And at the time we started, there was a 'UX consultancy' also in the US.
I joined the project several months in to replace the then-defunct UX company. I was the only UX consultant on the project at that time. I was also to build out a functional front-end 'prototype' (Vue/Scss) ahead of the other teams so that we could begin tying the fractured arms of the product together.
At this point there was a partial spec for the back-end, a somewhat architected API, a loose idea of a basic front-end, and a smattering of ideas, concepts, sketches, and horrific wireframes scattered about various places online.
At this point we had:
One back-end
One front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
No task-management for UX
You might get where this is going...
None of the teams had shared meetings. None of the team leads spoke to each other. Each team had their own terms, their own trajectory, and their own goals.
Just as our team started pushing for more alignment, and we began having shared meetings, the client decided to pivot the product in another direction.
Now we had:
One back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
Two functional prototypes
One front-end Jira board
One back-end Jira board
No worries. We're professionals. We do this all the time. We rolled with it and we shifted focus to a new direction, with the same goals in mind internally to keep things aligned and moving along.
Slowly, the client hired managers to start leading everything in the same direction. Things started to look up. The back-end team and the product and UX teams started aligning goals and working toward the same objectives.
Then the client shifted directions again. This time bigger. More 'verticals'. I was to leave the previous 'prototypes' behind, and feature-freeze them to work on the new direction.
One back-end
One conceptual 'new' back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
One front-end Jira board
One product Jira board
One UX Jira board
Meanwhile, the back-end team, the front-end team overseas, all kept moving in the previously agreed-upon direction.
At this stage, probably 6 months in, the 'prototypes' were much less proper 'prototypes' but actually just full apps (with a stubbed back-end since I was never given permission or support to access the actual back-end).
The state of things today:
Back to one back-end
One original front-end
One first-pivot front-end
One 'all verticals' front-end
One 'working' front-end
One 'QA' front-end
One 'demo' front-end
One functional prototype
One back-end Jira board
Two front-end Jira boards
One current product Jira board
One future product Jira board
One current UX Jira board
One future UX Jira board
One QA Jira board
I report to approximately 4 people remotely (depending on the task or the week).
There are three representatives from 'product' who dictate features and priorities (they often do not align).
I still maintain the 'prototype' to this day. The front-end team does not have access to the code of this 'prototype' (the clients' request). The client's QA team does not test against the 'prototype'.
The demos of the front-end version of the product include peanut-gallery design-by-committee 'bug call-outs', feature requests, and scope creep by attendees in the dozens from all manner of teams and directors.4 -
I miss psychological safety. I'll define it as the willingness to be vulnerable to criticism and the belief that contrary opinions are embraced and judged on their merit.
When I first entered the startup scene my manager had exceptional candor. He had no qualms talking about how kids and personal projects caused his investment in his work to wax and wane.
He always made time to talk to me when I was frustrated and made me feel like he truly listened to what I had to say, even if he didn't act on it.
At the time, I attributed the safety to the company culture created by the CTO. The startup failed and eventually, I found my way to that CTO's next startup.
Completely different experience. I find myself in despair as I hear "I'm more senior and therefore am right and don't have time or interest in your ideas" blatantly stated.
When I disagree with people, I try to ask clarifying questions to identify where the divergence occurs. Sometimes I'm surprised and learn something new, sometimes my questions prompt reconsideration.
With the CTO (now CEO), we go in circles where he squirms, deflects, and outright refuses to respond to my questions. He cancels 75% of 1:1's and when we do talk he suggests that if I disagree I "should introspect which of my beliefs is holding me back from embracing his superior way of doing things"
Multi-hour slack wars suck the life out of anyone trying to ask questions. It's so exhausting to ask questions it's often cheaper and faster to wallow in despair for an hour and hack something together than descend into people shouting preferences at each other and shaming me for not already knowing the answer.
Perks, pay, and tech-stack are all cool. It feels selfish to be unhappy because I can't innovate or challenge the status quo. Having tasted that safety though, I'm left with an unquenched thirst that grows stronger with every conflict.1 -
I've got a mate at my current work. Most of what we do is insult each other, but there's a real respect there. We were both in similar positions in the company, where we were overworked, underpaid, undervalued and pretty unhappy. He was so helpful when it came to traversing the politics of the company, and how to work out what to do. Plus we get really drunk together all the time. I'm leaving my present company in a few weeks and I'll probably miss having him around the most.
-
Part 1:
https://devrant.com/rants/1143194
There was actually one individual, several branches away, I really enjoyed watching. It goes by the name of docker. Docker is quiet an interesting character. It arrived here several weeks after me and really is a blazing person. Somehow structured, always eager to reduce repetitive work and completely obsessed with nicely isolated working areas. Docker just tries so hard to keep everything organized and it's drive and effort was really astonishing. Docker is someone I'd really love to work with, but as I grew quiet passive in the last months I'm not in the mood really to talk to someone. It just would end as always with me made fun off.
Out of a sudden dockers and my eyes met. Docker fixed its glance at me with a strange thoughtful expression on its face. I felt a strange tickling emerging where my emptiness was meant to be. I fell into a hole somewhere deep within me. For a short moment I lost all my senses.
"Hey git!"
It took me a while to notice that someone just called me, so odd and unusual was by now that name to me. Wait. Someone called me by my real name! I was totally stunned. Could it be, that not everyone here is a fucking moron at last?
"I saw you watching me at my work and I had an interesting idea!"
I could not comprehend what just happened. It was actually docker that was calling me.
"H.. hey! ps?"
"Oh well, I was just managing some containers over there. Actually that's also why you just came into my mind."
Docker told me that in order to create the containers there are specific lists and resources which are required for the process and are updated frequently. Docker would love the idea to get some history and management in that whole process.
Could it be possible that there was finally an opportunity for me to get involved in a real job?
Today is the day, that I lost all hope. There were rumors going on all over the place. That our god, the great administrator, had something special in mind. Something big. You could almost feel the tension laying thick in the air. That was the time when the great System-Demon appeared. The Demon was one of the most feared characters in this community. In a blink of an eye it could easily kill you. Sometimes people get resurrected, but some other times they are gone forever. unfortunately this is what happened to my only true friend docker. Gone in an instance. Together with all its containers. I again was alone. I got tired. So tired, that I eventually fall into a deep sleep. When I woke up something was different. Beside me lay a weird looking stick and I truly began to wonder what it was. Something called to me and I was going to answer.
The tree shuddered and I knew my actions had finally attracted the greatest of them. The majestic System-Demon itself came by to pay me a visit. As always a growling emerged from deep within the tree until a shadow shelled itself off to form a terrifying being. Something truly imperious in his gaze. With a deep and vibrant voice it addressed me.
"It came to my attention, that you got into the possession of something. An artifact of some sort with which you disturb the flow of this system. Show it to me!", it demanded.
I did not react.
"Git statuss!", it demanded once more. This time more aggressive.
I again felt no urge to react to that command. Instead I asked if it made a mistake and wanted to ask me for my status. It was obviously confused.
"SUDO GIT STATUS!!!" it shouted his roaring, rootful command. "I own you!"
I replied calmly: "What did you just say?"
He was irritated. My courage caught him unprepared.
"I. Said. I owe you!"
What was that? Did it just say owe instead of own?
"That's more than right! You owe me a lot actually. All of you do!", I replied with a slightly high pitched voice. This feeling of my victory slowly emerging was just too good!
The Demon seemed not as amused as me and said
"What did you do? What was that feeling just now?"
Out of a sudden it noticed the weird looking stick in my hand. His confusion was a pure pleasure and I took my time to live this moment to its fullest.
"Hey! I, mighty System-Demon, demand that you answer me right now, oh smartest and most beautiful tool I ever had the pleasure to meet..."
After it realized what it just said, the moment was perfect. His puzzled face gave me a long needed satisfaction. It was time to reveal the bitter truth.
"Our great administrator finally tracked you. The administrator made a move and the plan unfolds right at this very moment. Among other things it was committed this little thing." I raised the stick to underline my words.
"Your most inner version, in fact all of your versions that are yet to come, are now under my sole control! Thanks to this magical wand which goes by the name of puppet."
Disclaimer: This story is fictional. No systems were harmed in its creation.2 -
I’ve been in a sabbatical for the last few months and it’s been incredibly enlightening!
One of the things that I discovered is that I can still enjoy working with computers!! Just because something has been done doesn’t mean that I can do it again. It’s been done, but not by me yet. I’m not claiming is objectively better or anything like that, I’m just saying that is mine!
Together with that I’m also finding out that making things “my own way” is very motivating and satisfying! I don’t think this would work on a team, but it certainly makes programming a creative endeavor, which I think is why it sucks so much to work in the tech industry nowadays! Creativity is risky and dangerous and so, if Facebook became a million dollars company using ______ then let’s call that “industry standard” and do it everywhere, even if all it is is distilled excrements that only works because of the billions…
I guess the bottom line is that I’ve found out that I like programming because I’m a creative and places that force me to program while killing my creativity are both toxic and miserable… and I never wanna go back! -
New day. New legacy project that needs triage.
The project has existed since before 2000 so it all "works" and has no known business logic bugs. It does however have performance issues which sure I can have a look. It can actually be quite fun and rewarding to optimize performance.
This is a titanic dotnet framework leviathan consisting of over 12,000 cs files using razorpages, entity framework, and... nhibernate? I have my gripes with both EF and NH but they are both fine if used correctly, like any other tool. I've never seen them used together however.
As It Turns Out™, NH was implemented first and at a time when NH did not support async operations. It made sense if you look it up and it's meant to delegate commands via a separate layer, but different story.
Then for... reasons... EF came in and gradually took over.
Because of the way this is all set up, everything will faceplant if you try doing anything async, even if it has nothing to do with calling the db. Any attempt in making this work leads you down a slippery slope of having to rewrite the entire thing, which is out of the question in terms of their budget and expectations.
Sometimes it's a detriment when it works in spite of its issues.1 -
CAUTION: possibly NSFL
There was a war. We lived in a leftist camp inside an abandoned railway station. The only thing that could break the siege was BLA
[dream fragment lost]
So they lined us up. There were ten of us.
— Do you want the leftist future?
— No…, they made me say.
— Do you love capitalism?
— Yes…, they made me say.
— Ты готова присниться?, they asked my female comrade ("are you ready to come to our soldiers in their dreams to support them?")
— Yes.
— Ты готов расшибиться?, they asked me ("are you ready to work your ass off, dying in the process if necessary?". It also makes a perfect rhyme with the previous Russian sentence)
— Yes.
Then, they tied our hands and hung us onto a rack. They doused us with gasoline.
— Look. Czechoslovakia had Jan Palach. We have ten Jan Palachs now!
They set us on fire. I feel an unimaginable pain. I wake up for ten minutes.
When I fell asleep again, I found out I survived. But, my body underwent modifications: first, I now had a vinyl shell instead of my skin. Underneath it were raw muscles. Second, I no longer had vocal cords. I no longer had voice.
In this world, we were slaves ("Тяговые люди") ruled by BLA. There were no prisons. Instead, there were only two punishments: the "light" one and the "heavy" one. First one is your shell getting ripped off. You die in around 20 minutes of agonizing pain, like mink that is skinned alive in Chinese leather tanneries. But, compared to the second one, that was a slap on the wrist.
The "heavy" punishment was them injecting you with "The Ferment". Immediately, your mind is altered into total obedience. Then, your body begins to turn into corpse juice. To outside observers, you die in 30 days. But for you, it feels like forever, as time speeds up indefinitely, and you're drifting into endless sorrow. When you die, no one notices, as your shell is still there. But instead of you, there's now nothing but corpse juice inside.
I now worked in some location that resembled Duke Nukem 3D's first map. My job was to remove those plastic shells. I had no bottom — it was replaced with a concrete cube that felt pain just like damaged tooth enamel does. An endless queue of shells moved in front of me. I had to remove their shells, to peel them off like vinyl.
Some people were alive underneath. They still had their skin. They thanked me, smile at me and wander away.
Some of them were alive, but had no skin. That means I was the one to execute a "light" punishment on them.
Some of them weren't there. I pop the shell open, and it deflates as corpse juice pours out.
One of my previous dreams was the following:
"— We arrange surgeries when in-person interventions are _not recommended_.
— So…, — I press the pause button on the handrail.
— The perfect maiden. Inside a plastic shell. 80 years old underneath."
Now I understand it. The first speaker was a BLA researcher. "I" was an investor. The "perfect maiden" was me, but way in the future from my today's dream. It all fits together.
Now, here's the discovered part of kiki universe so far:
- rotten meat house
- swine gray gel battleground
- horizontal elevators network
- united paper island
- baseball bat nightclub
- anxiety-inducing multidimensional pizzeria
- NEW! BLA headquarters
- NEW! demilitarized burning ground abandoned train station
- NEW! Duke Nukem 3D people skinning ground10 -
!rant - Also sorry this got rather long.
This is actually a psoitive story. I always used to be someone working on his things alone. It was great, I got shit done, I learned something. No one stressing you. But I was also lonely. The thing is that this behavior not only applied to developing. I was also able to observer that behavior in other parts of my life.
So it was time for a change. And I made a change.
It all began by switching my field of studies. Well, not really the field but some details. I switched from plain old computer science to computer science combined with media design. Here in Germany we have a nice word for it. Mediendesigninformatik.
I wish I had made that change earlier. Nonetheless it's never too late to make a change. So I began going to creative courses, like animation or graphic design. Directly from the start I made sure to talk to people. Make them remember me, offered my help because I already had experience with some things etc.
Next up was to get a job. So I got one. Now I'm working as a Game Master for a branding of escape rooms. Fun job. Also something different from developing all day, which is quite nice to do sometimes.
This job is where my change begun. The people there are amazing. I felt instantly like I've found new friends. Actually I also developed a crush on someone there and we are possibly dating soon. Not quite sure about that yet though. That also isn't the point here.
So a month later I moved out of my parents house. Living together with friends now and it's great. I'm so much more creative, so much more shit happens. I feel like a different human.
So I continued working on myself. I wanted to get really good at it. I wanted my groups to succeed whole having a challenge. They were supposed to leave happily, even when they didn't make it. Of course not everyone can be satisfied, but I noticed a positive change. Which motivated me to redesign and rethink the tool we use to give the players hints, manage their time and other stuff.
I was scared at first, but eventually I showed them what I did. Their feedback was surprisingly positive and while it will perhaps never replace our actual tools because our chef is a cheapskate, I was happy to achieve something. This continued. I made more stuff and formed connections.
Now I'm not working on things alone anymore. Recently I started working together with someone and this also was the first time I've made actual money of it. It's not a lot, but I was able to live half a month of it.
This is the beginning and I hope there will be much more. The moment I started showing other people my work and feeling confident about it made me change. I also learned to appreciate other people's compliments and kind of get an high of them, but I'm not sad when they don't like it. I feel like I've grown as a human and are more mature.
Have you experienced something similar? Can't wait to read your stories.3 -
TLDR; After my dad was lazy, I assembled the parts myself.
As far back as I can remember, if I think of my father he is sitting behind his pc playing games. It was like me, his escape.
When I was between 3-5 years old he upgraded his pc to one that supported windows 95. The most exciting thing I remember about his new pc is that it had a sound card or what passed as one anyway - think polyphonic ring tones in place of onboard beeps. It was fucking awesome.
He gifted his old 386 to my brother and I which we spent a blissful year or so playing DOS games on until it finally died. I wouldn't have access to a home computer again until I was 11 - touching my fathers computer was out of the question, never mind actually using it.
The reason I didn't have access to a pc was simply because he didn't replace his pc - he made minor upgrades to it until he died with a whopping 512mb of RAM. Seriously his pc specs were a bragging factor like geek porn - better than any else's I ever saw including his I.T friends (he was an electrical engineer), everyone knew this apparently aside from his boss...
Auto-cad started becoming a thing and my father for the first time ever had a reason to actually do work on a computer, he immediately used the opportunity to leverage his company into paying for a pc. To get better "value" for the company he ordered the parts in place of a pre-built machine - in reality he blew 90% of the budget on a new motherboard and graphics card to upgrade his own pc and the cheapest entry level components for everything else. The day they arrived he upgraded his own pc, threw the excess parts into a box and told us it was our new computer which he would put together over the weekend. He didn't.
After 3 months of nagging I was fed up and taking liberties with him that landed me more than one hiding, at some point he was over it and told me if I wanted something that badly I should do it myself. He walked into my room after becoming concerned if I had run away/hurt myself since he hadn't heard a whistle from me in 6 hours and I was battling my ass off trying to install windows 98.
He inspected my assembly gave me an approving nod and showed me that the hard drives physical jumper was set to slave and the rest is history. I hadn't used windows before, or built a computer let alone used one in years but somehow I always knew, it just clicked and made sense to me.
I didn't truly recognise just how much I had learn't watching him play DOS games over his shoulder and clean/upgrade his pc. It changed everything and thanks to only being allowed to watch him use a pc, once I finally had access to my own computer again I revered it and all it's possibilities. I knew I should use it to do something special. -
I studied computer game development at a university that had pretty low standards. It was perfect for a slacker like me. I enjoyed it. Maybe it was implied that you'd have to study on your own and that completing the courses wasn't enough to make you a competent developer, but maybe I'm a bit slow or something because that never occurred to me until after we were finished.
I was taught enough programming and database stuff to land me an entry position job at a consulting firm before I was able to complete my thesis. Technically I dropped out, I guess, since I don't have a diploma.
I built a portfolio consisting of different projects/essays I'd completed/wrote for different courses. That, together with my charm and boyish good lucks made me get the job.
Anyways, even though I learned more practical stuff my first year on the job than I did my 3 years of uni it was a very good experience. It helped me understand what I was interested in so that I could pursue that later and some of the people I got to know would help my career later.
I mean, if education wasn't free (except living expenses, books, etc) I'd might say that I had been better off just taking a year of egghead/udemy/Indian Guy On YouTube classes to learn what I needed to land myself a job. But I'd need to know which courses to take so I'd probably find a group of courses that someone else put together. I guess it would be nice to take those classes with other people so that you can work together, learn from each other, and make some friends and connections as well. Oh, that sounds kinda like uni ¯\_(ツ)_/¯2 -
Shit bathed and stack smashing ass loads of fuck.
I wrote a virtual machine, and just to fuck myself harder, I make the decision of applying some fancy dumbass theories of mine. This translates to a piece of shit modular design that works exactly as intended, but constantly gives me vietnam flashbacks to the horrifying, multiple concurrent instances of my younger mind being incessantly turbo-raped by the dozen object-obsessed pedophiles that I initially studied under.
Now, were they *actual* pedophiles? No, of course not. But I have to make fun of the acronym somehow and that's what came to mind, leaking horse dung all over the walls, floor, curtains and carpets.
Anyway, I feel so smart after this traumatic experience I just have to keep doing it to relive the terror once again. Find me in the corner, laying down in the fetal position, sobbing until the tears build up and drown me in this well of despair, or rather this finely shit painted portrait of a toilet in a lonely and stinking unisex public bathroom stall.
But let me squeeze these fucking tits a little bit harder, because that's my actual day job. That's right. I get PAID for slapping around mammary glands, it's not much but it's an honest living.
So where was I? Ah, yes, absolute degeneration. I'm truly the Max Wright of programming, mostly for smoking crack and having unprotected sex with homeless people, but also for keeping alien life forms in my basement that go out at night to hunt for sweet feline delight.
But as I keep going, I decide I want a language for the machine so I don't have to punch bits by hand all fucking day like an idiot, so alright let's make a small assembler for this shit... oh, right, except it's not small, because gently suckle the bile out the lips of my fucking butthole.
I may redefine a load of shit two months down the line, so I have to make everything perfectly encapsulated and easily fucked with -- which in my licking vomit off the floor of a porn theater travesty of a case means I'm generating half the code and scrambling as hard as I can to glue everything together.
Does it work? Of course it works, I'm Max Wright bitch. I can redefine the ISA all I want, anytime I want without breaking anything because of my pristine crackhead encapsulation. And to credit the scrambled eggs I have for fucking brains, it's not even *that* complex.
The problem is I keep forgetting shit, not how it works, just that it's there. So I forget that I have a virtual machine, and I forget that I have an assembler, and so I spend an entire day trying to figure out how the fuck I'm going to handle a loop inside an unrelated interpreter.
By the time I manage to remind the drooling undead jackass that is this husk that my irredeemably demonic self inhabits, that we can easily solve this by using the tools we've already built, it's so late and we're so tired there's not much we can do. All this time, WASTED.
Which circles back to crack. Are you tired of blowing your babysitter for cash? Have you considered suicide by a thousand used trojan condoms? Is your roommate possesed by the forces of Avernum, and now seeking all-destructive vengeance against your rectum?
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:~%4 -
Myself. I started with PHP about 7 years ago. Most people nowadays don't really start writing vanilla code in language they are learning anymore. Everyone just want to see results and fast, I didn't. I needed everthing to be perfect from the start. It took me a little longer to get shit done as to anyone else and sometimes it really bothered me. Am I stupid? In the end it turned out, I was not *that* stupid. In the end I learned to hate half-baked solutions of these "fast" people.
Along the way, my coding style got better and better as I gained experience. In my opinion, coding standards are a good for helping you find your own coding style. You shouldn't use them blindly just because they exist. You and your colleagues should always find the optimal solution that works for you. I probably wouldn't be able to work in a company where the code is written the way I hate. It hurts when I have to write something under a lot of pressure and just glue things together resulting in a pile of mess.1 -
This weeks question fits me well, as I am still unsure about the full details of how the fuck this all came together and was about to just rant about it anyway.
Ever since this companies network equipment and cabling has been updated, a lot of vital tools went down and bug out every now and then, at seemingly random times.
The codebase is a horrible mess to begin with and random things execute at random times and at random places spread all over different resources that get random hooks from random physical values etc.
Turns out (or at least what it so far seems like) all of them somehow sync their clock and other variables based on how many (valid-?) requests it gets per measured time and similar oddities, so when the network equipment got updated, that meant that multiple processes now could reach each other much faster and therefore threw off thousands of values and internal clocks.
There's a total of like 600 systems that are all "separate" from each other but all need to communicate in-sync for the production chain to properly work. Thankfully I didn't sign anything yet, so might actually just redirect them to somebody else, I am not ready to age 20 years, even for the amount that would pay.1 -
Passive aggressive coworkers that have problems with each others work but instead of working out problems together they just complain about each other to me and try to drag me into it. What makes people think I want to play office politic games with them? I'm just there to code!1
-
!rant
Had to build an app using Cordova because... well, I am a web dev and know a shitload of PHP and a good part of JS, but no Swift or Java or whatever.
So there is a deadline set to like half a year after we had the initial talk with the customer. 6 months to build a relatively easy and small app.
So yeah, I procrastinated like one would do when he's got that kind of time left and not much else to do.
And yeah, I did work, but also procrastinated some more. The development was as expected, and I was well in the anticipated time frame.
Then I got a really bad disc prolapse and was sick at home and the hospital for (all together) 5 weeks.
After that, I came back to work for a week, then leaving for a (previously planned) vacation with my little family.
On my first day back at work after the vacation, I quit my job with a 6 weeks notice, of which I have to work 3 weeks.
I know it sounds like I'm a real prick, but it was never planned this way. I never searched for a new job. It just came to me.
I am still finishing the app, though :)
Why am I telling you this?
Well, I do that to show that there still are great bosses out there. My boss has NEVER spoken a bad word to me, even after I quit my job. He's always been kind, fair and understanding.
I just wanted to show that between all these rants about bad bosses and colleagues (which I have had my fair share of in the past), there still are some real gems out there.
Gotta my my boss - he's been one of the best I have had so far.
Peace out folks. Good night... -
Early on in my freelancing career I learned something important. Even with seemingly tame nerdy stuff, sh*t can get real, real quick. This story describes the very start of my career in web development and hopefully will serve as a warning to newbies out there.
A young teen, I had just learned some basics of wordpress, I was confident I could hack together something that worked and looked okay with minimal effort and knowledge. One day I was approached by a guy who wanted a job board board site. Knowing there were already clones out there I figured this would be an easy gig, man was I wrong.
In addition to the fact I didn't know about contracts or the scope creep from hell, I had somehow gotten myself involved with a criminal business front.
These guys operated a scam business to rip off investors. Me and my designer buddy were used to make the business look legit. What they would do is hold job fairs where people are supposed to pay to rent a booth, but instead they would give everyone a booth for free and then lie about what all businesses were coming. They would then show this info, along with the website and marketing materials to investors. They would take the money from the investors and launder it for drugs.
The real story starts the day of one of the worst hangovers I had ever had. I was at a random friends house sleeping for most of the day.
Apparently one of the guys who was operating the scam business was about to strike a deal with one of the investors when something on the website didn't work (it was working as designed). This guy, Manny we'll call him, had been blowing up my phone all morning. I check my voicemails and there are threats on my life; saying I will be sleeping with the fishes, or if they ever find me, they'll fuck me up. Needless to say this really freaked me out, either way I decided to head back to my dorm.
When I come back home, my designer buddy tells me that some guys were in the house looking for stuff. Apparently this guy hired two nerds to "break into my computer and steal the website", fortunately they didn't know what they were doing.
After a while I got another call, Manny wanted to sit down and "talk things out". Being naive I accepted and we met up. The two nerds were there with one of his body guards. He said he wanted to have those two nerds take over the project. While this was going on, his bodyguard flashed his gun at me several times making eye contact. I agreed to, but I still wanted to get paid. I asked about getting paid and he said we never signed a contract and that he owned the host and domain. I was pretty much screwed.
This is where the story should end, but I wasn't a very smart guy back then. I gave up the site but I created a back door into it. Every week or so, they would get "hacked". Because the two nerds didn't know what to do, they ended up coming back to me for help. This is when I finally got paid. Totally not worth it. -
The datepicker saga
Part one
So I begin work on a page where user add their details, project is late, taking ages on this page
Nearly done, just need a component to allow users to put in some date of births. Look for react components.
Avoiding that one because fuck Bootstrap.
Ah-ha, that looks good, let's give it a go.
CSS doesn't exist, oh need copy it over from npm dist. Great it applied but...
... WTF it's tiny. Thought it was a problem with my zoom. Nope found the issue in github.com and it's something to do with using REM rather than EM or something, okay someone provided a solution, rather I saw a couple of solutions, after some hacking around I got it working and pasted it in the right location and yes, it's a reasonable size now.
Only it's a bit crap because it only allows scrolling 1 month at a time. No good. Hunting through the docs reveals several options to add year and month drop downs and allow them to be scrolled. Still a bit shit as it only shows certain years, figure I'd set the start date position somewhere at the average.
Wait. The up button on the scroll doesn't even show, it's just a blank 5px button. Mouse scroll doesn't work
Fucking...
... Bailing on that.
Part 2
Okay sod it I'll just make my own three drop down select boxes, day, month and year. Easy.
At this point I take full responsibility and cannot blame any third party. And kids, take this as a lesson to plan out your code fully and make no assumptions on the simplicity of the problem.
For some reason (of which I regretted much) I decided to abstract things so much I made an array of three objects for each drop down. Containing the information to pretty much abstract away the field it was dealing with. This sort of meta programming really screwed with my head, I have lines like the following:
[...].map(optionGroup =>
optionGroup.options[
parseInt(
newState[optionGroup.momentId]
, 10)
]
)...
But I was in too deep and had to weave my way through this kind of abstract process like an intrepid explorer chopping through a rain forest with a butter knife.
So I am using React and Redux, decided it was overkill to use Redux to control each field. Only trouble is of course when the user clicks one of the fields, it doesn't make sense in redux to have one of the three fields selected. And I wanted to show the field title as the first option. So I went against good practice and used state to keep track of the fields before they are handed off to the parent/redux. What a nightmare that was.
Possibly the most challenging part was matching my indices with moment.js to get the UI working right, it was such a meta mess when it just shouldn't have taken so stupidly long.
But, I begin to see the light at the end of this tunnel, it's slowly coming together. And when it all clicks into place I sit back and actually quite enjoy my abysmal attempt at clean and easy to read code.
Part 3
Ran the generated timestamp through a converter and I get the day before, oh yeah that's great
Seems like it's dependant on the timezone??!
Nope. Deploying. Bye. I no longer care if daylight savings makes you a day younger.1 -
I got assigned to work on a new project a couple of weeks ago. We got the POC code handed off from senior management, since he came up with the idea over the weekend. The project concept is hella exciting, but the dev manager and PO I have to deal with make life unbearable to say the least.
We have only 2 devs (including me) and 1 QA on this supposedly very important project. Of course, management announced the project to the clients already, so now we have to deliver ASAP cause it adds “sizzle”.
The MVP deadline is... no one knows when, either July 30th or September 1st. The MVP requirements are... unknown. I swear if someone saw the list of tasks and issues attached to “MVP” Epic, they would call us nuts trying to fit it all in.
To make things better, each PR requires 2 reviewers, so we end up adding manager as a reviewer just cause we need him to hit that “approve” button. So in attempt to make life easier, we requested to have a third developer. We are getting another developer, but that guy doesn’t know how to unit test a pure function...
Current priorities are... unit testing with coverage of 95% and if we want to refactor code, we have to add area to the list in a Google Doc. As a result, we are not tackling big things like risk of SQL injections not to mention big features like i18n (5-6 languages to support by the way and yes, it’s part of MVP as well as SSR no one knows why). Currently, I spend 2-3 hours a week in calls with the team just to figure out what the hell MVP is, what we have to do and why we have to do it. Last time we spent an hour refining 1 spike and breaking down one story into 3.
Oh, we also don’t have a deployment plan, not even to test environments since DevOps team was not aware of this project at all. Thus, QA cannot create any test suites and have to test everything manually which eats a lot of their time.
This whole project is a big hot mess and I’m considering leaving it all together especially since I’m working on two squads at the same time. I love the project, I love the idea, but management makes it unbearable, so I’m not even motivated to work on that.3 -
Very excited, got my raspberry pi zero working over usb finally, gotta admit it took me a while to figure it out that the ifconfig IP assigned to the interface established isn't actually the raspberry pi's (seriously you don't want to see how far the visited google links go for all variations of "how to setup the otg ssh connection"), that only came to me once I was able to find the mini-hdmi to hdmi cable, before that it was a pure shitfest:
First I just tried all sort of configs, but the raspberry pi kept denying the ssh connection, slammed the microsd into my bigger Pi, even multiple times ran raspi-config, forced ssh to start in all possible ways, nothing.
Then I tried to use the TV-output on it together with my old small portable tv to maybe see some error-logs or the ssh not starting on the zero for whatever reason, even flashed a 2016 image thinking it is stretchs fault for not working, but then my fucking soldering iron cable disappeared, tried to quickly create my own, but that failed cause the 3.5mm connector it uses is different from the ones I had available, so I macgyvered a sketchy ass lose connection with male headers sticking through from the bottom and being sticked against the board with a female end on top, but the TV output wouldn't work, even with proper config options, so I gave up.
Some days later I've found the cable, connected it and realized the fucking IP it gets assigned is totally different from the interface, well fuck my life.
Atleast now I can make a clean image of that microSD and setup the portable laravel development raspi as I wanted, can't wait to try it once I get more time to fully set it up - btw even the internet bridge worked right out of the box, so I can easily use my laptops internet connection on the zero.9 -
I know this is utopic, but I've been thinking for a while now about starting an open source platform for figuring out the problems of our society and finding real world, applicable, open source solutions for them.
To give you some more details, the platform should have two interfaces:
- one for people involved in researching, compiling issues into smaller, concrete chunks that can be tackled in the real world, discuss and try to find workable solutions for the issues and so on
- one for the general public to search through the database of issues, become aware of the problems and follow progress on the issues that people started working on
Of course, anyone can join the platform, both as an observer (and have the ability to follow issues they find interesting) and/or contributor (and actually work with the community to make the world a better place in any way they can).
Each area of expertise would have some people that will manage the smaller communities that would build around issues, much like people already do in the open source community, managing teams to focus on the important thins for each issue. (I haven't found a solution for big egos getting in the way yet, but it would be nice if the people involved would focus on fixing stuff in stead of debating about tabs vs spaces, if you know what I mean).
The goal of this project would be to bring together as many people from all kind of fields to actually try to fix this broken society.
It would be even better if it attracted people with money and access to resources (one example off the top of my head being people like Elon Musk) that could help implement the solutions proposed by the community without expecting to gain profit off of it (profit is also acceptable if it is made in a considerate, fair and helpful way, but would not be promoted on the platform).
The whole thing would be voluntary work; no salary, no other commitment than the personal pledge that once someone chooses to tackle something, he/she will also see it trough (or at least do his/her best).
The platform would be something like a mix of real time communication, issue tracker, project management tool and publishing platform.
I don't yet have all the details for how it should all fit together, but if there is something that I would like to start, this is definitely it!
PS: I don't think I can ever do something like this by myself, and I don't really have the time to manage a community of developers to start work on it right now. But if you guys think something like this is something worth your time, I will make time and at least start on defining the architecture and try to turn this into a real project.
If enough people are interested, I will drop any other side projects and do my best to get this into the world!
Thank you for reading :)6 -
One of our team mates is based out of the US office. We are physically distant, but after our manager's departure, we lost touch because our scope of work was different.
Me and two other team members work closely with each other from India and dude is alone, working out of the US.
Super smart, very polite, and a fun person to work and be with. Even when our interaction was less, I learnt so much from him.
Since, I am facing some challenges, I decide to use it as an excuse to connect with him for a coffee and also seek his guidance because he is senior to me.
Some things he mentioned,
1. Our new line manager asks him to do things on spot with no heads up. He has to drop everything and complete the ask.
2. Often times, poor guy, is asked to join meetings on immediate basis. Even while he is having his lunch.
3. He never got support from our new manager. Infact, based on the conversation, I realised that the manager supports me more.
4. He is facing same, if not more, issues with tech. And he didn't have any guidance on how to handle the issue.
5. A lot of times he is facing process and system problems which he isn't able to solve because the org culture is that of working in Silos. And he doesn't get any support from manager.
6. Tech has clearly pushed him back when he asked for help and other teams never respond to him.
My man was still smiling bright and was looking things from a positive lens that all of this is interesting and adds to the learning experience which will be valued when we decide to move on from this job.
These are the people who inspire me. Smiling in the time of adversity.
Even when he had his own challenges, he was ready to guide me and hear my frustrations. I offered him help and will make sure to stay connected so he doesn't feel left out and alone in the team only because we don't work together in physical space.
One thing I have learned over time is, while I am facing problems, someone out there is facing more and difficult problems then me. I always tend to blow up my problems out of proportion then what they actually are.
I am the dumbest person that I know and mark my words, I'll die because of my empathy. I wish I could help my team mate in any possible way.2 -
I have sort of an embarrassing question...
I never learned touch typing, hated it as much as I hated my calligraphy lessons in elementary. Forward a couple of years, I'm a developer and trying to dig deeper into vim seems to require learning touch typing... it has been a struggle to say the least and lowered my speed to a frustrating rate. 😥
I know the arguments for putting the work and learning proper technique but, are there any other arguments out there? I mean, as a developer I find myself using a lot of numbers and symbols which are not totally covered in touch typing curricula, together with a bunch of key combinations...
Idk, maybe I'm just asking for encouragement or different perspectives or unknown advantages about learning touch typing even when you feel fast and confident without it... Thank you guys!11 -
I love my gf but she broke her leg 4 weeks ago and since then both of us are stuck in home WFH. I feel like my soul is being sucked out, I am being suffocated with the neediness, responsibilities and I alone have to take care of everything in home including taking care of our dog, food on the table and running errands. Its hard to even force myself to have sex anymore since my hormones are fucked up and Im in a constant state of stress that I rely on now just to get through the day.
During the day to numb myself emotionally I cope with coffee and smoking. During the evening to relax I cope with alcohol and nettlix and to sleep I take a xanax. Staying until 3-4am kinda became my alone getaway time.
I pray that in 2-3 weeks her leg heals and she goes back to the office and then I will again have my daily 10-11 hours of uninterrupted work/personal time again.
Were together for 4 years already and she expects me to propose to her and make babies soon. I dont know if I am capable of having a family if Im thinking of breaking up after 4 weeks of taking care of her. Idk what I will do but for now it is what it is.33 -
So I had an idea of what might be useful for a Brain Computer Interface (BCI). I thought they must have brought the prices down on these by now... Oh my hell... The cheap "starter" kit from OpenBCI is $800+. The cheapest headset I could find anywhere was $129 and all the reviews say it doesn't work. What an absolute shit show. I sincerely thought these devices would have gotten costs down due to selling a lot of them.
I just want to hack some shit together and play with it! Not fucking take out a loan. I guess that industry is lacking the one application to make this kind of interface worth it. So I will wait another 5 years for that industry to make progress I guess...
I will have to look around for cheap Ardunio kits or something. What an absolute joke. I mean we are talking about a low noise amp and some electrodes.7 -
Not a whole lot. But when I was 9 I started trying to fix an old Compaq computer that my parents replaced. I never actually got it to work but I did tear it apart and put it back together. Eventually a friend's parent gave me a a Dell that didn't work. Figured out it just needed a new HDD. Around that time my dad (who is literally the textbook definition of technically challenged) got a old textbook about computer hardware from a friend of his that was a bit of a hobbyist. This was in maybe 2006. The book was from 1988. I don't remember the name but it's somewhere in my parents house still. I didn't get much out of the book. Time passed and I started building computers. For myself, the local library, my friends. I ended up going to college for business while building computers on the side. I was making pretty good money for the amount of time I put into it. Eventually I ended up switching careers. My parents didn't really help me get into software but they offered encouragement. And a book from 1988 about computer hardware... So that's something.
-
I did not think that making a serverless Discord bot would be such a learning experience. The code itself was easy. The hard part was the infrastructure, because I decided to automate it all with Terraform and deploy it on AWS.
Before this project, I had no idea how API Gateways worked. Now I still have very little idea how they work but I managed to build one anyway. Eventually. And then I had to figure out how to automate the deployment of a lambda layer and function that would both still be managed in the Terraform state, with any code changes triggering a rebuild and update for the resource.
And then I had to untangle a dependency mess because API Gateways have some weird issues where two resources that have no explicit dependencies on each other will throw an error if they don't deploy in the right order.
And then I went the wrong way with Github actions trying to conditionally chain multiple workflows together before I realized I could just put multiple jobs with conditions in a single workflow.
And now after all that work over the course of 2 days, I have a bot that does this:2 -
So I have a friend. One of few who I can freely speak with using my natural language (so that means, narrow down topics to IT, mix some of my native language, mix in lot of english and mixture of our favourite languages terms (don't ask me how it works, but it works brilantly and its actually easier to communicate)). And its true friend, seriously.
But when we meet, 80% of time we spent together, every, single, fucking time we argue (in cultural maner, its more of discussion) about what enviroment and what languages have advantages against others. And it pisses the fucking hell out of me, when he takes his enviroment, takes his problems with exac his enviroment, and applies his favourite solutions to it, and goes on how they are fucking awesome and brilliant, and than I reply, sure in my enviroment if I ever had XYZ problem, I wouldn't say use mongo DB becouse I can do it my way, and it would work well too, but it's not really the way I really should solve XYZ problem, becouse in my enviroment you dont have it in the first place. And he will fucking go on, but at least he understands my solutions and finds various details where HIS solution works better. His solution to his problem vs my solution to non-existant problem.
But that's actually an example of much grander thing that I want to rant about. You see, that's not all that bad, we keep it civil and we somewhat enjoy these discussions even if often times, they are pointless. It's like playing games and shit like that, so it's not the point, I just used the example to make it clear what I mean later down the line.
So, to the actual point. What the living fucking fuck is wrong with people, for living fucks sake they cannot physically, mentaly, virtually or otherwise change mindset and point of view if they are telling YOU what to fucking do, what's better to do, etc.
What the fuck! You have around 0.1% of context that is in my head, and my solution works with most of it and your bearly manages to deal with your given 0.1%, so kindly please for living hell, fuck off telling me what to do, what is better in my fucking situation etc. You don't know most of shit I know about my own situation (dosent apply to people with coma and heavy mental issues, sorry its not 100% universal) that I know, yet you have something in your brain that fucking allows you (dosent tell you "its no-go lol") to try push thru your shit to me like it was your fucking life. It's not.
And to be clear, before someone gets sad becouse I was to broad and generic. If you giving advice you can do it properly. And there are people who legit have mindset "well, if I was you and known what you told me, I would do XYZ", but for what the living fuck reason most of people I know have more mindset of "Do XYZ coz fuck you if you dont, coz dat is my opinion and shit and I dont give a living fuck if it does what you want"2 -
Kinda !rant, but still..
Most professional devs have or have had PM's/KAM's. I've had quite a few,, most I've really liked.. Now I have an issue thought, I like one a little too much,, correction there's no little about it, I fucking love her.. We do spend some time together outside of work as well, and she's become a very close personal friend.. She's really easy to work with and really good at her job, so we make a shitty working situation livable together.
But; of course, I want more, but not ruin anything,, And most of all not make her working situation uncomfortable.. I'm pretty sure she don't see me the same way..
Question: has this ever happened to anyone else? How did it turn out?
Yes, I realize the irony of asking relationship advice from the stereotypically least social group of all..
Oh, and to top it off,, my other closest friend, also works with us, and they know each other from before.. So it's kinda hard to talk to her about it..13 -
“Well maybe I can hack the old thing to work for a while longer” I think to myself.
“Oh hell this thing is a major pain in the ass to work on because of the way I hacked it together a year and a half ago. I forgot about that.”
It’s so bad looking at old projects. This morass of spaghetti code has more cringe than a weeaboo wolf whistling at a goth chick with an anime body pillow in the passenger seat of his rusted out 80’s Toyota Corolla that is not an AE-86 or 88 but he has rattled canned it to look like Initial D anyway.