Nobody asks about your education because you have to self-educate to pass an interview.

Usually, you work for a foreign company. And usually, you pay small taxes because you're not counted as an employee.

You pay lots of money to volunteers helping your country's army. I think every volunteer knows IT-workers help the army a lot. Though others help too, more or less.

Not a horror. I'm rewriting services.

It started as a help request. I was asked to help with completing a service dealing with push notifications which was a research prototype. It was suggested to keep core part of it, but it was so awful that I just removed all files and wrote the service from scratch.

The second service had been developed for more than a year by a junior and then by our manager who wanted to complete it as fast as possible, without taking care of code quality. Then I was asked to take over the project and after some time I agreed with one condition: I'll have 1 month on takeover. But when I looked at the code, it became clear that it's much faster and better to rewrite everything except API and database than to takeover existing code.

The third service dealing with file exchange was working, but the junior who wrote it advised to rewrite it because it was a very simple service. So, I initiated rewriting, designed a new API and reviewed the final result.

And now I'm dealing with the fourth one. It was developed in my team but not under control. Now, when I "inherited" this complicated project, I decided to rewrite it because it should be simple, but it doesn't. It features reflection, layers inside layers, strange namespaces, strange solution structure. And that's after months of refactorings and improvements. So, wish me luck because I want to keep part of the infrastructure, but I don't know if it's possible.

Is it me or software subscriptions make developers lazy?

There is a great photo editing software: Capture One. Every year they release a new major version, so users need to buy an upgrade. In the past developers packed a bunch of big changes into major update, also they released 3 minor updates yearly, and every minor update brought some cool features. But then they added subscription model which was cheaper then perpetual model. And at the same time major updates became not that cool. Developers started to add enterprise features needed by museums, features involving other camera brands users, changes targeted at newbies and so on. For perpetual model users most of these changes are not worth 80-255 EUR yearly (depends on license type and offs) but is ok for subscription model users because they continue using the software and even small updates and enhancements are fine for them.

Not every major update is that weak but many of them are not worth upgrade. And developers are not motivated to do more cool stuff because subscription model users will continue paying for their subscriptions.

Top reason to not be a dev? There are so many ways to shoot yourself in a foot. Some of them are creative, some of them are fun. Unless it happens to you.

I guess all other genders were invented to make some developers stop using bool for gender field

- Can antivirus create a file it cannot scan?
- Easily.

A very experienced PM/WebDev came to us. His resume was fantastic but a bit strange. He wrote he had been working for 15 years but his experience in C# was 18 years. Though I was sceptical about this guy, others expected him to be a .NET guru. So, the interview began. The candidate described his brilliant career, then he said he wanted to move forward as a programmer and work with the newest technologies. It wasn't easy to ask him basic questions but they were in the list, so we needed to start with questions for juniors. I asked him to tell us about value types and reference types, and the answer was: about what? I repeated the question, and he said he didn't know about such complex things. I knew his resume was strange but I was disappointed. It turned out that our candidate didn't know C# at all.

My best code review was when my merge request was accepted in less than a minute after creation. It was simple but I expected more time on review and accept action.

"Ideal" online banking:
1. Force users to change passwords often.
2. Implement possibility to login if forgot password.
3. Make it impossible to chage password if forgot one.

1. Write already refactored code.
2. Get rid of all legacy.
3. Interesting tasks.

auto water = new Water();
auto wine = reinterpret_cast<Wine>(water);
// C++. Miracles happen

Simply walking. While walking I'm getting many ideas how to implement my features/changes. Especially when they are interesting.

Important merge request howto:
- Hey, I implemented very important server change and it doesn't break compatibility with current clients!
- Cool, but we don't need this compatibility code. We'll adopt our clients as soon as the merge request is accepted.
- Ok, I removed support of current clients.
- Cool, but it's too dangerous to adopt our clients rights now. We'll accept your merge request later. Some other day... somewhere... some other time...