I could use some advice. Immagine this: you recently started a new job where the people are great, the product is pretty cool and pay is good. But the code you have to work with is the biggest pile of shite you've ever seen and your manager does not want to change any of this, even after you suggest you would build something that would be a thousand times better, not only "code wise" but for the users too. What would you do?

Love the topic, and I have multiple.

We were designing a frontend for a new application and we were using University lingo for the text placeholders. I forgot to remove one section in which the text stated "You are looking to enroll in the University of Deez Nuts", on another section I left "Click here cuh". Our manager at the time liked the design so much, but forgot to check for spelling or texts and as such sent the demo to our entire department. Everyone saw it, and while they all found it funny it could have seriously gone wrong. Thankfully our department VP had a pretty good sense of humor.....dude also knew exactly who it was from the start.

On another application, a director, who is a friend, asked for multiple items on a request form, during testing, I added text in Spanish (I am in Texas, but Spanish is pretty well known and spoken in the state) saying "Que bien chinga <Name of the Director>" which roughly translates to "<Name of the Director> is being annoyong" (but in a very Mexican spanish way)
I neglected to consider that the dude was probably viewing the admin board and checking the items as they were being added to the system and he called me not even 3 minutes later saying "You know I can see what you add right??"

All in all, I was pretty lucky because in any other places I would have been severely reprimanded :P

There are many more, but these came at the top of my head as the better ones.

Trying to refactor legacy code can be a real adventure. It's like exploring an ancient ruin, except instead of hidden treasures, you're uncovering cryptic code and dead ends. But the real plot twist comes when you realize there are no unit tests to guide you. It's like trying to navigate a maze blindfolded - you never know when you're going to hit a dead end and end up with a headache! 🤯

Medium before:
How to perfectly manage a reactive server with 4 frameworks blindfolded

Medium now:
THAT'S WHY YOU SHOULD BE SCARED OF AI
AI WILL KILL US AND RAPE OUR WIVES
YOU ARE USING CHATGPT WRONG!!
DON'T WAIT AI TO STEAL YOUR JOB, KILL YOURSELF NOW

Another rant reminded me:

I’ve been at the same company for almost five years now, and I’ve seen the dev teams grow: several juniors come in, and even a few that left - or more precisely, was let go. And for each of those that were let go, the root issue with them was always the same: not the lack of skills or ability to learn their trade at job, no. It was always communication issues serious enough to render working with them impossible.

So remember juniors, besides googling and problem solving, the most important skill to master in team-based dev envs is COMMUNICATION. You need to fucking be part of the team or you’re out, no matter how good you are technically. If that’s too hard, either this is the wrong line of work for you or you need to just go solo. It’s that simple, boys, girls, and everyone else on the spectrum.

Sales person: I hope this mail meets you well.

How the mail meets me:

Employer: so why do you want to join this organization?

Engineer: well like i said in the first 4 interviews, I love desks. Sitting behind them. Standing behind them.

Employer: are you a standing or sitting man?

Engineer: i like to sit in the morning and then switch up to stand at lunch.

Employer: a man with a plan. Very good. Do you remember anything from school?

Engineer: not a goddamn thing.

Employer: perfect. You don't need math. Just emails. You like emails?

Engineer: love emails.

Employer: there's gonna be a lot of emails.

Engineer: can't get enough emails.

Employer: perfect. Do you like a clear separation between life and work?

Engineer: oh not at all. I like it to muddy together in a never ending hell.

Employer: alright and you're familiar with work culture?

Engineer: oh those hours i work for free?

Employer: yes.

Engineer: I love that bullshit.

Employer: alright terrific. And are you familiar with the hate hierarchy?

Engineer: yeah the tech's hate the engineers, the engineers hate the tech's and the managers hate everyb-

Employer: everybody. Perfect. Alright I- honestly I think we'd like to make an offer.

Engineer: well, first I gotta leverage that with my current employer for a raise. And if they don't budge, I'll jump shut.

Employer: no loyalty at all?

Engineer: not at all.

Employer: you're hired.

Notifications

Phone calls, whatsapp, emails, slack messages, recurring meetings. The list is limited but distractions abound

FML, I hate projects where managers (and other developers, too!) irrationally think that the only thing to do in the codebase is delivering new features and fulfilling change requests.

After 5 years of such approach, the code is bloated, and has hack-on-hack done against the original architecture, and management complains on the time to delivery a change, however asking them to get some time to "refactor" meets a deny every single fucking time because "we don't have budget".

Decided to leave the team. Any reason to stay there longer?

When pandemic hit in 2020 I found myself out of work. Until then I used to have a java based pirate gameserver of a MMORPG as a hobby.

When pandemic hit I noticed that online players count increased from like 70 to 200 without much advertising because purely of people being stuck in home. So i decided to scale and spent 2 years with that. What a wild ride it was.

So i invested a bit in ads, managed to reach around 500 online players, opened my own company and launched a couple other successful spinoffs of that gameserver.

First year it was a goldmine but I was doing 10-14 hour days because I had to take care of everything (web, advertising, payment integrations, player support and also developing the server itself, ddos protections and etc.). I made quite a bit of money, saved for a downpayment for mortgage and got an apartment.

Second year I noticed that there was a lot of competition and online players count dropped, but I double downed on this and invested a lot into the product itself and spent most of the time developing a perfect gameserver that would be the big bang while also maintaining existing ones. Clasic overengineering mistake. As you can guess, I crashed and burned on all levels, never even managed to launch my final project because simply the scope was too big and I had trouble finding decent devs to outsource it to, since it was a very niche gameserver.

In the end I learned a lot especially about my own limits and ownership, now Im back to being a dev but working as a contractor.

I believe having actual business owner experience allows me to have different perspective and I can bring more to the table rather than focusing on crunching tasks.

4+ years ago, in an interview, I was asked if I was familiar with keeping backups of my code on Google Drive.

When I asked them to explain what that is, they said that after a deployment, they make a ZIP file of the project and keep it on Google Drive.

When I asked about using GitHub/BitBucket they said they don't know what that is and neither do they intend on using it.

So yeah .....

Two probable reasons why people don't mind their own business:

1. No mind
2. No business

"ChatGPT passed an interview for Google"
"I ask to ChatGPT to write my new song"
"What ChatGPT tells about our humanity"
"ChatGPT pooped its pants"

I'm the only one sick of seeing articles, posts and threads about Chat fucking GPT?! I can't wait for the hype to die out... or for someone to build a time machine able to bring me back to 2009

muh ai is taking over muh i'm gonna loose my job 🤡

everyone was doing clients.. so it was my turn.

watchRant is out!!!

devRant client for your watch, for the ones who need a higher dose of devRant!

Features: rant feed (top/recent), rant, comments, profile (about/.../avatar/rants), download images

Github: https://github.com/joewilliams007/...

Works with wear-os minSdk 28

(apk available on github, can be sideloaded by using easy fire tools android app, or built by urself)

Data scientist: we need to whitelist a pod to connect to a database
Me: Whitelist? We don't use whitelists on private databases
DS: It's the new data warehouse database
Me: is it on <X> VPC?
DS: I'm not sure what that means but its ip is <real world ipv4>
Me: Are you hosting a publicly accessible database with all our end users information?!
DS: ...
Me: There goes our SOC2 audit controls...
DS: how long until you can white list it?
Me: I won't be whitelisting it. You need to put it on a private VPC and peer with the cluster, you'll have to rebuild all the Terraform and redeploy
DS: We didn't use Terraform because it takes too long, just white list the pods IP.
Me: No. I'm contacting the CISO and CTO...

No wonder it’s hard to hire devs with even a basic level of competency or some kind of promise that them might be able to learn shit given time, opportunity and guidance. The sheer amount of idiocy and stupidity and straight up incompetent cringe I witness on every platform giving us devs a voice (yes, including here) is mindboggling…

TLDR : Some dude was immediately fired by creating union. The email from the CEO of Sii Poland (one of the biggest software houses in the country) shocked the whole IT community

> Find cool repo on GitHub
> Works very well
> Respectable weekly downloads
> …Hasn’t been updated in a year
> …Owner from Shanghai, China
> …Hasn’t pushed to any repo in over a year
> Last profile update: Feeling sick 🤒
> …
>😔
> Rest in peace friend, thanks kindly for the time you’ve saved me.

👀

I can't help but be disappointed in the direction that technology has directed us into, especially social media.

While I love my girlfriend, she more often than not spends her time scrolling away at the dumbest shit on Instagram, Facebook, .. reels. Reels everywhere. And she's not dumb, mind you. She's an engineer just as much as you (presumably) and I are. Just in a different field.

When looking into it online and stumbling upon more than one study, I learned about the term it had been coined.. technoference. That's the constant interruption of social media into our day-to-day lives, and the dopamine kick it gives -- more so than IRL peers do. Why that is, being the digital equivalent to McDonald's, that's beyond me. But somehow it seems to be better, all while the content isn't even useful. It doesn't allow you to learn anything, to gain insights, or to explore things that could serve you in the real world. Cat videos and random shit that's somehow.. funny? Having pretty much completely disconnected from social media years ago, I seriously fail to see how.

Maybe us nerds in the 90's and early 2000's telling everyone else how we'd change the world and prove everyone who called us freaks wrong, disenchanted as we were (and probably still are), were the catalyst for this social disaster. We had the cognitive skills to do it, but not the social equivalent. I feel guilty... Even though I've always been part of a big tech resistance in some capacity, I still feel guilty. Because I'm one of those people with the skills of those who created this trash fire of a societal status quo. Everyone glued to their screens, 95% of the time not for work. Not even to aid one's ability to function in the real world. Just to combat boredom. All day, for many hours on end.

Where is it going to end? When will people realize the dystopia we got ourselves into? Will anyone but a few fight it? Would those who don't fight it even care?

As we currently see a lot of codeless software platform, in the next 10 years there is gonna be high demand for people to extend these shitty apps into something proper, just like it happened with wordpress. There is a key missunderstanding that writing code and developing an application are the same thing; they are not.
Once you can write code you sure ass aren't a developer, thats a grueling journey until then, and being able to create an application without code exaggerates the problem even further.

I think, right now, it's bitting more than I can chew.

I get my hands on way too many projects because they're easy and then problems pile and I end up being behind schedule on everything.

That, and maybe sometimes subconsciously thinking I'm invincible. It's a direct psych response to those telling me I can't do shit, and then I do shit out of pure stubbornness, and then I have super-confidence for a short while. (Even if I don't show it)
I just don't think it's healthy.

At a former job, the company decided to replatform to Salesforce. The entire dev team was laid off. But it would take an outside agency a year to build the Salesforce site. The company wanted the devs to stay for an additional year.

The only severance was something they called a stay bonus. It was 30% of our gross income but it was still contingent on performance. And if they decide to let you go earlier, it gets prorated if you still qualify for the bonus. Not a good deal.

Each month a dev left. By the time I secured a new job and left, all that remained of the dev team was a junior frontend dev and two team leads (one FE and one BE) with no team to lead. Well, there were contractors, but they were only brought on after the Salesforce replatform announcement. I’m pretty sure the company had to hire even more contractors. No idea how much that cost them.

For me, I think it was serendipitous that I gave notice during their busiest time of year. They actually tried asking me to extend my notice. Karma was coming back to bite them. Not just for the Salesforce thing. But also for their lack of support when I was blindly accused of being both insubordinate and incompetent.

FUCK CORPORATE EMAIL SPAM

AND I DON'T MEAN SOME SOME EXTERNAL SCAM/AD/PISHING EMAILS

I MEAN THE SHIT MY OWN COMPANY SENDS TO ME

LIKE:

"tHE WelLbeIng Course : SiGN In now!!!!!"

"#MoRnIngcOfFEE witH SOME cORporatE TWAt"

"Give togetHER : LETs circLE JerK OurSeLveS in SOMe fuCKiNg oNLiNe mEetInG !!!!!!!"

I DON'T FUCKING CARE !

I GET DOZENS (IF NOT FUCKING HUNDREDS) OF SUCH SHIT EMAILS EVERY DAY.

IF I GO ON VACATION, I HAVE TO SPEND HOURS TO SORT SHIT OUT

I HAVE HAD TO SET UP ELABORATE OUTLOOK RULES TO GET IT SORTED AUTOMATICALLY INTO SOME MANAGEABLE FOLDERS (AND SPEND SOME OF MY LIMITED TIME, HERE ON EARTH, TO DO SO)

AND GUESS WHAT

THANKS TO THOSE STUPID RULES I MISSED, ONE FUCKING IMPORTANT EMAIL

CAN YOU JUST STOP FUCKING SPAMMING ME ?!!!

FOR CHRIST SAKE AND I DON'T CARE ABOUT THIS STUPID CORPORATE BULLSHIT

STOP SENDING IT TO ME

When you are overconfident about your changes and don't test them...

Rant
Why do shithead clients think they can walk away without paying us once we deliver the project !!!

So, here goes nothing..
Got an online gig to create a dashboard.
Since i had to deal with a lot of shitheads in the past, I told them my rules were simple, 20% advance, 40% on 50% completion and 40% after i complete and send them proof of completion. Once i receive the payment in full, only then i will hand over the code.
They said it was fine and paid 20%.
I got the next 40% also without any effort but they said they also needed me to deploy the code on their AWS account, and they were ready to pay extra for it, so i agreed.
I complete the whole project and sent them the screenshots, asking for the remaining 40% payment. They rejected the request saying my work was not complete as i had not deployed on AWS yet. After a couple of more such exchanges, i agreed to setup their account before the payment. But i could sense something fishy, so i did everything on their AWS account, except registered the domain from my account and set up everything. Once i inform them that its done and ask for the remaining payment.
The reply i got was LOL.
I tried to login to the AWS account, only to find password had been changed.
Database access revoked.
Even my admin account on the app had been removed. Thinking that they have been successful, they even published ads about thier NEW dashboard to their customers.
I sent them a final mail with warning ending with a middle finger emoji. 24 hours later,
I created a github page with the text " This website has been siezed by the government as the owner is found accused in fraud" and redirected the domain to it. Got an apology mail from them 2 hours later begging me to restore the website. i asked for an extra 10% penalty apart from the remaining payment. After i got paid, set an auto-reply of LOL to thier emails and chilled for a week before restoring the domain back to normal.
Dev : 1
Shithead Client: 0

Dude, remote work in a country side city makes me feel like people think I'm a drug dealer or something

I never leave my house

Family reaction story to me being a dev?

- My dad still refers to my profession as 'something in computers'.
- My older sister goes to her weirdo friends for technical advice because she thinks all I do is fill paper in printers (that's a long TL;DR story about a phone upgrade)
- My brother, a car mechanical genius thinks what I do is near God-like. He also races cars and can blabber on about the physics, aero-dynamics, weight ratios, etc and says "Oh, no way. I'm too stupid to do what you do." Then I'm like, "Dude, shut up, I can barely change my oil and you could replace an engine blindfolded", then he just laughs "Yea, probably."
- Baby sister just wants me to fix her phone. "Can you make <insert some random app> do <insert a random behavior the app was never designed to do>?". I'm like "Uh no, I didn't write Instagram", then she's like "I thought you went to school for computers?".
- My mom passed way (long battle with cancer). I'm sure she'd be proud, but still asking me to how to switch the channel so she could watch a movie on the VCR.
I can clearly see having this conversation with my mom.
Me: "Mom, why are you still using a VCR? I bought you a subscription to Netflix"
Mom: "Net what? Do I turn the dial to channel 2 or 3?"
Me: "No, its the Netflix button on the remote."
Mom: "Can't you come over and do this? I just want to watch my shows. Didn't you go to school to learn these things?"
Me: "No mom, that's not...um...never mind. I'll be right over."

I think my worst trait is my lack of organization outside a work environment

I spent a few hours cleaning my old hard drives and I freed up 600GB of just duplicate files. Everything from driver backups and progam exe's to simple text documents

Most were in subfolders of a folder named some variation of 'sort_later' :/ oof