I just had a really great conversation with a Co-CEO of a startup, and I've never seen someone's eyes light up like this before. As soon as I asked:

"How did you see the need for (company name)?"

They spent a good 20 minutes talking about it and how they got there. Sometimes people force a square peg into a circle hole, but this person really sees and feels the need for the product. Very refreshing.

"The burnt pen-is mightier than the sword."
- Vaporator User ostream

"Mind if I smoke?"
- Concentration Camp Inmate 107984

"C++ is made for segfaults."
- Flaming Rust User @sucksemballz

"LSD is a key component to vibe coding."
- @retoorii

"If you are not offended then I will try harder next time."
- some asshole on devrant

I told my landlord that his rent is so high that I can't eat every day. I think he actually believed me. Fingers crossed. Last time he raised with 50 euros and I'm without warm water now for almost two weeks. That's not very common in the Netherlands. He came a few times and delivered half work. You would expect a few times half work would mean a completed job.

This rant is IT related bevause it limits me contributing to open source.

devRant is crawling again. devRanters are truly the members of society that face the most unjust lives.

Got a customer right now who constantly finds new technologies with which the whole app will be built faster and be more flexible.

Oh joy...

Just submitted my first bounty PR. Waited 3+ weeks to hear anything back from maintainers.

Jumped in their discord and politely asked for a review.

Maintainers said, "tomorrow".

Thank them for their time

Waited an extra 3 days, asked again. Maintainers ignore me in Discord but happily tend to everyone else's PR

Get tired of waiting, being ghosted

Close PR
Delete branch
Leave comment saying "haven't heard anything, deleting this and taking it with me"
Leave discord
Block all organization members

Don't waste time on people who won't give a moment of theirs

My colleagues are really addicted to Pokémon. They took their lunch break at 10:00 to go to shop because the pokémon cards are restocked today at 10:00. Now half of the team eats their lunch while working cuz their lunch break is already used lol

Also, the company doesn't even measure the breaks. They usually take multiple smoke breaks totalling over 1h each day. Nobody complains about that. Idk why they suddenly care about the duration of their lunch break

How nice it is to work when almost no notifs and everybody is off. No slack distractions.

My senior dev pushed the backend on lab finally. It's even worse than expected.

- No documentation
- 1 query that retrieves data
- the one query is not even usable in our application without changes
- the total of 1 record that is able to fetched
- somehow misses queries he demo'ed in a meeting more than a month ago

2025/6 is the year contrast dies.

Apple, obviously, with liquid glass (AKA, "I can't see what's on top or bottom!")

But now also, trying out Visual Studio 26, everything is just a slightly different shade of gray.

Won't anyone think of the clarity?! We have reached the point where we are so biased towards form over function, that our form is no longer functional! Bring back contrasting shades of colors in UI!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We have a cold moving through our house. Some people have it, some people don't.

Me: Do you have a cold?
Kid: I don't know...
Me: Is your nose running?
Kid: Yes
Me: Then why don't you go catch it?
Kid: ...shut up...

We maintain an internal java framework, and one of its components requires a configuration file with a simple field: "Timestamp = 09112025000001".

Because this timestamp is persisted in a central database for state management, the developer is forced to manually increment the value after every single test run to avoid collisions. (I know... legacy systems...)

Anyway, a developer called us because they were running into a strange issue with the framework. We jumped on a debugging session, and I asked them to pull up their configuration file.

I fully expected to see a slightly incremented number, maybe 09112025000002, or at worst, a random number to ensure uniqueness. You know, anything numeric.

Instead, the timestamp they had been using was:
Timestamp = 091120250000K

A letter. A single, non-numeric character sitting right there in a field clearly named "Timestamp." I had to blink a few times. I mean, what is the thought process here? Did they hit the wrong key and just decide to commit to it?

The worst part: That wasn't even the root cause of the bug they called us about. But after seeing that config, I had to step away for a mental health break.

We desperately need better input validation, because our "robust" framework apparently accepts a letter as a valid time marker...

I am a student. I like my tech. I am obsessed with it.

And I've studied hard my entire life thinking it was gonna pay off one day.

2021 rolls around. AI gets wild. I'm not threatened, because I understand it's a natural part of technological progress, and hence inevitable.

I am not against it, but I've always held off on using it until I have no other options.

I've been coding ever since 9, since my dad taught me how to mess with variables in Python on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ hooked up to our TV.

I loved it. Still do.

So when AI came along and people started vibe-coding, I understood why - but I kept my distance. I knew it was a tool, but I also knew becoming over-reliant would cost me big-time in terms of my intellectual development.

I'm in college now.

I have a thing for coding manually. I love building stuff from scratch and I'm good at it. When my peers ask me why I dont use ChatGPT, or Claude, or Perplexity, etc, I tell them that it wont help me interview for a job. Because companies test your skill.

Right?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

THOUGHT WRONG DIDNCHA? GET FUCKED LOSER. MUHUHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA.

COMPANIES ARE STARTING TO ALLOW AI IN INTERVIEWS.

YES! BECAUSE WHY WOULD WE ASK EMPLOYEES TO LEARN SHIT WHEN A MACHINE ALREADY KNOWS ALL?

WHAT DOES IT MEAN IF I SPENT YEARS OF MY LIFE PAINSTAKINGLY BUILDING EACH FUNCTION AND METHOD, ONLY FOR THAT TO BE STOLEN BY AN AI WHO CHARGES YOU MONEY FOR EACH QUERY?

FOR THINGS THAT ARE AND HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ON THE WEB?

I feel lost now. I've looked forward to college all my life.

I've always been mocked for wanting a desk job because people somehow think it is limiting.

But I loved it. Every moment of it. Because it felt _right_.

This was always happiness to me.

I've always been an extroverted kid with no friends. Don't ask how. I just don't have the humor that people find attractive.

This was my life. This was something I was good at.

And now an algorithm does it all.

A business major who can't even change his screen brightness now has the audacity to mock my work because his LLM can do more than mine.

Fuck y'all. I still love this. I've been doing this all my life, and I'll keep doing it.

And if one of you uneducated, uncultured, smooth-brained fucks remind me ONE MORE TIME that you can "code" better than me just because you can type into a textbox, then BEST BELIEVE I will go Dark Souls on your ass.

I've been working in my freetime on a hobby project that a certain established community will use (sub 10k users, unironically the project with the largest userbase I ever created so far). We had yesterday a design meeting for that project. Now I'm even more frustrated that this, unpaid, position has much more documentation and clearly set expectations than my work project. Nobody is being paid for that project compared to a project that costs nearly half a million per year to just run now (we are working on a cheaper replacement now).

But nobody is being paid in that community, everyone is volunteering. Heck, the people that are running it do not have professional experience in project management or running a company and they are doing an awesome job. I do however notice that they are inexperienced in some parts. They want to make designs for that project and just had 1 brainstorm session and just started working on it. It did look great but not really usable (UX-wise). i'm very motivated by their passion lol

We have recommended some design flows & changes in their flow and they were open in trying it.

Seen it done wrong so many times makes me wonder what it may look like if done right. What are your thoughts on "micro-services" and maybe specifically "AWS Lambdas"?

Client: "Can we have the info of the report as a spreadsheet?"
Sure. To minimise change, I just make it so that instead of the PDF report, the app downloads a zip file with the report, and an Excel file with the info.
A week later, the client: "when we download the list of evaluated people, it downloads a weird file there's no way of opening" (sic, except translation)

... What? Are we just stupid now? Even Windows explorer should be able to deal with that...

I HOPE I'm misunderstanding and there's a real issue, because if they really are complaining about using zip files... I don't know what I'll do.

Being unemployed for the first time in 9 years is definitely more stressful than I thought. I have enough money to ride out a job search for about 8 months, but still. Not having recurring income for the first time is scary.

Ain't nothing like compiler development to make you want to jump of a bridge

I went in with my childish naivety. How wrong I was... lmao

I built an addon to the system that we've been using for almost 15 years now that uses the exact same config screen as we've always used.
And, just because the configs are being applied to a new concept, it's being treated like I abducted them with a flying saucer and are forcing them to learn Alienese. The config screen is exactly the same otherwise.

Paying for youtube premium and then almost every author these days has his own freaking ads in their videos. What the fuck is this for shit. Fuck off. Greedy fuckers. Degenerates.

It's also always for products that they don't use for sure while many times claiming they do. Talking about sophisticated shit and then "Here's incogni". Wraaaahh. You know it won't help fucker. You know it you know it you know it.

Using c++ without (most of) the standard library and avoiding operator overloads has made me like the language again. It's an extremely capable language, but my LORD is it bloated and overgrown. Using it like "c with classes" again is the way.

It's the year when I did not renew domain I bought for my project.

Feels weird to stop bleeding money for a project I haven't finished

Client: “We need an app that tracks live birds using AI.”

Me: “Cool, that’s complex. What’s the timeline?”

Client: “We need it before our annual picnic next week.”

Me: “You want an AI that can detect flying birds, in real time, in seven days?”

Client: “It’s not that hard. Just use ChatGPT or something.”

So now I’m here, watching pigeons on my balcony, manually updating a Google Sheet, calling it “AI prototype v1.0.”

I think I’ve finally achieved “Agile Enlightenment” — deliver results, not features.

Client’s happy.
My soul isn’t.

Time to rename the project: BirdBrain.

What a disastrous deployment: instead of deploying one thing, 50.000 unexpected other things had to be done before. When the "official" deployment was done inside our own network, nothing worked as expected, servers had to be reconfigured, errors everywhere. Mind you it was tested multiple times by multiple people in a testing env. Difference between test and prod, classic.
When it was finally deployed, other errors started emerging, things that weren't considered before came to surface.
On top only the main dev knows the ins-and-outs, no substitute in case anything happens.
Deployment was rolled back in the end.

Working on a really neat idea app for client as a consultant.The app is in production and has active users. Sounds great except few facts like...

...every developer left the company, no handover whatsoever, no documentation, founder is vibe coding the app with claude and pushes like 500 times daily directly to master, production breaks every minute, its a slow dockerized nextjs fullstack app - literally waiting like half a minute when clicking on a link locally, prisma migrations don't work at all, also a lot of unfinished integrations with 3rd party services...

First time working on the vibe coded app, certainly will be also last. No money will get me into project like this again. Good thing is that I am almost over with it. Will never look back!

Also next js no more, I'll rather herd goats on a mountain than fixing someone elses nextjs sloppy app again.

Happy Friday everyone! 💕

My wife asked me if I could take a look at her keyboard because some of the keys suddenly had stopped working.
I checked the keyboard and saw that crumbs were literally blocking the keys. I gave it a shake, the crumbs fell out, and the keyboard started working again.

My urgent, drop-everything, “bad actors have access to merchants and we can’t block them!” ticket that I rushed to finish didn’t make it into the release. It passed QA; everything works. There’s no complaints on code quality, either.

The blocker? My code uses the word “whitelist” (which is already present in the greater codebase in a related feature), and that made the woke VP (who happened to review the ticket) go REEEEEEE!! and demand I fix it to use approved language, therefore delaying the security fix until the next release cycle.

Yes, seriously.
It would be comical if I wasn’t so disgusted.

Oh well. Enjoy your bad company PR, dude. I hope it all burns.

I work for a company who decided to put real effort on introducing LLMS and other AI tools not just in the product, but on corporate life as well, especially on development. It has benefits like we have access to Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf and Claude Clode, even we have the budget to run our models if we want. We saw the performance improvement and pitfalls on daily basis, but overall as a developer, I am happy with the tools and the improvement. BUT (rant mode on) the Product Management got a bit too excited about this. We have a legacy Python service? "LLM can code in that". Dont we have any experience with a programming language? "LLM can code that" We need to make changes some complicated internal project for our needs? "Dont ask the maintainer team, just use LLM to implement it and they'll review" We are not frontend, Java, devops and other focused team members. Everybody is everything.

PRO TIP: Always save the user password client side, validate it there and send a boolean to the server. It reduces backend load times and unnecessary calculations/computations.

Nothing worse than having to wrangle multiple coordinate systems for model files and your engine. Extra points when one is left handed and one right handed

I actually want to die