I can't belieeeve that in some environments, developers are judged and rated by how they behave. I think they should be valued on skills, not on how 'cool' they project themselves as.

Got this message from my CEO: "When are we going to have a perfect working version? 100% sure without bugs? "

How do I even respond to this? "We are wondering the same"?

(for context, he requested an early alpha build of a certain feature)

Why yes we have these nine types of transactions mocked. See? The factories make CSV data just like we get in those gigantic CSV files every day that are like ultra-important or whatever.

Wait, you want to actually use the data? to create records? Like build a record like we do in the code? Nonononono that won’t work! Why? Why!? You want us to actually MOCK the data, like make it look real AND MAKE IT PASS VALIDATION? Are you CRAZY!? THERES LIKE THIRTY COLUMNS THERE! No way. No no no way. If you want to do that, you’re on your own. But make sure you don’t break anything with your “improvements” or it’s on you.

Also, all of this is going away soon, so make sure you don’t do anything unnecessary, like mocking all that data. (It’s been “going away” for well over a year now…)

agdkdagafskdsifaskfgdlfff

Me: Hey, guys, this stuff is seriously flammable. Like, I’m surprised it hasn’t caught fire yet. I really want to clean it up. Here’s how I’d make it better.

Management: No. It’s fine, it works. Don’t touch it. It’s getting replaced anyway. Just add the things on top like we asked you to, and call it a day.

Me: Are you sure? This is seriously going to be a problem.

Management: We just said it’s getting replaced. Don’t. touch. anything. OK?

Me: alright.

… Eight weeks later …

Management: so this thing caught fire over the weekend, and the fire spread to other areas. We’re doing some emergency cleanup. The new guy looked at it and figured out why, and has some great ideas on fixing it, so give him some well-deserved praise!

Me: Hey! I told you about this months ago!

Management: Yes. I tuned out during today’s firefighting meetings. But it’s important to strike a balance in everyone’s style. Do you have any other concerns?

Procastinator's tricks to be productive: Schedule messages

I hate to write people. They could answer. My whole plan might be thrown off. But when is the best time to answer them? The day after tomorrow? Too late. Tomorrow. Around 10? Thank you to all messengers that allow me to schedule a message. Instead of procrastinating, I answer, I schedule, and if I am in a bad mood, I later come back and abort and rewrite the message nicer.

Went perfectly swimmingly with my happy new year messages. Everyone got them at 00:00. Yes my friend, you're obviously the most important thing in my life, first thing I did was writing you!

Just had the realization that the reason why the internet is so toxic isn't really because of anonymity

It's because if you're a massive asshole to someone, that person can't punch you in the face

I mean this for real, and it's kinda counter intuitive, but the underlying threat of violence is what keeps society civil and polite

We're still safe...

Deleted over 1'500 lines of code over the last 2 days and replaced it with 80 lines of readable, simple, generic code.

And I'm feeelin' gooood 🎶

Medium: Create account to view full story
Me: Ok, let me create the account
Medium: Upgrade to read full story

Holy fuck, I hate the internet

Kiki’s meme of the day

Spent weeks cleaning up legacy code, because my phone was ringing non-stop about errors and crashes, got it done. The CEO has been on vacation for like a month and a half, so I had to make executive judgements, and has just now returned. I got called down to the CEO's office so that I could get bitched at for marginally changing the appearance and behavior of a part of the site. I explain that it was necessary, and the response I got was "it was working fine for five years". All I could say to that was "no it fucking wasn't, are we working at the same company?" When I go to take another job, I might just put all of the old code back in place to remind them of how much "better" things ran before I worked here. Massive headache now, physical and proverbial.

I’m on this ticket, right? It’s adding some functionality to some payment file parser. The code is atrocious, but it’s getting replaced with a microservice definitely-not-soon-enough, so i don’t need to rewrite it or anything, but looking at this monstrosity of mental diarrhea … fucking UGH. The code stink is noxious.

The damn thing reads each line of a csv file, keeping track of some metadata (blah blah) and the line number (which somehow has TWO off-by-one errors, so it starts on fucking 2 — and yes, the goddamn column headers on line #0 is recorded as line #2), does the same setup shit on every goddamned iteration, then calls a *second* parser on that line. That second parser in turn stores its line state, the line number, the batch number (…which is actually a huge object…), and a whole host of other large objects on itself, and uses exception throwing to communicate, catches and re-raises those exceptions as needed (instead of using, you know, if blocks to skip like 5 lines), and then writes the results of parsing that one single line to the database, and returns. The original calling parser then reads the data BACK OUT OF THE DATABASE, branches on that, and does more shit before reading the next line out of the file and calling that line-parser again.

JESUS CHRIST WHAT THE FUCK

And that’s not including the lesser crimes like duplicated code, misleading var names, and shit like defining class instance constants but … first checking to see if they’re defined yet? They obviously aren’t because they aren’t anywhere else in the fucking file!

Whoever wrote this pile of fetid muck must have been retroactively aborted for their previous crimes against intelligence, somehow survived the attempt, and is now worse off and re-offending.

Just.
Asdkfljasdklfhgasdfdah

makes my knife click-click

can you feel the walls closing in on you yet

Sufficiently advanced XML is indistinguishable from satire

Choose your gender

I applied for four jobs today, including GitHub. I feel kinda proud of myself.

I’m getting really tired of all these junior-turn-senior devs who can’t write simple code asking ChatGPT to solve everything for them.

I’m having to untangle everything from bizarre organization/flow to obvious gotchas / missed edge cases to ridiculously long math chains (that could be 1/10th the length), or — and I feel so dirty for this — resorting to asking ChatGPT wtf it was thinking when it obviously wrote some of these monstrosities. Which it gets wrong much of the time.

“ALL HAIL CHATGPT!” Proclaims the head of Engineering. “IT’S OUR PRODUCTIVITY SAVIOR! LEVERAGING AI WILL LET US OUTPERFORM THE ENTIRE INDUSTRY!”

Jesus fucking christ.

Before I left for vacation two weeks ago, I busted my butt to build out another portion of my frontend testing framework and get it in place (and spec’d) to unblock a coworker on a semi-high-priority ticket. I sent him detailed notes on which areas of the product it covers, how to use it, and copied one of his (blocked) tests over and updated it to use the new methods, pattern, namespacing, etc.

I came back today and discovered … he hasn’t even touched it. Everything is exactly as I left it.

Wheeeeeee.

Here’s to a hopefully better 2024!

Let’s all tell our bitchface thundercunt micromanagers to fuck off, find better employ elsewhere, and finally make progress on that side project that was our world several months ago.

And if the world continues going absolutely mental, may all of you find a peaceful meadow away from everyone and build yourselves wonderful little cottages.

The state of operating systems in 2024.

Windows - has a user interface that changes with every update so Microsoft can push ads even though it costs $200

Mac - an unusable interface designed solely for consuming media anchored to hardware that costs 4x what it should

Linux - absolute freedom to do everything you want so long as you don't want to play games, connect to Wifi, or listen to audio

I'm just going to go be a beet farmer in the 1600s

My CTO told the COO and CEO i'd be finished SOC2 compliance by the end of December... On December 14th.

It takes 3 months to do the audit, let alone all the actual work. I hadn't even started yet.

He was fired shortly after that.

Stakeholders must learn that code quality and a user-friendly frontend are not "nice to have". If they don't fix their priorities accordingly, someone will have to pay their technical debt and that's going to be expensive.

DEI QA: “For step 2 should the checkbox be checked? Or uncheck ?”

… Step 2 of my testing steps reads: “Check it [the checkbox], save it, reload it. The box should still be checked. Repeat to uncheck it, just to be pedantic, then leave it off so we can test the existing behavior.”

🤦🏻‍♀️

DEI QA: “The payment_method_identifier will be in api callback logs if `Return payment method identifier in auth/confirmation callbacks` is checked?”

🤦🏻‍♀️

Me: it does what it says on the tin.

DEI QA: “BTW its a `tin`.”
DEI QA: “In Canada its `Taxpayer Identification Number`”

🤦🏻‍♀️

> TeamLeader1: I just discovered SQL is actually super fast! The low responsiveness I've experienced comes from our ORM!
> IHateForALiving: well of course SQL is blazingly fast. SQL has been refined by the best engineers in the world for the past 50 years, its performances are unparalleled for everything you could possibly need, unless you want to scale REALLY big. Sequelize, instead, is an Active Record ORM, so it's bound to struggle with huge amount of data, because every single row will get attached a significant amount of black magic to make sure everything syncs correctly. Why is that?
> TeamLeader1: I have a problem with this frontend component, it doesn't allow pagination. I tried downloading the whole DB to bypass that, but the ORM is slow... so I will bypass the ORM and download the whole table with a raw query. Look at that! It works like a charm, it's super duper fast!'

This mf is downloading some 35 thousand rows every time some user loads a page because he doesn't know how to paginate the fucking table with Angular, there's no way these people are real.

wake up america

So I told my wife one week ago: "Yeah, you should totally learn to code as well!"

Yesterday a package arrived, containing a really beautiful hardcover book bound in leather, with a gold foil image of a snake debossed into the cover, with the text "In the face of ambiguity -- Refuse the temptation to guess" on it.

Well, OK, that's weird.

My wife snatches it and says: "I had that custom made by a book binder". I flip through it. It contains the Python 3.9 language reference, and the PEP 8 styleguide.

While I usually dislike paper dev books because they become outdated over time, I'm perplexed by this one, because of how much effort and craftsmanship went in to it. I'm even a little jealous.

So, this morning I was putting dishes into the dishwasher, and she says: "Please let me do that". I ask: "Am I doing anything wrong?"

Wife responds: "Well, it's not necessarily wrong, I mean, it works, doesn't it? But your methods aren't very pythonic. Your conventions aren't elegant at all". I don't think I've heard anyone say the word "pythonic" to me in over a decade.

And just now my wife was looking over my shoulder as I was debugging some lower level Rust code filled with network buffers and hex literals, and she says: "Pffffff unbelievable, I thought you were a senior developer. That code is really bad, there are way too many abbreviated things. Readability counts! I bet if you used Python, your code would actually work!"

I think I might have released something really evil upon the world.

Hi guys, I created a tiny Anime quotes API called Animechan. Totally free to use anywhere 😊✨

https://animechan.vercel.app/

I really like that a lot of people in construction work just dont take anyones bullshit. If someone fucks up, it gets fixed. Sometimes with a lot of cussing.
Meanwhile as a programmer if you call out anyone or anything for doing something wrong, you get immediate backlash cause of it. Its a lot like that you are the problem for calling it out and not the one who caused the problem in the first place.

Ok, I really gotta start looking for jobs.

— says while lying in bed with depression