1. If your contract allows it (and it should), get more involved in public dev community. Your employer benefits greatly from making a small closed source core product, with a giant open source ecosystem around it. Write public articles. Working in a community larger than one single business is fun.

2. Start a company coding club, a "labs" division, work in a slightly more exotic language. Great if your employer gives you time, but using some of your own is worth it too. Work on non critical tools, creative experiments. Sometimes you stumble onto incredibly valuable ideas which would never have popped up if you had strictly followed stakeholder requirements.

3. Listen to your body. If you feel restless, go for a run. If you feel tired, take a nap. If you're stuck, wander around the company. If you feel down, go find a place with more than a dozen trees. And always have a notepad nearby for doodling!

Writing a, for me, quite big system and had about everything ready to go, the earliest version about works.

But, it's written for one (broad) specific use case and guess what: in the past few weeks, a few other use cases have presented themselves. The 'principle' is the same so I could integrate them into the current system, but; then I'd have to rewrite the entire thing to be more flexible.

I think I'm going to do that but damn I've been debating this for hours now 😬

The project where I realized I wanted to go from chemist to pro dev.

I built a flow-chemistry spectrometer with monitoring backend in Haskell.

Spectroscopy is where you add a reagent to a glass tube, it changes color, and by measuring the exact color it tells you how much of something (for example, a toxin) is present in the sample.

I had to do that a lot on factory samples, writing down measurements using pen & paper.

I'm lazy so I decided to do the logical thing: Automate it. I bought a second hand spectrometer, stripped the casing, did a shitload of glassblowing and hooked up tubes to the production pipelines, so I could get samples, mixing them in the correct ratio with reagents in continuous flows using valves.

I ended up using 2 home-crafted arduino-like boards (etching PCBs is fun!).

One to calibrate the mixture against known samples and control solenoid valves to continuously cycle through various reagents and deionized flushing water, the other to record the measurements and send them to a server running a Haskell/Yesod API.

The server collected the information into InfluxDB (A time series database), displaying all data on a graphite dashboard.

Eventually I wrote Haskell plugins for most of the chemistry processes, from pH & temperature measurements to polymer property and pigment tests (they made a lot of printer ink).

Then I was fired because they didn't need chemists anymore, and the code "could be maintained by the intern" (poor guy)...

But I did find out that I loved functional programming, chemistry automation projects, and crafting my own electronics during that time.

I'd really fucking love if somebody developed a browser plugin which puts a red fucking glowing banner over every website which sends data to PRISM.
Users deserve to know what cunty sell-out crapsites they visit.

As a backend dev, I have this habit of just dropping script & style tags all over the place, and using inline style attributes on divs.

Then when I'm done I just link the code to a frontend dev, they'll hate it so much it will be cleaned up within minutes.

I thought to myself, "i nee some company in my life"

1.Registers on a app to meet some people
2. Fills in profile
3. Falls asleep from bordom.
*ting*

Notification from app: "we see you are in the engineering field, want to have a look at the opportunities we have at our company?"

.. I look for company and get job offers. Nice

The laziest thing I've done was during an internship:
We had to open big table files in a special software, click on some buttons and then save it. Each step took 1-5 minutes untilnwe could proceed with a click on the next button. So I wrote a click script, predefined the mouse positions and run it all day. This was able to run for 1 hour straight with no human action needed, so I started using the new sparetime for more interesting stuff: Gaming.

Screaming at a coworker?
The INTJ in me has prevented that pretty well in almost every critical devSituation.
BUT one time in the past, I was really close to a level 9001 scream:
This fucker, despite having been told about code formatting guidelines and DRY/KISS multiple times, had the balls to commit such utterly crappy and unreadable code that I almost bursted.
He quickly realized his mistake after I reset the repo to before his push, disabled his Gitlab account and wrote him a simple email containing the text:
"IF YOU EVER COMMIT SUCH SHIT AGAIN, THERE WILL BE UNFORESEEN CONSEQUENCES. GFYS."
After a peaceful coffee and a croissant I decided to re-enable his account. He did good after that.

Not so much screaming as staring in disbelief, mumbling profanity in his direction...

When my department lead said "I don't think this unit testing hype or code reviews make much sense, it's more efficient to just make a checklist and test the application yourself"

This was the QA department of an aerospace company, we wrote NDT software to do image recognition on xrays of alloy welds and micrometer laser measurements on fuel tank surfaces. Software which is quite mission critical, a single misrecognized welding fault could literally cost up to half a billion dollars — not to mention that it's a very sabotage & espionage sensitive industry.

After raising some hell he was replaced though.

Me: "Just upload the god damn file you bastard! I got called 5 times today because you couldn't upload this fucking piece of shit!"

Co-Worker: "Relax dude, I got all here on my computer"

Me: "....." (In mind: if you kill him later, you can hide the evidence)

Someone on here, a while ago, posted a link to a github repo having a huge ass list of open source projects for about anything you can imagine.

I lost the link 😥 anyone an idea? (can't find it either)

The NOS (Dutch national news agency/company) was criticized recently because the cookie/tracking consent thing was 'too much/inconvenient'.

Seriously, their consent thing exists out of three yes-no buttons (one for each subject and the subjects have a very short but understandable description) which you can click or tap (it works perfectly on mobile) within a fucking second.

It's the best fucking consent thing I've seen and now they're saying it's inconvenient.

Inconvenient my ass, other companies should take it as example! (https://nos.nl)

!rant

I applied to three totally exciting jobs tonight. (!!!)
I feel so giddy ;3

Also: I had no idea salaries were so much higher than what I've been earning. I feel so horribly used and abused and undervalued. Toxic environment, indeed!

I will be so so so glad to leave it all behind. (And finally move!)

eeeeeeee!

Me: good morning, what can I help you with?
Client: I THINK REMOVED SOMETHING AND NOW ALL MY EMAIL IS GONE. HELP.
M: okay sir, do you have the domain for m....
C: HEY WAIT IT'S BACK NEVER MIND THANKS BYE
M: Oh tha....
*click*

😆

Worst career choice: Not following computer science because there were few careers for computer techs pre-2000s.
Best career choice: Do a 2 years course in CNC (paid by the government). Also, the worst carer choice because I got my burn out in the first (one of the best in the region) molding company I worked for.

Today I got to my new office. After booting my PC I noticed, that my phone-client isn't working.

I wrote an Incident to our helpline, telling them my phone isn't working.

After one hour I got an mail:
"Dear XYZ, we couldn't reach you at your phone. Please call back so we can fix your issue"

FUCK YOU WTF! ARE YOU GUYS RETARDED? READ YOUR FUCKING INCIDENTS! MOTHERFUCKING CUNTS!

Ma chéries!
What job sites do you recommend?
I want to leave this nightmare behind.

You write more bugs than code.

'lashed out' to a client for the first time yesterday.

Clients have the habit to call after tickets and while its annoying, it's manageable if it happens *sometimes*

It was happening the entire fucking morning and when a client called for an update about a ticket for the second time, I couldn't help but sound frustrated.

"how far are you with the ticket?"
"i have other things to do as well, you know, you're not the only customer i have to help right now"
"i understand, do you possibly have an eta?"
"no. You're next in line, is that clear enough?"
"okay" *hangs up*

*crap*

He e-mailed me afterwards apologizing, that was nice.

I'm sorry sir 😥 nothing personal but it can become so fucking annoying sometimes.

!dev

A year or so ago (or more...?), Facebook started with text based 2FA. They promised not to use the phone numbers for anything else than the extra security.

I immediately said that they'd probs do that anyways and got into a few fights and people started calling me paranoid yet again.

Guess what was revealed a few days ago .____.

I don't even want to be right in these kinda cases :/

I was just browsing for freelancing jobs, found a NodeJs one that didn't sound like crap.

> Plz download attached project description

Ok *download and open PDF*

>Comic sans all over the place with blue and purple font color

NOPE!

Finally sharing my desk! The team is allowed to work in a dark room, the proper environment for developers.

Sometimes, when bugs get a bit out of hand... You have to counter them with better debugging methods 🐥

!dev

An interesting read about why the second (and last) WhatsApp co-founder left Facebook while leaving behind a whopping 850 million because ethics/morals.

"I sold my users' privacy to a larger benefit," Acton told Forbes. "I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day."

Here's the article (do click through to the Forbes one): https://fossbytes.com/whatsapp-co-f...

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.

"yes, sir, we block ftp and ssh connections from outside the benelux (shortcut for: belgium/netherlands/luxembourg, didn't say this part but it's a very widely known term here)"

"if you allow connections from INSIDE the benelux, why can't I connect from Germany, eh?!?!"

💀😶

Just read Uncle Bobs book series:
Working with Legacy Code,
Clean Coder,
Clean Code,
Clean Architecture

Read it in this exact order and each book was better than the one before.

What did you think of them and what other books do you recommend reading?
(Coding books of course)

Who use stress ball at work?

I really lost my faith in our profession.
A Software&Hardware solution that costs more several 10.000€ is broken after every update.

The Producer even achieves to break untouched features in new releases.
No communication at all. If you report Bugs, they are your fault. The whole system has absolutely no security at all.
It is unsecure by design.

And even if they hear your Bug report you have to pray that they will fix it.
Most if the time you have to wait the whole year for a new release tio get your bugfixes.
But there are also bugs that are untouched for years.

WHY? WE PAY YOU!
I want to cry

Back to the fundamentals 😅