If you invite me to a "lunch and learn" about company policies, and I have to bring my own lunch, well, that's just a meeting during my lunch, isn't it?

Git ransom attack
https://github.blog/2019-05-14-git-...

People who write functions which return NULL should be moved to /dev/null.

Sales employee Bob wants a clickable blue button.

Bob tells product owner Karen about his unstoppable desire for clickable blue buttons.

Karen assigns points for potential and impact (how much does a blue button improve Bob's life, how many people like Bob desire blue buttons)

Karen asks the button team how hard it is to build a button. The button team compares the request to a reference button they've built before, and gives an ease score, with higher score being easier (inverse of scrum points).

These three scores are combined to give a priority score. The global buttonbacklog is sorted by priority.

Once every two weeks (a "sprint") the button team convenes, uses the ease scores to assign scrum points. Difficult tasks are broken up into smaller tasks, because there is a scrum point upper limit. They use the average of the last 5 sprints to calculate each developer's "velocity".

The sprint is filled with tasks, from the top of the global button backlog, up to the team's capacity as determined by velocity. Approximate due dates are assigned, Bob is a happy Bob.

What if boss Peter runs into the office screaming "OUR IMPORTANT CLIENT WANTS A FUCKING PINK BUTTON WHICH MAKES HEARTS APPEAR"?

Devs tell boss to shut the fuck up and talk to Karen. Karen has a carefully curated list of button building tasks sorted by priority, can sedate boss with valium so he calms the fuck down until he can make a case for the impact and potential of his pink button.

Karen might agree that Peter's pink button gets a higher priority than Bob's blue button.

But devs are nocturnal creatures, easily disturbed when approached by humans, their natural rhythms thrown out of balance.

So the sprint is "locked", and Peter's pink button appears at the top of the global backlog, from where it flows into the next sprint.

On rare occasions a sprint is broken open, for example when Karen realizes that all of the end users will commit suicide if they don't have a pink heart-spawning button.

In such an event, Peter must make Bob happy (because Bob is crying that his blue button is delayed). And Peter must make the button team of devs happy.

This usually leads to a ritual involving chocolate or even hardware gift certificates to restore balance to the dev ecosystem.

“No we don’t use the time zone info you send on each request. We get all the drivers for the store ID, choose one of them randomly and take their time zone. We have been assuming it will always be the same for all drivers for each store.”

This is my new favorite response to a Jira ticket in this company.

I may have to print it out and hang it on my desk

Unpopular opinion:

The "I hate everyone" mentality doesn't make you quirky or unique, it likely just means you're a real pain in the ass to deal with and/or have the social skills of a rock.

My name's Stux, and thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

What a day and what an achievement!!!

Today ladies and gentlemen I broke my record for number of passive aggressive “as per last email” comments, in a single email.

I now stand at 11

Today is a great day and I’d like to thank everyone not reading my emails who got me to this point. You guys are the real record holders!

New job was killing me. remote team has an 8 hour time difference to us, and no understanding of it. Constant last minute invites to meetings at 10pm my time. Made worse by the fact that many were unnecessary, duplicates or just plain pointless. So for the last few weeks of last year I made in my mission to clean it up.

New plan: move my hours around on Mondays, stay later, move all the meetings back to back and get everything out of the way for the rest of the week.

First day back and heres how the new plan is shaping out:

- 5:30pm meeting organiser decided we actually need 2 almost identical meetings instead. Sends out a big team meeting for the same time as my 1st meeting at 5pm, as well as the existing one for 5:30pm. Already agreed on by everyone else, so had to go.
- Cancelled my original 5pm meeting for today, said we'll re-arrange it for earlier going forward (not enough time for notice for remote team).
- Went into my new 5pm meeting, turns out we don't need 2. Got everything done by 5:30pm.
- Just to be safe though, a new invite will be sent around for the hour of 5 - 6 "Just in case".
- My 6pm meeting just got cancelled as she has a conflict (despite setting it up 2 months ago)
- Now I have to wait around, after hours for my 6:30 meeting.

..... believe it or not, this is progress.

Happy new year!

Java dev here. I rewrote an app and replaced a system call to ssh with a modern jaxrs post for uploading a file and (new) some additional data.
I even used a stream.

1 hour in production, first client doesn't get his file. Log says OutOfMemoryError: heap.

Me: wtf? I already use streams.
Looking at the Jersey library. Docs say nothing. An issue from 2013 says: oh if you silly don't use the Apache httpclient addon, we disable chunking and buffer the whole body, because our tests fail with the jdk included http client otherwise.

Me: meh.

No warning in the logs. Thank you soooooo much! Who could have known?

Amazing how people misuse the term technical debt.

A bug is a flaw in your design/development.

Tech debt is a conscious decision/tradeoff, which is often tracked and removed as the product matures.

The difference is subtle. Avoid this mix up at least in written communication.

My client had a meeting and presentation of app for one possible client of that app. I, as a developer of that app, left a hardcoded id,I saw it but forgot about it immediately. Let's just say filtering did not work properly. Sorry.

Dude! We have toilets on each floor. Why do you push shit on git?

Me: buys gaming laptop.
Me: plays Age of Empires II

This morning I became an Electronic Engineer! It's been a long ride but finally I got it!

Let's get something straight people, the trend to change terms in programming languages for PC approved ones is NOT for "making the workplace a better place".

If you are one of those who say "oh it's just terms, if it makes them feel better why not?", "I don't care so should everybody else", "the outrage proves we need to change the terms!".

No sir, first of all, since when has programming been about ditching standards to make people "feeel" better? Since when has engineering been about that?! We are engineers, we don't change shit and waste effort trying to fix things that are working.

Second, this word cleansing does NOT come from a well intentioned one, it's not about making the workplace a better place, it's not about minorities, it's about sanitizing language from an ideological and political standpoint to please an agenda pushing minority who doesn't give a shit about any real social issues.

They have done it to movies, videogames, news, political speech, magazines, books and now programming. It doesn't stop and they will never be satisfied, it's not about changing the terms, no one gives a shit about the terms, it's about pandering to ideological crybabies who want to control what you say because it "offends" them or some supposedly oppressed group from which we just hear anecdotal evidence.

Personally I wouldn't give a shit if it was for technical reasons, but it's not and I've seen what this shit does to communities I love and I won't stand it happening to the dev community just because some weak ass, no balls coders decided to pander to the retards on the far left to score virtue points instead of standing their ground.

Are you worried about oppressed groups? Donate money to third world children, speak out about women in Siria, travel to actual shitty 3rd world countries so you realize changing words on a GitHub repo on your expensive ass MacBook, sipping your soy based coffee on an office with air conditioning is not making the world a better place you delusional prick.

You want to ignore the facts be my guest, be willfully ignorant, but I will not police myself and my ideas for your ideological beliefs, not in gaming, not here. Fuck off.

>X gets corrupted somehow
>"sudo apt-get remove xorg"
>begins uninstalling millions of packages
>a fullscreen warning flashes by: "Are you SUUUUUURE you wanna remove the kernel?"
>wasn't prompted to deny
>After process, get kernel panic
>reboot
>kernel panic within 10 seconds

Why must you do this to me, Debian?

At lunch, someone asked a question about our Sunday Hack-a-thon. Our PO said it was a "Smack-a-thon." I told her, "No, don't make stupid names. Let's call things what they are. It's Management Failure Sunday." Manager was sitting across the table when I said it.

Vacation for two weeks, fuck yeah, two weeks of not having to give a single fuck about customers and their problems.

🍺🍿

Fuck my project manager. He wants to sacrifice code quality, test coverage and technical debt in favor of more features. In the future when everything takes longer or breaks guess who is responsible? Certainly not him.

3 hours long Scrum Meetings

"should I commit this? nah let's just implement this huge feature first and commit that clusterfuck of changes with a commit message «changes»"

Yeah GDPR emails are annoying, but you know what's worse? People complaining about GDPR emails!
And you know what's worse than that?
People complaining about people complaining about GDPR emails
And you know what's worse than that?
...

My manager doesn't get it.

Fuck savvy

"Only stay late at work when it makes sense to, otherwise always leave on time. There's always going to be work left, no matter how much you get done in one day."

Best advice ever.

Edit: I have to say it was during my first week in my first recent grad job.

Don't work for free

"Leave this fucking company, now."

Template for every Silicon Valley episode be like:

1. Start solving problem from previous episode.
2. Creating some shit that solves the problem.
3. Initialize new problem.

Damn it. I'm still hooked!!

Uh oh,there it goes...

If you are a developer and the resume you send me says "Certified Web Ninja" on it. I will invite you to an interview. But keep in mind, if you don't show up wearing all black and carrying a Katana, I will throat punch you and send you on your way.