My son is remote learning, 5th grade.

When the teacher calls on one of the student's named Alexa and asks a question... some kids with Alexa devices in their house get the answer for free....

"Pythonists don't comment, they write readable code."

Yea, tell that to the list comprehension with three lambdas

Cutting edge

Is it real that github are changing master to main? Does this mean I need to call my dungeon master main now? She’s not going to be happy...

Please do rename the "master" branch to "Führer". The umlaut will probably catch a bunch of applications that aren't UTF-8 ready.

I work for "a" company. This company has completely broken my desire to improve user experiences.

For instance, they have fetishized reducing the amount of clicks users have to go through to improve user productivity. Normally this is good, in their grossly mutated views, not so much.

They want ALL the data on a single page, and want people to use ctrl+f to find whatever they want on these pages instead of, ya know, a site-wide search(which fucking exists).

So this makes page times and UX horrible, some pages will take upwards of 2 minutes to completely load. 2 fucking minutes! My team and I had reduced these down to 15 seconds by reducing the data displayed and paginating it using some awesome JS lazy load functions. Not great by any real metric, but still a huge improvement.

You know who uses it out of 400 employees? Me. You know who still constantly gets complaints that the pages load really fuckin slowly? Still me!

Fuck these dumb asses and their retarded ideologies. They are stuck so far up 1990s ass they can practically TASTE Clintons' taint.

The culture is so toxic for developers it's absolutely abhorrent and depressing.

There is no freedom to do what you need to do because you're too busy doing the things they ask you to do. Follow that up with quarterly performance reports that bring up questions like, "What do you do for us?".

The only positive to working in this shithole is that they wouldn't dare fire you because they would never find anyone that would stay long enough to become an expert on this pile of shit. Over the last year we have gone through an entire 16 dev team, twice. That's 36 developers that just straight up quit in 12 months, and it's not like any of them worked together either. I would say 3-4 out of the first group met the second group, and 1-2 stuck around for the current group.

I don't normally rant like this, but I've been holding this shit in for a very long time and I can't hold it in.

Impossible deadlines are ubiquitous in our company. Our CTO has the opinion that development is a lightning-fast process that doesn’t require testing and deployment because every developer is a God.
It is normal to hear something like ”just develop it tomorrow morning, it is easy” from him, but in reality, it is never that easy.

One week, and it turned out to be worse than that.

I was put on a project for a COVID-19 program in America (The CARES Act). The financial team came to us on Monday morning and said they need to give away a couple thousand dollars.

No big deal. All they wanted was a single form that people could submit with some critical info. Didn't need a login/ registration flow or anything. You could have basically used Google Forms for this project.

The project landed in my lap just before lunch on Monday morning. I was a junior in a team with a senior and another junior on standby. It was going to go live the next Monday.

The scope of the project made it seem like the one week deadline wasn't too awful. We just had to send some high priority emails to get some prod servers and app keys and we were fine.

Now is the time where I pause the rant to express to you just how fine we were decidedly **not**: we were not fine.

Tuesday rolls around and what a bad Tuesday it was. It was the first of many requirement changes. There was going to need to be a review process. Instead of the team just reading submissions from the site, they needed accept and reject buttons. They needed a way to deny people for specific reasons. Meaning the employee dashboard just got a little more complicated.

Wednesday came around and yeah, we need a registration and login flow. Yikes.

Thursday came and the couple-thousand dollars turned into a tens of millions. The amount of users we expected just blew up.

Friday, and they needed a way for users to edit their submissions and re-submit if they were rejected. And we needed to send out emails for the status of their applications.

Every day, a new meeting. Every meeting, new requirements that were devastating given our timeframe.

We put in overtime. Came in on the weekend. And by Monday, we had a form that users could submit and a registration/ login flow. No reviewer dashboard. We figured we could take in user input on time and then finish the dashboard later.

Well, financial team has some qualms. They wanted a more complicated review process. They wanted roles; managers assign to assistants. Assistants review assigned items.

The deadline that we worked so hard on whizzed by without so much as a thought, much less the funeral it deserved.

Then, they wanted multiple people to review an application before it was final. Then, they needed different landing pages for a few more departments to be able to review different steps of the applications.

Ended up going live on Friday, close to a month after that faithful Monday which disrupted everything else I was working on, effective immediately.

I don't know why, but we always go live on a Friday for some reason. It must be some sort of conspiracy to force overtime out of our managers. I'm baffled.

But I worked support after the launch.

And there's a funny story about support too: we were asked to create a "submit an issue" form. Me and the other junior worked on it on a wednesday three weeks into the project. Finished it. And the next day it was scrapped and moved to another service we already had running. Poor management like that plagued the project and worked in tandem with the dynamic and ridiculous requirements to make this project hell.

Back to support.

Phone calls give me bad anxiety. But Friday, just before lunch, I was put on the support team. Sure, we have a department that makes calls and deal with users. But they can't be trained on this program: it didn't exist just a month ago, and three days ago it worked differently (the slippery requirements never stopped).

So all of Friday and then all of Saturday and all of Monday (...) I had extended panic attacks calling hundreds of people. And the team that was calling people was only two people. We had over 400 tickets in the first two days.

And fuck me, stupid me, for doing a good job. Because I was put on the call team for **another** COVID project afterwards. I knew nothing about this project. I have hated my job recently. But I'm a junior. What am I gonna say, no?

When Coronavirus become a household name, our Manager said:

"This is a good to time to build a real-time chat system like Zoom. If anyone is able to build something like it, it will help our company grow."

[Silence]

Manager: "There is a lot of demand."

[More silence]

Would you like to smile for 10 seconds? Read this short story:
*Story begins*
During World War II, numerous fighter planes were getting hit by anti-aircraft guns. Air Force officers wanted to add some protective armour/shield to the planes.
The question was "where"?
The planes could only support few more kilos of weight. Mathematicians were called for a short consulting project.
Fighter planes returning from missions were analysed for bullet holes per square foot.
They found 1.93 bullet holes/sq. foot near the tail of planes whereas only 1.11 bullet holes/sq. foot close to the engine.
The officers thought that since the tail portion had the greatest density of bullets, it would be the logical location for putting an anti-bullet shield.
A mathematician said exactly the opposite; more protection is needed where the bullet holes aren't - that is -around the engines.
His judgement surprised everyone. He said "He said We are counting the planes that returned from a mission. Planes with lots of bullet holes in the engine did not return at all".

Moral: Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.

Source: From the book -
"How Not To Be Wrong", by Jordan Ellenberg.

Solving one problem at a time:

While I was in university, I used to be a good programmer (which I still am :D ), my friends used to copy my code for the assignments. One day, the teacher (one of my my mentors) called me in his office and said, "this is your code".
I'm like, in my mind, "How did he know this?"
The teacher said, "If you let others copy your code one more time, I will fail you".
I nodded my head in affirmation.
Later I understood that I've been a "Clean code" principle follower even before I knew this term. So, it was pretty easy to differentiate my codes from my friends. The teacher is really a genius ^_^

The more depressed you get over the current state of software is how you know you made it.When you start making your own opinions and say"wow these people are full of shit"

Primary example, the web development overblown bullshit. Fuck me dude, you really don't need that full featured react, vue, angular framework to make sense of shit. You are going over the top for fucking ajax functionality and state management that you could do by yourself without needing to learn a full framework, by the time you finish learning react you probably would have been better served with standard vanilla af JS and server side rendering.

Our world is full of fads and many talented people that perpetrate them. Its fine, it is a the nature of the beast. But a lot...A LOT of software is very POORLY written. And adding levels of abstraction over a very broken paradigm (web in this case) does and will not make it better.

Basically I am fucking hating being a web developer and want to go back to a time in which we cared about how much memory consumption our applications made as well as not worrying about the fucking frontend having the ability to implement machine learning.

I want to run sublime.exe and being sure that it is a native application to my system and not using a fucking contained web browser to implement my fucking text editor. With 20mb of ram at most instead of 500mb WTF.

I knew I made it when I could read comments on Hacker news and reddit and say "this idiot is full of shit", I knew I made it when I would sigh heavily at the idea of having another project rather than having a fan girl attitude towards it.

I knew I made it when people writing about software development meant shit to me rather than the wonder of what the fuck they were talking about.

I knew I made it when getting laid was more important to me than fucking around with code.

pussy > code
Fuck you.

hAckErmAnz...

This made laugh for a moment until the truth sunk in

Documentation is like a sex.
If you don't have it, It's bad.
If It's bad, at least you have it.

— Why do you want to work at our office in Mexico?
— I want to be a señor developer.

CAPS LOCK – Preventing Login Since 1980.

GF: What are you doing there?
Dev: I've been trying to reproduce a bug for two hours now...
GF: You need two bugs the opposite sex, otherwise they won't reproduce.

From a sad true story.

Never thought one could explain this simple 🙆🙆🙆

short one.

So my CS course is full of people who can't write a fucking for loop (I shit you not) after more than half a year.
And then there's those that don't know what a return type is.

So I asked them once, after they stated that the course sucks, why they even chose it in the first place.
Freely translated it would be:

"I dunno, I thought we'd be doing cool hacker stuff in here..."

At that point I just wanted to jump out of the window.

aahh just keep googling

"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results." - Winston Churchill

!dev
!!misery

I'm drunk, so it's time for some faux-emotional, blunt oversharing. and lots of profanity. It won't be pretty.

------

I'm miserable. I can't sleep at night. When I finally manage to, I sleep like crap. In the morning, early, I get woken up by my children screaming or pulling my hair or jumping on either the bed or me, or talking ad furore, or any number of other miserably unpleasant things that completely prevent sleep. So I'm tired every single day, which totally surprisingly makes focusing on work fucking difficult. Doubly so because the work is fucking uninteresting and the code is awful to read and difficult to understand because it's complicated and often poorly written. And extending it takes enormous mental effort I simply do not have to give. Oh! Guess what my job is?

To make matters worse, time to myself basically does not exist, ever. I wake up, I attend standup, I cook and eat breakfast, I work while fighting against endless distractions and interruptions, I cook and eat dinner, I work some more, and finally: I can go to bed and try to sleep. The next morning, I wake up and repeat this misery, ad nauseam.

Et ad nauseam? Nauseam est nunc.
It's not proper latin, but fuck you. it's good enough. and nobody speaks it anyway.

Ego sum miseriae. Is that good enough for you?

I can't find it in myself to care about anything. I've been doing whatever I can to feel a little more normal, but mostly I just feel numb. If I drink, it helps a little because I notice my misery a little less. That's a great solution right there: drink until I don't care anymore, and keep doing the same shit without even trying to make things better. Why? Because I fucking can't. I hate this house, I hate the lack of quiet, I hate this city, I hate the dust and the clutter, I hate this state, I hate this codebase, I don't like my coworkers, I hate that I can't get a fucking thing done without spending 6x longer than it should, I hate that I can't fucking think of a single thing I want to do, I hate that I can't ever enjoy anything, I hate that I'm beginning to hate myself, and I fucking hate everything else, too.

In short:
I'm not happy. I'm fucking miserable.

And no, I'm not posting this here for you to psychoanalyze me or suggest solutions. It's for me to vent. Fuck your opinions and fuck your advice and fuck you.

Fact!!

Had a dodgy stomach. Muted the mic & let out an almighty fart.

Only, as you'll have guessed (and I quickly guessed from the silence that followed), I'd missed the mute button.

Windows troubleshooter

I was asked to present a code I wrote previously. This was not planned. I shared my screen and presented. Things went well.

One employee asked me to search a particular term which was possibly related to an advance topic in the domain we were working on.

I opened Chrome and the first page had a Quora post: "Why my dull co-workers try to act smart and are not yet fired?".

[silence]

Only around 700 lines of code and I finally have my first working Vulkan drawcall! Can't wait to integrate it into my engine for all the parallel rendering goodness (not to mention better architecture and asynchronous-ness)

One thing that's a bit weird about Vulkan is the way everything is very static and tightly linked together. You basically need a different renderpass for each stage of rendering (scene-hdr-no-aa, scene-hdr-msaa4, scene-hdr-smaa1, scence-shadow, post-bloom, post-resolve, etc.), a different pipeline object for each distinct pipeline configuration (!!) and both framebuffers and pipeline objects are only valid within the single renderpass they've been created for (roughly speaking)

Oh, and each time the window is resized you have to recreate *all* of these objects from scratch because they also depend on viewport size

No wonder `pipelineCache` is the first argument of `vkCreateGraphicsPipelines` lol

Im a idiot in a world full of idiots