As if dealing with an unstable infrastructure and being unable to properly test microservices I work on Isn't enraging enough now developers at my workplace have to double as Ops too and have to configure themselves the K8s pods and containers in which our code runs. That would be ok for me if it isn't for the fact which we should do that trough company's shitty documented and totally leaky abstractions.

It's a career suicide wanting to transitioning to desktop developement? I'm tired of fighting with tons of external dependencies (VPN, database, other microservices) just to test a microservice or a piece of front-end, I just want to focus on code.

My job description is software developer but I'm spending more time playing the sysadmin to keep my local developement environment working than what I spend actually coding.

I’m struggling in studying and that’s seriously holding me back, regardless of the type of technical book I’m reading I’m always in a fight with my brain. Even if I enjoy the topic and then I’ll enjoy using what I read while I study I struggle to learn more than 1-2 chapters (sometimes even less) at time then my head starts to hurt, my focus drifts away and if I force myself to go ahead my brain just refuses to store the new informations, it feels like filling a full tank.

At this point I should have learned C++ and Swift and started to contribute to projects which aren’t overdone web apps but all I have are two half read books which silently “judges” me anytime I open my eBook library and I dread returning to having associated them to headache and frustration and the only things I read this year are design patterns (which haven’t found a single real life use since then) and F# (which I never used with the exception of some little demos and is now slowly fading away in my memory).

Have you got any study advice to help me dealing with this frustrating situation?

Did your motivation ever suffered for company enforced tooling/stack?

I'm striving to be as adaptable as possible to not bitch if I have to use Angular insted of React or Java instead of Go but the stack which I was forced to use for the last two years is killing the joy I find in programming.

I'm talking about Spring WebFlux a stack which in theory is very promising (IO performances of NodeJS but in Java) but in practice is a pain to use: it makes polymorphism very hard forcing to rewrite tons of code, it significantly reduces your library choice, even after studying a damn book about it debugging remains a huge headache, unit testing often requires hacks and workarounds to be done...

Programming with it always feels like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and I'm catching myself in procrastinating more and more, initially I feared I was burning out or losing my passion for the field but I noticed which the rare times I get to use a more canonical stack like .NET my motivation instantly returns but sadly I can use it only for few hours and then I return to WebFlux and my passion flees again.

I'm considering to look for another job but sadly lately I neglected my GitHub so I might have hard times in finding it.

I understand unit testing and its value but I’m really struggling when I have to mock databases or other external resources. It’s normal or others have this annoyance?

Due to non work related shit I'm struggling to focus, I can still wrap my head around programming (even if with significant struggle) but I cannot keep up with cloud/containers/microservices/cool new tech of the day

I like Mac but it’s annoying how it went from a product aimed mainly to a technical (in early 2000s OS X presentations were rich of in-depth details) or creative audience to a product aimed mainly to hypebeasts, basic Starbucks girl and tech illiterates which believes which sending a file trough Wi-Fi is cutting edge technology.

Electron is a plague, MSN in 2009 had far more features than Discord today but was able to run like a champ on Pentium 4 PCs with 1GB of RAM.

While I'm coding I'm listening the whole "Chris Chan: A Comprehensive History" in background

I miss when my job was just about coding, I could spend entire workdays writing C# or TypeScript while listening rock or metal with few meetings in between, being very passionate in programming and computers sometimes I found was I doing so engaging which I spent more than my 8 hours workday on company's code base trying to improve it and my older coworkers were very happy with my code.

Then a "promotion" happened, I went to work directly with a client, a huge enterprise which is working on renovating his internal software and here the fun stopped. Long useless meetings are a regular occurrence, there are absurdly long procedures to do everything (for example since CI/CD is leaky we have to do dozens of workaround to get a microservice deployed) and having very little written documentation this gives an huge advantage to people which actually enjoy to spend their entire workdays on a MS Teams call over "lone programmers" like me which actually feel significant fatigue in doing that (alone sometimes I was able to log 12+ hours of programming daily between work and personal projects while after 3 hours of PP I feel drained) since the information passes in meetings/pair programming and I dread both.

I feel which my passion is still there, I still enjoy coding, tinkering with Linux and BSD, broadening my knowledge with technical books and having passionate conversation about tech but I dread my job, sometimes I try to look at it under a more optimistic eyes but most of the times I just end disappointed.

Any of us had annoyances with people with “a million dollar app idea” but what about these which gives unsolicited career advice?

I’m dealing with a boomer which keeps trying me to change my career and work into cyber security (because TV told him it’s a well paid field) despite me kindly telling him for multiple times which it’s not going to happen because I won’t throw away a career I love to work in a field which seems deadly boring to me (I love anything about coding from design to typing for hours on Vim meanwhile the only thought of reading for hours obscure documentation to find potential vulnerabilities on a system kills my spirit).

It's nice wanting to follow the best practice but many Java programmer have the bad habit to overdo it making lasagna code which causes painful headaches to who needs to maintain it afterwards. This is just a little sample of the "paranoia driven development" many does in my company.

It seems which the crazy enterprise microservice project which I'm doing (an awful distributed monolith splitted in 10+ microservices, hard to test and requiring continued context switching and running on an unreliable platform) has finally won over my brain.
It's so boring and frustrating to work with which I lost all my ability to focus, I used to be able to program well even under significant distress but more than two years of continued boredom, repetitive tasks and frustrations destroyed my motivation and with that my ability of focusing died. It doesn't matter if I'm at home or in the office, my brain is like a car stuck in neutral gear and I struggle to focus in every task.

A sweaty furry sodomizing a dead dog would still be less disgusting than the codebase on which I have to work, some highlights are:
- The same class repeated 40 times with little variations instead of using some decent parametrization
- Inexistent encapsulation and separation of concerns, most changes requires to modify and recompile 2-3 indipendent Maven projects
- Abuse of inheritance which instead of being used to create "is-a" relationship as it should be it's used to reuse some methods of a class in another instead of using Spring dependency injection as we should be

It would be understandable in a 20 years old legacy projects but in something which started 2 months ago it drives me mad, I tried to fight to change it but in the big enterprise to which I'm "body-rented" it's impossible

Why MacOS have to suck more at every release?
If it's on me I'd be happy to keep using Leopard

The last major version made IntelliJ Idea unbearably slow on my 1 year old Intel Core i7 PC.

Fuck it, as soon as I have one hour free I'm going to reinstall Java extensions on Neovim. Stack traces sucks enough even without seconds of lags when you try scrolling them.

I used to hate email and to consider it a chore but after adopting "inbox zero", switching from web based shit to a proper client and automating the management of the many automatic notifications I get everyday I'm starting to think which when well managed email is still one of the best asynchronous communication tools, far better than sluggish and distracting chats like Teams or Slack which have their place but I think which currently they're pretty overrated.

Damn, I hate Spring and most CoC frameworks. We’re using it from 2 years, I read most of the docs and it still gives issue for basic taks which takes hours to fix because I have to guess the exact convention which allows the program to process corner cases which aren’t explained in the docs. Yes, in the end the code is more elegant but it’s worth it when issues which could be solved in minutes by a trivial if/else statement takes hours (rigorously on pair programming™️ since being one of the few which actually read the docs I end up with lots of calls for help for Spring related issues by other teammates) and huge headaches to fix following the framework’s way?

> Work with Spring Boot
> Find a bug in an official Spring Boot Plugin
> Open a GitHub issue offering to fix it yourself
> Wait a month
> "status: waiting for triage"

I love Pivotal Labs professionalism

Why building a library of React component should be this hard: I'm sick of Webpack, Babel, Typescript and all the shit which is duct taped together to build some damn widgets.

When used properly No-SQL databases are an incredible resource but my employer keeps hammering them in problems which could better be solved by traditional SQL databases in an attempt to be more "hip" and "cool".

This causes huge PITA in making the database work properly with the ORM we're using and waste of time since we're force to emulate basic features which are already exists in almost any SQL database (i.e. relational integrity) using No-SQL storage.

It's me or the "Reactive Functional" Spring WebFlux is a stupid fad? It's hard to train new developers on it, a PITA to debug and there isn't any study which proves which it brings better performance compared to the classic Spring MVC.

The big enterprise in which I work wants to mandate which we have to write a microservice for each individual HTTP endpoint, since we cannot even have an artifactory for code sharing the code duplication is going off the charts and having these microservices sharing a single DB we are creating a big and messy distributed monolith.

I love my Mac but damn, most MacOS releases are so damn useless, I won't do a major OS overhaul (updating from Big Sur to Montrey) just to get Share Play and the opportunity to watch movies together with my few Mac using friends, I don't need those fucking marketing driven bells and whistles, just give me a stable UNIX base an efficient and good looking UI and regular security patches and I'm good.

I would be happy to keep using Mavericks but without yearly MacOS release how Apple would be able to convince normies to replace their 10 years old MacBooks?

Almost 800MB of dependencies just to download the damn npm, sometimes I wonder if some part of the software developement world is going crazy

I’m excited because VM based languages such as Java are no longer in their prime on desktop and server and languages which compile directly to machine code (Go, Rust, Swift…) are finding a broader audience

WinUI looks nice and performs really well, I'm not a Windows fan but that's definitely a hidden Microsoft gem. It's a same which Microsoft was really late to the desktop development game and kept providing ugly frameworks until few years ago otherwise we could had a nice ecosystem on desktop apps on Windows as we have on macOS instead of tons of ugly and slow Electron based apps.

Unpopular opinion: although Windows 10 improved in the years Windows 7 is still better: Windows Search on 10 is almost useless and the control panel and many “modernised” system utilities often glitches, the system looks cruder and takes way more system resources than 7 without giving significant features in return.
Newer is not always better.

Unpopular opinion: unit tests are often overrated.

Although a well written test suite is almost essential in some parts of the application (I.E. business logic) I cringe when I see hundreds or thousands of line which “mocks” everything to test a micro service which just does CRUD operations on a database, in cases like that unit tests are just a waste of time because almost every operation involves a mock which may not behave like the real database and often needs to be rewritten when the code undergoes a huge refactoring. In these case a integration test suite is faster to write and way more helpful.

After more 3 years developing for the web I’m considering to learn Swift and Objective-C and then switch to iOS hoping to find a job which involves less multitasking (now I’m split between front-end, back-end, DevOps and other), what’s do you think about a switch like this?