A while back, I had a lot of telemarketers were calling me daily, and I mean A LOT of them.

I got so frustrated with he calls that I decided I had to figure out a better way to handle those calls.

At the time, I was working with a PBX software called Asterisk, which is used to handle hardware interfaces and network applications for phone calls.

I needed a suitable side project and there was a version of Asterisk designed for Raspberry Pi, so I made a fun little answering service for myself.

Whenever a telemarketer called, I asked them to call back later, but to "my personal number", and gave them the number to my phone robot. (which had a pre-paid SIM card in a GSM dongle mounted)

When it received a call, it would play a pre-recorded phrase, wait for 1000 ms of silence and then play the next phrase.
After all 16 phrases had been played, it would start from phrase 7 again and repeat until the caller gave up.

I had this set up running for a while, and then added another robot for english speaking callers.

The calls stopped after a few months.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

When I was in 7th grade, my neighbor (a DoD programmer) challenged me to write a sorting algorithm for a hypothetical super limited environment (he said a satellite). It didn’t have any built-in sorting methods, had very limited memory, slow processor, etc. so I needed to be clever about it.

It took me a few nights before i found a solution he liked. The method I came up with counted the number of occurrences of each number in the array and put them in the appropriate spots in a new array. This way it only required O(2n) running time and 2n memory.

I just learned today that this is called the “counting sort” 😄

I’m proud of little 11 year old me.

Yay, I have to rewrite + design a 15-20 year old website 🎉

Originally written in, God knows what version of php, HTML and JS by a Java dev, and patched every other year when something broke or a new feature was needed, every time by someone new...
Some years ago the system was moved from a Windows host to Ubuntu and that was a nightmare in its own, because of all the hard-coded paths...

Welp, at least some fucker found another fucker who is willing to create a new design for the site, so that's off my plate...

Until a few days ago, I had 2 teammates. The one I got along with better left. Kind of weird doing this without my backup eyes. He was very on ball which was nice since my brain is basically a sieve these days

It's not a compsci paper if it doesn't start the intro with "Recent advances in [insert name of subfield] show that ..."

Bollocks. Really decent guy in our team just left unexpectedly 😟

I might lose my Job. Thanks to Central Bank of Nigeria's shenanigans, a promising FinTech startup might be about to go under.

Last month I got married, last month I got a raise. This morning, got told I'm being put on compulsory leave without pay (same as everyone).

Expecting no salary this month. I guess I'll be fine with some Laravel/Flutter freelancing.

Now, how to break the news to my wife. She knows I love my job, she's gonna be even more heartbroken/worried than I am. We were supposed to move to a bigger apartment next month when yearly rent here is due.

I guess we'll be alright. It is what it is.

"Hard times make good developers
Good developers create good frameworks
Good frameworks create bad developers
Bad developer make hard times" - Wisdom from internet

No amount of coffee can prepare me for this code review

Motivation lost!
Anyone seen it?
It's a battered old thing, smells a little bit like sunshine and redemption, been in decline for a long while.
Last seen 2017, small reward.

Fucking Kubernetes tutorials on youtube. I still have no clue on why. I just get the how.

Fucking explain why we need it in the first place!

is it just me, or do some people just make life difficult for the fucking sake of making life difficult?

now, lets ignore the lack of sanitised data, lets also ignore the lack of prepared statements, and for the love of god... lets ignore some magic numbers, because I still don't know what they mean yet....

but why! why would you create an array, implode it, smash it into a database query on the fucking fly, instead of just adding the data into the query in the first place.... it's not like you were doing this right to begin with, but this... this is next level!

Don't do like my work supervisor:

Step 1:
*gives task*
Me, starts working on task early in the morning
*task requires his interfering, and is stalled without it*
Me, messages supervisor

Step 2:
*supervisor takes the whole work day to reply, saying that he didn't have time to look into it*

Step 3:
Me, does almost nothing at work the whole day; closes laptop upon seeing the message of the supervisor

Step 4:
Profit: go home early

Today is *very* intense. Production broke.

Coming from NodeJS, writing APIs with Express, I now do my first steps writing APIs in golang with gin.

Now I know, Express is not the fastest solution out there, but I mean - a good 30ms is alright for non-high-performance backends. And I always thought that's on the faster end of HTTP handling..

..but then I used gin. A GET request doing a MongoDB-write and returning some json. 3ms response time. THREE MILISECONDS. holy fuck. By it's debug logs the actual handling took 540 MICROSECONDS. holy fuck I'm in love.

It is discouraging to realize that most people can be thieves if there are no consequences.

Proof: We cracked applications, video games, operating systems without a second thought. And yes, I still think it is a form of stealing.

I read once "productivity is elimination of distractions" or something like that.
And honestly, it has worked so far.

Motivation is even better tho. But if I'm really unmotivated, or anxious, I subconsciously create distractions; then I have to deal with me inner child. Point is, motivation has a direct line to productivity, so I usually don't do what I can't bring yourself to do.

What's the shadiest tactic you've witnessed HR use at your job?