Last time, my friend said CSS stands for
"Custom Sexy Styles" (dig into my older rants)

This time, he said
"Centering Somewhat Sucks"

Now he knows the deal.

I hired a woman for senior quality assurance two weeks ago. Impressive resume, great interview, but I was met with some pseudo-sexist puzzled looks in the dev team.

Meeting today. Boss: "Why is the database cluster not working properly?"

Team devs: "We've tried diagnosing the problem, but we can't really find it. It keeps being under high load."

New QA: "It might have something to do with the way you developers write queries".

She pulls up a bunch of code examples with dozens of joins and orderings on unindexed columns, explains that you shouldn't call queries from within looping constructs, that it's smart to limit the data with constraints and aggregations, hints at where to actually place indexes, how not to drag the whole DB to the frontend and process it in VueJS, etc...

New QA: "I've already put the tasks for refactoring the queries in Asana"

I'm grinning, because finally... finally I'm not alone in my crusade anymore.

Boss: "Yeah but that's just that code quality nonsense Bittersweet always keeps nagging about. Why is the database not working? Can't we just add more thingies to the cluster? That would be easier than rewriting the code, right?"

Dev team: "Yes... yes. We could try a few more of these aws rds db.m4.10xlarge thingies. That will solve it."

QA looks pissed off, stands up: "No. These queries... they touch the database in so many places, and so violently, that it has to go to therapy. That's why it's down. It just can't take the abuse anymore. You could add more little brothers and sisters to the equation, but damn that would be cruel right? Not to mention that therapy isn't exactly cheap!"

Dev team looks annoyed at me. My boss looks even more annoyed at me. "You hired this one?"

I keep grinning, and I nod.

"I might have offered her a permanent contract"

The moments when you grow the most as a person are those where you have a big axe in your hand, ready to shout through the office WHICH OF YOU LOWLY SPERMSLURPING JERKS FORGOT TO WRITE A FUCKING TEST FOR THIS METHOD

...only to see your own name appear in git blame.

DST is my arch enemy.

"Why did I get paid for 7 hours instead of 8?"
"Because you worked from 1:00 till 9:00"
"Yeah, that's 8 hours"
"No it wasn't"

"Why does this input field say invalid time for 02:00?"
"Because that time doesn't exist"

"Why are so many tests failing"
"Because they check timestamps and durations which don't make sense in non-continuous time"

October is even worse...

1. Buy boxes of orange juice, almost past their expiry date.
2. Put boxes on the hot office windowsill for a few weeks.
3. Cool down juice in fridge.
4. "Hey dear coworker, would you like a refreshing juice box on this hot spring day?"
5. Watch coworker retch and vomit, spitting blue-grayish juice over his desk, crying: "Why would you give me old moldy juice without checking the date?"
6. "Do you remember when you told me you didn't have time for unit tests? THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS, DAVE, THIS IS WHAT FUCKING HAPPENS WHEN YOU DEPLOY UNTESTED CODE.... NOW FINISH YOUR JUICE!"

This is so mean

Up to 864 kb/sec divvied out to over 500 passengers... it's practically morse code at that point