Guy: *hands me sheet of paper* What does this code do?
Me: *looks through code written on the paper* Well, most likely segfault.

*awkward silence*

People who say "hi" on slack and then take 50 years to say what they actually want to say.

People who sit on the table beside yours to play games on their phones.

People who call you dad.

People.

MICROSOFT YOU ABSOLUTE COCK STOP PINNING SHIT TO MY TASKBAR

divorce

Someone, I have no idea who, commented on my personal project that he wanted to pick up one of the issues.

Then, he followed through and fixed it and sent a PR.

Feels good man.

Hi

Aaand, I can't even post a rant with so little chars... Yet coworkers and customers find it ok to only write hi and wait for me to respond.. Just write what the fuck you want in one go so I can decide if I really need to jump, or I can get back to this later..

Sorry bud.

Learned bash scripting age 17 for the sole purpose of automatically downloading porn using wget.

We need another developer to our team, but my team leader wants someone who is familiar with our stack. A week later HR comes to our room :
"Look I have a perfect candidate! He knows all things you have listed, plenty of experience. Please take a look and I will organize an interview".
Team leader took a glimpse and started to laugh: "This is my CV from before I started working here"

I. FUCKING. HATE. MOBILE. DEVELOPMENT.

I already manage the data, devops, infra, and most of the backend dev.

We had a mobile guy. He was great. I never had to think about it and kept moving quickly on my work. #SpecializationOfLaborFTW

He left. Why? Because they wouldn't give him a small raise despite being one of the best mobile engineers in the firm. WTF.

I made the mistake of picking up just enough slack on this workflow in the interim such that I'm, apparently, the fucking god-damned release manager, fixer of pipelines, fixer of build configs, fixer of anything where someone just needs to RTFM for a half-hour to not fucking break things.

Now, 8 months later...and, apparently, Fortune 500 companies are too fucking god-damned cheap to pay for someone who actually knows WTF they're doing for a very reasonable thing to have at least one dedicated set of eyes for.

I never wanted to be a mobile dev.
I never will want to be a mobile dev.
And I certainly don't want to manage your HALF-FACE-FUCKED detached expo configs.

There's a reason I never intentionally involved myself in mobile. All the way down, it's just shitty cross-compilation, transpilation, dependency-hell, brittle-as-fuck build processes so we can foot-gun and mouth-gun react-native and expo and babel and whatever the fuck else cargo-culted horseshit into the wild.

And why? What's the actual fucking root cause? The biggest white elephant that ever fucking elephant-ed? It's because Apple and Google decided to never collaborate on a truly-native cross-platform SDK--where engineers could write native code that compiles to native binaries that's simply write-once, run-everywhere. They know they could have done that, and they didn't. So what'd they get back? Expo--a too-cleverly-designed backdoor/hack--more-or-less a way to circumvent the sane release process software has usually followed: code -> executable -> deploy. Or code -> deploy (for interpreted langs). Expo's like "keep your same executable, we're just gonna to do updates by injecting new code into it whenever we want". Didn't we learn anything with web? Shit gets messy real quick? Not to mention: HEY EXPO, WE WERE ALREADY BUILDING NATIVE APPS, YOU SHORT-SIGHTED FUCKS. THANKS FOR LURING OUR CTOs INTO FORCING EXPO DOWN OUR THROATS W/ THE IMPLICIT (BUT INCORRECT) TOO-GOOD-TO-BE-TRUE PROMISE THAT WE CAN HAVE WRITE-ONCE, RUN-ANYWHERE WITHOUT ANY BUY-IN OR COOPERATION FROM THE ACTUAL TARGET PLATFORMS.

And, we just, like, accept this? We all know it's garbage engineering. The principles we learned in the classroom aren't just academic abstractions--they actually yield real-world results--and eschewing them yields real-world failures. Expo is tightly-coupled to high-heaven, with leaky abstractions six-ways-to-christmas, chock-full of foot-guns, and fails the most basic test of quality: does it, "just work?"

Expo is fucking shameful and it should fucking die. Its promises are too bold, its land-mines too many, its future-proof-ness is alway, always, always questionable as fuck and a risk to every project that uses it.

You want a rant? This is my fucking venue, 'tis not? Well, then this is a piss and vinegar rant straight from my blood-red, beating fucking heart:

EXPO FUCKING SUCKS. AND IF YOU'RE A FAN, YOU FUCKING SUCK TOO.

I once worked until 8am to get a demo ready for a client of the client. I knew the client was a bit thick, so I made some comprehensive video demos and sent them over to him, to save him trying to demo it himself. I wake up at 11am with him screaming down the phone at me:

“It doesn’t work, none of it works!”

“What do you mean?”

“I go to login and I can’t enter anything.”

“I haven’t sent you anything to log into...wait, are you trying to log into a video? Tell me you’re not trying to log into a video of a login page.”

“Uh...oh hang on, it just worked. Ok no pr-“

“No wait, what do you mean it worked?”

“I logged in fine.”

“It’s a video. You can’t log into a video.”

“Uh...alright, bye mate, thanks!”

The moral of the story is: never assume any level of intelligence on the part of a client, even if they exhibit signs of it at first. If they are paying you they will forget how to tie their own shoelaces.

I like how a co-worker is expecting a Windows Container to work in Linux, and vice versa.

No, it doesn't work like that you fucking baffoon, Linux rootfses needs the Linux kernel (hence why it runs on WSL2 or Hyper-V using LCOW), and same can be said for Windows Containers.

How dumb of a human being must you assume everything should "just work" in a container?

I just got a text from T-Mobile telling me about their updated privacy policy and that I can “opt out.” So, naturally I do exactly this.

After a little bit, I land on their “Do not sell my data” page and discover that, not only does it have 175+ trackers,
it doesn’t even fucking work. Also, on the desktop version of the site, the very control allowing the user to opt out of having their data shared/sold doesn’t even render.

These are all absolutely inexcusable.

When requirements and budget do not match

It fucking staggers me how many backend/devops-y people don't understand what a client side "request timeout" is, versus a server side one.

What does it mean:

The client was fed up with the servers bullshit, and decided to piss off and not wait around for the server to take forever to respond, because life's too short.

How not to solve/debug this issue:

- "I've checked the API request in tool xyz, and it works fine for me"

Congratulations, you've figured out how to call an API once, in isolation to the rest of the application, and without any excessive load. And using a different client to me, with a different configuration. Lets get back to actually looking at the issue shall we?

- "I only see HTTP 200's in the logs"

Yep, you probably will in most circumstances, because its the client complaining about it taking too long, not the server. If the server was telepathetic and knew what the client was thinking/doing at all times, we wouldn't have half of the errors we do.

- "Ah ok, I understand ... so how do I solve this?"

Your asking me? I don't fucking know, I didn't build the server! Put better logging in place and figure out why sometimes it takes forever.

Jesus fucking christ

Rekked/insulted a client so hard today in a way which was obvious for me/colleagues but not for the client that the colleague sitting next to me completely fucking lost it. (client did not detect/notice it)

That's entirely fine as he was not too loud but his laughter is so fucking contagious that he went outside to make sure that I wouldn't catch it any worse while on the phone.

God damn it took some serious self control to not completely lose my shit xD (it only partly worked 😅)

Slack update notes are by far the funniest out there.

* phone conversation with Dad*
Dad: What are you doing?
Me: Busy creating website.
Dad: So, if I type " www", will I be able to see it?
Me: *explaining website hosting and servers for 15mins straight*
Dad: Huh. You do learn something in college then.
Me:🤐

This one time, a client wanted a complete overhaul of her website.

I asked her for the credentials to the VPS, She gave me some random crap to try, cause clearly the site hadn't been touched since 2003 (and boy was it fugly).

Me: Maam, these aren't the correct details.

She sends in more crap to try...2 days pass with this back and forth.

Client: "contact steve, he should have the login details"

Me: ****Calls Steve *****
Me: "Maam, he says the login details are in your mail"

Client: "well, I don't remember this fact. Steve handled everything.
Hack into the website and then reset it.

The Russians did not need login details to hack into America's system. So please, do what you have to do to get us moving."

No jokes...that was the exact crap that came out of her fingers

Dev: "Ah, I finally fixed that code I was working on the other day and got it pushed to staging!"

Almond: "Ah, great! What was the issue in the end?"

Dev: "It was an odd one - it wasn't actually my code that was the issue, there was a bunch of other code getting in the way."

Almond: "How do you mean?"

Dev: "It kept complaining about something called a "unit test" failing - so after a while I found the right unit tests, deleted them, and now it works great!"

Almond: "..."

OMG I have no clue why they're leaving
- Every asshole manager ever

Windows, why are you like this?

I bought a System76 laptop. They're headquartered in the same city where I live. In the "special instructions" section of the checkout process, I put, "I'm buying this because Apple took away my escape key."

This note came today.

Found this in our repo…

NodeMeme

Why Apple developer are up at night?

Look Who's happy! Thanks for the sticker @dfox and @trogus it came right when we celebrate our Anniversary. It is a very great Present from you.

oh hey
it’s just me
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yet again

toxic workplace; leaving

I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.

I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.

------

On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)

Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).

I'm just.
so, so done.

I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)

Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.

But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.

So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)

I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)

With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.

How about some good news for a change?
We have new baby! 😊 He's our second.

And he was born on 10/24!
He's going to be my little devvy.
😊😊😊