Android studio in my case. lol

Something I've noticed over my many jobs. "Professional" means entirely different things at different jobs, and doesn't follow fields either. That is, "Professional" in one field is understandably different from another, but businesses inside the same field also have different definitions of it.

It's almost as if "Professional" is just a euphemism for saying "we expect you to act a certain way, but are being passive aggressive about it so we can't be called out for it".

Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.

Some context first and then the rant!

Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.

Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!

Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.

In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)

He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.

The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.

Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).

Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.

Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!

Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.

Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).

Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.

From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.

I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.

Modern web development is fucked. Just absolutely, totally screwed up.

I want to create a simple to do list web app. Look for a tutorial: "OK guys, this is really easy, it just takes five minutes."

First step, install these:
- Git
- NPM
- NodeJS
- Express
- MongoDB
- Docker
- React

Second step, npm install about one million modules. Don't question what they do or why they're there.

Before you know it, six hours have passed and you've got a code base of 3GB and you haven't even _started_ on your app.

FUCK that shit! I can create this web app with Internet Explorer and Notepad.

I want to stop charging my e-scooter at around 85% because this will increase the battery life. To avoid always having to pull the plug at the right level, I made a stop circuit that goes between charging brick and e-scooter.

There's no processor involved, just a CMOS 555 used as inverting Schmitt Trigger which controls a power mosfet. Also two status LEDs and a start switch. The poti adjusts the cut-off level. Worked on first try, with only manual voltage and tolerance calculations beforehand!

Our client decided to save some $$. At the end of each business day teams downscale their environments before leaving and the next day scale them up in the morning to start working.

The idea is not bad, but they are a bit too ignorant to the fact that some environments are exceeding AWS APIs limits already (huge, HUGE accounts, huge environments, each env easily exceeding /26 netmask, not even taking containers into account). Sooo... scaling up might take a while. Take today for example:

- come in to the office at 7
- start scaling up
- have lunch
- ~15:00 scaleup has finished
- one component is not working, escalating respective folks to fix them
- ~17:00 env is ready for work
- 17:01 initiate scaledown process and go home

Sounds like a hell of a productive day!!!

Me: So i've cloned the iOS project, i've run carthage, but it won't build.. Have I done something wrong?

Devs: Oh read this doc on github, we do loads of custom stuff. The depenedncy manager can't do it all by itself. You need to run `./scripts/boostrap.sh`

Me (another day): I've switched branches and i'm getting all these errors. Any ideas?

Devs: Ah this happens when someone modifies xyz. Read this pinned slack message. Run `./scripts/bootstrap.sh` again.

Me (another day): I've switched branches again, getting different errors, re-running boostrap didn't fix it.

Devs: Ah yeah, this happens when someone modifies abc. You need to run `./scripts/nuke.sh` and then boostrap when this happens.

Me (another day): Guys When I try to run the prod app its not building any ideas?

Devs: Ah yes have a look at this confluence link. You need to run `./scripts/setup_debug_release.sh`, then nuke, then boostrap and you'll be good.

Me: .... ok

Devs: Oh btw very important! do not commit any changes from `./scripts/setup_debug_release.sh`. It will break everything!

Me: ... no i'm sorry we have a much bigger problem than that. We need to talk ... like right now

😂😂😂😂😂😂

As soon as my own projects income stabilize and outweigh my salary I’ll quit.

I haven’t even read sicp and continued to improve my dev knowledge just because I already can make something that can make me some money. So why spend health and energy polishing interview-passing skills for suits if I personally don’t need them?

World doesn’t revolve around software development.

I'd love to develop stuff I find cool for a living and currently doing a first try but right now I can keep this up for a few more months until I have to get a job again :/

Seriously, the amount of motivation I have right now is goddamn high but money is going to become an issue soon.

Make enough passive income to quit my job, live in the mountains and develop something i like without feeling guilty for not using the time to work on money yielding projects instead.

me: I don't have access to X project

PM: you don't have access to X project?

me: no, I don't have access to X project

PM: don't worry I'll take care of that

2 min. later

PM: so, you were saying ... ?

me: that I don't have access to X project

1 month later

me: I don't have access to X project

PM: you don't have access to X project?

Boss's son (who, despite being 19 and having no formal education or experience, was head of the technical team, consisting of one ops guys, one part-time web developer, and one part-time data entry/programmer) brought a cross bow to work. Just strolled in with it one day and took it back to his office, walking past all the visibly uncomfortable employees. One of the marketing ladies said to him "wow that's a bit scary" but it had no effect. He also wore a trench coat and kept a flying squirrel in a sock in his pocket.

At another place (not doing dev work) I had my manger tell me to type more slowly to get all my hours in, as I was promised 20/wk but they had about 3 hours of work for me to do. I quit after a month.

I actually lent a girl an umbrella yesterday which takes the total number of girls I've made wet this year to -1.

note: Not the worst dev I've interviewed but worst I've worked with.
A guy who worked in my company before me "HARDCODED" the entire calendar for next 10 years starting 2016 in dictionaries and arrays in Python for a project.

When our sales guy came by for the 200000000000th time on a day to boast about how good he advised someone on a sales related matter.

Mate, we're Linux engineers and currently trying to fix shit up so why don't you get yourself a cup of shut the fuck up.

My mate bought me a peach stressball that smells like peaches every time you squeeze. It has now become my coding companion.

Toilets and race conditions!

A co-worker asked me what issues multi-threading and shared memory can have. So I explained him that stuff with the lock. He wasn't quite sure whether he got it.

Me: imagine you go to the toilet. You check whether there's enough toilet paper in the stall, and it is. BUT now someone else comes in, does business and uses up all paper. CPUs can do shit very fast, can't they? Yeah and now you're sitting on the bowl, and BAMM out of paper. This wouldn't have happened if you had locked the stall, right?

Him: yeah. And with a single thread?

Me: well if you're alone at home in your appartment, there's no reason to lock the door because there's nobody to interfere.

Him: ah, I see. And if I have two threads, but no shared memory, then it is as if my wife and me are at home with each a toilet of our own, then we don't need to lock either.

Me: exactly!

I just finished my thesis defense, one of the committee members obliterated me with incredibly difficult questions but it was so much fun to respond to this 40min smackdown after presenting all my work in 50 minutes. The battle has been won ladies and gentlemen, I am incredibly happy.

I showed a friend of mine a project I made in two days in Docker and Symfony php. It is a rather simple app, but it did involve my usual setup: Nginx with gzip/cache/security headers/ssl + redis caching db + php-fpm for symfony. I also used php7.4 for the lolz

He complained that he didn't like using Docker and would rather install dependencies with composer install and then run it with a Laravel command. He insisted that he wanted a non-docker installation manual.

I advised him to first install Nginx and generate some self-signed certificates, then copy all the config files and replace any environment-injected values (I use a self-made shell script for this) with the environment values in the docker-compose files.

Then I told him to download php-fpm with php 7.4 alpha, install and configure all the extensions needed, download and set up a local Redis database and at last re-implement a .env file since I removed those to replace them with a container environment.

He sent an angry emoji back (in a funny way)

God bless containerized applications, so easy to spin up entire applications (either custom or vendor like redis/mysql) and throw them away after having played with them. No need to clutter up your own pc with runtime environments.

I wonder if he relents :p

Why does ppl think that Saturday Sunday means u need to go out and only then u can enjoy ur life...

Thanks, Google. Very cool.

Today was fucking awesome!

I always wanted to do a project in C++ since I've been more of a Java guy for years now.
And today, I finally wrote a full console program in C++! (For windows, it's a .exe)

The purpose of that program is to show if a file has a file lock on it (because of copying for example).

It started as simple as that, but got complicated quickly:
- It needs colors! So I added colors.
- Just a single file? Boring. I need wildcards, so I can put a * for anything in the file name! Jup.
- Just one directory? Boring. I need a recursive directory walk! Got it.
- But wait! There has to be an option to switch between recursive and wildcard/single mode! So I checked if the first argument equals "-r"! Hacky but works.
- Oh uh... that spams a lot now! The purpose was to show locked files, so I need another argument to specify that I only want to see locked files! Damn now it get's hard... I need a Linux-like command line argument parser (this -h and -s "hello" stuff). So I took the opportunity to write one myself! Done.
- Refactoring everything to use my new fancy parser...
- Adding more and more arguments, just because I can:
- "-d" hides "access denied" messages
- "-l" shows only locked files
- "-r" activates recursive directory walk
- "-f" formats everything nicely, basically printf("%-150.150s | %s", filename, locked); a maximum width which get's truncated if too long so everything lines up nicely
- "-h" which of course displays the help page
- "-w file" watches a file, if the file is locked it will refresh every 500ms, if it's still locked nothing happens, if it's unlocked, the program prints "unlocked" in green and exits. And yes, it does have a rotating line (something like this: "-" "\" "|" "/" "-" and so forth...)

That project was just awesome to make. I learn languages fastest if I just do a big project in them, and today, I really learned a lot.

Thank you for reading all this!

Engineers don't work on weekends. :')

I am beginning to hate the relationship between email and my clients. I never thought it would come to the point where email is the worst communication platform I've ever used because some of my clients simply don't know how to use it properly.

I have one client who never uses the subject header in his emails. This makes conversational threads very difficult to follow, and I can't just scan the inbox I have for him. I have to actually do searches on my emails just to find recent conversations.

For some reason nobody knows how to start a new email thread. I have multiple clients that will just take the last email that I sent them, regardless of what it's about, and start a new conversation completely unrelated to the other email by hitting"reply". I end up with email threads that are 60 to 100 emails long and contain many different subjects, which again makes it hard to find anything. Never mind that they've usually put two or three important attachments, or username password combinations, or other valuable information in there amongst all the noise.

Worst of all, I have a few clients and co-workers who insist on starting a new email thread whenever anything about a particular issue comes up. This means that just today I have five separate email threads about the same goddamn issue from the same damn person. Am I supposed to respond to each thread with the same damned information? One of these people is supposed to be both a media consultant and an SEO expert and really should know better. Also, if you do actually send me an email with a subject like "the robot.txt error", please don't give me one sentence about that and five paragraphs about what color you'd like the background to be. That's ridiculous. How the hell am I supposed to find that later? Especially since we already discussed this in the other email that sitting in my inbox.

I swear I am setting up a bug tracking system simply so that my clients can log in and leave me bug reports, and feature requests, and will stop filling up my poor email boxes with what amounts to piles and piles threads that I have to sort through.

For a person who suffers with a form of ADD this is extremely frustrating. Why is it so difficult for my colleagues and clients to write good emails with good subject lines, and reply to the right damn emails?

Am I just being too anal, or does this bother others as well?

Am I going crazy or am I just retarded?

Overheard from the room next to mine:
Person 1: My computer is frozen ..
Person 2 (Not a native English speaker): Did you try to shut down and shut up ?

TLDR : I left a company which doesn't understand the concept of email id and passwords.

Me (trying to login to the alumni website) *no register user option*

Customer support - you've to click on forgot password to create an account.
Me - Wonderful

*clicks on reset password*
*enters employee id, name, email, father's name, DOB, date of joining , date of leaving, current city because apparently if I just enter my employee id it is as if they never knew me. Sigh*
*your password will be sent to your email id*

Me - okay. *waits for two weeks because I assumed someone will manually go and create my account and email me, considering the state of system. *

After two weeks,

Me - I still haven't received my password on email after I created my account. Can you please check?

After one week,

Customer support - you need to click on forget password if you forgot your password.

Me - *inventing new curse words* I have not forgot my password, I never received it in the first place!

After one week,
Customer support - yes you'll receive your password on your email id.

Me - *runs out of curse words* seriously dude?
* proceeds to reset password*
System - your password has been reset. Your new password will be sent to your email id. *apparently anyone can reset passwords if you have the employee id, which is an integer*

After a week

Me - Am I going to ever receive the password? I've tried generating passwords, resetting my password. I never get my passwords. What should I do!!

Customer support - yes you need to click on Forgot password.

Me - are you fucking kidding me!!!
You fuckers need to be fired and replaced by a FAQ page which has no question and just a single answer, because a peanut has higher IQ than you. For any questions you may have, just reset password. Goddammit idiots!
Also, which email id are you sending my passwords to?

Customer support - myname@oldcompany.com

Me - you do realize that this is the alumni website for the company. Alumni means ex members.
Being ex members, you can assume we don't have access to our company email ids obviously?

Customer support - yes.

Me - how am I supposed to get the password using my old email id then?

Customer support - you need to click on forgot password option.

I think I should probably move to the Himalayas for my anger management issues. Plus it'll be probably easier to throw idiots off a mountain.

A girl just canceled our first date to watch Avenger's Endgame with her friends. Pres ++ to pay respects.

Okay, mine is actually mildly interesting.

I was, at the time, obsessed with operating systems. The only thing I knew how to do (and I only knew how to do it poorly!) was make websites. And thus, Frames(TM) was born.

It was really labored for what it was. The whole thing worked off iframes to create different "Windows" which you could drag around the screen in a typical window-based environment. It had a start menu (Without search - I wasn't that good yet), task bar, background image, the whole 9 yards.

Some highlights from that project:

- Not hosted anywhere. Everything was file:/// protocol
- Originally, everything was statically created, and I learned about document.createElement during this project
- To communicate between the "Operating system" and the different frames, I used localStorage, which was continuously exec'ing anything it could find. Smart smart boi.
- Of course, the only thing available was web storage. The "Hard drive" was about 5MB, and if you cleared browsing data, goodbye everything!

Hours and hours happily dumped into that project, but I am definitely happy it is gone forever.