A young guy I work with burst into tears today, I had no idea what happened so I tried to comfort him and ask what was up.

It appears his main client had gone nuts with him because they wanted him to make an internet toolbar (think Ask.com) and he politely informed them toolbars doesn't really exist anymore and it wouldn't work on things like modern browsers or mobile devices.

Being given a polite but honest opinion was obviously something the client wasn't used to and knowing the guy was a young and fairly inexperienced, they started throwing very personal insults and asking him exactly what he knows about things (a lot more than them).

So being the big, bold, handsome senior developer I am, I immediately phoned the client back and told them to either come speak to me face-to-face and apologise to him in person or we'd terminate there contract with immediate effect. They're coming down tomorrow...

So part my rant, part a rant on behalf of a young developer who did nothing wrong and was treated like shit, I think we've all been there.

We'll see how this goes! Who the hell wants a toolbar anyway?!

I went to Paris for my first interview (that was 1989) for a job of Unix kernel developer. All dressed up. I step out of the elevator and see a young punk with scruffy hair and different colour shoes. I reckon he must be the pizza delivery guy. I ask him "dude, can you please point me to the CEO's office for interview". He said "sure, follow me man, I'll show you". We arrive at a desk, he sat down in the big chair and looks at me with a big smile and says "Ok dude, here we are. I am the CEO. Now let's see how good you are!"
I got the job. And 26 years latet, last week, amazing coincidence: I met him again at a trade show in Paris ... with the same coloured shoes. How cool is that!!!

I recently met a young fella (14yo) playing League of Legends. He asked:
- What do you do for a living?
- I'm a programmer, do you know anything about programming?
- I don't, actually.

Apparently he was playing from a LAN Gaming center 'cause he didn't have a computer at home (his computer had broken and these Lan centers are pretty affordable).
I figured I could explain to him what was it and what super powers you could get from it. Turns out I recommended a JS course in codecademy and now he goes to the LAN center every day to study programming (he got really into it!).
Now he always pings me with questions about JS and apparently he's learning a ton! He had almost no English skills too (we're Brazilian), and because most of the material in the internet is in English he found himself some free English courses and he's now taking them!

Knowledge is free on the internet and I guess he's just realized that.

Not exactly a rant guys, just figured it was a nice story to tell :)
#TeachAKidHowToCode

This is fucking annoying with some clients.

Client calls:
Me: Hello, how can I help you?
Client: *explains problem*
Me: *tells possible solution*
Client: you sound young, could you connect me to a more senior person?
Me: Sure.

Collegue: Hello, how can I help you?
Client: *explains problem again*
Collegue: *gives same solution as me*
Client: Oh uhm but that's the same solution the boy I had on the phone before you told me.
Collegue: Yeah......?
Client: well he sounded so young...
Collegue: Being young does not equal being inexperienced/less knowing about something.

Best office prank: I was pretty young and naaive. Senior dev comes to me and says that it would be hilarious to slide a note under the women's bathroom door saying, "I know what you're doing in there". He says that the woman in there will think it's hilarious too. We work with her, she's very funny and laid back, so I go along with it, expecting to get a laugh. A few minutes go by and a different older women enters my cube. She's got the note! She works on the other side of the building so I don't know her too well but I can tell from the look on her face that she's pissed. I'm frozen with fear as my career flashes before my eyes.
I apologise perfusely and try to explain but she's not having it. After a while she goes back to her office not having accepted that it wasn't meant for her and that it was just a joke gone wrong. I spend the next two days apologizing every chance I get, hoping she won't go to HR. She remains stone cold until late on the second day. She couldn't take it anymore as her mouth reluctantly begins to crack a smile. At that point she drops the serious expression on her face and busts out laughing.

It turns out that the three of them planned the whole thing and executed flawlessly. I've never felt so relieved to be the butt of a joke.

Boss: "I don't want to comply with the GDPR"

Me, DPO: "I've told you the house rules. You must comply, stop arguing"

Boss: "But I don't want it. Bobby doesn't have to, and Eve doesn't have to, their moms are cool"

Me: "I don't give a crap about the other kids, you're going to be GDPR compliant. Bob and Eve will end up being raped in prison. It's that what you want?"

Boss: "What if I just pretend to do it."

Me: "I'll take away all your marketing toys. No more mailchimp for you young man."

Boss, crying: "You wouldn't touch my Facebook pixel!"

Me: "Especially your Facebook pixel. I'm so sick of that thing...."

Me: "...Look, you can still play with your toys, all I'm saying is you need to be honest and ask your buddies for consent before you put your pixels up their various holes"

Boss: "But they will never agree!"

Me: "Maybe that is good thing"

Boss: "But how will we get people to like us if I can't feed them pills and insert probes into their holes to measure their responses?"

Me: "Maybe you should focus on being a nice kid, someone people like to play with. Your buddies will tell other kids that you're a nice guy. Now, I'm not going to lie to you, it will be hard work. Much more effort than what you're doing now. But you know, those friends will stick with you for decades, instead of just until the marketing-drugs wear off"

Boss: "I think I want a new mom"

Me: "You signed a contract. You're stuck with me for the next 2 years. And as long as you're living under my roof, you will follow my rules."

25 phrases you wish you could say at work more often

(Warning: Contains naughty words...:-)))

1. Ahhh...I see the fuck-up fairy has visited us again...

2. I don't know what your problem is, but I'll bet it's hard to pronounce.

3. How about never? Is never good for you?

4. I see you've set aside this special time to humiliate yourself in public.

5. I'm really easy to get along with once you people learn to worship me.

6. I'll try being nicer if you'll try being smarter.

7. I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message...

8. I don't work here. I'm a consultant.

9. It sounds like English, but I can't understand a word you're saying.

10. I can see your point, but I still think you're full of shit.

11. I like you. You remind me of me when I was young and stupid.

12. You are validating my inherent mistrust of strangers.

13. I have plenty of talent and vision. I just don't give a damn.

14. I'm already visualizing the duct tape over your mouth.

15. I will always cherish the initial misconceptions I had about you.

16. Thank you. We're all refreshed and challenged by your unique point of view.

17. The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.

18. Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.

19. What am I? Flypaper for freaks!?

20. I'm not being rude. You're just insignificant.

21. It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off.

22. Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.

23. No, my powers can only be used for good.

24. You sound reasonable... Time to up the medication.

25. Who me? I just wander from room to room

Worst dev advice?

My first manager said, "You're young and single. You don't have a family. You should spend all of your waking hours on work."

Me thinking, "I understand the importance of extra effort the first few years but I do have a life. One that I intend to enjoy."

A young Programmer and his Project Manager board a train headed through the mountains on its way to Wichita. They can find no place to sit except for two seats right across the aisle from a young woman and her grandmother. After a while, it is obvious that the young woman and the young programmer are interested in each other, because they are giving each other looks. Soon the train passes into a tunnel and it is pitch black. There is a sound of a kiss followed by the sound of a slap. When the train emerges from the tunnel, the four sit there without saying a word. The grandmother is thinking to herself, "It was very brash for that young man to kiss my granddaughter, but I'm glad she slapped him." The Project manager is sitting there thinking, "I didn't know the young tech was brave enough to kiss the girl, but I sure wish she hadn't missed him when she slapped me!" The young woman was sitting and thinking, "I'm glad the guy kissed me, but I wish my grandmother had not slapped him!" The young programmer sat there with a satisfied smile on his face. He thought to himself, "Life is good. How often does a guy have the chance to kiss a beautiful girl and slap his Project manager all at the same time!"

Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

*sitcom audience cheers*

Thank you, thank you. Ok so far we've had a developer from hell and a CEO who shot to fame for being the first rectum to receive a passport and be given a job.

2 pretty strong entrants if you ask me. But its time to slow it down and make sure everyone gets a fair chance. Its not all just about the psychopaths and assholes, what about the general weirdo's and the stoners who just made life awkward?

So here we go, Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 3, "A".

"A" was a bit of an unusual developer, despite having a few years experience in his home country, he applied for an unpaid internship to come work with us ... probably should have rang alarm bells but hey we were all young and dumb back then.

I had to say I felt very bad for A, as he suffered from 2 very serious, and job crippling personal conditions / problems

- Email induced panic attacks
- Extreme multifaceted attachment disorder (also known in layman terms as "get the fuck away from me, and do your job" syndrome)

While he never openly discussed these conditions, it was clear from working with him, that he had gone undiagnosed for years. Every time an email would come in no matter how simple ... even the services team asking to confirm his staff ID, would send him into a panic causing him to drop everything he was doing and like a homing missile find me anywhere in the building and ask me what to do.

Actually "A" also suffered from a debilitating literacy issue too, leaving him completely unable to read our internal wiki's himself. Every week we had to follow a set of steps to upgrade something and every week to mask his issue, he'd ask me what to do instead ... no matter how many times I sat with him previously ... must have been truly embarrassing for him.

But "A"'s finest moment in the company, by far, was the day where out of the blue, at the top of his voice (as if wearing headphones ... without wearing headphones) he asked

"DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO SELLS POT?"

... why no, manager of the entire department standing behind you, I do not

... why no, tech lead talking to manager, I do not

... why hello 50% of my team staring at me ... no "A", I do not!

Needless to say all our team meetings were a little awkward for the next few weeks after that but hey who doesn't like being thought of as a stoner / drug dealer by their team mates huh?

Will A make it to the top of the list of most incompetent? Well he has some truly logic defining competition yet to be announced.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

TL;DR: Teacher wants to invest in my company 😲

So, just this morning as I headed to class (still in school, 17 years old, from Germany) someone tapped me from behind - a female teacher whom I've only seen a few times (She is a really nice and friendly teacher who teaches economics)
She asked me: Aren't you the young businessman? I've seen your interview, fantastic! (Background info: I recently founded my second firm (Webdevelopment, Design and Marketing) and was quite often in the media (local newspaper, television, radio))
Quite unsure, I responded: "yeah, right".
Promptly she asked: "Is there some way I can invest in your company? Perhaps in stocks?" (Of course we can't offer stocks, we're just a small local company lol)
Me: "There always is a way I guess?" (I was extremely grateful but didn't know how to respond)
Her: "Great! Would you mind sending me an email with your contact info?"

What the fuck just happened. 😂

!geek girlfriend

Me and my partner are in the car driving. We drive by a young girl who is on her scooter. I look at my gf and ask,

Me: do you sometimes have some weird thoughts in mind (and nothing relating to sex her just so you know).

Her: well what do you mean?

Me: well i se that person scootering on the sidewalk and i imagine screaming at her like a lunatic “GET THE FUCK OFF THE ROAD PUNK” (which the little girl clearly isn't).

She laughs.

Her: yeah，i do too but it's more scientific， like sometimes i wonder how many times some one would flip. In the air if i hit them with the car or how long would it take some one to reach the ground if i pushed them off the balcony.

....

Me: silence...

Skin goes white

Her: looks at me with a big smile!!!

Im not sure if this is good or bad ;)

Once upon a time there was a shepherd looking after his sheep on the side of a deserted road. Suddenly a brand new Porsche screeches to a halt. The driver, a man dressed in an Armani suit, Cerutti shoes, Ray-Ban sunglasses, TAG-Heuer wrist-watch, and a Versace tie, gets out and asks the Shepherd:

Man: “If I can tell you how many sheep you have, will you give me one of them?”

The shepherd looks at the young man, and then looks at the large flock of grazing sheep and replies:

Shepherd: “Okay.”

The young man parks the car, connects his laptop to the mobile-fax, enters a NASA Webster, scans the ground using his GPS, opens a database and 60 Excel tables filled with logarithms and pivot tables, then prints out a 150 page report on his high-tech mini-printer. He turns to the shepherd and says,

Man: “You have exactly 1,586 sheep here.”

The shepherd cheers,

Shepherd: “That’s correct, you can have your sheep.”

The young man makes his pick and puts it in the back of his Porsche. The shepherd looks at him and asks,

Shepherd: “If I guess your profession, will you return my animal to me?”

The young man answers;

Man: “Yes, why not?”

Shepherd: "You are an IT consultant."

Man: “How did you know?”

Shepherd: “Very simple. First, you came here without being called. Second, you charged me a fee to tell me something I already knew, and third, you don’t understand anything about my business…Now can I have my DOG back?"

Not a specifically dev related story, but absolutely rant worthy.

Today I was working from home, and my wife called me to tell me that some awful person had thrown a young cat into the dumpster at her work.

To that person - you are a scumbag. You’re lucky no one left you alone in a hot car as a kid, let alone a dumpster. Seriously, why? Why is it so hard to take it to a shelter?

Anyway - I went and bought a whole bunch of cat stuff - I grew up with cats but I’ve never had one on my own. We’re at the vet now. I think we’ll name her Curry (after Haskell Curry, and lovely spicy dishes).

Job interview goes really well. Senior Dev 90-100k.

Ok, so for your "test" write up a proposal for a web based bulk email sending system with its own admin panel for building list, tracking emails, and with reporting.

I write up an estimate. Low ball the absolute fuck out of it because I'm trying to get a job. Know a few good libraries I can use to save some time. Figure I can just use sendmail, or PHPMailer, or NodeMailer for the emailing, and DataTables Editor for a simple admin CRUD with reporting. Write the thing up. Tell them they can have it in LAMP or Node.

Come in at 36 hours.

Then these fucking wanks told me they wanted me to actually do the project.

My exact response was:

"I bill $50 an hour, let me know"

They did not let me know.

Young devs, jobless devs, desperate devs. I've seen a fair amount of this. And for the right job I might go as high as maybe 4 - 6 hours of unpaid work for some "programming test". But please be careful. There are those who will try to exploit lack of experience or desperation for free work.

I turned 40 yesterday. Here are some lessons I've learned, without fluff or BS.

1) Stop waiting for exceptional things to just happen. They rarely do, and they can't be counted on. Greatness is cultivated; it's a gradual process and it won't come without effort.

2) Jealousy is a monster that destroys everything in it's path. It's absolutely useless, except to remind us there's a better way. We can't always control how we feel, but we can choose how we react to those feelings.

When I was younger, jealousy in relationships always led to shit turning out worse than it probably would have otherwise. Even when it was justified, even when a relationship was over, jealousy led me to burn bridges that I wished I hadn't.

3) College isn't for everyone, but you'll rarely be put square in the middle of so much potential experience. You'll meet people you probably wouldn't have otherwise, and as you eventually pursue your major, you'll get to know people who share your passions and dreams. Despite all the bullshit ways in which college sucks, it's still a pretty unique path on the way to adulthood. But on that note...

4) Learn to manage your money. It's way too easy to get into unsustainable debt. It only gets worse, and it makes everything harder. We don't always see the consequence of credit cards and loans when we're young, because the future seems so distant and undecided. But that debt isn't going anywhere... Try not to borrow money that you can't imagine yourself paying back now.

5) Floss every day, not just a couple times per week when you remember, or when you've got something stuck in your teeth. It matters, even if you're in your 20s and you've never had a cavity.

6) You'll always hear about living in the moment, seizing the day... It's tough to actually do. But there's something to be said for looking inward, and trying to recognize when too much of our attention is focused elsewhere. Constantly serving the future won't always pay off, at least not in the ways we think it will when we're young.

This sentiment doesn't have much value when it's put in abstract, existential terms, like it usually is. The best you can do is try to be aware of your own willingness and ability to be open to experiences. Think about ways in which you might be rejecting the here and now, even if it's as seemingly-benign as not going out with some friends because you just saw them, or you already went to that place they're going to. We won't recognize the good old days for what they were until they're already gone. The trick is having as many good days as possible.

7) Don't start smoking; you'll never quit as soon as you'll think you can. If you do start, make yourself quit after a couple years, no matter what. Keep your vices in check; drugs and alcohol in moderation. Use condoms, use birth control.

8) Don't make love wait. Tell your friends and family you love them often, and show them when you can. You're going to lose people, so it's important. Statistically, some of you will die young, yourselves.

When it comes to relationships, don't settle if you can't tell yourself you're in love, and totally believe it. Don't let complacency and familiarity get in the way of pursuing love. Don't be afraid to end relationships because they're comfortable, or because you've already invested so much into them.

Being young is a gift, and it won't last forever. You need to use that gift to experience all the love that you can, at least as a means to finding the person you really want to grow old with, if that's what you want. Regardless, you don't want to miss out on loving someone, and being loved, because of fear. Don't be reckless; just be honest with yourself.

9) Take care of your body. Neglecting it makes everything tougher. That doesn't mean you have to work out every day and eat like a nutritionist, but if you're overweight or you have health issues, do what you can to fix it. Losing weight isn't easy, but it's not as hard as people make it out to be. And it's one of the most important things you can do to invest in a healthy adulthood.

Don't put off nagging health issues because you think you'll be fine, or you don't think you'll be able to afford it, or you're scared of the outcome. There will always be options, until there aren't. Most people never get to the no-options part. Or, they get there because all the other options expired.

10) Few things will haunt you like regret. Making the wrong choice, for example, usually won't hurt as much. I guess you can regret making the wrong choice, but my deepest regrets come from inaction, complacency and indifference.

So how can we avoid regret? I don't know, lol. I don't think it's as simple as just commiting to choices... Choosing to do nothing is still a choice, after all. I think it's more about listening to your gut, as cliche as that sounds.

To thine own self be true, I guess. It's worth a shot, even if you fail. Almost anything is better than regret.

Years ago, when I was a young developer, I was asked to design and implement a complex but usefull feature. It took me some time, but I was really proud of my creation. It passed all the tests and was approved for production deployment. However, while the code was deployed, the customer asked for it to remain disabled for a while.

Months passed, other features were added often breaking the one I created. But I was relentless. I've fixed it every time. I've kept it ready for great launch...

After a few years, when I was already working on a different project, I received an email about my feature. It turned out that everyone simply forgot about it. You might expect that it was finally turned on... Nope, that email was a kind request to remove that feature from code.

Once upon a time there was a shepherd looking after his sheep on the side of a deserted road. Suddenly a brand new Porsche screeches to a halt. The driver, a man dressed in an Armani suit, Cerutti shoes, Ray-Ban sunglasses, TAG-Heuer wrist-watch, and a Pierre Cardin tie, gets out and asks the shepherd: "If I can tell you how many sheep you have, will you give me one of them?"

The shepherd looks at the young man, and then looks at the large flock of grazing sheep and replies: "Okay."

The young man parks the car, connects his laptop to the mobile-fax, enters a NASA Webster, scans the ground using his GPS, opens a database and 60 Excel tables filled with logarithms and pivot tables, then prints out a 150 page report on his high-tech mini-printer. He turns to the shepherd and says, "You have exactly 1,586 sheep here."

The shepherd cheers, "That's correct, you can have your sheep." The young man makes his pick and puts it in the back of his Porsche. The shepherd looks at him and asks: "If I guess your profession, will you return my animal to me?"

The young man answers, "Yes, why not?" The shepherd says, "You are an IT consultant."
"How did you know?" asks the young man.
"Very simple," answers the shepherd. "First, you came here without being called. Second, you charged me a fee to tell me something I already knew, and third, you don't understand anything about my business... Now can I have my dog back?"

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail!

This was something which my tech lead used to tell me when I was so obsessed with nosql databases a few years back. I would try to find problems to solve that has a use case for nosql databases or even try to convince me(I didn’t realise it back then) that I need to use nosql db for this new idea that I have, without really thinking deep enough whether the data in question is better represented using an sql schema or not.

Now, leading a team of young developers, I come across similar suggestions from few of my team members who just discovered this new and shiny tech and want to use it in production projects.

While I am not against new and shiny, it’s not a good practice to jump right in to it without exploring it deep enough or considering all the shortcomings. The most important question to ask is, whether some of the problems you are trying to solve can be solved with the current stack.

Modifying your stack requires more than just a week’s experience of playing around with the getting started guide and stack overflow replies. This is something which need to be carefully considered after taking inputs from the people who would be supporting it, that include operations, sysadmins and teams that are gonna interface with your stack indirectly.

I am not talking about delaying adoption by waiting for long list of approvals to get some thing that would bring immediate value, but a carefully orchestrated plan for why and how to migrate to a new stack.

Just because one of the tech giants made a move to a new stack and wrote about it in their engineering blog doesn’t mean that you need to make a switch in the same direction. Take a moment to analyse the possible reasons that motivated them to do it, ask yourself if your organisation is struggling with the exact same problems, observe how others facing the same issue are addressing it, and then make an informed decision.
Collect enough data to support your proposal.
Ask yourself again if you are the one holding the hammer.
If the answer is no, forge ahead!

Root interviews for a job

So I've been interviewing for fun lately (and for practice), and it's been going mostly well. This one company in particular looks interesting, and they seem to really like me. This morning was interview #4 with them; tomorrow morning is #5.

The previous interviews were pretty enjoyable, especially the last one where I interviewed with one of the senior devs who gave me his "grumpy old man rails quiz." He actually asked some questions I wasn't able to answer! (Mostly dealing with Rails' internals.) Also when showing me the codebase, there were a few things I hadn't seen before, so it's exciting that I'll actually be able to learn something if I sign on. We ended up talking for almost an hour past our allotted time, and we got along famously. He said he was very surprised I did so well on his quiz because most people don't. Everyone else I interviewed with so far has liked me and gave positive reviews, too.

I don't know if I want the job, but that's beyond the scope of this rant anyway. The real reason for this comes next.

My interview today was with the VP of engineering. It was more of a monologue, as he wanted to give me perspective to see if I actually wanted to work there, but it was still very much a monologue. He's an old white guy who seems to loves to drone, and he never seemed very happy when I responded, so I let him drone and drone. Good information though.

But he's very set in his ways in some regards, and two of them were pretty insulting. We never really talked about technicals, and he just assumed that since I wasn't old and graying that I was a junior dev. He said, and I'll quote: "We run a lean but senior team, so we typically only hire senior devs here. But the dev team is all old white men. There's no diversity in talent, age, sex, race, religion, etc, and I'm looking to change that." He made several more allusions to my more junior level, too. He made a lot of assumptions (like how I'm not comfortable with structure because I've been the only dev so often) and got annoyed when I countered them.

I realize he has no idea of my skill level -- even though he should if he was listening to his team -- but to just assume that I'm not talented because I'm young, and bloody hire me just because I'm female? I don't want to be your diversity hire, old man. 🤬

So I'm feeling angry.
I might still take the job because the it offers considerable benefits over where I'm working (despite being quite happy here), but it will absolutely be despite him.

I need to hide myself, my computer, programming skills and computer knowledge from people. Then only, I will be safe..

Friend: Heeey, you're good with computers right?

Me: No! 😑

Friend: Come-on bro. I know you are.

Me: What do you want?

Friend: I want you to check and book flights for me for country X.

Me: Are you ok? How does this have anything to do with someone being good with computers and stuff?

Friend: Haha, see? You're good with computers. *starts laughing. Anyway, since you're good, you can find the best prices. I know you know how to search sites and how to find things online.

Me: WTF?!?!!! All, you have to do is type in your search. If you don't like the results, you simply refine it.

Friend: See, all this tech stuff I'm not really good at it.

Me: But you're good at searching for other things online, right? Do the same for your flights.

*Picks my laptop and walks away.
How can a young man not be able to search for flights online but knows how to use several gadgets. Nonsense.

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.

#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?

A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.

As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.

A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.

About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."

Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.

R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."

As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.

!rant but a story

This happened today. Sorry for long post. A manager from another team in development team, I'll call him junkfellow, called me very very late last night to help them solve an issue in our application's test environment that blocking them from doing testing. They apparently doing integration testing with our application. Now said test environment is not even prepared by our team. We are development team and this test environment prepared by our application's support team. So I politely told junkfellow to get in touch with our support team counterpart as I am from development team. And he began shout at me

junkfellow: "WHY DO YOU THINK I'M FUCKING CALL YOU? IT'S BECAUSE I CAN'T FUCKING REACH ANYONE FROM SUPPORT!"
me: "With due respects sir I have no instructions to assist you and your team in your testing"
junkfellow: "THEN WHAT GOOD ARE YOU? IF YOU DON"T GET ONLINE NOW I WILL FUCKING ESCALATE YOU TO CW!!!"

We all know who CW is and he can make some people life very hard and I didn't want to call my boss so late so I quickly went online and spent the next 4hrs supporting their testing. Next morning I told my boss what happened and he scolded me for not calling him last night. He dropped an email to junkfellow's boss about junkfellow being "unacceptable attitude, disrespectful and threatening to escalate my team mates". My boss always refer to us as team mates, not his staff or his team member.

Then in few minutes, someone walking like a school bully with his chest out came to my boss place and announced himself (he is junkfellow). I say announce because he talking like he wanted everyone to know who is he. My boss stood up promptly, greeted good morning, introduce himself, shook junkfellow hand and sat down. Still young, maybe in late 20's or even younger than me. junkfellow talking to my boss loud enough for most of us to hear. Everyone's neck suddenly long like meerkat and listening:

junkfellow looking down to my boss who is sitting down: "How dare you send email like that to my boss? We are both managers you should act like one, you have a problem with me then you talk to me. You don't bypass me and go directly to my boss. You didn't even give me face!"
my boss sitting down: "So you didn't even ask your boss before picking a fight."

*junkfellow suddenly look confused*

my boss still sitting down talking calm with poker face: "I did give you face. You think by going to your boss I bypassed you and went one level up? No I went one level down!"

junkfellow still look confused and then slowly realized what my boss meant. Now he is staring at floor and can't look my boss in eye after he realized he is screwed!

my boss now standing up: "You treat my team mates like that againi or ask them to do something without my knowledge and I will talk to your boss' boss about it"
boss to me: "Hey tollywood! junkfellow here sincerely regrets what he did last night and wants to apologize to you in person" and boss' poker face turned to his familiar smirk

junkfellow immediately came to me, said "it's ok you no need to stand up", he sat down in a squat and apologized repeatedly. He really looked like he was about to cry and for a moment I pity him. But then I remember what he did and I just enjoyed the moment! Was pure gold :D :D :D

You know what? Fuck this shit. We spend most of our life locked down in a school, we are being told facts, tested and stressed for many years with the only hope to get out as soon as possible.
Failing is something that keeps you there indefinitely.
Parents keep pushing on kids to achieve the best and get good grades to have a job.
Then something happens.
You get out of school and what happens?
You start working.
A.k.a modern slavery...
Employers thinks that since you are young they are doing YOU a favor if they decided to hire you.
So you find yourself having to do the same tasks everyone is doing, perhaps you are even fully capable of managing them and get the shit done but guess what!!
You are paid the minimum.
You barely make enough to pay off your rent which keeps you locked away from Holidays abroad, from that huge cake you desperately want.
And guess what! Try to raise your voice and you'll get fired in a Matter of seconds, replaced with someone else which accepts any condition.
You dream of a house, a family and a car but you can't even eat healthy with that salary.
So you are forced to buy cheap and low quality food from the same store again and again till you had enough and spend some days with that horrible feeling...
Calling you to get a job interview feels like they are doing you a favor, they always try to give the minimum possible and expect you to work in a serious manner and respect their deadlines.
Colleagues earn a lot more even though they aren't doing anything different from you.
For the first year you won't have any holiday, let alone traveling or anything different from just staying home for 3 days straight.

Banks won't give you a loan because your job doesn't pay off
The day that your car is broken you struggle to eat the whole month.

On top of that, taxes. Because they aren't taking away enough.

I don't want to live this life, I don't want to become a modern slave and work 8-17 everyday for the rest of my life and retire with a shitty retirement pension that won't probably grant me anything again.

I had enough of this shit.
I don't want to go back to work and pretend to do what I am supposed to do with a smile on my face knowing that I am just a number and that no matter how skilled I am I can always get replaced with N number of people for a lower salary of mine.

I am tired
I dream of a life that I won't ever reach this way.

Today I looked up houses prices and felt like shit.
I will never in my entire life be able to afford something so expensive, let alone buying furnitures and what is needed or what I like.

I dream of having my place, my dog and my family but apparently I am asking too much.

How is this even fair in 2018/2019?

I... I am... Speechless.
I wonder how many people out there are in the same situation or even worse and I can't even wrap my mind around that.

This is just modern slavery.

My boss makes a shit load of money from young people that can't complain because they are threatened and will eventually be replaced...

This is my rant.

A quite normal Windows day:

Bios to Windows: "Go now! Get up!"

Windows to Bios: "Always slow with the young circuit boards."

"I've got something weird on screen."

Windows' answer: "Ignore it first."

Hardware assistant to Windows: "The user puts pressure. He wants me to identify this thing. Could be an ISDN card."

Windows: "Well, well."

Unknown ISDN card to all: "Will you please let me in?"

Network card to intruder: "You can't spread out here!"

Windows: "Quiet in the case! Or I'll cut both their support!"

Device Manager: "Offer compromise. The network card is allowed on Mondays, the ISDN card is on Tuesday."

Graphics card to Windows: "My driver retired yesterday. I'm crashing now."

Windows to graphics card: "When will you be back?"

Graphics card: "Well, not at first."

CD-Rom drive to Windows: "uh, I would have a new driver here..."

Windows: "What's ich´n supposed to do with it?!"

Installation software to Windows: "Leave it, I'll mach´ that already."

Windows: "That's nice to hear."

USB connection to interrupt management: "Alarm! Just been penetrated by a scanner cable. Request response."

Interrupt management: "Where are you coming from?"

USB connection: "I was in the computer right from the start. I'm joined by another colleague."

"You're not on my list." - "Say something."

Windows: "Hopefully there won't be another printer."

Graphics card: "The new driver twitches."

Windows: "We'll just have to get the old one out of retirement."

Uninstall program to new driver: "Go away."

Unwanted driver: "Fuck you."

Windows to Norton Utilities: "Kill him and his brood!"

Utilities to driver rests: "Sorry, we have to delete you."

Important system file: "Arrrrrrgghh!"

Windows on blue screen: "Gib´, the Norton Boys are over the top again."

Blue screen to user: "So, that's it for this week."

Excuse me for stealing your time

And I know it's way too long

I am amazed. I witnessed (mostly heard) a 14 year old girl calm down a young adult female suffering an anxiety attack before I managed to push through people on the tram. She told her to close her eyes, breath, tell her what she smells, then open her eyes, name first thing that she sees, then look left, name first thing, etc.

This is called sensory grounding and it works. And yeah, what she did was pretty awesome but this isn't what amazed me the most. I asked where she learned that and she said "from a game about apes". And I knew exactly which game she meant. There's a title called Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey and among many interesting mechanics there's one that puts the player in a state of anxiety when they venture into an unknown territory. The way to win that part is by analyzing surroundings by vision, hearing and the sense of smell before a panic countdown goes to zero. It's called "conquering your fear". Holly fuck, I played that and I didn't connect the dots. Are games nowadays teaching kids how to handle real life crisis? Where were those games when I was a kid??

I ranted about this somewhat in the past, but my biggest hurdle has been my family and friends. Please don't take this as ego or conceit, because I don't feel this way about myself. But they all say because of my exotic appearance (Being Japanese and Norwegian) that I should be a model, dancer, actress, or some other vapid thing.

I love tech. My dad is an engineer, so I've been surrounded by tech since I was very young. So now that I am out of high school, I want to turn my coding hobby into a career. My family and friends are not necessarily discouraging me much anymore, but they still aren't supportive. Doesn't matter though, this is the path I've chosen.

First day at CERN: done!

Nothing to rant about :) The place and the people are beautiful, lots of support and it's easy to navigate through things even for very young people like me! Couldn't ask for better stuff.

The welcome event in the Globe of Science and Innovation is already an experience on its own :) so many people to meet and share words with! Later on one of my senior colleagues showed me around the surface datacenter of ATLAS, as well as its control room and a (physically) separate computing testing environment to run simulations and software on to later be deployed at Point 1 (ATLAS). I am stunned, humbled and excited to say the least! More to come soon! Post your curiosities below and I'll gladly answer!

One of my best mentors was my father!

When i was very, very young (like 8 years old), he brought a new computer from his work! The first thing he did was play Doom (lol) but later, he always tried to show me all the things that could be done, coding in VB6.

He always told me: "You can use this to make the computer do what you want to do! You can do many things!". Even if at that time I did not understand much, he always tried to explain me how to develop a calculator or even a "Hello World" but with the name of my mother.

I will never forget his face of happiness, when I simulated a face that blinked with a counter. I do not even remember how I did it, but he hugged me so hard lol.

A couple of years ago, he was the first to try my first application on Android: An application that screamed when you shook the phone lol. He laughed a lot with that application.

He helped me in my university and we even developed several solutions together for different companies. Now we work separately, but he was an important part of what I am now.

PS: My english is kinda rusty, so forgive me ><.

Recently i had to interview a guy with 10 years of frontend experience for a react developer role

Me : Do you know what ecmascript is ?
Him : Yes
Me : Which version would you prefer to use and why ?
Him : I dont use it. I am more comfortable with JavaScript.
Me : (totally confused) 😶
Him : (trying to be oversmart) I know you young guys prefer to use these fancy frameworks because you dont know how powerful raw javascript is.
Me : (Trying hard to not "react") Ok.

How would you "react" to this ?

A young man was walking along in the forest, when he heard a muffled voice crying for help from behind a log. He leaned over to see a frog sitting in the mud.

The frog looked up at him and said, "I'm actually a beautiful princess, and if you kiss me, I'll transform back into my true self, and be yours for eternity."

Silently, the man scooped up the frog and continued on his walk.

A minute or two later, the frog piped up again, "Hey, buddy, maybe you didn't hear me -- I said, if you kiss me, I'll turn into a princess. What are you waiting for?"

Annoyed, the man stuffed the frog into his coat pocket.

Shocked, the frog yelled from inside the man's pocket, "What the hell? I'm a princess! All you have to do is kiss me!"

Opening his pocket and peering in, the man said, "Listen -- I'm a software engineer. I don't have time for a girlfriend. But a talking frog is kind of cool."

I know a guy, about 50 years old. He is a self-taught programmer since he was young, and he has always used Visual Basic (never anything newer than VB6).

He once needed to interface with a web application I wrote, so I asked him to send me a POST HTTP request. He didn't know what I was talking about. No notion of REST, sockets, HTTP, nothing.

The he showed me his code. Actually, his codes. He had multiple copies of the project, one for each version, and he even kept multiple variations of the software in different separate folders. He probably doesn't know what "version control" even means.
You think this is messy. You didn't see the actual code (it's a huge application!).

Spaghetti all over the place. Meaningful variable names, what are they? Default names for the controls, like button1, button2, etc, with forms with more than 30 buttons and text fields. This was the most incomprensibile code I have ever seen.

You might think that this guy is just a hobbyist.
No.
He sells his applications. To companies. They are obviously full of errors, but they buy them.

Now, if you're still with me, two questions come into my mind:

- why?? I hate this, because it's impossible to prove to a non-technical person that this is *not* software development.
- how do I know that, to someone else, I am not like him? How can I be sure that I know and will know what needs to be known?

Apple has programmed an avatar maker in iMessage that generates emoji that are supposed to resemble the person. However it does not have any setting for facial structure to represent a person’s sex. I’m pretty sure they did it because “gender is a construct”.

When I was growing up I had some issues with gender dysphoria. I am male genetically. I was mistaken as female my whole childhood because I was “pretty”, my best friends were girls, and I liked cooking, drawing, and dancing. Puberty happened and I started to look like a man. I considered transitioning because I felt female but I decided to let my body do what it wants and do the things I like to do without worrying about if they are gendered or not. I am married and male and I like what I like.

This stupid iMessage avatar. I have tried my hardest to make it look like me. I have long hair and keep my facial hair clean. They don’t have a switch to change some facial physiological traits so I have this Memoji that looks like a woman with a slight hormonal imbalance. It makes me feel conflicted like I felt when I was young. I haven’t thought about it in years and now I feel like I have an uncomfortable secret female avatar that i carry around on my phone and I feel like I’m carrying a secret.

A persons genetics result in differences in facial structures. Biological sex is more than the length of hair and whether a person wears makeup. I hate this “sex is a construct” trend. I’m fine living my life, but then companies push this software onto my phone like propaganda. I want it to look as masculine as I look IRL.

My first testing job in the industry. Quite the rollercoaster.

I had found this neat little online service with a community. I signed up an account and participated. I sent in a lot of bug reports. One of the community supervisors sent me a message that most things in FogBugz had my username all over it.

After a year, I got cocky and decided to try SQL injection. In a production environment. What can I say. I was young, not bright, and overly curious. Never malicious, never damaged data or exposed sensitive data or bork services.

I reported it.

Not long after, I got phone calls. I was pretty sure I was getting charged with something.

I was offered a job.

Three months into the job, they asked if I wanted to do Python and work with the automators. I said I don't know what that is but sure.

They hired me a private instructor for a week to learn the basics, then flew me to the other side of the world for two weeks to work directly with the automation team to learn how they do it.

It was a pretty exciting era in my life and my dream job.

Sooo, in my 5 years of high school, I had 5 different IT teachers...
Now, in Italy Highschool goes from 14 to 19 years old, I started programming some days after becoming 13, and "programming" classes begin on the third year, so I had quite a headstart on my classmates...

Now, for the third year, I had an awesome teacher, he noticed I was ahead and... Bored, so he gave me some extra stuff to study, he's the only teacher I've learnt anything from, it was awesome, very stingy with grades, but getting a perfect score with him was so satisfying.

Fourth year, the new guy was old, very old, at least 70, his lessons were just him talking about how programming was when he was young.

But then... During the second half of the fourth year I changed class due to bullying under a teacher's advice, and HE happened...

My new IT teacher, one of the most ignorant, awful people I ever met...
He's literally the reason I only went back to that school once, because another teacher needed help with a course...
One day I made the HUGE mistake to say that his "while(i <10000000000000);" wasn't very efficient for making a delay, because it didn't free the CPU, and since then:
- I never got more than 7 out of 10 at his tests
- He insulted me in front of the whole class
- He sabotaged the oral part of my final exam, shouting that he hated D'Annunzio when he saw he was in the literature part of my thesis (needed him to connect to WW2, and the Memex, that then allowed me to start talking about PCs and programming, my thesis was about the influence of lisp on modern programming languages), loudly chatting with other teachers when I was trying to keep calm (a teacher who knows me quite well, and was there to see my "performance" thought I was going to snap at some point), distracting the english teacher when I was exposing the english part of my thesis and pressuring the commission to give me 99 instead of 100 out of 100

So yeah, he almost made me hate the only thing I'm good at, undervaluing my work and my skills, undervaluing and humiliating me as a person, and I think that if I meet him again I might spit on his face...

So yeah, my biggest "programmer enemy" was a person that then did everything in his power to make my last year and a half of highschool hell

Now I can gladly say that with the help of my tutoring, some of my university colleagues are starting to appreciate programming, and my engineer friends ask for my help when they need advices about their code, and it's giving me motivation to keep doing it and becoming a better programmer to keep up with their expectations

Remember when folders/files were named like this when you were young (or was it just me 😅):
- project.xyz
- project-better.xyz
- project-last.xyz
- project-last-last.xyz
- project-final.xyz
- ...

A lite story about how i was hired at 16 years old.
Me at 11. Modifying HTML templates to create a sign up page for a game. Me at 14. Created some worthless websites in the past (at a training), barely knowing the structure of HTML.
Me at 15. Made my first website for a customer (using WordPress for the first time, didn't know how to use it before). The website was selling apartments, it was looking very good and went on the first place on SEO. Got my first money (100E).
Me at 16. Made some other WordPress websites for other customers (one of them still haven't paid, the website was made way back in 2015), so i shut down the website and replaced it with a text saying "This website is currently down until the customers pays the developer".
Me still at 16. A friend of my mom sent my CV to multiple companies, to work as a intern to learn more, and one of them accepted me for a interview (a well known and one of the best company with 30~ people)
Went to the interview, asked me about what i realized, what i can do, about my knowledges in others languages etc (forgot to mention that i love the computers from young age, so i was very good in them, specially at the age of 11), so they were happy about it and asked called me for another interview with the boss. Went to it, the boss asked me some tricky questions, i answered them immediately, he was very surprised about my knowledge at that age and accepted me immediately. After working for 2 weeks, instead of hiring me as a intern for 4-6 months, they instead hired me as a normal person, as a front end developer, for an undefined date, making 250 E / Month (6 hours per day in summer)
Now, I'm in the 11 grade, working for them about 9 months, making 315 E / Month, working for 4 hours per day after school, the place is cool, my entire team (family) is very funny and very cool, and they asked me many times to help them with different problems they had and i fixed them immediately (they really didn't know some stuff which i knew). Worked on big projects and worked on some from scratch by myself and they were very happy about how it went.

TLDR: was talented in computers (software), I'm a fast learner, barely knew about making websites, hired as a front end developer at 16 yr.

Btw, I'm in love with DevRant, I'm feeling like home everytime i visit this community :').

P.S. Sorry for my bad English and the mistakes i made.

alert("Thanks for reading my first rant!");

Big thanks to the guy who blamed the poor structure of a legacy database on me today because I'm young. You made my day

True Story. Good rant bad pitched.

Just a small information before: In Germany, if you want to be a softdev and want to learn it, you can either go study IT or you can have a apprenticeship, which is 3 years with 75% of work in a company which will pay you (around 1K / month) and 25% in a school.

I work for this city-govermant company nearly 1 year now. Around 6 month into I told them I which to have a intern for 3 years (apprenticeship) at my site. Most likely because I really enjoy to teach.

My boss agreed to this very fast, told me it's a good idea, it would be a new way for our company to evolve. In Feb 2019, when we had interviews with candidates, we decided for one and I made a resource plan for most of 2019 in which I blocked 3 weeks for the start of his apprenticeship in July (2 weeks ago) because I knew he is a kid, 18 years, etc, never coded etc.

7 days into his apprenticeship my boss called me and my boss to her and told me there is a project which should be done by end of june and why it isnt finished.
It was the same project which I had ressources for 4 weeks in June but the department didn't come up with proper feature requests etc. so another department got the time from me. I told my boss exactly this: not my fault that it isn't done, showed her emails, reminders etc.
I also offered her to spend a weekend soon if everything is there now, but she told me: no. It has to be done ASAP. ASAP means, start now, don't stop until its done.

I told here, I have a intern on my site, I blocked the time.

She told me one sentence I will never forget:
"If your intern is blocking this project, he has to go. You decide. Now."

I was so surprised that I didn't even got any word out then "yes, I will start." I was shocked by this words and her decision to quit this young guy.

Just to give a a bit more background: we hired him in Feb 19 for Jul 19. If we would quit him right now, he would most likely not have any chance on the market for another apprenticeship and has to wait for Jul/Aug 20 and 1 year without job, money etc. He even moved to our city for this job...

So I moved back to my desk and today, 2pm, I finished all of the project, nearly 50h+ work done in 5 days, so he can stay.

What the actual fuck...

I had a dream that I was working in an office, writing Python scripts.

Then they changed my role as a frontend web developer. I wasn't happy, but I dealt with it. My coworkers were playing games instead of working and the boss yelled at me for slacking off even though wasn't.

I had enough so I told my coworkers to stop slacking off, but they were about to beat me up and the boss held a gun and that's when I woke up.

Thank goodness I'm too young for a job like that.

I was talking to a few young developers at a Uni today and asked them what areas they worked in/were interested in.
Everyone: (tells their work/ interest)

Mr. Genius : Backend developer.

Me: (Being a Backend developer myself felt interested) Which language do you code in?

Mr. Genius : Firebase

Never have I ever wanted to murder someone until this moment.

Come on:
You can't trust estimates that two month ago me said!
He was young, foolish and full of hope.

Not a dev job but one I quit.

The company had Windows 98 on all their computers and we had to use it for our daily activities. Being relatively young, I'd only used Windows 98 for a couple of years between the age of 5 and 8 and mostly for playing games.

The company was paying me overtime to stay late and familiarise with the OS.

Basically, they were willing to spend money to train employees to use an obsolete OS - what a bunch of idiots and poor decision-makers.

I left after three months because I could no longer cope with their nonsense.

Got PHP Internship interview lined up tomorrow...
First ever real interview...big step for young me
Wish me luck guys

dear anyone looking to teach kids programming (especially organizations):

- please be realistic. teach things your students can use. how to debug, how to solve realistic, real-world problems. not how to make a turtle draw a circle, that's not programming.

- please don't have blocks. just don't. they hurt.

- focus on your content instead of putting up posters on the wall with celebrities talking about the importance of programming

- don't call it 'code,' call it 'program.' do you know how different muggles think they are?

- please teach in a logical order. too many times have I seen commands --> functions --> variables/variable types --> then back to functions and return types.

- don't set an appropriate "age" to do it. please. its enough for people to learn to program, but to be told they're too "old" for a course? I can't tell you how many forgetful seniors and special needs students have been insulted. and don't even get me started on being too young. knowledge is knowledge, skill is skill, ability is ability.

- teach concepts with programming. don't separate them. they work better when they're taught together.

- understanding is more important than style. for beginners, fuck style. all of your program could be all on one line for fucks sake. I've had teachers chose style > functionality, because, fuck working programs, right?

- let your content speak for itself. this is not the place for celebrity endorsements.

- give resources for after a lesson is complete. when a beginner is finished, recommend more resources. you're never done learning.

most of these were things code.org did wrong. fuck them. I was in a constructive criticism mood today…

I just mistyped a keyboard shortcut that caused my computer to say «I AM FILO AND EVERYONE LOVES ME» at full volume.
I have no memory of leaving a script attached to some random shortcut, and I can't find the setting anywhere.
Young me was a narcissistic asshole

6:30pm: "You programmers have no life at all. Spending the whole day infront of a computer! "
6:31pm: "Hey could you please loan me some money, I am so broke right now"
*Me singing in my head*: 🎵🎵Young, dumb and broke

Teacher: Who do you think you are, young man?
Me: I am DA GREATEST!
Teacher: -_- ... Says who?
Me: Google BITCH!

I found this posted by a recruiter and I liked it:
| hired someone that didn't shake my hand firmly during the
interview - he rocked as an employee.
| hired someone with three typos on their resume. - She was
the most detailed oriented person l’ve ever worked with.
| hired someone without a college degree- He was way
smarter, innovative, and creative than mel!
| hired someone with four kids- Never met someone so
devoted and committed to her career.
| hired someone who had been incarcerated as a young adult.
- He's a VP now.
| hired someone over 60- she taught me some tricks on excel
that | use to this day!
Can we please throw out all those silly assumptions and rules that we've made up in our head about what a person needs to
be, look like, have accomplished, and do, to succeed?
In my experience, as an HR leader and as a hiring manager, it's those that typically don't get a “shot” who tend to kick butt
in the workplace!
So before you throw that resume away because they don't have every certificate and degree - or - don't call back that candidate because they didn't give you a firm handshake - think about trying something new. Someone new.

The company I recently started working for are young guys my age, who want me to create awesome stuff, however I feel is best, and they let me think and try stuff, like new cool design ideas and use latest API's to create the most modern site possible. "Whatever you think is the best way to do it"

And I'm paid a decent salary. This is the first job I liked. Ever. I literally wake up early to get going, and work overtime (without them knowing nor paying extra) because I think this project is so amazing and I feel like giving back.. I usually hate PMs, but these guys rock.

My mother is the one that introduced me to computers from a young age. She would tell me that they were the future and that people could do amazing things with them. Fast forward at me graduating from uni with a B.S in Computer science and she was the happiest :) she tells everyone that I am a computer scientist, she seldom says "programmer" or "developer". She is super well versed in general computing and can use Linux and Mac, so yeah :) mom is awesome. My dad has lil idea of what I do, to him its just magic, my step dad is the same way but he will be the first to tell everyone that I am a wizard.
My brother and sister could care less...my sister tells everyone that I am the smartest person she knows, but that I spend most of my time glued to the screen "playing with a bunch of weird code!"
The rest of my family is pretty meh about it, 2 of my uncles are super proud of it and normally ask for my input regarding tech or about life as a dev.
Finally, the wife. The wife knows how to code from before I even knew what code was :) so she knows exactly what I do :)

Interviewer: I think you are too young for this job, blah blah, your age is too low, blah blah, this job requires elder people, blah blah

(...keeps repeating the same bullshit for literally half an hour...)

Interviewer: look, I have to leave in five minutes. Convince me that you are not too young for this job.

In Italy (Milan)🇮🇹, job hunting is a fucking hell for misfits like me:
• Young(26)
• 1 year(working) experience + continuous learning/improvement at home
• Skillful and adaptable full-stack
• Willing to do greater things with software without being payed like a monkey

This is the last week working at my current company (from which I rejected the renewal of the contract for 26K€/13 months) and almost every time at a new interview everyone tries to down sell me by default or because of the fucking little time that I've been inside companies without even looking at my skills/capabilities.

Also many little companies made by the CEO and a technical manager that are looking for someone from which being provided food 😒(metaphorically).

(On another side, in one month, me and my gf need to move to a new apartment, the renting process sucks, and she has issues to find a non-slavering job because she is a foreigner(with good knowledge of English and Chinese) with very basic understanding of Italian and I see her crying often in my arms because it's hard and stressful for her to become economically independent as she would like to be)

Young colleague: help me! My pc won't turn on!

Me.goto(colleague.desk)

Y. Colleague: See? I pushed the button and it didn't turn on!
Me: Have you tried push it a second time?
Y. Colleague:... No....
Me.push(start_button)
Pc turning on..

My worst ever manager was at my first job. He was a dumb, conceited asshole who somehow made everyone believe he was the best at what he did. Luckily he took special interest in me (me being a young girl in my early 20's and all), and tried to spend as much time with me as possible, to the point where he got jealous when i preferred to hang out with another coworker rather than him on business trips, or took smoke breaks with someone other than him.

To name just one example, we were drinking at my coworker's hotel room until late, at which point I fell asleep on his bed. I was later told that my manager wouldn't leave and let the other guy sleep (assuming that there was something going he did not give his blessing to). Finally he left at about 4 am, just to appear the next morning ten minutes early to pick us up, directly at my hotel room of course, to check on me. He was the sneakiest, slimiest bastard I have ever met.

Of course I left the company as soon as I could, and told HR about it. Don't worry though - by the time I left he's found himself a new 19 year old intern to harass, who happened to enjoy the extra attention.

Why the fuck do people care about age so much?
Unlike other activities, you can be 15 years old and be as good as a senior dev, so why the fuck do you need to degrade me because you found out my age?
I still deliver the promised work, so what the fuck?

As for kids who try to get recognition because they're young and program, well, fuck you too!

Programming isn't about age or maturity, since in this age of tech, anyone can pick up a computer and an internet connection and learn, so why do you feel that younger individuals have less capabilities?

I just had to get that out of me since it pisses me off a fuck load.

Yes, I love my parents.

But every fucking time I plan to buy a PC they will make some noise. I am not even touching their money to buy it yet they will make a fuss about it.

"All my son does is sit in front of computer whole day"

Sorry father but I am doing the same thing in my job. They are young enough to know what I am doing yet still keeps ranting on me.

I still love them but this is so annoying sometimes.

This was WAY back in my first job as a programmer where I was working on a custom built CMS that we took over from another dev shop. So a standard feature was of course pagination for a section that had well over 400,000 records. The client would always complain about this section always being very slow to load. My boss at that job would tell me to not look at the problem as it wasn't a part of the scope.

But being a young enthusiastic programmer, I decided to delve into the problem anyway. What I came to discover was that the pagination was simply doing a select all 400,000 records, and then looping through the entire dataset until it got to the slice it needed to display.

So I fixed the pagination and page loads went from around 1 min to only a few seconds. I felt pretty proud about that. But I later got told off by my boss as he now can't bill for that fix. Personally I didn't care since I learned a bit about SQL pagination, and just how terrible some developers can be.

Why dont you go to vacation?

Its summer why dont you go to vacation?

Just came back from summer vacation at my cunts place where have you traveled?

Why dont you travel?

You're a student! Youre so young and you should go to vacations more often! Why dont you go?

Youre so young! Why dont you travel more often?

How come youre a student and dont like taking vacations?

I traveled at a cumdumpster, pussylicker, shitsmeller, dickbigger, lickthicker and titkisser countries this summer! Which country have you been at vacation?

Heyy where are you going for the summer vacation? Cause I'm going to sukmikehok!!

Omg ive been in Mike Oxmaul country as my summer vacation. What about you?

You didn't travel? What is wrong with you?

You didn't travel? Omg you're like soooo weird!!

You didn't travel? You're so boring i dont wanna hangout with you

You dont like traveling or you already traveled for this summer vacation?

Etc...

------

I get asked these fucking questions all the fucking time.

THEY ASK IT LIKE TRAVELING COSTS 0 UNITED STATES DOLLARS. 0 USD.

THEY ASK IT SO SOFTLY LIKE TAKING A VACATION IS FUCKING FREE OF COSTS AND REQUIRES NO FUCKIN EXPENSES.

WHY DONT I? GIVE ME YOUR FUCKING WALLET MOTHERFUCKER AND I WILL FUCKING TRAVEL THE WHOLE WORLD WITH IT WHILE CONCURRENTLY FUCKIN UR MARRIED WIFE AS SHE RIDES MyH FAT COCK ON THE BOAT IN BAHAMAS.

FUCK YOU

ANYONE WHO ASKS ME THESE DUMB FUCKIN QUESTIONS MAKES ME GET A BOILING BLOOD AND AN URGE TO PUNCH THAT CUMLOAD IN THE FKIG FACE

HHHHHHHHHHHHH

I think the hardest thing about being a programmer in college with a security emphasis is when I approach a business for a penetration test or for a vulnerability analysis (your pick) is that they almost always say, "you are pretty young don't you think?"

Ummmm not sure what that has to do with it. If it would make you feel better I have claimed bug bounties from an antivirus company, a bank, several local businesses in my area and I do this for work at my 9-5.

And this week I got this, "I think I would like someone older so we can define the goals better."

Oh so rules of engagement, yeah of course I understand that and that's something we would discuss and draw up a contract for...

"Well we really need someone more skilled."

---- End of story ----

I don't understand, you haven't asked about certifications or schooling and you glanced at my resume for exactly 5 seconds what the hell do you want? Me to double my age over night?

My worst experience is, that I was fired after the third week in a new job. I worked then for a really small company.

My supervisor didn't like me and just wanted me out.

He asked for feedback and new ideas. I provided good reviews.

I even gave the company really good ideas, didn't get any credits for it, but they have implemented them now. Never got any credit for it.

I can look back and say that my supervisor then was a douche and wanted to kill off a young guy with a bit more technical knowledge and a vision.

For me it's in the past...

Now I got a way better job at a really gigantic company, better pay, much better work with better working times, a very friendly and helpful team, which appreciate my feedback and effort.

Sometimes it needs to get worse, to have later something better.

Now I can enjoy my new job and go everyday with a smile in my face :)

!rant

*me trying to add one more field to a SQL request*
*asks coworker* Hey, do you know how I'd get this field? You have to go through 4 tables just to find it because of the way the tables are related.
*coworker looks for a bit* Oh. That's crazy. We should ask the DBA.
*we ask our 60 year old DBA for some help.*
He walks us through a minefield of inner and outer joins and selects and we finally arrive at a solution. Kudos to our DBA, who in the eyes of us young devs is a wizard.

CTO hired mid-level full-stack developer for really complex product we’re building.

Here’s the funny part - he has 2 YEO building on top of freelance dev. code base’s on wordpress… Just fucking yesterday he told me, that Angular 10 framework is simillar to Jquery. Fucking dipshit, his code is so fucking bad it looks like italian sausage made out of spaghetti.

Not sure if I hate him more than ours truly cheapest CTO or him for being ridiculously incompetent and arrogant young asshole.

I’m in charge of him.
Help me.

On the screen: four text boxes cycling through rainbow color backgrounds and spinning wildly in circles.

Manager walks in.

Here's the context.

We were pair programming and working on a simple form. We were just finishing up the style, and I suggested we use a CSS3 animation to make the invalid fields pulsate a light red once.

I'm the young guy in the office, so I am most familiar with the "new" front end stuff like flex and CSS3.

My colleague was unfamiliar with CSS3 animations, so I implemented the red flash quickly and showed him.

He was curious what else you could do with CSS3 animations, so I changed my "to/ from" to a "0%/ 25%/ 75%/ 100%" style animation to show how keyframes worked. Then I made the animation iterations infinite so it went on forever. Of course, I didn't have any normal colors on hand so I just went with my debug colors: red, green, blue, yellow, etc.

We submitted the form with invalid inputs and sure enough, they flashed rainbow colors. It looked pretty funny so I thought "haha, lets quickly add rotation while we're at it"

That's the point where the education turned to a little fun but it wasn't going to take more than a second.

So we did it and it looked pretty funny and it actually made me laugh. Then we started discussing next steps on the form (back-end). Discussion lasted maybe five minutes before our manager visited to update us.

As we were discussing, the invalid controls were still spinning and rainbow colored in the background. Whoops.

The words we managed to say were just "It's invalid" and then we broke out laughing.

Not really a rant but my biggest fuckup that entirely ruined my IT career and future life

> be me 21yo CS student looking for an internship
> looking for help with my friend and sent him my CV to apply to a big corp
> then I lied that I have sent CV to official email {here the fuck up begins}
> after that I got an instant phone call from a friend of him claiming that the CV was sent properly and I am going to visit a company
> I had a review but it was recorded my CV hasn't got precisely specified technologies so interviewer thought I can manage to work as a dev not an intern
> with my shitty communication skills I managed to "work" there 8days, fucked up someone's computer by deleting his Windows and all data he had and installing Ubuntu instead
> then shit got out of control for an intern I talked a lot of bullshit in this Corp they realized I was there an "alien" and I didn't even know what to do so I wanted to sudo rm - rf myself
> unfortunately my parents woke up that morning I decided to sudo rm - rf and and I am now in mental asylum with fucked up people and the Corp knows where am I and I am going to pay for my stupidity and being naive (I didn't even seen the CEO, I didn't have enough information that I really worked there)
> To sum up, being bipolar, naive and irresponsible has brought me to this point in life. Thank you for reading. I don't see a solution, my parents don't believe me and I feel isolated with this fuckup so I decided to share it as a remark for young people starting in IT. For me it already ended too fast.

Apparently, my younger self was a dumbass.

Coding gave me a way to express my creativity. It gave me meaning. When I was young I was constantly trying to find what I was good at. It's frustrating because I have one more year of uni doing what doesn't interest me.

Nevertheless, I'm glad I found what I want to do for the rest of my life 🐢.

Theory: zoomers are actually just boomers who come generationally full circle

Source: I work with clowns in their early 20s and the fact that they are young and were essentially born into tech and had it their whole lives literally has not contributed anything towards their understanding of basic tech concepts - if anything, it has made them more clueless.

The good news: now I know whatever is invented in the future, whatever tech comes to be, the next generation of clowns will always have many jobs to offer me.

Controversial tech rant begins here:

You know, I'm sure a lot of you guys know that it is pretty uncommon to encounter a woman who is who is into tech (and ranting about said tech). This has always made people question why. I personally feel like that is the case because those that do like tech, and those that don't just find a different interest. I thought that would suffice, but now Google and Microsoft are advertising their diversity programs. I was fine with all that until I was personally affected by it. I intended to apply for scholarships from Microsoft. They turned me away because according to them, they began giving them only to people who were "marginalized". That and their commercials trying to pressure young girls to join the STEM field. Again nothing wrong with women in the tech field, but now that this is turning into favoritism I have to fight harder battles to compete in the tech industry. Not only that, but now I read a study about their employment. Despite the number of people they turned away and the money they spent on these programs, thr companies STILL haven't become any more diverse, and from what it seems, their reaction lately has been to double-down and try harder. I just want an open, honest, and fair tech community. Has anyone else felt the affects of this situation?

always double check your rm -rf command...

long ago, young me was setting up a server. last thing was to remove a temp folder i created. instead of rm -rf /path/to/dir, i typed rm -rf / path/to/dir...
"this should not take so long...wait... shit"

You guys, I think I know what is it....I think I know why I wanted to be a developer.

It started off innocently enough. I was a young lad in IT. Wide-eyed. Absorbing anything and everything I could. Then, the asshole clients came.....

I would put on my best customer service face on, and address the client as calmly and as respectfully as I could. Reminding myself that their frustration is understandable.

To deal with the increased time dealing with clients took, I developed scripts to help me handle maintenance and keep my head above water. I developed scripts to streamline equipment provisioning for big deployments. I developed scripts to handle other technicians who didn't log-off the phone queue and fucked up our on-call flow. I put in place email rules to sift through the bullshit and time wasters.

I became a developer to streamline and make myself as efficient as possible. But the clients keep nagging. The bullshit keeps coming. The other players get in your fucking way.

There is no end you guys.... THIS IS ONLY TUESDAY. I can't script the passage of time. I'm....I'm.... I need a fucking nap.

When I was a young boy and I was writing my first programs, I remember I was sad because they were fast, unlike other applications I used daily and admired, with their long splash screens and the hard drive constantly making noise whenever you performed an action. At that time for me, 'slow' meant 'serious'.

It's fun to see how things have changed today: ensuring performance is a critical part of my job, and DAMMIT WHY HASN'T THE WEB PAGE LOADED YET?!?

Got an offer to work at a game development company. Office looked awesome (decked out in pinball machines and a huge marble track), located overlooking Schreveningen beach, young energetic team.
Then I saw the code. Oh God the code. And they wanted me to become system architect.
Hybrid PHP 4/5 OOP/procedural code custom framework running on a spaghetti database creaking by on the skin of its teeth... all backing Flash Facebook games.

Nope.

Please allow me to share my thoughts since I can't totally outrage my frustration because we have this so-called fasting to control our anger towards a person we currently disagree with.

A letter from your loving, sincere, pretty and gorgeous working partner to my young, chubby, smart and clever colleague:

Please do cooperate in times of live editing from the FTP since CTO is not and will never be going to appreciate version control since CTO is too tired for giving a shit and just want deliverables be delivered as fuck perfectly regardless of the resources that we have.

As you know, I tolerated you for not getting the freedom of live editing as what you've experienced from your previous team lead. All I ask of you is to get fresh file from FTP whenever we touch the same file because firstly, God knows how frustrating it is how your hard work is going to be replaced and be gone as much as I do. Secondly, I don't want you to experience how pain in the ass could this be in the long run, and lastly, I don't want any hard feelings to be wasted just because of this.

P.S. I'm too shy to send this to you because I don't want to hurt your feelings and don't want to sound too seriouz and feel old. I also hope we share the same telepathic understanding so we can agree with each other.

Your loving, sincere, pretty and gorgeous working partner,
xoxo ❤️

(thinking of stating my first name) 😂

*My Family goes to sleep*

Me: The night is still young.

I'm about to quit without a backup plan.

It's been almost 4 years since I started working as fullstack dev in my current company, also those are the same years of experience I have working in general. Right now I feel burnt out.

I feel I haven't progressed professionally at least in the last 2 and a half years... I feel stuck. Right now I don't feel like a dev, I feel like a dude that knows how to use a framework and only makes CRUDs.

I've lost the apetite for learning, also I feel very discouraged about the industry in general, watching media full of those tech-influencers and the apperently fakeness of the culture that companies show off only helps my disappointment and discourage about the industry in general. Also the unconscious action of comparing myself with others (and impostor syndrome) makes me feel less about myself.

I didn't go to college. During my last year of school I went to a Bootcamp and started learning by myself, I felt I choosed the correct path for me, I don't regret it, but makes me feel I entered at a young age (18) and unprepared to an industry I felt I knew at least a bit (I did two interships at 16).

Right now I can only think in taking a time for me and disconnect myself from everything, finish all the books I bought, continue doing excercise and therapy and stay connected with nature.

I know that most probably what I say about the industry is wrong but what I **feel** about it right now is not.

I know is better to search for better options and places to work than just quit, but I really feel it's gonna be the same, I know it's an unfounded fear and I'm a bit blinded about it.

Got a CTO at my Unity job that's younger than me, which by itself is fine, but the only reason this guy was put into that position was because the previous CTO left the company at the time where I was relatively new and he is the person most familiar with the codebase of our primary project than I was at the time.

I understood the decision at the time, but still, having a position of power being handed to them just as a matter of inheritance doesn't command my respect. Nevertheless, I withheld my judgement at the time to see how his leadership goes.

Not even 1 year in and this young CTO started making jabs at me, calling my code hard to read and incomprehensible, to my face, in front of everybody else.

Motherfucker, I don't find his code easy to read either but I went out of my way to frequently ask him, the previous CTO and other teammates to clarify what they wrote here and there. He on the other, made no attempt to ask me for clarification and instead waited until company meetings to air these grievances.

Our boss started to ask me to follow SOLID principles (even though he can't recite what that acronym means) due to complaint from the CTO guy, even though the CTO guy doesn't even follow SOLID himself! But I took the higher road and didn't flip it right back on him.

What I did propose in return though, is that the dev team start using pull requests and have a code review process if the CTO wants to sign off on everything that gets in the codebase. Sounds reasonable enough, right? Not for this guy! He immediately starts complaining that reviewing pull requests would be more work for him. Motherfucker, you refused to go to my table to ask for clarifications about my code yet still want to understand what goes on, then do code review.

It was at this point that I realized that this guy doesn't actually want me to write good, clear code. He wants me to write code HIS way so that he can understand. Yeah okay, I can accept that idea in isolation. Some open-source projects require contributors to follow certain coding convention to make the maintainers' job easier too. One project that immediately came to mind is "In-game Debug Console for Unity 3D" (disclosure: I am a contributor to this project)

But guess what?

THIS COMPANY DOESN'T HAVE A FREAKING CODING CONVENTION. NOT WRITTEN DOWN ANYWHERE. NOT EVEN A VOCAL ONE.

What this CTO guy wants from me is a complete blackbox.

To all fellow devs out there, I hope you don't work with a CTO like this, or become one.

Maybe it's old and well known, but somebody asked, so here it goes:

A shepherd is quietly grazing his sheep on the fresh village pastures.

Suddenly a shiny new car stops by. A cool guy, very well dressed hops out and asks him: "Good man, If I guess exactly how many sheep you have, can I win one?"

The shepherd, puzzled, accepts.

The cool guy, opens his laptop, download a satellite picture of the area, run a NASA algorithm for image recognition and in few seconds answers "you have 1342 sheep"

"Wooow" says the shepherd "you won, take one"

The cool guy is about to live when the shepherd approaches him:

"Ehi, Young man, I bet all my flock against your car that I can guess what is your job"

The cool guy, (he likes to bet after all) accepts.

"You are a consultant" says the shepherd.
"WTF! how did you even..."

"Well, easy" says the shepherd "you came out of nowhere, well dressed and smart looking, you answered a question nobody asked you, you told me something I already knew, you want to be payed for that and in addition, you don't understand shit about my business."

"Now", adds quietly the shepherd "please, give me back my dog"

(for @LOLjustCoding)

It's been 6y since i created a devrant account, and went from a college kid to a dev lead, so much changed and i use my old posts as a window to the young me.

I am working my dream job, yet it feels like a nightmare.
The young me would give an arm and a leg for this position, and here i am feeling like this is worthless.

If any of you guys experienced something like this, would love to hear what it took to go back to feeling excited to code.

kinda coding i guess, company specialising in making statistics for other companies, analytic stuff or such, wanted stack: php, mysql

Interviewer: so here is our tech guy, who will be your boss if... so he would like to ask a few questions
techGuy: how would you ask for all the rows in a table? * looks at me *
Interviewer: * looks at me too *
me (learning inner, outer, left, right joins and transactions yesterday): * am i a joke to you? *
also me: * they must be making fun of me or something * well the query should be SELECT * FROM tableName; but one should really not use that, as * in theory really slows things down, because it loads unnecessary meta data bla bla
they: * look at each other * You're really good young man! Yes of course we know that, haha!
Interviewer: You said you just finished Uni, you doesn't seem like a junior to me! good job!
techGuy: so how would you LIMIT your results to 100 rows?
me: sigh * looks at door without turning head, so they wont notice *

Some more of Stux's !dev pet peeves

1) Teenagers who comment shit like "I'm from the wrong generation" or "today's music is trash. This is real music" on songs from like the 70s and 80s. Like shut the fuck up. You can like whatever music you want, but your taste in music doesn't make you unique, so just shut the fuck up and listen to the music. I was jamming out to 70s and 80s when I was 9, so you aren't the first to enjoy older music at a young age
2) "Old heads" who comment shit like "this isn't real *genre*" on a new song that isnt like the older version of that genre. News flash: music fucking evolves. Just because that country song doesn't have a twangy guitar in it, that doesn't mean the song ain't country. Just because the rap song ain't some deep ass poetic shit, it doesn't make it any less of a rap song.
3) People who edit their comments on YouTube to say shit like "wow thanks for all the likes, I wasn't expecting this." Wooptie fucking doo. Your comment got a few thousand likes. Fun fact: those likes are meaningless.
4) Humidity. Fuck that shit man.
5) General education classes. They're a fucking pain in the ass man. Like im 98% confident I don't need art history in the real world. Or mythology. "tHeY tEaCh YoU tO lEaRn." Teach me to learn in degree specific classes then. At least their content will be interesting to me.

My name is Stuxnet. Thanks for coming to my TED talk again.

Today I explained a young kiddo that <insert multilayer game here> cannot work without servers.
Then he asked me how I don't get bored writing so much...

> Young dev apprentice me pair programming with another developer
> Dude checks bug report of a customer, saying something about a "Blind SQL Injection"
> Young me asking what that "Blind" part means
> "Dunno man, maybe u gotta close your eyes when hacking this"

Guess what, the issue was never fixed

Another smartass! Here we go!

Look, I'm an idiot and I'm absolutely aware of it. But you don't get to give an opinion without having the knowledge or skills. I may be young-ish and stupid, but that doesn't mean you're right, or that you know better than me ffs. If I'm down to earth, that doesn't mean you're above me. If you want my respect, then behave yourself. Just because you think you've "schooled me"...doesn't mean you did.

... Aaaaaand those are stuff I'll never say in real life. Gah. I can't lecture people I don't care about, but some do piss me off regardless. And what is with this sharp increase of people pissing me off these day? 🤔 🤔 🤔

I feel this is more of a show off, and lacks good creativity, but seeing young Kurt there made me excited

VoIP meeting today lasted 7 minutes.
I have kept the board down to ~5 ticket average for the last 3 months.

Co-worker(jokingly): I guess we don't need you anymore.
CEO: Quite the contrary. @chenb0x may need a promotion.
Me: *smirks*

This is why I like working for this company. Love the culture....no matter how much I may bitch about the clients.

'How did I get here?' a young dev may ask.

1. Delegate where proper
2. Script whatever can be scripted
3. When the board is low in tickets, it becomes a recursive responsibility to keep it low.

Back story
-----------------
When I was hired, the VoIP board was sitting at a ~30-40 ticket average.

I've never used Windows in my day-to-day life. No kidding.
When I got my father's first computer, I used an old distribution called BBC Linux. I didn't have any computer knowledge, it was my first contact with a computer, so I went to a friend's house and asked for a CD to install on my computer. I don't know if this friend ended up making a "gotcha" and thought I'd give up, but I just read the manuals and fell in love. That was year 2000.
Then I used Conectiva Linux, then I went to Red Hat 9, then Slackware, then in 2007 I started using Solaris. And I stayed on Solaris (Solaris 10, Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris) until 2011.
In 2011 I bought a Mac. I stayed at Apple until 2020, when I couldn't stand Apple forcing me to buy new computers (I still don't understand how a 2011 iMac, i5 (4 Hyper Thread cores) with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD only runs up to High Sierra).
Then I bought a Dell. It came with Windows 10, the first thing I did was install WSL2. I could not stand it, the system is bad, sorry. I installed OpenSuse and have been using it for two years.

It's just that every day someone tells me "how can you use this"? "There is no alternative to Windows, do you want to be different?"

I know that my story was the reverse of the "mainstream", so I'm going to talk about my vision of Windows, that in my brain it is actually the "alternative".

- Having a file explorer without "tabs" in 2022 is unthinkable for me.
- I love terminal. And the Windows terminal is very limited. "ps ... | awk ... | xargs ..." is a must for me. "find ./ -name '...' -exec ..."... these things on Windows are totally "different" and have the "powershell way" while all other operating systems keep the same form. And cygwin is not an option. As Wine for serious work is also not.
- Dragging a file into the terminal, and having it write its path, is so natural, that when Windows didn't do it, I was dismayed.
- I've always used StarOffice, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. All the people in my story received my documents and reports as a PDF and no one complained. Until a coworker saw me editing in LibreOffice and said "oh I want it in word format". As long as he didn't know, everything was fine, right?
- Windows is paid. And is there advertising? I don't understand. And I refuse. If you want to display advertising, then excuse me. I have no problem paying, I'm not an opensource shiite. It's just that paying and not working bothers me much more than an opensource that I can fix or expect a fix knowing the good will of the people involved.
- Hyper-V is a joke. QEMU/KVM is better, and Bhyve on FreeBSD which is a very young project, is already a million times better than Hyper-V.
- Developing in C/C++ for Windows is only possible in two ways: Either you've always lived in Windows and your brain is conditioned, or you compile with MSYS2 (CLang or GCC).
- There is no significant evolution of the windows desktop since 95.
- Multiple workspace support with multiple monitors, not ready. It's another joke.
- REGEDIT does not need any comment.
- The system loses performance over time. I still don't know how Windows achieves this.
- I've seen people complain about desktop fragmentation on Unix and Linux. Many DEs end up leaving applications with different themes (like running a Qt application in Gnome and GTK in KDE), but to be quite honest, the lack of Windows standard bothered me much more. Even Microsoft's own software is completely different: Control Panel, Calculator, Paint and Office, To-Do, and Settings, have horrible style differences and look-and-feel fragmentation.
- Dark mode has not been implemented. It's another joke. Many applications are white while everything else is dark. Sorry, even on Linux which is a mess, this has been resolved. And well resolved.
- NTFS? Serious?
- C:, D:.. It doesn't convince me since DOS.
- Bloatware.
- News "biased" in the search bar is a lack of respect for those who use the computer to work.

And that. For me, Windows is the alternative operating system. I can't take Windows seriously, for me it's an experimental one like Haiku or ReactOS. It's good to play.

About market share, it doesn't convince me to use it. But convinces me to sell. I've always developed applications to run on Windows. And when I need it, I turn on a VM to compile the project. But in everyday life? Impractical.

>today, we - junior .Net programmers - have a teambuilding event
>after it we will go to the bar (with our boss)
>the bar is pet friendly
>I need to walk my dog
>he is young, probably west siberian laika mix plus a resque dog, therefore every evening I spend 3 hours working with him
>my boss implies I should not bring him to the pet friendly bar.
>my boss wants me to walk my dog only for an half an hour max and return to the bar without it.
>I guess I won't be even going to the bar, couse my dog is more important to me
>ffs

So I'm just wondering if this happened to everyone else because a few friends of mine at work have corroborated my experience.

So, when I was very young and just starting to learn PHP, I was trying to grasp OOP. I read and read about it and did the example tutorials and nothing really did it for me. Then one day, writing some scripts for a game I played, it just hit me. Literally like "oh.....I get it. That's why this is a thing."

I lost one of my idols, there are few people I have that much respect for. I literally can not think of anyone else infact.

Ive just been taking a second.🙁 I mean you live your life thinking there's time or that you can wait to do things , like I'll just do that one thing a little later. But it's not true. The reality is there's so little time.

There are few truly great people. It's going to take me a little while to get over it properly.

But when I do I hope I don't switch back into old patterns.

I want to be just like him, his work was amazing. He worked all the time not because of fame or money but because he just wanted to make cool shit for people to enjoy. Because he enjoyed it himself and he liked seeing people amazed and happy due to his work.

The best people are the types of people who bring a smile to your face by just being who they are.

It was enough to know he was out there doing his thing being that incredible, it never occured to me he could just be gone. The world needs more people like him especially now with everything so fucked up. He died far to young. 33 isn't old it's not even middle aged

All I want is to be like him, I hope I will be one day 😞 and I'm going to start trying right now.

And I will try harder.

Since I were born in the year 2048 I were still young when it happen, we then had AIs to create our programs from very vague requirements and my father were researching how to resolve conflicting requirement when a mistake happen. The requirement on Asimov law were down prioritized!
The rest is history so to say, human race decimated in a day, I got sent back in time to hinder the development on AIs and so on, so if you had a bug in your AI it’s a good chance it’s because of me

Got selected for an interview with a big internet giant.
Went there and was warmly greeted.
Thry asked to wait for a bit as my interviewer was busy with something.
Moments later a young beautiful lady entered the room. Her face was the most beautiful thing I've seen in my entire life. I was dumbstruck.
She then introduced herself and turns out she was my interviewer.
Everytime she asked me something I looked at her face and grinned stupidly.
Now even though I should feel bad about getting rejected, I am happy as fuck.

This message is to all cofounders/hr/etc. - please don't allow such beauties to take the interview. You might miss out an A grader.

I have been a frontender for a long time. I recently showed interest in backend development, and said to my boss that that is what I would like to pursue. He said that was never going to happen and I would only be a frontender in this company.

A lot of horrible things happened, some of the Lead Developers bailed and another developer flatly out committed industrial spionage on the company.

Then because of shortage of staff, gave me backend tasks, which all I completed within deadlines with few exceptions of course.

My project manager was very impressed about it.

Then I noticed the project management didn't concern themselves with ongoing projects, they became more focused on customer support and management of unhacking etc.

I noticed a wide gap that made it so all projects went past due the time because lack of coordination and planning

I stepped in because I was annoyed that this was common practice in the company.

While my two bosses were on vacation, they nominated me to be the "boss" of the company.

I earn close to minimum wage, and I felt this wasn't fair if I was to continue to do what I have done. So when our boss called us into a meeting and he said that he was going to move slowly away from the company, he said we should keep the reins of the company.

I didn't say much then, because I didn't feel like taking on so much responsibility I knew I wasn't to gain anything from more than knowledge.

I confronted him today and told him how I have felt throughout a long time. He basically said I hadn't proven myself and because of my young age, I didn't deserve to have more right now.

I was annoyed, he said he expected the same from every coworker and that I wasnt special or unique and that I could easily be replaced.

Not to mention I never got to finish a sentence without him interupting me or raising his voice to deafen out mine.

Have you ever had this experience and how did you feel? I feel terrible to be honest..

Today I saw, and heard, two attractive young women show a lot of annoyance over a dude revving his car's engine as he drove past them in an obvious effort to somehow impress them.

I have not once in my 32 years of age met a single regular woman (read as in, not a woman who is a car enthusiast, and even then they are annoyed) that has been impressed over a dude driving a car as if he were in a race track. Not once.

So I seriously wonder, what is the point? annoying people? I am a very standard dude, I like cars, but that shit fucking irritates me and I seriously do not get the point.

Communication.

I started coding at Engineering school (so like 4 yrs ago) and even if there were projects by group, I kinda learned it all the way by myself so I actually learned to code alone. And to resolve my issues alone.

And it costs me a job right after my internship. Was a big problem since I was almost alone (someone worked also on it but they was on multiple project at the same time so not 100% available).

That was one of my biggest fear in my career and one of my biggest challenge too in my personal development.

And so, like 8 months later, I got a job, I'm in a big team and no more problem of communication. That's something I'm very proud of. But I'm still young in my career.

I gave up on learning math as a young person because no one was ever interested in teaching it in a way that made sense to me.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve started working on a pet projects that require understanding of (what I would consider) fairly advanced geometry, which as it turns out is called computational geometry. And it’s fun.

I just look back at the time I was afraid of this stuff with regret. All because my teachers weren’t terribly interested in teaching, but more interested in fulfilling useless metrics that only make it look like students are learning when they’re actually not.

In my office there's a dev who regularly takes figurative shits on other devs — stuff like publicly shaming others for their mistakes, or dropping a conceited "I told you so" whenever his solution turned out to be the right one.

He's a young guy, still has lots to learn about office etiquette, and I know he usually means well (he privately apologized to me once after I told him to fuck off), but I'm not sure he knows of the effect it's having on the other devs he talks down to.

I like him enough that I don't want to go to HR about it, but I don't know how to approach the situation in a one-on-one level with this guy. I do know that something needs to happen, but I'm not sure how I can help the situation.

For now, he shuts up when I point out his flaws in logic and reveal that he's still got lots to learn about his demeanor.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

hello devranters,

been a while, past few weeks have been a painful one for me.

I finally got that second monitor and also built the small home server( I'll give details in another rant).

been a lot going on around me, there's a protest going on and a lot of young "unarmed" people including children killed, lots of gory images, all we were asking for was to stop police brutality, they're still shooting at people. it's a lot going on here. I can't even concentrate. I took some time off social media because all the bodies I was seeing was beginning to get into my head.
I really can't Express how I feel right now. we were expecting the international community(I really dont know who exactly) to come to our aid, lol
It's all over Twitter. images, videos, everything.
I just hope everything gets better.

the image is my new setup. I just log hello world on the console and that's all I do with it.
my table is basically two wooden slabs supported by textbooks on chairs(at last I found use for them since I never read them in school ). server is under the table.

keep us in your prayers. thanks

Going to sleep with a newly gained 4k milestone! I'm gonna have good dreams :)

I never thought anyone would actually like me on this platform when I joined last month, but I guess I was wrong. I got along with a few awesome people, which I'm gonna list right below. Other than that, I'm glad to be a part of the community :)

The people I got along with the most:
- Linuxxx, the privacy superstar
- ewpratten, the young programming genius
- devTea, the compulsive upvoter
- Condor, the account deleter
- Alice, the pink freak
- Stuxnet, which I kinda forgot the first time I wrote this (sorry!)
- Almost everyone on here!

To be clear, those are people I enjoy talking with, they might not feel the same way. I just wanted to thank those who made me smile the most here.

My biggest dev regret is that I did not intervene when we decided to use WP for a huge website.
1 year after going live I had to add new features and translations; imagine the PITA-level!

Young me was too reluctant.

Ok so to recap, we had shit beginning. We couldn't find client like 3 months and thank god that we agreed that we don't register the firm right away. If we did we would be broke a long time ago.

We found first client and he wanted to build some scrapers with gui. So me being BackEnd developer I created API for scraping (boredom) and my friend created website for that api and I just created gui that displays that site. The project was about 1200$. And since there are 3 of us we splited it into 3x400$.

After that it was again really hard to find clients again. We thought of quitting and just going to uni or something but we really didn't want to and anyways we needed to get money for uni ourselfs if we wanted to go.

So we said that as we are not paying anything and not losing money we will continue as long as we can.

And after we managed to get a hold of it and now we have 2 clients and after we finish them we have 2 more.

So I think the most important thing is that you help your coworkers. My friend who finds clients had a rough time at the beggining as I mentioned. So all 3 of us got together and started spamming people for few weeks. That's how we found our first client.

So now we are running. Not a milion dollar company but we are happy that we are doing what we love and that we have money doing it. We aim higher but we don't want to hurry and screw things up as we are young still.

Also thank you for getting interested after 300 days :)

My ex boss wants me to finish some stuff stuff for his company, which means month or two or more without getting paid, while my current job pays me 5 times more then my previous job.. No way I'll make my priority something that doesn't even give some money. Yes I'm young, yes I learned a lot in your company,but I am paying my bills, I have to eat something, and there is no fucking way I'm going to spend that much time in something that gives me nothing.

You remember that turtle game where you draw stuff? And lemmings. My dad got me playing with those at a young age. And one time I was ill as a kid, he took me into work with a briefcase full of lego, he woked away quietly while the rest of the office set doom up for me. Pretty awesome.

The coolest bug I ever found:
was a simple button on my first website ~2002 that said "Don't Click Me!" and was supposed to popup a dialog saying "I told you not to click me!" When pressed in IE on my middle school network it would spit the message out of the library printer... Oh to be young again