Me and a fellow friend started working as a freelancer.

of 3 projects that we have:

One has a terrible code (like really nasty and over engineered to the maximum). albeit each new feature is a challenge to our sanity... they pay are are somewhat nice.

Another after we did the job they don't want to pay (thankfully we are on a platform that is like the middle man for work, they already have the money so should be "trivial") because they say we did not do what they asked. Brother, the 2 A.M. is not an hour to be called, and we did all the little shitty task they askend AND the original tasks...

And in the last one we hired a team to work with us because we don't have more hours in a day... and they only rename some vars, call it a day, ignoring the task on the sprint and they wanna get paid for the "job"

I just wanna drink a few pints of guinness...

nee rule in office: if you are taking leave on a wfo day, you must come to work on wfh day in the same week. even if your whole team is working remotely.

wtf!?
I am being punished to take an emergency leave because i was in a er room taking breaths off an Oxygen cylinder?

what is the point of this rule? just day Directly that its 5 days a week. why even give a fake illusion of 3 days office

if i try to reject this rule, i need to take double leaves... leave on wfo as well on wfh day

i am tired of being in such an exploiting company. If only my country wasn't in the middle of war and I wasn't getting any worse in terms of health, i would have quit even without a job offer in hand

Someone's going to be fired. Not me. When I joined my current company I was severely unwell. The survival rate for the state I was in was only slightly better than cancer (at 2 years less than 3 in 4 survive). I told work all of this. As far as I can tell they did nothing. As far as I can tell they didn't belive me. They've now got shitty about my performance and have actually asked for an independent review of my health. It is bad. It's significantly better than it was and it probably sounds worse than it is, but it is bad. They don't even know how much worse it was when I joined because they DIDN'T GET AN ASSESSMENT LIKE THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO. Someone is getting fired. HR hasn't responded to my emails since last Tuesday when they got the assessment. The only person that's said anything to me is my manager, he was in a bit of a grump last Wednesday (I don't think they'd told him yet) but he's being nice today, not a single word of criticism.

Someone is getting fired.

My sister bought an Acer A315-44P laptop in which the keyboard and the top cover are one unit and everything else is built onto that part, meaning that replacing the keyboard involves disassembling the entire laptop, the keyboard is among the most expensive replacement parts, and it's unique to the model. This is already infuriating and it's hard to attribute it to gross incompetence rather than deliberate malice motivated by unchecked greed, but what makes it completely indefensible is that their European parts distributors don't stock this part for most models so third party repair shops can't easily obtain one.

But to seal the whole ridiculous charade, THE FIRST-PARTY REPAIR SHOP DOESN'T PICK UP THE FUCKING PHONE. I've already capitulated, just accept my fucking money! What, do they really expect that if I have to go out and buy another laptop because they made it hard to fix, they won't fix it, and won't let me fix it, that I'll ever buy Acer again? What is the strategy here? Do they think they're Apple, so people take this bullshit? But even Apple has a repair service! I don't understand this business model at all.

A shout out to those considering deleting their dR account [esp. old timers here] and still on the fence. If you can -- don't.

If you're an old timer here, chances are you actually dev-ranted about real dev issues and possibly posted a solution found after all the frustration.

If you delete your acc, all these posts will disappear. Leave them be. Let them be a contribution to the community, to your fellow devs.

If this platform is no longer worth your time [can't blame you, really], you can simply log out and not come back here :)

Have you ever proposed great ideas to the company, yet they were rejected time after time, only for some half-assed golden favorite boy to steal the show for you with their half-assed idea?

I mean, now I understand that once you've been long enough in the industry, you express a deep, long sigh at least once a day. Plus, it affects your mental health. Not giving a fuck and just working on yourself more and your personal projects is crucial.

Once upon a time, there was a young, clean-shaven dev.
Soon in his career the smooth faced dev realized he had a knack for cloud setup. He understood permissions and network configurations, he could tell apart security groups from access groups, he could get all the information needed for an IPSec VPN in a single breath.
But if things got really tough, if the network layout was really messy, if the security settings too arcane, some older, bearded senior dev would come to solve everything.
Time passed, the junior dev got better at stuff, switched companies many times, solved a million problems, delivered countless projects, attended infinite meetings - twice - and, as often is the case, the senior devs, one by one, left the companies and run ever more scarce each day.

One day, a long, loooong time after his first meeting, the once young dev was solving network problems. Weird ones. Tough security requirements. Poorly documented cloud services. For hours, the dev and his colleagues toiled away, chipping at the problem without getting at its core.
The silence fell in the meeting. Everybody looking at each other, waiting for someone to say something.
Then they all looked at the dev, their eyes crying for help.
And the dev realized that he hadn't shaved in weeks.

-------‐‐-------------------------------
I've shaved since then.
And I did solve the problem. Took many more hours, though.

Holy fucking shit, I can't stand this corporate framework they use for this banking app on which I've been working on for 2 months.

I’ve spent the last damn month just building three basic screens, and now my very first PR is buried under 50 fucking comments. Half of them exist purely because their shitty framework has multiple versions stacked and stitched together with so many workarounds that you need so much domain knowledge that intuition or actual dev experience goes out the window.

They’ve abstracted real app development into oblivion. It’s a CRUD app, but they've over-engineered it so much they’re now creating their own problems — just so they can specialize in solving them. It's become this self-sustaining nightmare where they make themselves irreplaceable... and simultaneously unemployable anywhere else.

I genuinely have no idea what I’m doing with my life anymore. The original plan was six months here, grab a mortgage, fuck off, and go back to contracting.

Now I’m stuck questioning my sanity every time I open this project or have to listen to another lecture from my 'buddy' about how everything that I'm doing is wrong.

I've had to create a very simple frontend feature connected to an API. That part works flawlessly but we have rewritten a bunch of code in the system for a certain hardware device.

Now the person that was working on the backend just said today he has no device to test it on lab environment. Neither does any colleague apparently

And guess who got a meeting with the CEO, COO, sales people and the project manager for a demo of that said feature :D

I give up.

I have to make a bunch of disparate things work together, in an otherwise easy-sounding ask, and they’re all broken. Every one of them is broken. Even links between them are broken. Devs hardcoding incorrect values; devs pushing broken code, broken dependencies, broken configs. The orchestration is broken. The containers are broken. The NATS/gRPC flow is broken. Nothing works out of the box; many of the pieces require config and env hacking to run, and when they do run, the data formats don’t match between services (nor do e.g. account IDs). I can’t do it anymore. I was so burned out before this ticket that I couldn’t look at anything work related without feeling physical pain. And now this.

I’ve spent weeks just getting things to run and talk, and being ignored when I ask for help. There have been walls every step of the way, and I’m still not done. I can’t do this anymore.

A blackbox seo tool that was made by aliens we use says that a couple of our WordPress sites are loading very slowly, so I enable caching through nginx and increase the resources available to them through high capacity fpm pools. They scan again and almost nothing has changed with the page load score.

So I look in lighthouse, which I just learned about, and I find that several of the pages have several MB size images. So that means I'll have to mogrify the entire uploads directory to try to get the size down.

It also suggests I use avif to save a ton of data, which I'm torn on. I hate downloading an image and it not being a normal format that everything can open. But my sites are not image sharing sites, so it's a lot less annoying to the user since they will never realize they're getting an avif. That also means I will have to redo all the image links to point to the avif instead of the original, which sounds like the least fun activity ever.

Another thing that I keep seeing is that Elementor is just slow and slow page loads are part of the deal. If we have to scrap Elementor, that means I will have to be more involved in developing the WordPress sites and I really don't want to.

messy backend API. root level payload object has a property that is being repeated in a property that takes an array of objects where this same property exists in each object in this array.

why do people work in a messy manner like this? why pass the same data twice in the exact same request?

(lead architect is smart, but holy fuck is his work a goddamn mess of technical debt and hurts my brain and productivity)

Watching someone at a conference trying to play a video in their presentation on Windows PowerPoint. It’s painful to see. No audio. They then ripped the video from YouTube. It still wouldn’t play even in Windows Media Player. They’re still fiddling with it while the speaker and audience trade dad jokes. If I hooked up my Mac it would immediately work. How do Windows users live like this?

My company is making is sit through what can better be described as "The Dundees".
Those useless, time wasting, self aggrandizing "award cerimonies" that companies use to... dunno, I think to stroke management's ego.
I guess it's part of their compensation package, right there with making the hottest employees wear revealing clothing in order to be "engaged" in "informal team building exercises".
Frankly, I'm glad my sixteen-years-after-my-navy-days ass doesn't qualify.

Fuuuck, why can't they just give themselves bonuses for being "such engaging person-bosses" and let the rest of us just work? Corruption used to be a quick and easy affair. Now it requires soooo much fanfare.

I've started messing with C++ again, and it's kinda fun :)

I'm a fan of modular systems, so I've decided to build a little proof of concept for plugin loading.

A plugin is basically just a shared library which exposes a class that extends the Plugin abstract class and implements some lifecycle methods.

Then a plugin file has a system specific PLUGIN_EXPORT create_plugin()... function that just returns an instance of the plugin.

I've decided to use a super simple event bus for communicating from the host system to the plugin and vice versa, it's supplied in a PluginContext class which is supplied to the plugin upon initialisation.

Loading the plugins is done via LoadLibraryA(...) or dlopen(...).

Of course I'm freeing/closing them again at the end of the host system lifecycle. I hope to eventually implement some form of HMR.

Idunno why I'm sharing this; The system has zero purpose other than learning, but I've figured that implementing plugins in a "lower" level language, rather than typescript with node is more fun :)

Overnight, our networking dept patched some systems, which unexpectedly caused a connecting system unable to work. That system was our alerting layer, which didn't/couldn't send out the alerts (phone calls, Teams messages, emails, etc) that alerting wasn't working.

This morning when networking came in, they saw the issue (our backup alerting system was sending emails all night long).

Instead of "Oh no, maybe we should have a process in place to verify patching X systems doesn't degrade Y systems", the various teams are dog-piling on alerting (my responsibility). VPs are now getting involved. They are saying things like "There should have been a monitoring system to monitor the alerting!!!". Which there is, the email back up alerting. Must be a dozens of messages in the team chat all pointing the finger that 'alerting should have worked', even though *those server clusters were all down*. My boss tried to chime in with common sense saying "If our infrastructure team can't guarantee 100% uptime on the clusters, then this will happen again. The issue happened once in the 5+ years we've been using this framework. We can spend time and money creating yet another monitoring system, which could fail too, or accept the reality that sometimes things break. We fix it and do what is reasonable so the issue doesn't happen again. In my opinion, paying for another solution isn't feasible in this situation."

Team chat is silent right now, but my spidey sense is tingling.

Client began micromanaging our project :/ . Now we have to log our hours on each task and then replicate that in another time tracking system. Double-accounting...

And we do not get the Jira's Tempo plugin to see a summary of what hours we've logged.

It's reached the point where now I have to create a task to cover for the hour spent for time logging alone :/

damn it. It was a fun project though.

Daily driving alpine linux on my laptop. Excellent distro:
- Probably the most secure linux in the world, with very low attack surface and a lot of money being spent to keep it secure — alpine is the most popular linux for docker containers, and everyone uses docker nowadays
- no systemd (but openrc, way lighter)
- no apt (but apk, the fastest deps manager for linux bar none)
- no glibc (but musl, way lighter)
- no sudo (but doas, lighter)
- wayland and gnome work out of the box
- flatpak for heavy ubuntu-centric apps like some browsers. Librewolf, Firefox and Chromium don't require flatpak, they're in the main index
- I couldn't figure out secure boot in ubuntu. I read all the manuals, to no avail. GPT-4.5 couldn't figure it out either. It was a deal-breaker for me — I need secure boot. In alpine, I spent one morning (today) and got up and running relatively easily. It just works
- everything is stupid fast
- usually, in minimal distros, you expect the desktop part to work, but dev & serious parts to be a PITA. In alpine, both work flawlessly bc it's a server-oriented distro

Alpine ftw!

Keeping up the tradition!
https://devrant.com/rants/15030806/...

Now powered by the awesome Claude 4!!!! The latest bleeding edge gem in the LLM trend that by the bold claims of big tech and various youtubers is stunning and will replace programmers/insane/godsmacking

This time, I decided to post because I was on the verge of a mental breakdown and I had a firsthand experience and a bit of free time, so instead of waiting that the rage boils down, I just took the chance and so we have a fresh AI experience to proof my previous rants.

Problem:
I have an application that manages interactions between a Mediator pattern between Kafka, some http listeners and other stuff (Rabbitmq, Redis (redis= another shit) etc etc)

Kafka handling was already done, i needed to exacly replicate what was being done with kafka for http. I said, heck, we have AI, it's good to do bovine stupid work, why not let him copy the whole structure, they have also agents on copilot on vs code, and they pulled out Claude 4, let's give it faith again.

Big error.
Beside the havoc the fucking agentic AI not being able to fully copy an already existing pattern and scaffolding, it did half shit wrong.

One of the most frustrating parts, since today I have an example, was this (summarized version of the prompt because I was very much more specific also giving the AI files and pointers to the code and explaining it):

PROMPT:"I have to return fake http transports, just copy what exists for kafka and adapt it to a new transport type called "Http", this is the structure {json with the class}

AI: "I need to see the current ITransportsItemResponse interface first to understand the structure, then I'll modify ...... BLAH BLAH"

Of course I had to review the whole code.

PROMPT:"any valid reason why you dumb shithead didn't respect the IGetKafkaConnectionsItemResponse and generic IGetTransportsItemResponse format and you pulled out of your ass a full blown IGetHttpConnectionsItemResponse with extra properties when compared to IGetKafkaConnectionsItemResponse"

AI: "You're absolutely right, I fucked up. Looking at the IGetHttpConnectionsItemResponse interface, it has way more properties than the basic IGetTransportsItemResponse and IGetKafkaConnectionsItemResponse interfaces. BLAH BLAH wall of text reasoning"

Then it modified the api calls to suit the kafka objects and didn't update any class of the Http transports

PROMPT:"So you tought it was a good idea to leave the #sym:IGetHttpConnectionsItemResponse like it is respect to #sym:IGetKafkaConnectionsItemResponse ? Why? And answer the why don't apologize like a little wuss"

AI: "I left them different because they represent different domain concepts... BLAH BLAH EXPLANATIONS WALL OF TEXT"

Now ai tought it was good to do this and that but....

PROMPT: "In your fucking careful analysis didn't you reallize the "items" object are a basic representation and in the fuckin same folder there is also the object with the full set of properties?"

Literally it missed objects used in the same folder for different scopes and modified stuff without caring.

AI: "You're absolutely right. I missed that there are TWO different response types BLA BLAH"

I won't continue to not get too lenghty than it already is but the point is:

AI IS RETARDED.
People say it will replace programmers.
People says agents are the future.

Sad reality it's an overglorified broken ball of if/else that can't do shit well beside bovine work.

No amount of tutoring it with careful prompts, explainig the code and whatever else is going to fix it.
I've used gpt since gpt 3 and no model has been up to anything good, not even NLP. They suck also at the sole scope they were invented for.

I tried to ask GPT to make a curriculum based on another, I gave it the example curriculum and another one with the informations.

I carefully explained that it must not be a copy of the other, they are 2 different roles and to play by fantasy to make it look it was written by 2 different persons and to not copy stuff from the other.

Hope lost. It looked like the other curriculum was copied over and some words swapped, lol.

What a fucking joke, lmao, I am studying deep learning and machine learning to get on the bandwagon to make my professional figure more appealing, but I can already feel this is a waste of time.

What we were promised:
- The world as seen in Frutiger Aero
- Solving chess by running minimax on quantum computers
- Fully automated luxury communism powered by blockchain
What we were delivered:
- The phone selling machine in Walmart values your $700 phone at "$59 Today", but when you hit "Cancel", it bumps the price to "$79 Today" while stealing your data via USB. You can sell the phone for $400 on Ebay.
- Microsoft will try to bruteforce your zip archive's password if you upload it to OneDrive
- Butthole logos